A Global Systems Approach
The resources of the planet are obviously not naturally distributed so that every person can gain access to what they need. The natural processes that produce our air, water and the biosphere which supports and sustains life are also global processes. The only way then to achieve maximum efficiency and hence sustainability and abundance, is to take a global systems appro
ach to resource management from monitoring and extraction to production and distribution. The Earth is a single symbiotic natural system and the need to recognize and align ourselves with natural processes should make the global systems approach self-evident. It has already replaced most of the human labor in agriculture and manufacturing and the trend is continuing now into the service sector. The incentive to cut costs is pushing business to automate wherever possible and we are running out of uses for human labor. The flip side to this is that as we automate, our productivity greatly increases. Instead of working to 'create jobs' we should try and eliminate the need for human labor wherever possible, thereby increasing our capacity to create abundance and making the requirements of labor for money and money for resources obsolete. The idea in the long run is to create an almost entirely automated system of resource management. People only need to monitor, maintain and update the system and it certainly wouldn't require everybody to work to do so. Nor would it exclude anybody from working with the system if they chose to. It would free humankind from drudgery and monotony and allow anybody to contribute to society in creative forms such as design, research, experimentation, writing, artistry and philosophy. No Money
When we talk about a Resource Based Economy we mean that we refer to existing available resources instead of commerce when thinking about an economy. Money is an artificial creation that was invented a long time ago to deal with problems which have largely been overcome today. For ancient societies the issues were scarcity and productivity. There were only so many resources available on whatever land a society occupied and there were only so many people to do the work of changing those resources into usable goods. Money allowed a system which would reward the necessary labor contributions with access to goods and services. The monetary system has succeeded in bringing about the solutions to the problems of scarcity and productivity. Today we face a new set of problems which the monetary system cannot address. We now realize the need for sustainability and the connection it has to efficiency and abundance. A profit based system has no incentive to create abundance, efficiency or sustainability because money is inextricably linked to scarcity. Money only works when things people need are scarce. You can't sell something if everybody already has it, so the more abundance there is in any area, the less money can be made in that area. When the issue is managing natural scarcity and creating incentives to increase productivity, a monetary system works, but when those problems are overcome and the issue becomes producing sustainable abundance then the monetary system is paralyzing because it has a powerful incentive to maintain scarcity for its own perpetuation. The same paralyzing effect comes into play with efficiency and sustainability because the more they increase the less money can be made from maintenance and replacement. If a battery company could make extremely cheap batteries that lasted fifty years, their sales would go down because nobody who bought them would ever need to buy them again. We argue for a transition out of a monetary system simply because it will be necessary to achieve sustainability and abundance. Access rather than Ownership
A Resource Based Economy operates under the notion that the Earth and all it's resources are the common heritage of all humankind. If we were to achieve something like a RBE there would be very little basis for property or ownership the way we know them today. Who would own the automated system of resource management? Who would own the inventory of goods and materials? The real question is what would be the point of any such ownership in a world with no money? The concept of property is, like money, largely an outgrowth of scarcity. If somebody had to work very hard to create or obtain something they will declare ownership and protect it. If people have access to everything they need there is very little incentive to steal from someone else and no reason to declare things as property. That is not to say that there would be no personal belongings in a Resource Based Economy, or that the house you're living in wouldn't be 'your' house, but the thinking about these things would be different. Property would actually be seen as a burden! Imagine your hobbies are golfing and playing guitar. Why would you want to store, protect and maintain your own golf clubs when you could select from the best available sets at the golf course for free, and then simply leave them there when you're finished? How about your guitar? You could obtain one when you wished, and if you liked that particular guitar take it home, keep it as long as you want, and return it if and when you no longer wished to care for it. The reasons we advocate a system of universal shared access rather than ownership are not arbitrary or based on morality, nor did we simply pick up some old communist idea. It is based solely on the efficiency mechanism. As previously noted, abundance requires sustainability and efficiency. Maintaining the idea that everybody has to have their own everything creates endless duplication and waste and is hence not sustainable or efficient. Think about the millions of cars out there that sit in parking lots for most of their lifespans, clogging up our cities . Imagine a system where automatically driven cars take you where you need to go and then are freed up to move to wherever somebody else needs a car. How many resources, not to mention space, would be saved by ending needless duplication of that one product alone? Objective Decision Making
How decisions get made has always been a defining feature of any social system. In the past social decisions have been made by individuals such as kings, emperors and dictators, or they have been reached more collaboratively by many individuals within a structure such as a parliament or council. There have no doubt been some good decisions made over the course of history, and a lot of very bad ones. So what defines a good decision? Generally speaking, a good decision comes from taking into account as much relevant information as possible, and examining that information as objectively as possible. When you are unable to take all relevant information into account you are forced to make a decision, but if you have enough information and are able to process that information objectively, the decision becomes obvious. Because you can clearly see which option will guide you towards your goal. This process is called arriving at decisions. For example; Imagine you are driving down a road and approaching an intersection. You will have to decide whether to continue straight, or to turn left or right. As you get closer however you notice that the roads to the left and right both drop off into cliffs. Given that your goal is to survive and reach your destination it is no longer a matter of making the decision, you arrive at the decision to continue straight based on the information you have about the other choices and your goals. When it comes to such a simple example it is easy to arrive at an objective decision given the small amount of relevant information and the obvious consequences of each choice, however when it comes to a more complex problem such as global resource management it becomes more difficult. First of all no one person or group could ever understand all the information relevant to resource management, and secondly it is very near impossible for people to be objective as we each have a subjective experience and point of view. So if we wish to remove subjectivity from decision making then we need to reduce human involvement in decision making. We recognized a long time ago that subjectivity doesn't work in mathematics, so we invented the calculator. Similarly, we found it difficult to be objective when trying to determine measurements of weight, so we invented scales. In a Resource Based Economy we would have a global network of satellites and sensors to gather information about resource depletion and renewal, environmental factors, demand for goods and services and so on. All of this information would then be fed into a massive computational database which is programmed to understand all the relationships of chemistry, physics, biology and the like, essentially becoming the ultimate calculator. By interacting with this kind of a database we would be able to collect all information relevant to the planet's resources , economy and environmental state and make decisions objectively that move us towards our social goals- meaning sustainability, abundance and efficiency. Addressing Common Criticisms
Discussing social problems and potential solutions always carries a measure of controversy. The Ottawa chapter of the Zeitgeist Movement welcomes skepticism and criticism as long as they are honest and constructive. There are some common criticisms that tend to come up when people listen to the movement's perspective on these issues and we would like to address some of those briefly. One type of criticism which is common boils down to a disagreement about our goals. Some people argue that we shouldn't move society towards a Resource Based Economy. We would ask people with that perspective which of our goals should not be pursued specifically? Do you argue that we shouldn't aim for sustainability, abundance and efficiency? Should we not aim to eliminate the need for monotonous, mind-numbing, socially irrelevant and dangerous human labor? Objectivity in social decision-making should not be sought? When talking about goals we may be working with ideals, but which one of our goals should not be sought at least as an ideal? And of course, if not these goals, what should define our social intent? A second common critique comes from those who disagree with us over our methods and proposals. People with this perspective tend to argue that we couldn't achieve something like a Resource Based Economy. This view is understandable given the state of the world today, however it reflects a misconception about the rapidly advancing state of current technology. All of the technological elements we advocate as the tools and infrastructure of a RBE are either a reality today or have projects working to make them a reality. Automation, hydroponics, clean energy, water purification, worldwide sensor networks, massive supercomputer databases and even so-called 'artificial intelligence' are all increasingly in use or under development today. One of the things the Venus Project wants to do is to construct a research city based on the principles of resource based economics. We know we have the technical capacity to construct such a system, trying to educate the global culture about the possibility is the hard part. The last type of criticism, and probably the most common is based on the notion that we simply wouldn't ever attain such a society. Many people argue that human nature makes the idea of a cooperative global society impossible, but this has to be a misunderstanding about human nature. It is not outside the bounds of human nature to cooperate- especially when we need to. If we see greed and violence and slavery throughout the history books it is easy to assume those things just come naturally to us, but it is only because natural scarcity has always produced a competitive environment that we continually see those behaviors. The idea that our genes control our behavior has given way to the observation that environmental factors impact how genes express
