Jacque Fresco is an industrial designer, a social engineer, a futurist
and a self-taught, multi-disciplinary scientist and inventor who has worked with both technology and social sciences.
In the late 1930s he joined a local Ku Klux Klan group in Miami and dissolved it in a month and a half. In the following short film, Jacque describes how this was done.
- You joined the Klan? - Ku Klux Klan, years ago.
There were about 32 members.
What I did is I spoke to the leader only.
If you could befriend the leader, that's important.
He owned a war surplus store, and I used to buy a lot of scientific stuff,
lenses and optical devices from him.
I did different optical devices.
He said "What do you do with that stuff?"
I said "I have a lab. Why don't you come out, and I'll show you."
And he liked what he saw. He saw things he never saw before.
I showed him a lot of things he never knew existed.
He said "You're a smart guy. What do you think of the Klan?"
I said "It's a great idea, but it doesn't go far enough."
Then they listened. But if you 'down it', they don't listen.
You understand what I am saying? - Yeah.
- What I did is I took my little girl when she was about two years old,
I put a cigarette in her mouth, and I used a gun and a mirror.
At 40 feet, I split the cigarette near her mouth.
I cut the cigarette with a razor blade, and I put a hairpin in it,
and when she rolled her lips a certain way,
the hairpin blew tobacco all over the place when I fired a blank.
Do you understand?
So Lou Merlin watched that and said "You the best shot I ever saw,
but I wouldn't do that with my own kid, you might miss and hurt her."
I said "No, I feel very confident." That impressed him,
and he said in his Southern accent
"Will you come on down to the Klan meetin' and talk to our boys?"
I said "They wouldn't listen to me, Lou."
He said "I'll get them to listen to you, 'cause what you say makes sense."
He said "I want you guys to listen to this Jacque.
He got a lot of good ideas."
And I spoke to them a little bit.
I talked a lot about guns and weapons, 'cause they were interested in that.
You know, they didn't know what rifling was, how it would spin the bullet
and centrifugal force kept the bullet on course.
I showed them a lot of stuff and they'd be scratching their heads.
A lot of them were very uneducated people
who don't know a thing about technology
except guns, automobiles and electric motors. They knew that;
but they didn't know enough about society, anthropology, human behavior.
So I began to fill them in.
I said to Lou "How is it that you can look at a person
(that's what he did) and tell us all about him?"
And he never knew the guy. He could look at the person
"That guy doesn't think. This guy is lazy," just by looking at him.
I said "Lou, will you teach us how to do that?"
He said, "Well, I didn't think I could teach you anything."
I said, "Well, if you can do that, tell me how it's done."
"Come on down to the next Klan meetin',
and I'll work on how you can tell what people are like
without knowing them." I brought my own equipment down,
and I projected an image on the screen
of a guy with a white mustache and grey hair, good- looking guy.
I said Lou, tell us all you can about him.
Lou said "Tell you one thing, he's a war veteran.
He's a good American and a good Christian."
He was very white. He looked respectable, you know?
Lou was projecting his own values, and when he got through,
I said "Lou, is there anything else you can add to it?"
He said "No, that pretty much sums it up."
So then I pulled the bottom of the picture out,
which I got from the post office. It said 'Wanted by the FBI
for subversive activity against the United States.' - Ha. - Hm.
And all 30 members of the Klan were laughing at Lou, for the first time.
When he used to speak, he just said anything,
and the others not knowing anything, shook their head.
This was the first time what he said didn't make sense,
so his group started to laugh at him. I said to the guys "Shut your mouths,
because Lou knows more about people than we do."
I had to defend him, until the next film.
In the old days, I wasn't smart enough to do that.
I would agree with those that laughed.
It didn't work that way,
so I learned to say we'll try another thing.
The next film was a record
of a man talking in an Oxford accent about aviation.
He said "I see a skinny Englishman
with a bald head and eyeglasses." He was projecting his own values.
Ten minutes later the image comes on. It's a black guy raised in England.
"Goddamn nigger, talk like a nigger!" This is Lou's reaction, not my words.
I said "Lou, that guy was raised in a different environment."
If you took a black man and raised him in France,
he'd speak like a Frenchman, since he was a baby.
If you raised him in Germany, he'd speak with a German accent.
In Italy you talk with your hands, "Mi mangiai, Americano!"
You say "Come on-a, eat! It's-a good food!" [Italian accent]
That's not you, that's the environment impinging upon you.
"If I took your son, Lou, and brought him up by a 'nigger' family,
your baby would say "Dat's right, you right. Mmhm" just like a negro.
Do you understand that, Lou?" He said
"Do you mean to say niggers act like niggers
because they're brought up in a nigger environment?"
I showed them French movies of blacks brought up in France.
In Sweden they speak Swedish. They don't speak like a black man.
They don't all 'jazz'. That's in America. All blacks are different.
They don't all like watermelon, all the stuff we project out there.
You know, Irishmen are drunkards; they all believe that.
I said "No, no, they are raised in an environment where 'Have a drink' is normal."
Sometimes people are not raised in that environment.
It depends on your experiences.
Your decision-making is shaped by experience.
Can you understand that? - Yeah.
Well, I got that across with 'The Immaculate Pig.'
That was a major film. It was done like 60 years ago.
In one of his many talks,
Jacque describes how he conditioned a pig to do many human-like things.
The full clip is available online and linked at the description box of this video.
This is an excerpt from it.
So when he walked, that would scratch his back. Pigs like that.
He turned around, and he walked up and back, can you understand that?
- Yeah. - Okay. I changed the bamboo to wire later,
so when he went under and touched the wires, it turned on the water faucet.
Do you understand? He'd come walk and back eight times,
and the water shower was coming down on him.
And I put a little jacket on the pig, called 'The Immaculate Pig'.
It was white, and it said 'The Immaculate Pig.'
He got up, changed his bed sheet, took a shower,
went in, picked up all the dirty rags, put them in the basket.
I'd run that film at the Klan meeting, after other films.
They'd say "I raised me a lot of pigs, Jacque.
I ain't never seen no pig that smart!
How come that pig's that smart?"
"That's because I raised him in a different environment."
He said "I don't get that."
I showed him how you train animals to do these things.
I explained how I did it, what learning was, and all that.
'The Immaculate Pig', we have to make a lot of films like that,
so now we make other films.
We're making films trying to help people understand these things.
They invent words. They say "This man's a racist".
That means you were brought up that way.
They don't understand that environment makes you that way.
If you hate 'Polacks' or Jews or Swedes,
it means you were brought up by the message 'the Jews control all the money,
and they take it away from the Gentiles'.
Environment shapes values, facial expressions.
If you were brought up in the Deep South, you'd speak with the Southern accent.
And if all you hear is that "damned niggers are lazy; they don't do. . ."
If that's all you hear, that's what you reflect.
So you might say "I'm gonna get me a nigger, and I'm gonna kick his ass."
Is that you or a reflection of your culture? Think about it!
In New York I asked a question
"What are the most undeveloped people in the area?"
I got one consensus. They said the Arabs that live on Atlantic Avenue.
I said "What makes you think they're backward?"
"That group still believes the Earth is flat,
not all Arabs, the group that you're talking about."
So I called up the lead Arab.
He wanted to know whether I was an Arab, and I said yes.
I'm not an Arab, but that was to gain entry.
He said "Where your father he born?" I said "Lebanon".
He said "Very good! Come and saw me" (meaning come and see me).
When I came to see him, he said to me "You believe the world be round?"
I said "Yes", and he went "Tsk, tsk, tsk".
In his language, that means it can't be round.
He pointed to his head. He says "If world be round, man fall-me-down,
all the water he fall-me-down.
Can be no ocean, nothing."
He kept pointing to his head, at how smart he was.
So I said "Boy, I've gotta get to this guy if I wish to change the world.
So I gave him a balloon, which I brought with me.
I rubbed it with fur, put corn flakes in his hand
and told him to hold his hand away from the balloon.
You know what happened? It generated static electricity,
and that sucked the corn flakes up to the balloon.
All the corn flakes go up to the balloon, and his jaw hit the pavement.
[Laughter]
He said "World be magnet?" I said "Yes"
"Ahhh!" He explained that to all the other Arabs.
In an hour and a half, they accepted the fact that the earth is round.
[Applause]
But if you use language 'scientific centrifugal force',
'geomagnetic field', they don't know what the heck you're talking about.
They say Arabs live in the past.
Well, that's because their environment is in the past.
You have to learn different peoples' values
and speak in their terms, not your terms.
When I first walked over to the Klan people
and said "Why are you beating up the black guy?"
They'd just say "There's a nigger-lover from the North."
They did not hear that, nor could they hear that. Do you understand?
So, if you use logic, it doesn't work.
If you speak ahead of the terms of people,
they don't know what you're talking about.
We believe in training people as problem solvers,
so we can bridge the difference between nations.
When you've got military people on television talking about the war,
always military people from the Pentagon, politicians that are pro-war,
you don't get any views from social scientists, sociologists.
The stupidity of the nuclear arms race, the development of weapons,
trying to solve your problems politically
by electing this political party or that political party. . .
It's not politicians that can solve problems.
They don't know how to solve problems.
Even if they were sincere, they don't know how to solve problems
because they're not trained to do so.
The world you live in is very sick. We are not civilized yet,
as long there are war machines, war movies,
canons in front of high schools,
bombers, military aircraft in front of universities.
This is not civilized.
Man is the dumbest animal, pollutes the ocean,
the air, the rivers, the atmosphere and people.
Men, they put themselves on a pedestal,
say we're the highest form of life. That's an ego trip.
We're not civilized yet.
As long you have prisons, police, armies, navies, we are not civilized.
For over 75 years of research, Jacque has repeated these experiments with different people and groups including: alcoholics, drug addicts, juvenile delinquents, bigots, racists, nationalists and more.
These experiments are only a small part of his research of human behavior.
Their findings are incorporated along with many more findings (in various fields), under his lifelong work called 'The Venus Project'.
This project is proposing a more liberated and humane socio-economic system
that is based on a deeper understanding of human behavior and its application to education.
For more information visit: www.TheVenusProject.com