Jacque Fresco - Inadequacy of Language (1975) (Repository)

... and it's very hard to check out all events. These little bits are partial bits of what they call information. And it's very hard for us to say "It looks like a shadow of a person, I wonder if it is." Alright? It is possible then, perhaps, to be able to decode something like this as a pictorial simplification of ... what? - Pyramids. - Yeah, a pictorial simplification of the pyramids. We can almost get away with this. We might get away with ... this. And it is possible that, like I tried to indicate in the past, when somebody drew a male, they drew the male like this: they drew the legs, and they drew this extension coming down, and the female they just drew this area. That was the major difference ... and male, woman. In very early development of language, they used to do pictorials. And so, today, we have gotten so far away from that, with the small 'a' and the capital 'A' and the King's English, and the curlicues, thick and thin lettering and all that type of shit. And they have all kinds of crap. Wouldn't leave it alone, and they kept at it, and of course you think I'm kidding, they actually, some people wanted to work piddling with the inside of that shit too. On marriage certificates? We go back in the early days, like a dollar bill, you got more shit on there than you can flush in any toilet bowl. I mean, when it comes to ginger bread patterns, money, marriage certificates, contract certificates have-... Would you call it surplus information? What would you call it? What would you call decoration? - Clutter. Alright? - Aesthetic information. - What? - Aesthetic insignificant information. - Insignificant information. - It's supposed to make it more impressive though, to impress the recipient. - How can it be impressive? - Just by its excess, they figure if they've got time to be this excessive, it must be something ... - Why don't they send you a certificate of debt with excess on it? - They probably do, I don't know ... - If you owe $10,000, why don't they send you a beautiful gold inlaid type thing saying "You owe $10,000"? It just says "Pay, or you'll be picked up at 4 o'clock." Very plain. See? It's only in a warranty or guarantee, that you have a silver ribbon hanging ... all kinds of ... Yeah! You don't laugh at that stuff yet, but someday people will, at diplomas and all that kind of shit, which they hand-... It's a piece of paper printed to look like it has great significance. - But it's a picture also ... You often hang those things up if it has to look nice in your house. ... It's visual! - Visual noise. - Visual. No, it's probably derivative from another time when people had papyrus ... - Is it necessary? - No. - So you get into information. Now I want to talk about simulation of information. At certain times, people try to impress other people. And they used to get a whole batch of United Cigar Store coupons. That doesn't mean anything to most of you, does it? United Cigars, cigar store coupons? And the United States Navy used to go to China many years ago, with a lot of United Cigar Store coupons. And they'd go into these Chinese stores and they'd buy lamps and things, and he'd stash and point ... you know. It didn't take the Chinese too long, maybe 6 months. And in the meantime they came away with a lot of goods. So what they did is simulated information. It's called deception. There are other people who took United Cigar Store coupons in great numbers, and put a hundred dollar bill on the top of the United Cigar Store coupons, and a couple of rubber bands around it. And they went into a store ... [bankroll riff sound] and he peals off a hundred dollar bill and says "Can you change this?" And that caused people to be impressed by them. Now, the technique that was used ... this has to do with information. A guy would come into a church and be very well dressed. He'd rent a Rolls Royce, for an hour or two hours, this guy would pick him up. He'd get out and he'd come into the church, and he'd take out that- and hearing it [bankroll riff sound] and peel off $100, while everybody is giving 2 or 3 or 4 dollars. A hundred dollars! Jesus! Then he'd walk around. "Who is he?" "What does he do?" Then he'd come in, back to the church, during a social, on a land promotion scheme ... and thousands of people would want to buy into this wonderful God-caring, good giving man. And so, what he did is simulate the greedy fucking values of the people that attend the church. He simulated their values, so they got sucked in. But if they were churchmen they'd say "Oh no, you know, I don't want to make that much profit off my fellow man!" Anyway, it didn't work that way. So he had people to continuously simulate information. Can you name other examples of information simulation? - Newspapers? - Alright. - Merchants. - What? - Well merchants, public relations in general, I mean ... - Rubber tits? [Laughter] Rubber ass? [More laughter] Artificial hair? [Laughter] Artificial hair? - Rubber dolls? ... - Whatever! What is then, what is information? How can you deal with that kind of word? So, if you sit down and try to figure out an approach to our life's problems, you're going to have to do what Fuller does to some extent. Whenever he runs into a linguistic jam, he invents his own language. He says alright, here's a new word, this is what it means. And from here on out- it's much easier than saying "What do you mean by information?" You can get stuck wrestling with people, because they have different associations as genuine as yours. When you start, "I'm gonna think about new ideas," they look at the dictionary and they'll argue with you "Here's exactly what it means," see? And so, it's better to invent a new word, and than you don't go through all that shit. And then they say "Where the hell did that word come from?" Don't say it came from you. Say it came from a professor of language ... at Oxford. Then you repeat it. But if you say it came from you, "Who are you?" Euripides Sneed? A new word? Not worth a shit! So, if you invent words, go out and invent a more appropriate word. No one has the right to say "This is the only word that you use." Now we think, when we write books, we always look in a dictionary, or a thesaurus to find an appropriate word. Make your own words, because you'll find, you get up in your school and say "It's not adequate!" Teacher says "What do you mean it's not adequate? Everybody's been using it for 1000 years." They've been beheading people for thousands of years. They've been burning people for thousands of years. It doesn't make it right, it doesn't make it useful. Therefore I suggest that you, when you use a new word, in the beginning of your book, or the end of your book, you have a, an explanation of the new word; you ever see things like that? Fuller uses it and technical journals use it when they write for the layman. They have a built-in dictionary at the back of the work, a glossary of terms. Alright? Now, a lot of you people here are afraid to do that, or you're afraid that you don't have command of the English language. Command of the English language is nothing but trouble. If you have good command of the English language, it means you are stubbornly non-utilitarian. Good command of the English language forces you to a discipline that's inadequate. Therefore, you've got to change the language. We set for some guys and we sit back and try to solve the problem, a lot of us, at least must of us here, think in terms of words. We sit back and we think well, can I use you? Paulette? "Many times with my grandmother, she's not fucking bearable, it bothers my ass," you know. We think in terms of words, and the words that we think about are the old words. So that's why its hard for us to work out a problem. Now, you don't have any problem - no-one has any psychological problems - when you show a movie and it shows the floor getting hotter, while a person's lying on it. So as the temperature is going up and the audience yells, "Get up and get off! Get up and get off!" Notice how appropriate everyone is? Or the Indian says [grunting] "Hnh! hnh! hnh!" But they're very appropriate. And you see a tremendous alligator coming out of a swamp and there's a little baby playing and the mother is sewing something looking the other direction and the audience says "Turn your head you fool!" They're very appropriate. "Look! Save your child," when the alligator comes out of the water. So, people have kind of appropriateness. Language has put in so much elaboration, sometimes in between the act of behavior, that - can you can the act of elaboration of language? Whereas a certain particular aspect of behavior is desirable, think of elaboration, and even in technology and medicine, that isn't necessary. Fresco's Classic Lecture Series www.thevenusproject.com