The Really Creepy People Behind the Libertarian-Inspired Billionaire Sea Castles

What happens when Americans plunder America and leave it broken, destitute and seething mad? Where do these fabulously wealthy Americans go with their loot, if America isn’t a safe, secure, or even desirable place to spend their riches? What if they lose faith in their gated communities, because those plush gated communities are surrounded by millions of pissed-off Americans stripped of their entitlements, and who now want in?

We finally have the answer, and you’re not going to like it: a new fleet of castles that float in the oceans. The super-wealthy are already building their first floating castle, a billion-dollar-plus luxury liner that offers permanent multimillion-dollar housing with the best protection of all: moats made of oceans, keeping the land-based Americans they’ve plundered at a safe distance.

The first such floating castle has been christened the “Utopia“–the South Korean firm Samsung has been contracted to build the $1.1 billion ship, due to be launched in 2013. Already orders are coming in to buy one of the Utopia’s 200 or so mansions for sale--which range in price from about $4 million for the smallest condos to over $26 million for 6,600 square-foot “estates.” The largest mansion is a whopping 40,000 square feet, and sells for $160 million.

Article by Mark Ames

Who wants to live in a world like they propose… it’s f***** up!!

I’ve written here before that these two movements seem weirdly and unnecessarily at odds with each other.  One group wants to elevate consciousness via spiritual means, one wants to elevate society via technological means.  Really, the latter could lead to the former: “This is what The Venus Project is all about – directing our technology and resources toward the positive, for the maximum benefit of people and planet and seeking out new ways of thinking and living that emphasize and celebrate the vast potential of the human spirit. We have the tools at hand to design – and build – a future that is worthy of the human potential.”  Great idea, doubtlessly.  Trouble is, people being as fucked up as they are, the Venus Project could very well lead to a fascistic Brave New World, and it does tend to overlook the human capacity to mess with each other.

Here’s the banner for the Venus Project, which has some problems:

Perhaps the reason some people don’t take something like the Venus Project seriously is because it does seem heavily quixotic, a little too good to be true.  Saying there will be “no crime” is a bit like saying there will be “no sexual frustration.”  While it’s of course true that crime goes up due to economic factors, those aren’t the only factors.  Humans are born with aggression, so it is beyond unrealistic to think that suddenly humans are going to shed all of their destructive tendencies just because they don’t have to slave at a 40-hour job, or suffer through unemployment.  People mess with each other out of boredom as much as out of economic necessity.

Short of creating a new Soma which anesthetizes people’s darker instincts, people will more than likely find ways to combat each other.  Aggression is normal.  To say otherwise may be fostering repression.

Recently, I linked to a quote by David Foster Wallace that I don’t entirely agree with:

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

I agree with it, I just don’t think it’s a problem.  Many a progress has been made out of this sense of self-loathing.  You can never strive to be better if you don’t in some way hate the part of you that’s incomplete.  In short – our darker instincts sometimes lead to progress.  What’s missing from something like the Venus Project is this very natural part of human nature.  Though Zeitgeist and the Venus Project are right about how the profit motive is a destructive force, it does not cover human’s natural desire for competition that’s not built merely into a capitalist system.  It’s who we are and it’s a large part of how we succeed.  Self-hate might be a destructive impulse, but it can also be the root of creativity.

Jacque Fresco, the VP’s designer, says he’s not a Utopian, but I don’t see how, that’s what it is:

Manly P. Hall writes in The Secret Destiny of America:

Our world is ruled by inflexible laws which con­trol not only the motions of the heavenly bodies, but the consequences of human conduct.  These Uni­versal motions, interpreted politically, are impelling human society out of a state of autocracy and tyran­ny to democracy and freedom.  This motion is inevitable, for the growth of humans is a gradual development of mind over matter, and the motion itself represents the natural and reasonable unfold­ment of the potentials within human character.

Those who attempt to resist this motion destroy themselves.  To cooperate with this motion, and to assist Nature in every possible way to the accom­plishment of its inevitable purpose, is to survive.

Our nature is dark as well as light – until we become the eternal light beings wished for by the Evolver Project.  Not to be overly dismissive, but it’s more likely that we remake society along the lines of something like the Venus Project than we all collectively evolve – as much as I’d like that to be true.  But the Venus Project would at least have to be a hybridization of what we have now, not some sudden jolt into peaceful coexistence.  Over time, there would be social conditioning in the sense that people’s incessant aggravation wouldn’t be passed on to their children year after year.  Eventually, people would mellow out – but that would take many generations, and mellowing out doesn’t mean being totally devoid of passion.

There’s also the unresolved issue that it would take billions of dollars to build something like the Venus utopia – the very thing the Venus Project wants to alleviate.  That’s a tragic part of this – if there really was going to be a future city, a Bill Gates would have to get involved.  That, or today’s cities would have to crumble to dust and be rebuilt as something better.  Once again, that’s probably even more likely than our sudden world-saving evolution.

More on the Venus Project:

The Venus Project clearly separates the Zeitgeist movement from other conspiracy theorizing from the likes of Alex Jones or David Icke – who seem mainly to be fear peddlers without any real answer to moving on from that fear. That’s what disturbs me about them. Obama may be a disappointment who is tasked with rescuing an unsustainable system, but he is not equal to the Bush legacy. The sheer fact that he’s a black man with the name Barack Obama shows that we’re inching closer to a more open society. I don’t think you can underestimate that, even if his promise of change is not really arriving – and most likely can’t because “rescuing banks” is the process of rescuing something that caused the problem. But Jones and Icke want to see totalitarianism everywhere and then sell that fear, so they will look for evidence wherever they can. Their terror alert level doesn’t seem much more honest than the one perpetrated by the Bush administration.

The Venus Project is in part what makes Zeitgeist so convincing, because it offers a level-headed alternative amidst some very far out claims. What this vision of utopia doesn’t see to emphasize is our potential for spiritual evolution, as well as economic and technological progress.  Daniel Pinchbeck, in 2012, rails against the concept of the Singularity, as it sees technology as solving all our problems, when his more-New Age stance is that a kind of mind technology is more important for our progress than literal technology.  If we see technology as the savior, we’ll be less inclined to explore and expand consciousness and tap into the greater world of outer and inner space.  There’s something to this.

Perhaps the Venus Project could usher that in because only until we become less warlike we’d be given access to other worlds.  Otherwise we might abuse the privilege, as we abuse everything.  What’s attractive to me about a techno utopia is that it satisfies both needs – technological and spiritual, as the technological would free us to spend more time with spiritual and creative pursuits.  And it’s more practical and feasible to create a sustainable environment than waiting for an evolution that never comes.

The Maya, after all, were technologically advanced, and going “back to nature” doesn’t necessarily mean being free from technology.  The Na’vi from Avatar are nice and all, but I don’t want to sleep in a hammock in a tree – I like my computer and the copy of Logic that allows me to record music.  That’s not a distraction like TV, it enhances the potential for creativity. So on that front I agree with the Venus Project and its aim to use technology to create an environmentally sustainable world that frees people from the mindless and unnecessary work that makes up most people’s workdays.  If a true Theory of Everything incorporates both the religious and the scientific (determining the “why” as well as the “how”), then it would seem an advanced society would incorporate both as well.  My worry is that our entire structure needs to fall apart first in order for it to be rebuilt as something better.

I’m currently reading (among other things) A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit, which makes the supposition that people are at their best amid total catastrophe.  Most people have no doubt seen this, even if they’ve never been part of a disaster, as the collective support after 9-11 shows how disaster can inspire goodwill.  That’s not entirely a positive prospect, as it may just be the case that the world system needs to collapse in order for us to start over with a better blank slate.  The environment might go to war with us before we go to war with each other as a form of self-protection.  Either way, we seem to be headed in that direction, and troubling as it may be, how else do you reform a world of 8 billion people that needs instant reforming?  I suppose everyone could take Ayahuasca at once, and blow everyone’s heads open, but somehow I don’t see that happening.

Whatever the case, Zeitgeist and the Venus Project are literal manifestations of my novel and the soundtrack so I’ve been glued to finding out new information about these two developments – “The New City is my home and I love all I know.”  Cool to me too that the filmmaker writes and records his own music.

More: Who is Peter Joseph?