The concepts of a RBE are out of touch with the real world, and shows that its idealizer and those who propose it are misinformed about the subject of Human Behavior.
First thing that strikes is the idea of no system of behavior control. Under current behavioral paradigms, humans cannot live in a civilized world without mechanism for dealing with behavioral disorders.
“Imagine a world with no police, no law, no need for work, etc.”
Is the marketing of the RBE concept. Yes, imagine a world with no psychiatric clinics, no neurology doctors, no authorities to arrest a criminal.
“But in this world there will be no crime, people will not be violent, etc.”
Let’s break it down:
“No utopia. We have no idea of what a perfect society means, it’s only a far much better society than of this one we have now”.
Let’s break it down:
But these premises of no leader, no control, no system, that seduces fragile people, are them true?
Let’s break it down:
“We are against fossil fuels, nuclear power and other pollutant forms of energy production. We believe in the future we will have more than enough energy to supply the entire world necessities with high efficiency.”
This is one classic move by RBE proponents. They appeal to the global warming debate, and to the energy crisis debate in order to make their RBE concept appears more feasible. But they actually took existing trends of thoughts and adapted to appear that it is something new that only they are thinking about. This is not true, following any scientific journal, magazine, blog or technological innovation website, one can easily see that these are old ideals being under research for a long time, some have being under research for more than 20 years! All RBE proponents do is to compile a list of cutting edge technologies under development and show them as something never thought about, exclusive of their RBE concept.
The energy thing is one of the topics very explored by RBE proponents following this deceptive pattern of compilation of existing researches. The problem is because they are severely out of touch with scientific realities of the technical possibilities of these energy sources.
Let’s break down some facts:
In other words, this effect is a demonstration that improving energy offer and efficiency does not ensure energy abundance, as promoted by RBE. To understand it better, think about this hypothetical scenario: A city creates a new power plant that will supply it with 3 times more energy than the actual consumption rate, creating a more than abundant energy offer. But, this extra energy is being lost. What happens is that society evolves to a more energy consumption society, 2 parks are opened and 1 shopping center just to have a place where to use this energy. Happens that in 5 years the place have overcrowded with new businesses and immigrants, and now it is again in an energy crisis, and now space is reduced by the growing city. And now the city can’t get rid of any of the parks or the shopping to save energy, since they are established social systems, intrinsically providing social services to citizens like jobs, markets, entertainment, tourism, etc. and sustaining the very life style of the city.
I think about a RBE, where nobody would govern any city. Whenever energy supply increased, people increased its consumption rates with nobody to regulate or tell them the limits of consumption. It’s like a self predatory society. Just providing large amount of energy and leaving people to make their own decisions about how to spend this energy is not the best idea in order to create a balanced society. This is like opening a box of pizza and say: “take it!” People will struggle to grab as many slices as they can, in a mad fashion, with no perspective of the others desires and needs. This is not because we are a stupid species, but because our brains are not wired yet to think broader than our immediate family circle. Our limited mammalian brain imposes us with constraints in concern, and we can possibly be aware of others concerns and problems, but they don’t penetrate our own concerns. This is the importance of a government system, since it theoretically guarantees the balanced well being and resources providing for every group of people; avoid them to fall into tribalism and domination by force.
“There will be no crime, no jail, no war, no polices, no courts. Every people will have access to the necessities of life and will not develop aberrant behavior”
This much repeated sentence is one of the appealing sentences of RBE, and to me one that most shows how out of date RBE concept is. This is solely based on the school of Behaviorism, from the 1950’s, a trend of thought that tried to create a theory about animal behavior but lost the race to Ethology. Is a school that never has being fully accepted given its flawed nature and creed-like belief systems. This flawed, fringe school is the very foundation of RBE, and the core belief to its social system function.
On the studies of human biology, behavior is a phenomenon with many causes chaotically influencing one another with none of them being the leader. As we surf on the waves of internal processes and external influences, triggers are shut on and off all the time reverberating influence on all the other systems of the body. We are far to have an objective chart to foresee every kind of behavior based on the many kinds of interactions of the many factors that generate behavior. Simplify it to the mere interaction of a person to the environment is too much of a simplification, naive and biased. This kind of thinking assumes every human being is exactly the same, thus will respond the same way to the same stimulus. This is a false logic that deny the very existence of DNA and its thousands of switches and switches of switches and triggers of switches of switches. Not a surprise, since behaviorism is a science school from the 50’s, and back that time no genome project was even dreamed.
Also, there is a contradiction on this discourse. Let’s analyze the following much repeated sentence from RBE proponents:
“No jails, No police. If someone commits an aberrant act, this person will be studied, so the causes can be fixed and this event never come to happen again”
After this, often the case of Albert Fish is mentioned as some sort of “proof” that behaviorism is right. Actually, this kind of serves more as a diversion, since listeners will not stop to think about the case of “catching a criminal to study it”. There are several implications in this sentence:
If you noticed, this RBE social structure has severe holes in the organization. Because RBE assumes that everyone will behave properly, things like police, jails, judges, lawyers, research institutes, ethics commissions and etc. are assumed to be useless. In fact, IF everyone behaved well, such things would indeed be useless. The fact is that assuming people will behave well and never derange is a completely misinformed opinion that clearly shows no knowledge on sciences of human behavior. Actually, this is more of a utopian/idealist point of view than an evidence-based verifiable science.
There is also a philosophical question: “behave well” according to what? A lion that kills violently a bull and rip his flesh of while the bull still agonizes in terror and pain is doing something right for his ecosystem, lifestyle, species, health and family. But this is straight murder, a cold murder. Is the lion behaving well? To use valor judgments such as “good or bad” a frame of reference necessarily needs to be set previously to the analysis. After a frame of reference is set, one can argue if something is good or bad. But in a RBE no one takes decisions and there is no democracy, so who will set the frame of reference in the first place?
Philosophically and politically there is other problem, the ethical limits of the study itself. Assuming the criminal was somehow caught and locked somewhere, and someone volunteers to study this person, who will decide the limits of this study itself? Can the researcher electrocute, insert needles, sexually abuse, inflict injuries and pain, use aggressive language, torture and menace the subject? Can the researcher operate the subject without anesthesia? Can the subject be kept under subhuman conditions with no proper nourishment, space, hygiene and sanitation?
Scientifically speaking, since there are no bosses, no democracy, no jobs and no enterprises in a RBE, who will study the criminal in the first place? To whom the researcher will write the report? Who will publish it? Who will peer review it? And who will overlook the research process? And who will repeat and test the hypothesis?
And what kind of force will decide about the future of the subject once the study is finished?
And in the last question proposed to the problem of the sentence above being analyzed, what if the study, assuming it was possible, shows a conclusive proof that the very science of human behavior is wrong? This is the major flaw in this sentence defended by RBE proponents. The fact is, Human Behavioral Biology studies have already shown behaviorism is flawed and outdated. And have shown it since the 1960’s, when Ethology won the race to become the animal behavior method of study. Ethology is far better because it worries and studies both internal/biological processes of the subject and the environmental effect on these processes, and also, what kind of behavioral phenomenon emerges from the interaction among these many factors.
Whenever a RBE proponent deliver the line and immediately runs for the case of Albert Fish, someone needs to cut the speech and argue that actually, studies on these subjects have already being made and are still on the making to this day and that these studies have already shown behaviorism is flawed.
Not to mention, many practical solutions have emerged out from these studies and these solutions have being researched on and helps to develop a better lifestyle and lifespan of people, such as new remedies, new therapies, proper diet, proper sleep and relaxation, lifestyle organization, etc. Nowadays we are entering the age of personalized treatments, where many biological factors of the person are taken into consideration, so the exact amount of remedy or therapy is applied. Also, subjective factors such as emotions made its way into mainstream medicine, and are things more and more taken into consideration. Not only subjective factors, as well as “indirect factors” (according to the medical approach) as diet, work load, rest periods, sleep patterns, entertainment and happiness, legal and illegal drug use and exercises. So we are studying problems and finding solutions, no need to transit to a RBE to have it done.
"No Utopia. It is just a far better society"
RBE proponents often use this catchy phase as rhetoric to the accusations of Utopianism and complete lack of touch with science facts and reality. The defense is that the notion of a RBE based strictly on the scientific method. The Scientific Method says that in order to affirm something you need a hard evidence that can be subjected to a battery of analysis, tests and experiments, from where you draw conclusions based n the results of those experiments to formulate a hypothesis, that will be tested and experimented to be confirmed, and once confirmed it will be published to be subject of peer review. Once passed tests will be repeated by other researchers or new tests will be formulated to test the hypothesis to the limit trying to find a crack or breaking point to show it is wrong. Once the tests finish the testers will compile the result of all the tests and calculate it, to determine if it passed or not. If yes, it will be released to be published as a fact.
RBE proponents have no evidence. Actually, the evidences are against them, as we could see in this article. Historically, biologically, socially, empirically, economically, etc. everything plays against the notion of a RBE and yet, RBE proponents use anecdotal evidences, rhetoric speeches and outdated sciences to validate their point of view over uninformed people. The blindness is such, to the point of denying and entire field of science in order for the RBE concept be able to be justifiable (As Peter Joseph Merola often does dismissing economics claiming “it is just a bunch of complicated numbers to fool people and track money sequences”, and Jacque Fresco does dismissing modern biology, architecture and urbanism, claiming “scientists knows nothing”).
“It is a far better future”
There is no evidence or experiment that clearly demonstrates that a RBE can provide a better standard of living today. Since no evidence can be draw from today, it is impossible to outline any scenario for the future.
The evidence needed is formal evidence, any kind of long term study on social systems, with reports fully detailed and possible to be replicated both on the real world and in virtual simulators. This would prove the social system to be applicable based on a nation’s constitution (experiment’s host) or international human rights, meaning, this new social system would provide the human’s social and biological needs, and also have self-regulatory and safety mechanisms to guarantee order. Also the system must provide variable scenarios to foresee problems or excesses to be dealt in the future.
To explain it better, let’s dive on some items with a couple of examples:
“No privately owned property. Nobody owns anything.”
One of the weirdest proposals of a RBE is the notion of abolishment of private property. After abolishing money and law, and all the mechanisms on place to sustain these two systems, Jacque Fresco idealized that naturally this would lead to the abolishment of privately owned property. He goes on declaring that “the worlds resources must be declared common heritage”, beliefs that his followers share and defend. The catch in the sentence is to think about a world where you can acquire goods and services for free. Here there are several huge problems, let’s analyze:
In any part of this article, other system or ideology was used to justify the arguments. The arguments were built upon, and only upon, verified facts and logic. There is no intent on the part of the author to lead the reader towards another kind of ideal or alternative (or established) system. There are also no philosophical or religious intents in this text, either to accuse or to defend philosophy or religion.
Any part of this text can be used for profit motives. Copies and printings are allowed, as long the source, being this website, is cited.
This website has no malicious intent to harm anyone using any kind of bad intentioned software. Please rate this website on the Web Of Trust since RBE proponents act like a sect, and do defamation campaigns to every website that refutes their beliefs.
The sources are the most complete possible trying to encompass every important topic mentioned in this article especially human behavior. Please note that in text there are other sources like films and books worth taking a look that will not be mentioned in the sources below. Some sources are papers that serve as basis to refute other topics where ideologies were created upon by RBE proponents like language and individuality (topics which RBE proponents affirm different beliefs from what is known as science fact, specially dealing with the notion of human nature). This article is intended to point the critical flaws within the proposal of a RBE, not to debunk topic by topic, for such reasons these topics were not commented on, but if you wish to draw your own conclusions, please refer to these papers below: [51], [52], [53], [54], [58], [59], [60], [61].
Further sources to reference the accusations present on this text to demonstrate they are real, such as print screens, books, audios, links and citations, will be inserted on the section “accusation sources” little by little along the time as soon as they are found.
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58. Damasio et al., 1990 Individuals with sociopathic behavior caused by frontal damage fail to respond autonomically to social stimuli. Behav Brain Res 41, 81
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60. Wenner M 2008 Disease for Darwinism – More kids, less cancer: Huntington’s may confer survival benefits. Scientific American 298, 20.
61. Rapoport J Excerpt from her book, The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing. This gives a sense of what OCD is like.
62. Sapolsky, Robert M. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. 2004. Holt Paperbacks; 3rd edition.
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Zeitgeist knows nothing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfDcnDZFias&feature=fvwrel
Split meeting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ef8VzYXMgj0
Audio excerpt of cult leaders declaring their split: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CktO4wXiV3A#!
Jacque Fresco affirms plants feel pain, mentions Chandra Bose experiment as some credible scientist, when in fact he was a paranormal investigator and believer. This shows how much science background and depth Jacque really have: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU491ofOxSI
Peter Joseph affirms plants feel pain, mentions Chandra Bose experiment too, even declares that plants are “some kind of animals too” showing the level of science knowledge and depth he really has: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AZSjiadUSw
About the Bose experiment and belief: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_perception_%28paranormal%29
More about plant perception with a good source section on the end: http://www.skepdic.com/plants.html
Roxanne declares Venus Project is an Autocracy with power centralized around her and Jacque, also declares scientists are incompetent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pxT9_oyDOLQ
First thing that strikes is the idea of no system of behavior control. Under current behavioral paradigms, humans cannot live in a civilized world without mechanism for dealing with behavioral disorders.
“Imagine a world with no police, no law, no need for work, etc.”
Is the marketing of the RBE concept. Yes, imagine a world with no psychiatric clinics, no neurology doctors, no authorities to arrest a criminal.
“But in this world there will be no crime, people will not be violent, etc.”
Let’s break it down:
- The RBE concept is totally based on the principle of behaviorism, which basically says that if I can control the mechanisms of reward to an individual so I can control his behavior patterns. It took its fame in the 1950’s and its biggest proponent is B.F. Skinner. This approach is outdated, and therefore flawed. Although environment does affect human behavior in some degree, it is not the sole reason that shape behavior, but serves as a catalyst one.
- A really shy guy, middle class, quiet life, pacific and simple, overnight becomes one of the worst coldest serial killers ever seen, with high degree of violence with his victims, ending up in a dramatic suicide. Those types of cases where neighbors report to police “But he was such a nice guy, I don’t understand…”. This type of thing can be caused by a brain tumor or a sudden depression that itself can have many biological and psychological triggers, these things that are out of control of any social systems. In a world without systems of control, like an RBE, this mass murderer would be able to do much more, and the consequences of things like family revenge would bring the social stability to chaos, and the whole concept of a non violent society down. And without authorities, who will decide the fate right now? Who can forbid the victim’s family members to start a bloody revenge against the brain tumor guy and all his family?
- Somebody goes to the Pet Shop and buy a dog. This little dog has been taken from its mother since it was a newborn, and bought before it even opened his eyes. The only social contact it had was human contact. But this dog knows how to bark, to sniff, to shake water from his wet fur, understand the barking of other dog if it hears another dog barking, etc. None of these behaviors were learned by human contact or behavior, neither from its mother or other dogs. As well as the little pet dog of this example, other animals, when isolated after being born or after hatch from the egg, also happen to know how to behave. Nobody teach a spider how to do those complex webs. Sea turtles, newly hatched on a beach, will automatically move toward the ocean. A joey (young kangaroo)climbs into its mother's pouch upon being born. Honeybees communicate by dancing in the direction of a food source without formal instruction. Other examples include animal fighting, animal courtship behavior, internal escape functions, and building of nests. This in Biology is called Instincts, and RBE proponents deny the existence of such innate characteristics in animals. To the RBE core belief system, every behavior have a social basis of learning. Social learning, meaning, learn within a social context facilitated through such concepts as modeling and observational learning, is a valid theory and exists among animals and humans, more explicitly in the case of cultural values. Chimpanzees and Bonobos, for example, have a wide variety of cultures and isolated behavior patterns as well as any human tribe would have. There is language variation within the same species in the animal kingdom too. Any animal, including humans, can assimilate new behaviors, adapt to new circumstances and adopt another culture. There is also the conditioning factor that can happen. All these social learning mechanisms together makes the core belief of RBE proponents, but although it exists, social behavior is not the only cause of behavior itself. There is a wide variety of factors, deeply studied by Behavioral Biologists:
- Environment influence;
- Inherited DNA;
- Epigenetic;
- Transcription factor;
- Bacterial flora, parasites and viruses;
- Diseases;
- Brain structure, neurology;
- Neurotransmitters;
- Hormones;
- Stress factor;
- Diet;
- Population density;
- Social contact quality and quantity;
- Interspecies contact;
- Sex;
- Age;
- Social status.
Beyond dismissing economics, Peter Joseph Merola contradict himself when in his writings when he talks about things as Technological Unemployment and Planned Obsolescence, but both things are part of the Economic Science, being technological unemployment part of Structural Unemployment and planned obsolescence part of Market studies. Going deeper to understand from where he takes these wild ideas we found that Peter Joseph in his early radio shows stated that “plants feel pain”, clearly denouncing his mystical beliefs, because this belief is called “Plant Perception”, and is part of the esoteric/pseudoscientific belief system. Peter also has a recorded radio show with Jordan Maxwell dating from before he became a RBE leader after his first movie came out, around 2007. Those who know, Jordan Maxwell is one of the leader figures in the realm of esoterism, pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, defending things such as reptilian aliens mind controlling humans, new world order spearheaded by illuminati, pyramid powers, spirit possessions, telepathic communication with extra dimensional beings, and wide variety of other weird stuff. I don’t think that Peter Joseph, who dismiss science and follow esoteric beliefs, would be qualified to propose an economic reform such as a Resource Based Economy. Esoteric beliefs makes people dream about a world without violence, crime, etc. to a degree that they (esoteric believers) start to compile anecdotal evidence to prove themselves right, forming what we know as Pseudoscience. One simple example of pseudoscience making: “If physics says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, therefore if I curse someone this curse will go back to me”. RBE and its non violent, non corrupt world make this same mistake, is a compilation of half facts that together sounds reasonable, but fail to a deep review of its proposals and fail to offer a good body of solid evidence. Peter seems to be someone who collects half facts to sound really intelligent to his peers, but fail to understand anything deeper. Jacque Fresco, however, seems to not buy into esoterism or conspiracy theories, but fail to update his knowledge to a more recent body of evidence, especially in city system designs and behavioral biology.Next thing on the discourse is
RBE is a flawed concept. Albeit utopias are good for the thinking exercise.
“No utopia. We have no idea of what a perfect society means, it’s only a far much better society than of this one we have now”.
Let’s break it down:
- Utopia does not actually mean a “perfect society”. This concept appeared when describing the mythical Atlantis society, and is related to its social system as being perfect, not the way of life of each individual. Since the RBE concept defends a reform on the social system to a stage where it would work perfectly, it can be labeled a utopia. Social systems means that food will be produced the exact amount its needed and people will receive the exact amount they want whenever they want, that people will have the exact transport they wish with no delay, no accident, etc. in other words, a society where its functions works flawlessly. Any people realistic enough easily see the problem with this thinking. To create a flawlessly system is almost impossible, since the variables are too many, and some of them are out of human control, like weather, cosmic events that affects planetary events, human behavior, etc. To affirm that such perfect social systems can be made, specially be made under current technological, scientific and social paradigms, is lacking a huge amount of touch with reality.
- RBE proponents have a readings list, and one of the books in there is the Skinner’s book Walden Two. A fictional novel of a society where every aspect of behavior, meaning, the reward mechanisms, are controlled. This book is actually a Dystopia disguised as Utopia. Since an RBE proposal can be based on a fictional novel of a biased proponent of behaviorism, so critics of RBE can point the fictional novel Brave New World, from Aldous Huxley, as a valid critique to the RBE ideal.
- The book Seeing Like a State, from James C. Scott, also points detailed reports of some of the last utopian proposals of planned state that ended up in total failure, and worse! The nearby case to an RBE is the Garden City Movement, created by Ebenezer Howard, that have striking similarities to nowadays “movements” out there proposing RBE ideal, including the circular cities with self contained resources and perfect (utopian) social systems. I wouldn’t admire if the RBE concept is not just a modern version of Howard’s Garden City Movements, a version with machines instead.
- The movie Die Welle, of Dennis Gansel, based on the 1960’s real experiment called The Third Wave, shows how RBE proponents behave pretty accurately. Actually, any cult* follower behave like this. The blind defense of the ideal leads to a terrible display of non sense and lack of realism by them, justifying acts of propaganda, vandalism, and even domestic terrorism disguised as “means for a greater good”, or “means to save the world”.(*RBE proponents deny that their group is a cult, and affirm they have no ideology, no leader and no control mechanism.)
But these premises of no leader, no control, no system, that seduces fragile people, are them true?
Let’s break it down:
- Peter Joseph Merola, musician and filmmaker, founded the internet based group called Zeitgeist Movement. It keep affirming he is no leader, but behind the curtains he assumes this role. He is the one who decide events dates, who appears on interviews, who built the ideals, the websites and the texts, he is the one who designated roles for internal regiment. In the event of the split between The Venus Project, from Jacque Fresco, and the Zeitgeist Movement, he was the one who decided for the split and who publicized a note on their website officializing the split, without taking any consensus from his peer’s community, meaning, the “movement”. Anyone who can decide for the whole community whatever they have to follow, or believe, or defend is nothing else but a leader.
- Concerning internal regiment, Peter’s movement has a series of laws, behavior conducts, belief systems and control structures. It has the misnamed role of “coordinators” and their finger selected moderators. Under them are “sub-coordinators” and “co-coordinators”. But actually none of them coordinates anything, but just are there to make sure the laws of the group are being noted, and whoever is a transgressor is judged by the authority itself, who solely decides the fate of this person on the group. None of them were chosen by any democratic means, or by any consensus of community, neither by voluntary reporting for duty, but they were chosen by personal delegation. Someone above pointed his as so. The trend beginning by Peter himself. Again, please watch Die Welle to see exactly how it happens, and study the Third Reich, specially Poland’s case, to see what this pattern of community though can produce. Peter Joseph also keeps reaffirming in every place he is given voice that he does not have any direct relationship with zeitgeist, and have announced a couple of times his retirement, and yet he keeps reappearing in interviews, videos and governing his group in the background, deciding who is banned and who is not. Many banned or defectors “coordinators” have made public denounces of his “string pulling” in the background of things. He strongly resembles the professor of the movie Die Welle, Mr. Reiner Wenger, [SPOILER ALERT] who lost control of his little experiment and now struggles in madness trying to prove to himself he is right and that his group is going to do the right thing. Who watched the movie knows what really happened.[End of Spoiler]
- Concerning Ideology, let the definition talk:
“An ideology is a set of ideas that constitute one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things, as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies, or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society. The main purpose behind an ideology is to offer either change in society, or adherence to a set of ideals where conformity already exists, through a normative thought process. Ideologies are systems of abstract thought applied to public matters and thus make this concept central to politics. Implicitly every political or economic tendency entails an ideology whether or not it is propounded as an explicit system of thought. It is how society sees things.”Whoever says an RBE isn’t an ideology is seriously lacking education or is caught under a brainwashing hype of a cult.
“We are against fossil fuels, nuclear power and other pollutant forms of energy production. We believe in the future we will have more than enough energy to supply the entire world necessities with high efficiency.”
This is one classic move by RBE proponents. They appeal to the global warming debate, and to the energy crisis debate in order to make their RBE concept appears more feasible. But they actually took existing trends of thoughts and adapted to appear that it is something new that only they are thinking about. This is not true, following any scientific journal, magazine, blog or technological innovation website, one can easily see that these are old ideals being under research for a long time, some have being under research for more than 20 years! All RBE proponents do is to compile a list of cutting edge technologies under development and show them as something never thought about, exclusive of their RBE concept.
The energy thing is one of the topics very explored by RBE proponents following this deceptive pattern of compilation of existing researches. The problem is because they are severely out of touch with scientific realities of the technical possibilities of these energy sources.
Let’s break down some facts:
- Energy is something that is promptly used, and is very difficult to store in large amounts for long periods of times. The technology we have to store energy is still not enough to power any city system, not even a modest house. The life span of the most advanced battery currently in development is still not even close to what RBE proposes. To improve one’s society, it needs energy. Any evolution demands an increased energy offer to supply the city systems. Even if technologies become more efficient, the complexity of social systems always tend to increase, increasing the demand for energy, thus demanding more and more power plants.
- Fossil fuels are something that we entered in because of its slow energy release characteristics, and there is no substitute for it in current days. The byproducts of these materials are also used in a variety of other industrial processes, offering cheap materials for regular consumption, like plastics and gas. To end fossil fuel consumption, is necessary to completely modify every society mechanisms, how it work and how people approach it. RBE proposes that alternative energy systems will provide the same power fossil fuels provide to the world today in a more sustainable way, actually, zeitgeist are the ones who promotes this conjecture, because in any of Jacque’s books or essays or talks he present any scientific, technological solution to the energy problem, he just assumes it will be there. But zeitgeist goes beyond and affirm that solar and wind power will be enough to power every world’s cars, trains, buildings, hospitals, parks, streets and homes. Zeitgeist also defend the idea that we already are capable of completely abandoning fossil fuels and adopting solar and wind power as the sole means of energy production. These affirmations shows how completely out of touch with reality they’ve got.
- Solar and wind power are not very efficient forms of production, and are still under heavy research by many laboratories, universities and independent researchers, all trying different methods to improve the energy production and the energy release efficiency of these systems. Also, solar and wind power are not permanent, and fluctuates a lot. Since energy is something promptly consumed, hardly stored, using these sources are not reliable to a society that demands stable energy flow.
- Wave power also fluctuates. It depends on marine dynamics and wind patterns. Also, ships can affect the wave strength depending where they are. Also, piers, seawalls, bulkheads and bridges can severely affect a wave power plant.
- There is also the problem of locality and weather. These alternative energy sources are good for small production facilities, to help alleviate the burden on the city power supply, like to light the light bulbs in a house or in a street. But in many cases, these devices are not always reliable. In coldly regions, on tropics or polar zones, mountain shadowed regions, valleys, forests or rainy places, these technologies will be of little use. Cold and heat affect efficiency of the system, also dust and weather factors like lightning or saltpeter. Lightning literally can destroy wind towers, strong gusts also can overburden the towers, making it to explode. Animal life can cause damages on the system, like bird’s feces or collision, also, animals may scratch the plants or make homes on them. In forests, leaves can be a major pollutant, insect life can also cause damages since they are attracted to heat and light. Shadowed or polar zones have little solar exposition, and also heavy snow precipitations. Rain is also something that can temporarily disrupts and damage solar and wind power plants.
- There is the night period. No solar, of course. Winds often reverse. And is the period of major energy consumption. Alternative energy sources couldn’t provide as many power as they would during the day, and since at night consumption increases, alternatives here fail.
- Every energy collector plant removes a certain amount of energy from the environment. You can’t just trash the whole world with wind turbines, because they will simply end with the whole energy of the wind itself. Altering the wind strength and energy can cause heavy changes on weather.
- The Jevons Paradox:
“In economics, the Jevons paradox (sometimes Jevons effect) is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological improvements could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption.
The issue has more recently been reexamined by modern economists studying consumption Rebound Effects from improved energy efficiency. In addition to reducing the amount needed for a given use, improved efficiency lowers the relative cost of using a resource, which increases the quantity demanded of the resource, potentially counteracting any savings from increased efficiency. Additionally, increased efficiency accelerates economic growth, further increasing the demand for resources. The Jevons paradox occurs when the effect from increased demand predominates, causing an increase in overall resource use.”
In other words, this effect is a demonstration that improving energy offer and efficiency does not ensure energy abundance, as promoted by RBE. To understand it better, think about this hypothetical scenario: A city creates a new power plant that will supply it with 3 times more energy than the actual consumption rate, creating a more than abundant energy offer. But, this extra energy is being lost. What happens is that society evolves to a more energy consumption society, 2 parks are opened and 1 shopping center just to have a place where to use this energy. Happens that in 5 years the place have overcrowded with new businesses and immigrants, and now it is again in an energy crisis, and now space is reduced by the growing city. And now the city can’t get rid of any of the parks or the shopping to save energy, since they are established social systems, intrinsically providing social services to citizens like jobs, markets, entertainment, tourism, etc. and sustaining the very life style of the city.
I think about a RBE, where nobody would govern any city. Whenever energy supply increased, people increased its consumption rates with nobody to regulate or tell them the limits of consumption. It’s like a self predatory society. Just providing large amount of energy and leaving people to make their own decisions about how to spend this energy is not the best idea in order to create a balanced society. This is like opening a box of pizza and say: “take it!” People will struggle to grab as many slices as they can, in a mad fashion, with no perspective of the others desires and needs. This is not because we are a stupid species, but because our brains are not wired yet to think broader than our immediate family circle. Our limited mammalian brain imposes us with constraints in concern, and we can possibly be aware of others concerns and problems, but they don’t penetrate our own concerns. This is the importance of a government system, since it theoretically guarantees the balanced well being and resources providing for every group of people; avoid them to fall into tribalism and domination by force.
- Nuclear dilemma: Any RBE proponents will affirm that any nuclear energy power plant would be allowed in a RBE society. But nuclear power is the only thing that can provide for a sustainable future, actually under knowledge of science. Nuclear fission is dangerous and not really desired, but nuclear fusion is much more safer, non pollutant and creates large amounts of energy, and is the biggest bet current in offer to provide for a sustainable future. This also shows how RBE followers are not researching well and just repeating beliefs given to them by their leaders.
“There will be no crime, no jail, no war, no polices, no courts. Every people will have access to the necessities of life and will not develop aberrant behavior”
This much repeated sentence is one of the appealing sentences of RBE, and to me one that most shows how out of date RBE concept is. This is solely based on the school of Behaviorism, from the 1950’s, a trend of thought that tried to create a theory about animal behavior but lost the race to Ethology. Is a school that never has being fully accepted given its flawed nature and creed-like belief systems. This flawed, fringe school is the very foundation of RBE, and the core belief to its social system function.
On the studies of human biology, behavior is a phenomenon with many causes chaotically influencing one another with none of them being the leader. As we surf on the waves of internal processes and external influences, triggers are shut on and off all the time reverberating influence on all the other systems of the body. We are far to have an objective chart to foresee every kind of behavior based on the many kinds of interactions of the many factors that generate behavior. Simplify it to the mere interaction of a person to the environment is too much of a simplification, naive and biased. This kind of thinking assumes every human being is exactly the same, thus will respond the same way to the same stimulus. This is a false logic that deny the very existence of DNA and its thousands of switches and switches of switches and triggers of switches of switches. Not a surprise, since behaviorism is a science school from the 50’s, and back that time no genome project was even dreamed.
Also, there is a contradiction on this discourse. Let’s analyze the following much repeated sentence from RBE proponents:
“No jails, No police. If someone commits an aberrant act, this person will be studied, so the causes can be fixed and this event never come to happen again”
After this, often the case of Albert Fish is mentioned as some sort of “proof” that behaviorism is right. Actually, this kind of serves more as a diversion, since listeners will not stop to think about the case of “catching a criminal to study it”. There are several implications in this sentence:
- Who will catch it?
- How this person will be catch?
- What place will host criminals?
- Who will trial and prove he made the crime?
- Who will investigate the crime scene to collect proofs?
- Who will prosecute, and who will defend the accused?
- Who will decide who study the criminal?
- What are the ethical limits of this study?
- What will happen once the study is done?
- What happens if the study shows that the very science has a flaw and need to change?
If you noticed, this RBE social structure has severe holes in the organization. Because RBE assumes that everyone will behave properly, things like police, jails, judges, lawyers, research institutes, ethics commissions and etc. are assumed to be useless. In fact, IF everyone behaved well, such things would indeed be useless. The fact is that assuming people will behave well and never derange is a completely misinformed opinion that clearly shows no knowledge on sciences of human behavior. Actually, this is more of a utopian/idealist point of view than an evidence-based verifiable science.
There is also a philosophical question: “behave well” according to what? A lion that kills violently a bull and rip his flesh of while the bull still agonizes in terror and pain is doing something right for his ecosystem, lifestyle, species, health and family. But this is straight murder, a cold murder. Is the lion behaving well? To use valor judgments such as “good or bad” a frame of reference necessarily needs to be set previously to the analysis. After a frame of reference is set, one can argue if something is good or bad. But in a RBE no one takes decisions and there is no democracy, so who will set the frame of reference in the first place?
Philosophically and politically there is other problem, the ethical limits of the study itself. Assuming the criminal was somehow caught and locked somewhere, and someone volunteers to study this person, who will decide the limits of this study itself? Can the researcher electrocute, insert needles, sexually abuse, inflict injuries and pain, use aggressive language, torture and menace the subject? Can the researcher operate the subject without anesthesia? Can the subject be kept under subhuman conditions with no proper nourishment, space, hygiene and sanitation?
Scientifically speaking, since there are no bosses, no democracy, no jobs and no enterprises in a RBE, who will study the criminal in the first place? To whom the researcher will write the report? Who will publish it? Who will peer review it? And who will overlook the research process? And who will repeat and test the hypothesis?
And what kind of force will decide about the future of the subject once the study is finished?
And in the last question proposed to the problem of the sentence above being analyzed, what if the study, assuming it was possible, shows a conclusive proof that the very science of human behavior is wrong? This is the major flaw in this sentence defended by RBE proponents. The fact is, Human Behavioral Biology studies have already shown behaviorism is flawed and outdated. And have shown it since the 1960’s, when Ethology won the race to become the animal behavior method of study. Ethology is far better because it worries and studies both internal/biological processes of the subject and the environmental effect on these processes, and also, what kind of behavioral phenomenon emerges from the interaction among these many factors.
Whenever a RBE proponent deliver the line and immediately runs for the case of Albert Fish, someone needs to cut the speech and argue that actually, studies on these subjects have already being made and are still on the making to this day and that these studies have already shown behaviorism is flawed.
Not to mention, many practical solutions have emerged out from these studies and these solutions have being researched on and helps to develop a better lifestyle and lifespan of people, such as new remedies, new therapies, proper diet, proper sleep and relaxation, lifestyle organization, etc. Nowadays we are entering the age of personalized treatments, where many biological factors of the person are taken into consideration, so the exact amount of remedy or therapy is applied. Also, subjective factors such as emotions made its way into mainstream medicine, and are things more and more taken into consideration. Not only subjective factors, as well as “indirect factors” (according to the medical approach) as diet, work load, rest periods, sleep patterns, entertainment and happiness, legal and illegal drug use and exercises. So we are studying problems and finding solutions, no need to transit to a RBE to have it done.
"No Utopia. It is just a far better society"
RBE proponents often use this catchy phase as rhetoric to the accusations of Utopianism and complete lack of touch with science facts and reality. The defense is that the notion of a RBE based strictly on the scientific method. The Scientific Method says that in order to affirm something you need a hard evidence that can be subjected to a battery of analysis, tests and experiments, from where you draw conclusions based n the results of those experiments to formulate a hypothesis, that will be tested and experimented to be confirmed, and once confirmed it will be published to be subject of peer review. Once passed tests will be repeated by other researchers or new tests will be formulated to test the hypothesis to the limit trying to find a crack or breaking point to show it is wrong. Once the tests finish the testers will compile the result of all the tests and calculate it, to determine if it passed or not. If yes, it will be released to be published as a fact.
RBE proponents have no evidence. Actually, the evidences are against them, as we could see in this article. Historically, biologically, socially, empirically, economically, etc. everything plays against the notion of a RBE and yet, RBE proponents use anecdotal evidences, rhetoric speeches and outdated sciences to validate their point of view over uninformed people. The blindness is such, to the point of denying and entire field of science in order for the RBE concept be able to be justifiable (As Peter Joseph Merola often does dismissing economics claiming “it is just a bunch of complicated numbers to fool people and track money sequences”, and Jacque Fresco does dismissing modern biology, architecture and urbanism, claiming “scientists knows nothing”).
“It is a far better future”
There is no evidence or experiment that clearly demonstrates that a RBE can provide a better standard of living today. Since no evidence can be draw from today, it is impossible to outline any scenario for the future.
The evidence needed is formal evidence, any kind of long term study on social systems, with reports fully detailed and possible to be replicated both on the real world and in virtual simulators. This would prove the social system to be applicable based on a nation’s constitution (experiment’s host) or international human rights, meaning, this new social system would provide the human’s social and biological needs, and also have self-regulatory and safety mechanisms to guarantee order. Also the system must provide variable scenarios to foresee problems or excesses to be dealt in the future.
To explain it better, let’s dive on some items with a couple of examples:
- To create a social system, first one needs a set or regulations from where the systems will build upon. This can be a constitution borrowed from some prosperous nation, or the declaration of human rights. You simply can’t build a social system based on nothing. In order to create a system, for example, of food production, the designer need to know what kind of regulations exist for land use, chemical usage, overall size of a vertical building, land ownership, land improductivity, etc. This is the case of a RBE, is a sketch of a system which takes many things for granted and builds upon nothing. It assumes that things will be there because “scientists will make measurements on spot and determine the rules for that spot”. Not that simple, this kind of thinking shows extremely misunderstanding of science as well as human affairs. For example, what kind of “science” would “determine” if a piece of land of 1000 square meters is proper to build a traditional farm, vertical farm, park, or a mansion? Some questions are simply impossible to be answered using science alone.
- In order to experiment with the future, one needs to create a scenario. In this scenario, hypothetical situations are set up and built, where subjects will be inserted for a blind test, and the observation of these subjects provide information on where the hypothetical situations have passed the test or not based on grade. This can be made both in the real world using real human beings interacting with real systems, although logically in a very small scale, but still practicable. Other choice is to set up virtual environments, where size is no matter as long as you have processing power. The subject can be automated or manned, each one with their proper characteristics. The rest of the process is the same, they will live the scenario, their performance will be noted and these results will be used to draw the final conclusion. Other types of experiment for future scenarios involve R&D (Research and Development). This basically is to engineer an idea to reality. For example, in the RBE proposal, helicopters are disc shaped with the helix running alongside and a glass dome to host the passengers. There is no experiment or engineering tests performed in such design to ensure it is possible, safe and viable, and yet it is displayed as cutting edge technology read for use. This is a small example but the RBE proposal has many other examples to which there is no evidence, project, engineering work or prototype to validate it. Some things have models, like the houses, but they are artistic models used for visual impact, not functional models to be put into tests. To understand the problem with these models, let’s compare it to food safety: In order to ensure food safety, the regulatory organization will analyze samples of the food from some lot, not the package whose objective is to sell the product using visual impact.
- Social and biological needs are those which every constitution of a democratic country and the declaration of human rights try to ensure, some examples are, freedom, well being, nourishment, security, fair treatment, etc.
- Self-regulatory mechanisms keep the social system in order and running, so the goods and services are kept available and also to ensure the motivation to live under a civilized manner is kept present (PS: The “self” on the word “self-regulatory” is made present because the system is assumed to be a whole thing, not a bunch of scattered pieces, therefore this thing regulates itself, thus the “self-regulatory” word, although only “regulatory” also is applicable). In a RBE, self-regulatory mechanisms exist, but only for non-human affairs such as, for example, a bridge repair performed by robots with AI. Although today’s technology is far to be satisfactory to ensure this level of automated intelligence, this is not impossible. The problem is there is no self-regulatory mechanism to deal with human affairs. For example, a child that decides to take every single ratio of food available in a city, to fill a dry pond with food and make a child-dream’s food pond, leaving everyone else starving on that city, or a megalomaniac man that decided that he want to have a mansion as big as an entire city and a army of robots programmed to act as medieval knights and archers.
- Variable scenarios are calculations made using possible scenarios that derange from normality. For example, a scenario can calculate the amount of food be able to be produced by a crop if El Nino is present that year and the crop suffered from drought, or the opposite, if heavy rain sudden falls and wreak havoc the crop. Or things like an earthquake damage, population increase and decrease, pandemics, etc. In today’s world these scenarios are evolving together with the evolution of our civilization, since our model of society was not designed, but emerged during thousands of years. More and more we can foresee good and bad scenarios and prepare to deal with them. Non human problems are everyday better dealt with allowed by advances and discoveries of science and technology. Problems involving human affairs in today’s world have money as the main regulatory mechanism. It is NOT a perfect regulatory mechanism, and has many flaws, but is what we have now and can’t simply be removed overnight. In order to remove money from the human world, another regulatory mechanism for human affairs must be found, otherwise weird or destructive cases may arise and society can devolve back to savagery, tribal mob rule and primitivism.
“No privately owned property. Nobody owns anything.”
One of the weirdest proposals of a RBE is the notion of abolishment of private property. After abolishing money and law, and all the mechanisms on place to sustain these two systems, Jacque Fresco idealized that naturally this would lead to the abolishment of privately owned property. He goes on declaring that “the worlds resources must be declared common heritage”, beliefs that his followers share and defend. The catch in the sentence is to think about a world where you can acquire goods and services for free. Here there are several huge problems, let’s analyze:
- RBE is supposedly a system without laws or law enforcement mechanisms, so how this declaration of common heritance will actually work? Without laws and organizations to establish them, no common heritance can be approved and established, also defended and assured. Nobody will hold any power to ensure the common heritage declaration to be put into practice and respected by everyone, or to simply just make it something official and backed up.
- World’s resources do not translate as goods and services. This hole on the statement leaves goods and services without any kind of definition, therefore passive of being claimed by any organized power, such as armed gangs of organized crime or fundamentalist religious armies. And worse of all this, such groups could argue and claim the world’s goods and services using legal arguments, even in a world without laws. Such feat could be achieved by common consensus and propaganda, led by mob motivations or coercive power (religion, drugs, weapons). Since no law is established, a law of a group could be self declared sovereign. Without any government constitution to declare sovereignty, things like Nazism could happen in a blink of an eye without any resistance and through legal means.
- Property can be abusive. People with money nowadays can perform every kind of abusive act of waste of precious resources. But there is the other side of property, it can be legally taken and transferred, so no matter how misused some property is, it will circle hands. Somewhere along the line someone will have the opportunity and intelligence of putting that piece of property into better use for the common good. Also, some nations have laws to punish misuse of land, and provide a better share of resources to every citizen (land improductivity, building constraints, etc.).
- Personal property is something that actually needs to be protected for hygiene and moral reasons. In a world without rights of ownership, I can’t declare mine things such as a teeth brush, eyeglasses or underwear. Not only simple things, but some more complex things such as a massage gear, or a wheelchair. Things that can’t simply be shared for very intimate reasons. And since there is no law, nobody could protect people’s rights of ownership, and if some brawler decides to remove these intimate things from people by force, nobody can ensure justice or protection. RBE proponents defend their belief claiming that the RBE system itself ensures that nobody turns violent, but if you followed this article from the beginning you know this argument is ignorant is was thoroughly refuted. If not, please review the beginning of the article, on the subject of violence.
Disclaimer
In any part of this article, other system or ideology was used to justify the arguments. The arguments were built upon, and only upon, verified facts and logic. There is no intent on the part of the author to lead the reader towards another kind of ideal or alternative (or established) system. There are also no philosophical or religious intents in this text, either to accuse or to defend philosophy or religion.
Any part of this text can be used for profit motives. Copies and printings are allowed, as long the source, being this website, is cited.
This website has no malicious intent to harm anyone using any kind of bad intentioned software. Please rate this website on the Web Of Trust since RBE proponents act like a sect, and do defamation campaigns to every website that refutes their beliefs.
The sources are the most complete possible trying to encompass every important topic mentioned in this article especially human behavior. Please note that in text there are other sources like films and books worth taking a look that will not be mentioned in the sources below. Some sources are papers that serve as basis to refute other topics where ideologies were created upon by RBE proponents like language and individuality (topics which RBE proponents affirm different beliefs from what is known as science fact, specially dealing with the notion of human nature). This article is intended to point the critical flaws within the proposal of a RBE, not to debunk topic by topic, for such reasons these topics were not commented on, but if you wish to draw your own conclusions, please refer to these papers below: [51], [52], [53], [54], [58], [59], [60], [61].
Further sources to reference the accusations present on this text to demonstrate they are real, such as print screens, books, audios, links and citations, will be inserted on the section “accusation sources” little by little along the time as soon as they are found.
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Accusation sources
Split meeting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ef8VzYXMgj0
Audio excerpt of cult leaders declaring their split: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CktO4wXiV3A#!
Jacque Fresco affirms plants feel pain, mentions Chandra Bose experiment as some credible scientist, when in fact he was a paranormal investigator and believer. This shows how much science background and depth Jacque really have: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU491ofOxSI
Peter Joseph affirms plants feel pain, mentions Chandra Bose experiment too, even declares that plants are “some kind of animals too” showing the level of science knowledge and depth he really has: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AZSjiadUSw
About the Bose experiment and belief: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_perception_%28paranormal%29
More about plant perception with a good source section on the end: http://www.skepdic.com/plants.html
Roxanne declares Venus Project is an Autocracy with power centralized around her and Jacque, also declares scientists are incompetent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pxT9_oyDOLQ
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