A non-technical,
easy-to-follow guide...
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[On money, work & idleness]
in black
Those who make money with money deliberately
keep it scarce. Money is not wealth. Wealth
is the accomplished technological ability to
protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all
growful needs of life. […]
History's political and economic power structures
have always fearfully abhorred "idle people"
as potential troublemakers. Yet nature never
abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails,
coral reefs, and clouds in the sky. […]
In 1953 my friend the late Walter Reuther,
then president of the United Auto Workers, was
about to meet with the board of directors of
General Motors. [...] Walter had all his fine-tuning
machinists put the following problem into their
computers: "In view of the fact that most
of General Motors' workers are also its customers,
if I demand of General Motors that they grant
an unheard-of wage advance plus unprecedented
vacation, health, and all conceivable lifetime
benefits for all of its workers, amounting sum-totally
to so many dollars, which way will General Motors
make the most money: by granting or refusing?"
All the computers said, "General Motors
will make the most profit by granting."
Thus fortified, Walter Reuther made his unprecedented
demands on General Motors' directors, who were
elected to their position of authority only
by the stockholders and who were naturally concerned
only with the welfare of those stockholders.
Reuther said to the assembled General Motors
board of directors: "You are going to grant
these demands, not because you now favor labor
(which, in fact, you consider to be your enemy),
but because by so granting, General Motors will
make vastly greater profits. If you will put
the problem into your new computers, you will
learn that I am right."
The directors said, "Hah-hah! You obviously
have used the wrong computers or have misstated
the problem to the computers." Soon, however,
all their own computers told the directors that
Walter was right. They granted his demands.
Within three years General Motors was the first
corporation in history to net a billion-dollar
profit […]
The computer will show that 70 percent of all
jobs in America and probably an equivalently
high percentage of the jobs in other Western
private-enterprise countries are preoccupied
with work that is not producing any wealth or
life support – inspectors of inspectors, reunderwriters
of insurance reinsurers, Obnoxico* promoters,
spies and counterspies, military personnel,
gunmakers, etc. […]
We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing
people going to their 1980 jobs in their cars
or buses, spending trillions of dollars' worth
of petroleum daily** to get to their no-wealth-producing
jobs. It doesn't take a computer to tell you
that it will save both Universe and humanity
trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely
to stay at home.
One would hope the at-home-staying humans will
start thinking – "What was it I was
thinking about when they told me I had to 'earn
my living' – doing what someone else had
decided needed to be done? What do I see that
needs to be done that nobody else is attending
to? What do I need to learn to be effective
in attending to it in a highly efficient and
inoffensive-to-others manner?"
"It is a matter
of converting the high technology from weaponry
to livingry"
[On ruling elites & technology]
In 1600 Queen Elizabeth I and a few intimates
founded the East India Company. Exercising her
crown privileges, the queen granted the company
limited liability for losses on the part of
the enterprise backers. They could lose their
money if the ship were lost, but they could
not be held liable for the lives of the sailors
who were drowned. While the owners could insure
and very greatly limit the magnitude of their
losses, the sailors and their families could
not. "Ltd." – limited, in England – and "Inc." – incorporated, in the
USA – and other similar legal definitions in
all capitalist countries constitute "for
ages uncontested" – ergo, custom-validated
and legal-judgments-upheld – royal decrees greatly
favoring big-money capitalism over the mortal
breadwinner-loss-taking vast majority of the
poor.
Elizabeth's East India Company scheme was to
have her national navy (and armies) first win
mastery of the world's sea-lanes. This advantage
would thereafter be exploited by her privately
owned enterprise. This scheme became one of
the first of such national power structure bids
for establishing and maintaining world-trade
supremacy through dominance of the world's high
seas', ocean currents', trade winds', critical
straits', and only-seasonably-favorable passages'
world-around line of vital and desirable supplies.
All the other world-power-stature individuals
who vied for supreme mastery of the world's
high seas lines of supply also operated invisibly
through monarchs and nations over whom they
had sufficient influence. Through such behind-the-throne
influence the influenced nation's resources
could be politically maneuvered into paying
for the building and operation of the navies
and armies that would seek to establish and
protect their respective privately owned enterprises.
With the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 the British
Empire won "the world's power structures
championship" and became historically the
first empire "upon which," it was
said, "the sun never sets." This is
because it was the first empire in history to
embrace the entire spherical planet Earth's
71-percent maritime, 29-percent landed, wealth-producing
activities. […]
Building and maintaining the world's most powerful
navy, the 1805 supremely victorious British
Empire was to maintain its sovereignty over
the world's oceans and seas for 113 years.
Concurrently with its 1600 A.D.-initiated two
centuries of maritime and military struggle
for world dominance, England was also developing
a civilian army of the world's best-informed
and Empire-backed scientific, economic, and
managerial personnel for the most economically
profitable realization of its grand, world-embracing
strategies. To educate the army of civil servants
was the responsibility of the East India Company
College located just outside of London. (In
1980 it is as yet operating.) Its graduates
went to all known parts of the planet to gather
all possible data on the physical and human
culture resources to be exploited as well as
information on the local customs of all the
countries large and small, with whom Great Britain
and the East India Company must successfully
cope and trade.
[On Malthus, Darwin and Marx]
In 1800 Thomas Malthus, later professor of
political economics of the East India Company
College, was the first human in history to receive
a comprehensively complete inventory of the
world's vital and economic statistics. The accuracy
of the pre-Trafalgar 1800 inventory was verified
by a similar world inventory taken by the East
India Company in 1810. In a later – post-Trafalgar – book Malthus confirmed in 1810 his l800 finding
that world-around humanity was increasing its
numbers at a geometrical progression rate while
increasing its life-support production at only
an arithmetical progression rate, ergo, an increasing
majority of humans would have to live out their
short years in want and misery.
"Pray all you want," said Malthus,
"it will do you no good. There is no more!"
A half-century later Darwin expounded his theory
of evolution, assuming that nature's inexorable
processes were the consequence of the "survival
only of the fittest species and individuals
within those species."
Karl Marx compounded Malthus's and Darwin's
scientifically convincing conclusions and said,
in effect "The worker is obviously the
fittest to survive. He is the one who knows
how to handle the tools and seeds to produce
the life support. The opulent others are 'parasites.'"
The opulent others said, "We are opulent
and on top of the heap because we demonstrate
Darwin's 'fittest to survive.' The workers are
dull and visionless. What is needed in this
world is big-thinking enterprise, courage, cunning,
and fighting skill." For the last century
these two ideologies, communism and free
enterprise, have dominated the political
affairs of world-around humanity. Each side
says, "You may not like our system, but
we are convinced that we have the fittest, fairest,
most ingenious way of coping with the lethal
inadequacy of life support operative on our
planet, but because there are those who
disagree diametrically on how to cope, only
all-out war can resolve which system is fittest
to survive." .
Those in supreme power politically and economically
as of 1980 are as yet convinced that our planet
Earth has nowhere nearly enough life support
for all humanity. All books on economics have
only one basic tenet – the fundamental scarcity
of life support. The supreme political and economic
powers as yet assume that it has to be either
you or me. Not enough for both. That is why
(1) those in financial advantage fortify themselves
even further, reasoning that unselfishness is
suicidal. That is why (2) the annual military
expenditures by the USSR, representing socialism,
and the USA, representing private enterprise,
have averaged over $200 billion a year for the
last thirty years, doubling it last year to
$400 billion – making a thus-far total of six
trillion, 400 billion dollars spent in developing
the ability to kill ever-more people, at ever-greater
distances, in ever-shorter time.
[On the "more from less" trend of
technology and the obsolescence of war]
A one-quarter-ton communication satellite is
now outperforming the previously used 175,000
tons of transatlantic copper cables, with this
700,000-fold reduction in system-equipment weight
providing greater message-carrying capacity
and transmission fidelity, as well as using
vastly fewer kilowatts of operational energy.
[…]
[This is just one of] hundreds of thousands
of instances that can now be cited of the accomplishment
of much greater performance with much less material.
[…]
Neither the great political and financial power
structures of the world, nor the specialization-blinded
professionals, nor the population in general
realize that sum-totally the omni-engineering-integratable,
invisible revolution in the metallurgical, chemical,
and electronic arts now makes it possible to
do so much more with ever fewer pounds and volumes
of material, ergs of energy, and seconds of
time per given technological function that it
is now highly feasible to take care of everybody
on Earth at a "higher standard of living
than any have ever known." It no longer
has to be you or me.
Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable
as mandated by survival. War is obsolete.
It could never have been done before. Only
ten years ago the more-with-less technology
reached the point where it could be done. Since
then the invisible technological-capability
revolution has made it ever easier so to do.
It is a matter of converting the high technology
from weaponry to livingry. The essence of livingry
is human-life advantaging and environment controlling.
With the highest aeronautical and engineering
facilities of the world redirected from weaponry
to livingry production, all humanity would have
the option of becoming enduringly successful.
All previous revolutions have been political – in them the have-not majority has attempted
revengefully to pull down the economically advantaged
minority. If realized, this historically greatest
design revolution will joyously elevate all
humanity to unprecedented heights. […]
Technologically we now have four billion billionaires
on board Spaceship Earth who are entirely unaware
of their good fortune. Unbeknownst to them their
legacy is being held in probate by general ignorance,
fear, selfishness, and a myriad of paralyzing
professional, licensing, zoning, building laws
and the like, as bureaucratically maintained
by the incumbent power structures. […]
Bureaucracies will panic because all the great
political, religious, and – most of all – big-business
systems would find their activities devastated
by the universal physical success of all humanity.
All the strengths of all great politics and
religion and most of business are derived from
the promises they give of assuaging humanity's
seemingly tragic dilemma of existing in an unalterable
state of fundamental inadequacy of life support.
[…]
The world populace identifies technology with
(1) weapons and (2) machines that compete with
them for their jobs. Most people therefore think
they are against technology, not knowing that
the technology they don't understand is their
only means of exercising their option to "make
it" on this planet and in this life.
[On the global energy network]
The world energy network grid will be responsible
for the swift disappearance of planet Earth's
150 different nationalities. We now have 150
supreme admirals, all trying to command the
same ship to go in different directions, with
the result that the ship is going around in
circles – getting nowhere. The 150 nations
act as 150 blood clots in blocking the flow
of recirculating metals and other traffic essential
to realization of the design science revolution.
[A subversive viewpoint on education]
Comprehensively and incisively programmed with
all the relevant data regarding education, it
will be evidenced that the physical and social
costs will be far less for individual, at-home-initiated,
research-and-development-interned self-teaching
than having individual students going to schools,
being bused, and so on. This mass-production
baby-sitting is only continued because of the
union-organized response to the fear of the
teachers about losing their jobs. Their political
clout has for long been strong enough to guarantee
continuance of this inefficiency to the present
moment. The computer will make it clear that
by far the most effective educational system
for human beings – all the way from birth through
early childhood and on – is that to be derived
from the home video cassette system and its
supporting books, the pages of which are also
to be called forth on world-satellite-interlinked
video "library" screens as published
in any language. The computer will also make
it very clear that, freed of the necessity to
earn a living, all humanity will want to exercise
its fundamental drive first to comprehend "what
it is all about" and second to demonstrate
competence in respect to the challenges. The
greatest privilege in human affairs will be
to be allowed to join any one of the real wealth-production
or maintenance teams.
[Utopia or Oblivion]
Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will
be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the
final moment. The race is between a better-informed,
hopefully inspired young world versus a running-scared,
misinformedly brain-conditioned, older world.
[…]
The political and economic systems and the
political and economic leaders of humanity are
not in final examination; it is the integrity
of each individual human that is in final examination.
On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate.
[…]
If you read the entire Critical Path
book carefully, including its sometimes long
but essentially detailed considerations, and
pay realistically close attention to these considerations,
you will be able to throw your weight into the
balancing of humanity's fate.
Buckminster Fuller Links
Full text of Chapter 3 of Critical Path
(on power structures & ruling elites):
http://www.anxietyculture.com/criticalpath3.doc
(MS Word format; 171K)
http://www.anxietyculture.com/criticalpath3.txt
(plain text format; 160K)
http://www.anxietyculture.com/criticalpath3.rtf
(rich text format; 174K)
Full text of Fuller's book, Grunch of
Giants:
http://www.bfi.org/grunch_of_giants.htm
Full text of Fuller's book, Operating
manual for Spaceship Earth:
http://www.bfi.org/operating_manual.htm
The Buckminster Fuller Institute:
http://www.bfi.org/index.html
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