You have been brought up to believe people are inspired by rewards or money.
The free-enterprise system does create incentive to achieve, however it also breeds the incentive for corruption, theft, and greed. Our aim is to encourage a new incentive system, one no longer directed toward the shallow and self-centered goals of wealth, property, and power. Today, financial barriers place enormous limitations on innovation, individual creativity, and personal incentive. In The Venus Project, money would not be required to help one achieve or create, as facilities would be made available to serve everyone's needs.
I worry about people whose main motivation is money. For instance, if this is the motivation of a doctor instead of the desire to solve problems in the field of medicine and health and enhance people's lives, to many others, and me the services are not very trustworthy. It is a tremendous myth perpetrated on people in a monetary system that people are mostly motivated by money to achieve and produce. I could give you endless examples of people who fought, studied, created, and excelled without the allure of money as a reward, there are much more meaningful rewards than that. It depends on the value system that one is given and the culture that one is raised in that reinforces what is meant by a reward.
In essence all of the people we have admired in the past, Michael Angelo, da Vinci, Bell, the Wright Brothers, Darwin, and many others worked because they were interested in problem solving, not financial gain. This in some cases was a by-product. Usually money-oriented people become business men, or stock brokers; they are rarely creative. I have always felt threatened by people whose sole motivation is financial gain. On islands in the South Pacific, people had more than enough resources. Although banana, coconuts, fish and breadfruit were abundant, the natives worked continuously building navigation equipment, canoes, huts, and weaved cloth. Although no money was used, their incentive improved their standard of living.
In the early days in America a man and wife could build a log cabin in several months. Today it takes 30 years or so to pay off a house with the additional funds to bankers and others that actually have nothing to do with the building of the house.
If you examine your statements carefully of people who have access to all the necessities of life you will find that many wealthy people do not eat 25 meals a day even though they have access to it and they do not stuff their environment with hundreds of musical instruments and accumulate hundreds of cars. It is not the availability of resources that is disturbing to people, it is the lack of resources that is responsible for most crimes, embezzlement, deception of all kinds, etc.
Consider this when few nations control most of the worlds resources and exploit other nations with their positions of differential advantage.
All of the technical staff and everyone else will have access to a very high standard of living; the incentive, which will propel people, is the end of war, territorial disputes, economic hardship, debt, and the basis for most crimes as they will all be eliminated. In this new society as proposed by The Venus Project, the environment in which people are raised and educated will be based upon the fundamental principles of science and the comprehensive knowledge of the interrelationship between people and the environment, which sustains all life.
