Why Did I commence this Project?

Introduction

The attributes that had lead me to create this project is my innate desire to comprehend everything by questioning anything that I do not understand as well as my integral stance to hold good judgement when making decisions about the actions that I commit to.

Ever since I was very young, I have always wanted to make good moral decisions, regardless of what other people think or what society thinks.

In the educational system, I was always the one with a hand up asking the questions about the subject I was learning and comprehending as much as I could about it.

In employment, I would question whether I was doing a task correctly and what the objectives of my role in the company was, allowing me to align my goals with the goals set up by the company.

Overtime though, many people did not like me asking questions, since, unusually, a lot of tension would build up about answering simple questions. People would get uncomfortable as they struggled to give a response that was both detailed, comprehendible and morally justified.

This peaked during my time at University, since both the campus itself and the organisations sponsoring the course I did, made financially questionable decisions, leading to very unusual behaviour of both the organisers of the course, as well as the people representing the industry I would be aspiring to be employed into.

After Graduation

As I graduated in 2016, the country I lived in (United Kingdom), became centre stage globally as a referendum concluded with the departure from Europe, leading to many implications for the current people living in the UK and their status as a citizen. Even though I have British citizenship, this would still mean I may require to have a visa if I were to work or even travel for long durations across Europe.

This change in perspective finally gave me a reason to want to learn about how the world functioned, and to really comprehend the reason society ran the way it did.

Once I arrived home though after my volunteer work during the summer, my parents immediately got divorced and I had to move house, which as you might think, is not the best time to look for a job and establish a good working routine. So during this time as I recovered and reflected on my university experience, I started to use my newly acquired research skills to look into politics, economics, and the various problems happening across the world.

After a few weeks, I wondered whether I needed a job at all and what I would need to do to not work for a company, since after all I was living with my parents and was living in relative comfort. When confronting Google with these questions I was surprised that there were indeed many other people asking these same questions and that there were already many solutions already in the works.

One of my first realisations was with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in which food, water and shelter was the first priority. So the question remained, what is the cheapest method to acquiring shelter (since food and water are relatively simple)?

Tiny House

One of the first movements I started to follow was the tiny house movement established in America, in which families would build a home the size of a car parking space and live in it, and that idea was just brilliant to me, and the implications of implementing this globally would change how we managed many things.

But after looking at what people in the UK did with the tiny house movement, the reality of the corruption of the world suddenly hit me. To build a home you needed land, and to build on land you needed something called planning permission, which is a big legal bundle of joy to read, because it basically makes the tiny home movement in the UK very difficult to do without buying vast amounts of land and having a lot of money for the planning permission to be approved, which are due to the strict requirements people have been given to build by. This made me realise that it was not the small, individual problems that needed to be solved but how the entire society was structure and all of its laws.

Ubuntu

Quickly after this I stumbled into a few movements that were tackling these major issues, one of these was the Ubuntu movement, relating to small house building and something called Voluntarism, where each individual volunteers to do the tasks the society needed to be done, rather than creating jobs and exchanging them for salaries.

But this movement had no fundamental basis to go off and had some major flaws that it needed to solve before it could even be implemented properly.

Resource Based Economy

The one movement that caught my eye and that I follow to this day is The Venus Project, a resource based economy that determined the economic and political decisions on what the earth could provide from an empirical point of view, where each area could be measured and tested to see the how much food and water was available in an area, or for example, see how many people an area could sustain based on a variety of these factors including distance from rivers, amount of sunlight received and amount of plant to graze on is available for the animals.

The founder of The Venus Project, Jacque Fresco, had a very unique perspective and way of thinking about society and the way that it functioned that resonated with many people, and has managed to create a sizeable following over the years, but it has lost traction since the founder passed away in 2017.

TROM

After Jaques passing, a few members from the Venus Project left the group due to hierarchical control over the project by Roxanne, the person Jacque left the project to, and founded the TROM project.

This project has similar goals to the resource based economy but sees TRADE itself as a fundamental flaw in todays economy and advocates for a TRADE-FREE economy, which also implies many other components such as PATENT-FREE, COPYRIGHT-FREE (also called copyleft/open source/free software), etc…

I found this project out by reading a blog by Sasha on the website www.bigworldsmallsasha.com, where this women has managed to travel the world without having to trade, which is quite fascinating and something I wish to explore myself one day, after I get tired of playing the job game.

Conclusion

I see The Venus Project as a final solution for humanity, but it has one fatal flaw. For the project to even commence, the entire earth needs to be examined for all of its resources before a decision can be made to allocate resources between humanity and the wild life, which I doubt will be achieved, even in my lifetime.

As soon as I realised this about The Venus Project, I decided that a solution was needed to transition this society into this better society, whether that be a resource based economy, or one not yet imagined.

The TROM project gives me hope in that they are pursuing something that seems to be going in the right direction. But again with all projects this one also has a flaw, in that it is not the people that have to change, but the laws themselves, since for this project to commence on a larger scale, laws have to be dismantled or at least not enforced through the police and military that may intervene in projects such as TROM, the Venus Project, and for any other project in the future for that matter.

And so, over these last few years I have been researching into how this can be achieved, as well as learning how this current society actually functions on all levels.

Many ways of living have existed over the millennia, so we have a lot to look at and a lot to learn from, but we must not ignore the physical infrastructure built up in the last few centuries that supports this way of living.

If we are going to live in a different society without needing this type of infrastructure, then we need to change it or demolish it and do something else with the land, whether that is for the good of humanity, or for the good of the wildlife still remaining, the choice for what we do is now in our futures hands.