Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Peaceful relations among humans on earth, and peaceful relations between humans and the other life forms on the planet, are imperative for the survival of planet earth as a habitat for life as we know it. Making the achievement of peace an affirmative goal for all humanity is noble and essential.

Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Postby admin » Tue Jul 28, 2015 5:55 am

Critical Path
by R. Buckminster Fuller
Adjuvant: Kiyoshi Kuromiya
© 1981 by R. Buckminster Fuller
Design by Dennis J. Grastorf

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Table of Contents:

• Foreword
• Introduction: Twilight of the World's Power Structures
• 1. Speculative Prehistory of Humanity
• 2. Humans in Universe
• 3. Legally Piggily
• 4. Self-Disciplines of Buckminster Fuller
• 5. The Geoscope
• 6. World Game
• 7. Critical Path: Part One
• 8. Critical Path: Part Two
• 9. Critical Path: Part Three
• 10. Critical Path: Part Four
• Appendix 1: Chronology of Scientific Discoveries and Artifacts
• Appendix 2: Chronological Inventory of Prominent Scientific, Technological, Economic and Political World Events: 1895 to Date
• Index
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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Postby admin » Tue Jul 28, 2015 5:56 am

Fig. 6 Dhow, p. 24, photograph by Mirella Ricciardi, reproduced from "The World of the Dhows," Part II, Yachting World, December 1974.

Fig. 8 Erathosthenes' Map, p. 36, reproduced from The Story of Maps by Lloyd Brown, Dover Publications, Inc., 1979.

Fig. 12 Ptolemy's Map, p. 45, reproduced from Maps & Man: An Examination of Cartography in Relation to Culture and Civilization by Norman J. W. Thrower, Prentice-Hall, 1972.

Fig. 17 Price Index for All Items, p. 107, is based on information found in the 1913- 1970 Historical Statistics of the United States and the Statistical Abstract of the United States. 1979.

Fig. 18 Total National Debt, p. 115, is based on information found in the 1918-1970 Historical Statistics of the United States. the 1970-1978 Statistical Abstract. and the Survey of Current Business 1979.

Fig. 36 The Birthrate and Energy Production, p. 207, is reproduced from Ho-Ping: Food for Everyone by Medard Gabel, Anchor Press, 1979.

"Those whom God hath joined together let no one put asunder. "

To ANNE HEWLETT FULLER on this, our 63rd Wedding Anniversary and my 85th Birthday -- July 12, 1980


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We wish to express our thanks for their help in preparing this book to: Tom Vinetz, E.J. Applewhite, Michael Denneny, John Berseth, Paul Dinas, Janet Bregman-Taney, Shirley Sharkey, and Ann Mintz.

R.B.F.

K.K.

CONVENTIONAL CRITICAL-PATH CONCEPTIONING is linear and self-under-informative. Only spherically expanding and contracting, spinning, polarly involuting and evoluting orbital-system feedbacks are both comprehensively and incisively informative. Spherical-orbital critical-feedback circuits are pulsative, tidal, importing and exporting. Critical-path elements are not overlapping linear modules in a plane: they are systemically interspiraling complexes of omni-interrelevant regenerative feedback circuits.

-- Synergetics 2 [revised]


Foreword

IT IS THE AUTHOR'S working assumption that the words good and bad are meaningless. This is based on science and not on opinion. In 1922 physicists discovered a fundamental complementarity of disparate individual phenomena to be operative in physical Universe. This was fundamentally amplified with the subsequent discovery of the always-and-only-different, always-coexisting proton and neutron which, with their always-coexistent electrons, positrons, neutrinos, and antineutrinos, are eternally intertransformable.

No longer was valid the "building block" of the Universe. It was discovered that unity was plural and at minimum sixfold. All the intercomplementations are essential to the successful accomplishment of eternally regenerative Universe. Science's discovery of fundamental complementarity has frequently occasioned individual scientists' realization that the word negative used as the opposite of the word positive is at best carelessly and misinformedly employed.

Since complementarity is essential to the success of eternally regenerative Universe, the phenomenon identified as the opposite of positive cannot be negative, nor can it be bad, since the interopposed phenomena known heretofore as good and bad are essential to the 100-percent success of eternally regenerative Universe. They are both good for the Universe.

Science recognizes many fundamentally complementary aspects of Universe. The black hole is not a negative. As implosion is to explosion, the black hole phenomenon is to the inside-out, expanding Universe. The black hole is the inverse phase -- the outside-inning phase -- of cosmic evolution. What humans have spontaneously identified as good and bad -- or as positive and negative -- are evolutionary complementations in need of more accurate identifications.

If you want to sail your ship to windward through a narrow passage, you have to do what sailors call "beating to windward" -- first you sail on your port tack, then on your starboard tack, then port, then starboard, again and again, not on your "good tack" and your "bad tack." We walk right foot, left foot, not right foot, wrong foot.

This book is written with the conviction that there are no "good" or "bad" people, no matter how offensive or eccentric to society they may seem. I am confident that if I were born and reared under the same circumstances as any other known humans, I would have behaved much as they have.

There's a short verse written long ago by an English poet and teacher, Elizabeth Wordsworth:

If all good people were clever,
And all clever people were good,
The world would be nicer than ever
We thought that it possibly could.
But somehow, 'tis seldom or never
That the two hit it off as they should;
For the good are so harsh to the clever,
The clever so rude to the good.


If you think you identify with anybody in this book, be sure to remember that I don't have any "good" or "bad" people. You and I didn't design people. God designed people. What I am trying to do is to discover why God included humans in Universe.

I'm trying to find out what God permits us progressively to know and preferably to do if we humans are to continue in Universe.

For many years I hesitated about writing this book. God has introduced me to many, many thousands of humans. Quite a few of those I have known have had decision-making powers that could, and often did, affect human affairs in major ways. Much of their decision-making integrated with thousands of decisions made by other Earthians. The integrated thousands of decisions inadvertently were compounded with a myriad of unforeseen technological, exploratory, and environmental happenings. The individual decision-makings and unforeseen happenings around the world and in Universe at large altogether synergetically produced historical results not contemplated by any. Such noncontemplated-by-any results constitute evolution -- the will of God.

In my eighty-five years I have often been privy to what was at the time secret, critical information. Time and change have "declassified" those secrets. In piecing together the significant components of world-around hu- manity's evolutionary trending, my insights have frequently been illumined by information confided in me by others. In recollecting once-confidential information, which is now essential to an adequate comprehension of relevant evolutionary trendings, I hope no one will make the mistake of thinking that I am being a traitor to my friends. Not only am I being loyal to all my friends but to all humanity -- without whom there would be no life.

My reasons for writing this book are fourfold:

(A) Because I am convinced that human knowledge by others of what this book has to say is essential to human survival.

(B) Because of my driving conviction that all of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly -- right now.

(C) Because I am convinced that humanity's fitness for continuance in the cosmic scheme no longer depends on the validity of political, religious, economic, or social organizations, which altogether heretofore have been assumed to represent the many.

(D) Because, contrary to (C), I am convinced that human continuance now depends entirely upon:

(1) The intuitive wisdom of each and every individual.

(2) The individual's comprehensive informedness.

(3) The individual's integrity of speaking and acting only on the individual's own within-self-intuited and reasoned initiative.

(4) The individual's joining action with others, as motivated only by the individually conceived consequences of so doing.

(5) The individual's never-joining action with others, as motivated only by crowd-engendered emotionalism, or by a sense of the crowd's power to overwhelm, or in fear of holding to the course indicated by one's own intellectual convictions.


We all see things differently. Seeing is sensing. Hearing is sensing. Touching is sensing. Smelling is sensing. What each of us happens to sense is different. And our different senses are differently effective under ever-differing circumstances. Our individual brains coordinatingly integrate all the ever-different sensings of our different faculties. The integrated product of our multifold individual sensings produces awareness. Only through our sensings are we aware of the complementary "otherness."

Awareness of the "otherness" is information. The complex of successively experienced informations produces interweaving episodes -- and the complex of special-case-episode-interweavings produces the scenario that our brain's memory banks identify as our individual being's "life."

The way only-our-own, individual integrity of being responds spontane- ously only to our own exclusive sensing of any given otherness episode is what I mean when I use the word feeling: How do I feel about life? How do I feel about it now? ... and again now? Our feelings often change. What do I feel that I need to do about what I am feeling?

One of the many wonderful human beings that I've known who has affected other human beings in a markedly inspiring degree was e. e. cummings, the poet.

He wrote a piece called "A Poet's Advice," which I feel elucidates why "little I," fifty-three years ago at age thirty-two, jettisoned all that I had ever been taught to believe and proceeded thereafter to reason and act only on the basis of direct personal experience. Cummings's poem also explains why, acting entirely on my own initiative, I sought to discover what, if anything, can be effectively accomplished by a penniless, unknown individual -- operating only on behalf of all humanity -- in attempting to produce sustainingly favorable physical and metaphysical advancement of the integrity of all human life on our planet, which omnihuman advantaging task, attemptable by the· individual, is inherently impossible of accomplishment by any nation, private enterprise, religion, or other multipeopled, bias-fostering combination thereof.

A POET'S ADVICE

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn't.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel -- but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling -- not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time -- and whenever we do it, we are not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world -- unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does this sound dismal? It isn't.

It's the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

-- e. e. cummings


Exploring, experiencing, feeling, and -- to the best of my ability -- acting strictly and only on my individual intuition, I became impelled to write this book.

I'm not claiming to be a poet or that this book is poetry, but I knew cummings well enough to be confident that he would feel happy that I had written it.
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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

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INTRODUCTION: Twilight of the World's Power Structures

HUMANITY IS MOVING EVER DEEPER into crisis -- a crisis without precedent.

First, it is a crisis brought about by cosmic evolution irrevocably intent upon completely transforming omnidisintegrated humanity from a complex of around-the-world, remotely-deployed-from-one-another, differently colored, differently credoed, differently cultured, differently communicating, and differently competing entities into a completely integrated, comprehensively interconsiderate, harmonious whole.

Second, we are in an unprecedented crisis because cosmic evolution is also irrevocably intent upon making omni-integrated humanity omnisuccessful, able to live sustainingly at an unprecedentedly higher standard of living for all Earthians than has ever been experienced by any; able to live entirely within its cosmic-energy income instead of spending its cosmic-energy savings account (i.e., the fossil fuels) or spending its cosmic-capital plant and equipment account (i.e., atomic energy) -- the atoms with which our Spaceship Earth and its biosphere are structured and equipped -- a spending folly no less illogical than burning your house-and-home to keep the family warm on an unprecedentedly cold midwinter night.

Humanity's cosmic-energy income account consists entirely of our gravity- and star (99 percent Sun)-distributed cosmic dividends of waterpower, tidal power, wavepower, windpower, vegetation-produced alcohols, methane gas, vulcanism, and so on. Humanity's present rate of total energy consumption amounts to only one four-millionth of one percent of the rate of its energy income.

Tax-hungry government and profit-hungry business, for the moment, find it insurmountably difficult to arrange to put meters between humanity and its cosmic-energy income, and thus they do nothing realistic to help humanity enjoy its fabulous energy-income wealth -- in fact, they send their government "revenooers" out into the mountain forest to fine and to destroy the equipment of any civilian so "treacherous" as to apply private enterprise in the alcohol-from-Sun-energy-photosynthesis harvesting to personal advantaging. If any citizens start making their own automobile-powering alcohol, the "revenooers" will have to pounce on them just as they do on those making moonshine "likker."

Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to "make it" economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do. It can only be accomplished, however, through a design science initiative and technological revolution.

For three-quarters of all the trillions of nights humans have been on board planet Earth, the Moon has been their most intimate sky companion. For millions of years humans assumed it to be obvious that no one would really touch the Moon. Those who did not assume that to be obvious were obviously loony -- lunatics, "Moon touchers."

In the battle of human power systems to see who is to control the world's people and their economies, the communist U.S.S.R. and the capitalist U.S.A. had been taught by World War II that whoever could fly the highest would gain the observational advantage for controlling the firepower of their guns and thus win the military supremacy of the world. In the "cold" Third World War the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A., inspired by the German rocketry, saw that whoever could maintain the greatest number of around-the-world- outer-space-platforms could control around-the-Earth firepower. The Moon was just such a "permanent" sky advantage.

Greatly challenged by the Russians' initially most successful space-operating accomplishments, President John Kennedy authorized the funds for the Apollo Project, which had first to do all of the tasks here on Earth preparatory to getting a team of humans ferried over to the Moon, to land, and then to return safely to Earth.

There were obvious first things first to be accomplished-second things before third things and 7308 things before 7309 things. Some were going to take longer than others. There would be a pattern of start-ups and lead-ins of differing time lengths. This complex, shad-bone-like pattern would be known as "the critical path." The critical path of overall human history's technological evolution involved two million things that had to be done before blast-off of the first Earth-to-Moon ferrying-over-and-back.

Fortunately early humans, having no knowledge that what they were do- ing would someday lead to humans physically, safely visiting the Moon, had already accomplished one million of those essential tasks before President John Kennedy allocated the federal funds to accomplish the remaining one million. Suddenly it was evident -- but only to those few students who cared about the overall significance of such nonobvious, vast-time-scale inventories of evolutionary, historical, technological accomplishments -- that without the million items already accomplished, it would be impossible to realize any of the Apollo Project's one million additional technical requirements -- let alone accomplish them within the critically "effective" U.S.A. vs. U.S.S.R. competition time limit. Evolution is methodically synergetic and omnimeaningful.

Now, in 1980, a large number of all humans ten years of age and under, all of whom were born after humans reached the Moon, have learned so much about the Apollo Project as to be quite familiar with its critical-path accomplishment. They have entered the evolutionary scenario at a spontaneous conceptual level twice as well informed initially as were any pre-Apollo Project humans, and they find it logical to think about the solution of major evolutionary challenges in the comprehensive terms of both the all-history critical-path lessons as well as those of the as-yet-clearly-remembered and -documented special-case lessons of the Apollo Project's one million additionally accomplished, critical-path tasks. The under-ten-year-old post-Moon-landers are saying, "Humans can do anything they need to do." They are writing me letters saying so and asking why we don't make our world work satisfactorily for all humans. This is encouraging.

By 1989 those successful Moon-ferry-over conditioned, thoughtful young ones will be twenty. That's just the right age for commanding and executing the 1989 world-embracing design science revolution, which will result in the conversion of all humanity into an integrated, omniharmonious, economically successful, one-world family.

As of 1980 the successful solution of the myriad of social-economic-psychological problems now existent is obviously a more difficult task for humanity to address than was the achieving of the Apollo Project. For those who care to know how we're going to accomplish the 1989 omnisuccess of humans on Spaceship Earth, it is necessary to invest the rest of this hour in reading this Introduction, which contains the minimum information leading to ultimate comprehension of the fact that humanity now -- for the first time in history -- has the realistic opportunity to help evolution do what it is inexorably intent on doing -- converting all humanity. into one harmonious world family and making that family sustainingly, economically successful.

It will take all the evenings of one week to read the Critical Path book itself. This is the minimum time investment necessary to discover what roles may be effectively performed by humans individually in support of the 1989 design science realization of the success of humanity.

History shows that, only when the leaders of the world's great power structures have become convinced that their power structures are in danger of being destroyed, have the gargantuanly large, adequate funds been appropriated for accomplishing the necessary epoch-opening new technologies. It took preparation for World War III to make available the funds that have given us computers, transistors, rockets, and satellites to realistically explore the Universe. In the one hour of concentrated introductory reading about the critical path that must be accomplished in order to achieve understanding that we have the option to "make it," the first thing first is to understand what the world power structures are and of what their unique technical levers and strategies consist.

* * *

Throughout the history of land and sea transport those who have gained and held control of the world's lines of vital supply have done so only by becoming the masters in the game of establishing supreme human power over all other subpowerful organizations -- ergo, invisibly over all humanity.

The historical development of massively keeled and ribbed, deep-bellied ships, which came into human use in the 3000-1000 B.C. era of the Phoenicians, Cretans, and Mycenaeans, altogether altered and vastly enlarged the interregional and international physical-transporting means of the world's lines of supply. The change was the shift over from that of the armed-horsemen-escorted, way-station-fortressed, twixt-city-states, overland, mule-horse-and-camel-borne caravaning to the thousandfold-greater cargo- and armaments-carrying capacity of the fighting-crew-manned fleets of those massively built, wind-sailing and slave-rowed, seagoing ships.

Ancient Troy was a powerful city-state and commanded much of the overland traffic between Asia and Europe. The Mycenaeans' siege of Troy -- when their. supplies were continually replenished by their fleet of those heavily ribbed, deep-bellied ships -- reversed the city-state's former supremacy over invaders, whose brought-with-them food had theretofore become exhausted long before exhaustion of the food supplies stored in the great granaries of those inside the walls. The fall of Troy saw the supremacy over human affairs pass from the masters of the overland, Asia-ta-Europe, inland-sea ferrying and caravaning lines of supply to the masters of the high-seas, maritime lines of supply.

The center of the stage of history's most critical events moved ever westward and mildly northward. Thus unfortified Venice became in due course the headquarters of the masters of the Mediterranean lines of supply.

The fifteenth-century Europeans' adoption of Arabic numerals and their computation-facilitating "positioning-of-numbers" altogether made possible Columbus's navigational calculations and Copernicus's discovery of the operational patterning of the solar system and its planets. Facile calculation so improved both the building of the ships and their navigation that the ever-larger ships of the Mediterranean ventured out into the North and South Atlantic to round Africa and reach the Orient. With Magellan's crew's completion of his planned circumnavigation, the planet Earth's predominantly water-covered sphericity was proven. The struggle for supreme mastery of human affairs thus passed out of the Mediterranean and into the world's oceans. Ships could carry vastly greater cargoes of the fabulous riches of the Orient to the European market than could the overland caravaning. One European ship completing one successful round trip to the Orient could realize a great fortune for its owners.

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 U.S.A. -- 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. All previous empires -- Genghis Khan's, Alexander the Great's, the Romans', et al. -- were unified European, North African, and Asian-continental, river-, lake-, and sea-embracing, flat-out land areas completely surrounded in all lateral directions by the infinitely unknown. All earlier empires were infinite systems-open systems. The British Empire was history's first spherically closed, finite system. 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 or 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.

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 1800 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 U.S.S.R., representing socialism, and the U.S.A., 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.

• • •

Weighing only fifty-five pounds, with a wingspan of ninety-six feet, the human-powered Gossamer Albatross was able to fly across the English Channel because the structural materials of which it was built were many times tensilely stronger than an equal weight of the highest-strength aircraft aluminum. The tensile strengths of the Albatross's structural materials were sixty times stronger per equivalent weight than the strongest structural materials available to Leonardo da Vinci for realizing the design of his proposed human-powered flying machine. The Albatross's high-strength carbon-fiber and Mylar materials were all developed only a short time ago -- since World War II.

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.

Continuing to attempt to fit our late-twentieth-century astronautical man-on-Moon-visiting capability into a nineteenth-century horse-and-buggy street pattern, house-to-house-yoo-booing life-style (and a land baron racket) is so inefficient that the overall design of humanity's present social, economic, and political structuring and the physical technology it uses wastes ninety-five out of every 100 units of the energy it consumes. (Our automobiles' reciprocating engines are only 15-percent efficient, whereas turbines are 30 percent, jet engines 60 percent, and fuel cells used by astronauts 80 percent.) In the United States, throughout all twenty-four hours of every day of the year -- year after year -- we have an average of two million automobiles standing in front of red stoplights with their engines going, the energy for which amounts to that generated by the full efforts of 200 million horses being completely wasted as they jump up and down going nowhere.

Environment-controlling buildings gain or lose their energy as "heat or cool" only through their containing surfaces. Spheres contain the most volume with the least surface -- i.e., have the least possible surface-to-volume ratio. Every time we double the diameter of a spherical structure, we increase its contained atmosphere eightfold and its enclosing surface only fourfold. When doubling the diameter of our sphere, we are not changing the size of the contained molecules of atmosphere. Therefore, every time we double a spherical structure's diameter, we halve the amount of enclosing surface through which an interior molecule of atmosphere can gain or lose energy as "heat or cool." Flat slabs have a high surface-to-volume ratio, and so flat slab fins make good air-cooling motorcycle and light-airplane engines. Tubes have the highest surface-to-volume ratios. Triangular- or square-sectioned tubes have higher surface-to-volume ratios than have round-sectioned tubes. Tall slab buildings and vertical, square-sectioned, tubular-tower skyscrapers have the maximum possible energy (as heat or cool)- losing capability.

One two-mile-diameter dome enclosing all the mid-Manhattan buildings between Twenty-second and Sixty-second streets and between the Hudson and East rivers, having a surface that is only one eighty-fourth that of all the buildings now standing in that midtown area, would reduce the heating and cooling energy requirements of that area eighty-four-fold.

The human pedal-powered airplane and the communication satellite are only two out of hundreds of thousands of instances that can now be cited of the· accomplishment of much greater performance with much less material. The inefficiency of automobiles' reciprocating engines -- and their traffic- system-wasted fuel -- and the energy inefficiency of today's buildings, are only two of hundreds of thousands of instances that can be cited of the design-avoidable energy wastage. But the technical raison d'etre for either the energy-effectiveness gains or losses is all completely invisible to human eyes. Thus, the significance of their omni-integratable potentialities is uncomprehended by either the world's leaders or the led.

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.

The architectural profession -- civil, naval, aeronautical, and astronautical -- has always been the place where the most competent thinking is conducted regarding livingry, as opposed to weaponry. Now is the time for the comprehensive architectural profession to reorient itself from the six-months- per-one-residence work schedule to the millions-per-day, air-deliverable, sewer-and-water-mains-emancipated, energy-harvesting, dwelling-machine- production world with its unpurchasable, air-deliverable dwelling machines only rentable from a Hertz-Hilton-Bell-Tel service industry, able to accommodate at unprecedentedly high standards of living all humanity's remote-from-one-another living accommodations. Now is also the time for the architectural profession to reorient itself from the years-to-build, human-need-exploiting cities to the all-in-one-day-air-deliverable-or-removable, human-need-serving, singly-domed-over cities. We have to satisfactorily rehouse the alternately convergent and divergent shuttling phases of four billion uprooting, around-the-world-integrating, sometimes transient, sometimes resident, sometimes in cities, sometimes in the country humans- before 2000 A.D.

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, self- ishness, and a myriad of paralyzing professional, licensing, zoning, building laws and the like, as bureaucratically maintained by the incumbent power structures.

Dismaying as all this paralysis may be, it will lead eventually to such crisis that comprehensive dissemination of the foregoing truths ultimately will be accomplished through (1) the world-around-integrated electronic media broadcasting and (2) the computerized switchover from the inherently-inadequate- life-support accounting assumption of yesterday to the adequate-for- everyone-and-everything, time-energy accounting comprehensively employed by the multibillion-galaxied, eternally regenerative Universe itself. An exclusively-to-be-accomplished, world-around-integrated, computer-facilitated, cosmically compatible accounting switchover will make it popularly comprehensible that we do indeed have four billion billionaires on our planet, thereby publicizing that fact and thereby inducing the systematic release of their heritage to all Earthian humans. All this accounting switchover must also be accomplished before 2000 A.D.

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. Money is only an expediency-adopted means of interexchanging disparately sized, nonequatable items of real wealth.

A shoemaker has ten milk-drinking children. He wants to acquire a milk cow to convert grass into milk to take care of his children. The shoemaker makes his shoes out of cowhide, but that is not the reason he wants the cow. If and when the cow gets too old for milk production, he can butcher it for its meat and obtain a goodly supply of cowhide for his shoemaking.

A cow breeder wants a pair of shoes. He and the shoemaker agree that it takes much more time and individual inputs to produce a milk cow than it does to make a pair of shoes. They agree that you can't cut the cow up and still milk it. So they employ metal, which, being scarce and physically useful, has high and known exchange value and which could be cut apart into whatever fractions are necessary to implement the disparate values of interexchanging. that's how we got money.

Computers do not have to see or feel anything. Computers do not deal in opinion judgments; they simply store, retrieve, and integrate all the information given them. The more relevant the information they are given and the more accurate that information, the better the answers that the computer can give as to the consequences of doing thus and so under a given set of circumstances. Only the computer can cope with the astronomical complexity of integrating the unpredicted potentials of the millions of invisible technology gains in physical capabilities already accomplished. Only world- considerate computer accounting will be able to produce the figures that will persuade all humanity to divert high-science technology from weaponry to livingry. Computer capability will clearly manifest that we indeed now have four billion real-wealth billionaires.

Computer capability will distribute only-computer-readable credit cards to all humanity, whose constant living, travel, and development use will continually integrate all the production starts and holds on world-wide coordinated supplying of the needs of a world-around dynamically dwelling humanity. Computers will relegate all gold to its exclusively functional uses as a supreme electromagnetic conduction-and-reflection medium -- with its supremacy amongst metals also manifest as rated in weight and bulk per accomplished function. The computer will relegate all physical substances to their uniquely best functional uses.

All the foregoing considerations demonstrate clearly why the computer accounting switchover is not only possible but mandatory and must be accomplished before the fear and ignorance of the billions of humans involved in the power structure's bureaucracies panic and push the atomic-bomb release buttons. What makes us say "panic" of the major political, religious, and business bureaucracies? 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.

There are two more prime obstacles to all humanity's realization of its option to "make it." One is the fact that humanity does not understand the language of science. Therefore it does not know that all that science has ever found out is that the physical Universe consists entirely of the most exquisitely interreciprocating technology. Ninety-nine percent of humanity thinks technology is a "new" phenomenon. 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.

Fortunately the mathematical coordinate system that has been and as yet is employed by science is not the coordinate system employed by the physical Universe. Nature is always most economical. Science's coordinate system is not most economical and is therefore difficult. Nature never has to stop to calculate before behaving in the most economical manner. Scientists do. Also, fortunately, we have discovered nature's coordinate system, which is elegantly simple and popularly comprehensible. (See Synergetics, vols. 1 and 2 -- Macmillan, 1975, 1979.) Synergetics will make it possible for all humanity to comprehend that physical Universe is technology and that the technology does make possible all humanity's option to endure successfully.

The other prime obstacle to realization of the "great option" is the fact that the world's power structures have always "divided to conquer" and have always "kept divided to keep conquered." As a consequence the power structure has so divided humanity -- not only into special function categories but into religious and language and color categories -- that individual humans are now helplessly inarticulate in the face of the present crisis. They consider their political representation to be completely corrupted, therefore they feel almost utterly helpless.

Asking a computer "What shall I do?" is useless. You can get an informative answer, however, if you program your question into the computer as follows: "Under the following set of operative circumstances, each having a positive or negative number value in an only-one-value system, which of only two possible results will be obtained if I do so and so? And by how much?"

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 to form a new and timely post-World-War-II-oriented labor pact. At that time the first of the "new-scientists" -prototyped computers ever to be industrially manufactured were being assembled, put in running order, and fine-tuned by Walter Reuther's skilled machinists. 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 Gen, eral 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 com- puters 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 after paying all government taxes -- with their profits increasing steadily thereafter for twenty years.

* * *

In the electrical-power and light-generating industry the privately owned "public" utilities' largest customers are the industries. The public utilities must always generate enough electricity to ensure their customers' never having a shortage and that electricity be cheap; otherwise the industrial customers would install their own generating equipment. What the customers don't use of the surplus generated power is pure loss to the "public" utilities. To cope efficiently with the foregoing variables, each utility has plotted the peak and valley patterns for each second of each day of all the years since the "public" utilities entered the business. The utilities have many stand-by generators, most of which are in operation for only a small fraction of the time. All of each company's past peak-and-valley history is combined with probability mathematics to determine how many generators to have in operation at any given time of any given day of each newly evolving year.

In the 1930s Wendell Willkie was first to discover that with integration of the electrical-generating networks of neighboring localities, whose peaks and valleys inherently differ to some degree, the excess of any of the network's member utilities at anyone moment is frequently used by other grid members' peaks. When this happens, it brings pure profit to the excess-power- generating seller.

The practical limit on the distance of electrical power delivery from the time of World War I until twenty years ago was 350 miles. However, 350 miles could not span the distances between any two of the continent's four national time zones. Twenty years ago, as a consequence of the new technologies of the space age, ultrahigh-voltage, superconductivity, and other technical developments occurred that made 1500-mile delivery of electricity possible, practical, and economical. This reach provided the ability to span continental time zones, whose peaks and valleys obviously differed greatly from one another, and this meant greater profits to be derived from across-time- zone-integrated electrical-energy networks.

Responding to 1929's Great Crash, the New Deal set up the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built many huge dams and enormous hydroelectric- power-generating capability. This solved all the flood problems of that area. It also greatly irritated the "private sector," which said government had no right to enter into competition with "private enterprise." Subse- quently the government set up its Rural Electrification Administration (REA). The government was interested in rehabilitating the country's Depression-ruined farms. The private sector's electrical-generating industry was not interested. They thought it could be done only at a great loss. The electrical grids financed and administered by the REA interspersed' all the great urban centers' electric grids in the United States. When the 1500-mile electrical-delivery reach unpredictably occurred and potential grid integratings across the time zones loomed, the government-administered rural grids became strategically involved. The boards of directors of all the private-sector "public" utilities said they would never integrate electrically with government -- they were completely against government being in their game. However, they obviously could not integrate across the time zones except by employing the government's Rural-Electrification-established-and-financed grid.

The problem, with all its pro and con data, was put into the computer by the engineers of both the government and the private sector. The question was asked: "In which way would the private sector make the most money -- by integrating with the government's network, or not?" The computer said the private sector would make 30-percent greater profit by integrating with government. The private sector undertook to do so. When both sides found that great profit would occur for the private sector -- which for many years had been the prime financial backer of the Republican party -- great political barriers developed in the Democratic administration which had to be overcome. President Lyndon Johnson, acting on behalf of the federal government, used his power over the Democratic party to remove enough barriers to permit the government to agree to integrate with the private sector. The "private sector," which theretofore had always backed the Republican presidential candidates, apparently became confused and backed Democrat Lyndon Johnson's successful bid for re-election.

Time and again in their short history computers have demonstrated their ability to reverse historically assumed-to-be-unalterable positions of both sides of the opposed political/economic power structure's directorates or committees. Computers can remember accurately and can cope with and integrate the vast amounts of all known, relevant information on complex problems, uncopeable-with prior to the computer. What we had prior to the computer were respected opinions and only-selfishness-conditioned reflexes on how to cope. Though an opinion might be wrong, there was no practical and convincing way to prove it. Unchallenged, the opinions became respected precedent, then exceptionless concepts, and sometimes even civil and academically accepted social law.

Computers will be used more and more to produce the opinion-obsoleting answers to progressive crises-provoked questions about which way world society as a whole will enduringly profit the most. Computers will correct misinformed and disadvantaged conditioned reflexes, not only of the few officials who have heretofore blocked comprehensive techno-economic and political evolutionary advancement, but also of the vast majorities of heretofore- ignorant total humanity.

Within the crises times immediately ahead -- into which we have already entered -- the computer is soon to respond: "We must integrate the world's electrical-energy networks." We must be able to continually integrate the progressive night-in to-day and day-into-night hemispheres of our revolving planet. With all the world's electric energy needs being supplied by a twenty- four-hour-around, omni-integrated network, all of yesterday's, one-half-the- time-unemployed, standby generators will be usable all the time, thus swiftly doubling the operating capacity of the world's electrical energy grid.

A half-century ago I discovered with my non visibly distorted, one-world-island- in-one-world-ocean, 90· longitude-meridian-backbone, north-south-oriented, sky-ocean world map that a world energy network grid would be possible if we could develop the delivery reach. Since I was on the watch for it, when the 1500-mile-reach capability was technically established twenty years ago, it was immediately evident to me that we could carry our American electrical network grid across the Bering Straits from our Alaska grid to reach the extreme northeastern Russian grid, where the U.S.S.R. had completed a program of installing dams and hydroelectric-power-generating stations on all their northerly flowing rivers all the way into eastern Kamchatka. About 1500 miles could interconnect the Russians' Asiatic continent electric integrated power grid with the Alaskan grid of the industrial North American electric energy grid.

In the early years of Trudeau's premiership of Canada, when he was about to make his first visit to Russia, I gave him my world energy network grid plan, which he presented to Brezhnev, who turned it over to his experts. On his return to Canada Trudeau reported to me that the experts had come back to Brezhnev with: "feasible ... desirable."

I therefore predict that before the end of the 1980s the computer's politically unbiased problem-solving prestige will have brought about the world's completely integrated electrical-energy network grid. This world electric grid, with its omni-integrated advantage, will deliver its electric energy anywhere, to anyone, at anyone time, at one common rate. This will make possible a world-around uniform costing and pricing system for all goods and services based realistically on the time-energy metabolic accounting system of Universe.

Image

[i]FIGURE 1. Ultra-High-Voltage World Electric Grid

................... Grid line of world's ultra-high-voltage, 1500-mile, intergenerator connection reach

Establishing electric current currency for whole world: 1 cents = 1 kwh

B. Fuller's Dymaxion Sky-Ocean World Map

PERCENTAGE OF WORLD POPULATION South America 6% Central America 1 % North America 7% Africa 11% Europe 16% Asia (54% land, 7% water) 61 % 100%


In this cosmically uniform, common energy-value system for all humanity, costing will be expressed in kilowatt-hours, watt-hours, and watt-seconds of work. Kilowatt-hours will become the prime criteria of costing the production of the complex of metabolic involvements per each function or item. These uniform energy valuations will replace all the world's wildly intervarying, opinion-gambled-upon, top-power-system-manipulatable monetary systems. The time-energy world accounting system will do away with all the inequities now occurring in regard to the arbitrarily maneuverable international shipping of goods and the top economic power structure's banker-invented, international balance-of-trade accountings. It will eliminate all the tricky banking and securities-markets exploitations of all the around-the-world-time-zone activities differences in operation today, all unbeknownst to the at-alI-times two billion humans who are sleeping.

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.

In treating with the many immediate, most important survival problems, each question will be programmed into the computer asking which way society will experience the lowest-cost optimum living: by giving all humans handsome fellowships, with an income adequate for a high standard of living, or by having them go on earning their livings. 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 [ii] promoters, spies and counterspies, military personnel, gunmakers, etc.

The computer will also have verified both of the important findings of the brilliant Denver, Colorado, oil geologist, Fran'1ois de Chardenedes: (1) the script of his scenario of "Nature's Production of Petroleum," and (2) his economic findings regarding the amount of energy employed as heat and pressure, for the length of time initially that it took nature to photosynthetically process Sun radiation into the myriad of hydrocarbon molecules that comprise all the vegetation and algae, which later are consumed and growthfully multiplied by a myriad of other biological species, a large percentage of which Sun-energy-nurtured-and-multiplied molecules are ultimately processed into petroleum.

The script of de Chardenedes's "Scenario of Petroleum Production" makes it clear that, with all that cosmic-energy processing (as rain, wind, and gravitational pressure) and processing time (paid for at the rates you and 1 pay for household electrical energy), it costs nature well over a million dollars to produce each gallon of petroleum. To say "I didn't know that" doesn't alter the inexorable energy accounting of eternally regenerative, 100- percent-efficient -- ergo, l00-percent-concerned -- physical-energy Universe.

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.

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.

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?"

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 anyone of the real wealth-production or maintenance teams.

Fortunately, the computer-directable design science revolution option does exist by which all looming problems can and may be effectively solved. Evolution does seem intent upon making humans a success.

* * *

Critical Path comprehensively traces all the important trends of history that have led to this moment of humanity's potential first-stage success and its opening of a whole new chapter of humanity's ever functioning in local support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe.

To know now what we could never have known before 1969 -- that we now have an option for all humanity to "make it" successfully on this planet in this lifetime -- is not to be optimistic. It is only a validation of hope, a hope that had no operationally foreseeable validity before 1969. 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. Humanity is in "final exam" as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe as mind, with the latter's access to the design laws -- called by science "the generalized principles" -- governing eternally regenerative Universe.

Human minds have a unique cosmic function not identifiable with any other phenomenon -- the capability to act as local Universe information-harvesters and local Universe problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe.

At the present cosmic moment, muscle, cunning, fear, and selfishness are in powerful control of human affairs. We humans are here in Universe to exercise the Universe-functioning of mind. Only mind can apprehend, abide by, and be led by truth. If human mind comes into control of human affairs, the first thing it will do is exercise our option to "make it."

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. While you could be "the straw that breaks the camel's back," compressively you can also be the "straw" -- straw of intellect, initiative, unselfishness. comprehensive integrity, competence, and love -- whose ephemerally effective tension saves us.

The invisibly tensive straws that can save us are those of individual human integrities -- in daring to steer the individual's course only by truth, strange as the realized truth may often seem -- wherever and whenever the truths are evidenced to the individual -- wherever they may lead, unfamiliar as the way may be.

The integrity of the individual's enthusiasm for the now-possible success of all humanity is critical to successful exercise of our option. Are you spontaneously enthusiastic about everyone having everything you can have?

For only a short time, in most countries, has the individual human had the right of trial by jury. To make humanity's chances for a fair trial better, all those testifying must swear "to tell the truth, all the truth, and nothing but the truth." But humans have learned scientifically that the exact truth can never be attained or told. We can reduce the degree of tolerated error, but we have learned physically, as Heisenberg discovered, that exactitude is prohibited, because most exquisite physical experiment has shown that "the act of measuring always alters that which is measured."

We can sense that only God is the perfect -- the exact truth. We can come ever nearer to God by progressively eliminating residual errors. The nearest each of us can come to God is by loving the truth. If we don't program the computer truthfully with all the truth and nothing but the truth, we won't get the answers that allow us to "make it."

When we speak of the integrity of the individual, we speak of that which life has taught the individual by direct experience. We are not talking about loyalty to your mother, your friends, your college fraternity, or your boss, who told you how to behave or think. In speaking of truth we are not talking about the position to take that seems to put you in the most favorable light.

It was the 1927 realization of the foregoing that brought the author to reorganize his life to discover what, if anything, the little, penniless, unknown individual, with dependent wife and child, might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that would be inherently impossible for great nations or great corporate enterprises to do. This occasioned what is described in my "Self-Disciplines," Chapter 4.

With world-around contact with youth, generated by invitations to speak to the students of over 500 universities and colleges during the last half-century, I can conclude at the outset of 1980 that the world public has become disenchanted with both the political and financial leadership, which it no longer trusts to solve the problems of historical crisis. Furthermore, all the individuals of humanity are looking for the answer to what the little individual can do that can't be done by great nations and great enterprises.

The author thought that it would be highly relevant to the purpose of this book to enumerate those self-disciplines that he had adopted and used during those fifty years. Only those self-disciplines can cogently explain why he adopted the design science revolution and not the political revolutions (the strategy of all history). Only by understanding those disciplines can we understand the strategy governing the development of the artifacts, which strategy is called "critical path" -- ergo, the name of this book.

Each year I receive and answer many hundreds of unsolicited letters from youth anxious to know what the little individual can do. One such letter from a young man named Michael -- who is ten years old -- asks whether I am a "doer or a thinker." Although I never "tell" anyone what to do, I feel it quite relevant at this point to quote my letter to him explaining what I have been trying to do in the years since my adoption of my 1927-inaugurated self-disciplinary resolves. The letter, dated February 16, 1970, reads:

Dear Michael,

Thank you very much for your recent letter concerning "thinkers and doers."

The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done -- that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.

Try making experiments of anything you conceive and are intensely interested in. Don't be disappointed if something doesn't work. That is what you want to know -- the truth about everything -- and then the truth about combinations of things. Some combinations have such logic and integrity that they can work coherently despite non-working elements embraced by their system.

Whenever you come to a word with which you are not familiar, find it in the dictionary and write a sentence which uses that new word. Words are tools- -- nd once you have learned how to use a tool you will never forget it. Just looking for the meaning of the word is not enough. If your vocabulary is comprehensive, you can comprehend both fine and large patterns of experience.

You have what is most important in life -- initiative. Because of it, you wrote to me. I am answering to the best of my capability. You will find the world responding to your earnest initiative.

Sincerely yours,

Buckminster Fuller


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. You can-deceive others, you can deceive your brain-self, but you can't deceive your mind-self -- for mind deals only in the discovery of truth and the interrelationship of all the truths. The cosmic laws with which mind deals are noncorruptible.

Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate.

_______________

Notes:

i. This is only a magnitude figure. It obviously is not exact.

ii. See description of Obnoxico in Chapter 6, pp. 225-26.
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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

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PART I

CHAPTER 1: Speculative Prehistory of Humanity


THE DYMAXION WORLD MAP shows one world island in one world ocean with no breaks in the continental contours and with no visible distortion of the relative size or shape of any of the cartographic patterning. (See map on page 169.) The coloring on the full-size map is that of the optical spectrum, with red representing the hottest climates and dark blue representing the coldest climates. The borderline between yellow and green is the freezing line. The color shown for any area of the map represents the coldest conditions for that geographic area. Verkhoyansk, in northeastern Siberia, is the cold pole of planet Earth's northern hemisphere. Yet, sometimes in August at noonday, Verkhoyansk is as hot as equatorial Africa. Frequently in midwinter Verkhoyansk's temperature falls to sixty-five degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Equatorial Africa rarely has a temperature at midwinter of less than seventy degrees above zero Fahrenheit. The annual temperature variation between the hottest and coolest in equatorial Africa is only twenty degrees Fahrenheit, while the annual variation at Verkhoyansk is 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

The vital factor that determines social patterns, human preoccupations, and economic customs of those dwelling in different geographic environments depends on how cold it gets, not on how hot. With their shade-making artifacts humans can live nakedly under the hottest of Earth's weather conditions. Consisting physically of 60 percent water, humans cannot live nakedly where it is cold -- not below the freezing line of thirty-two degrees above zero Fahrenheit.

The Dymaxion Map shows that (1) the colder an area gets, the more the annual temperature variation, and (2) the more the geographical temperature varies annually, the more inventive the humans who live in those areas have to be to survive. If you live by Lake Victoria in eastern Africa and you wish to cross it, you will invent a wooden boat. If you live beside Lake Baikal in central Siberia and you wish to cross that body of water, you will invent a wooden boat in the summer and skates and sleds in the winter. The people who live in the colder areas are not more inventive -- they simply have many more environment-caused occasions in which to employ all humans' innate inventiveness. Move humans from a hot country into a cold country, and they become as inventive as those who live there -- or they perish.

* * *

As flying insects are hit by the windshields of our speeding automobiles, their intricate wings, legs, sensors, and bodies splash out as flat, yellow-green blobs. More than 50 percent by both volume and weight of the average physical structure and mechanics of all biological species consists of water. Humans' structuring and integral organic equipping is over 60 percent water. Earthians are hydraulically designed technologies.

All structures consist of a balanced interaction between tensive and compressive forces. Nature services all her tension functions rigidly with three crystalline, maximum-cohesion bonds, and services her compression-resisting functions with double-bonded, flexibly hinged, variously viscous hydraulics. These are noncompressible, but being flexible, they distribute their loads evenly to all the surfaces of their triple-bonded, tensional-container systems. As long as the triple-bonded tensional crystalline's containers are strong enough, the hydraulic structural system will hold its tensionally predesigned, optimally extended shapes because the contained liquids, which entirely fill the designed container, are noncompressible.

Because water is essential to all the biological organisms' ecological system of regeneration on our planet, the major facts about it are vitally relevant.

Vital fact number one (as already stated) is that biological life is 50 percent water.

Vital fact number two is that we don't know of any water in Universe other than that on our planet Earth. Almost three-quarters of the Earth's surface is covered with water. The water coverage averages in depth the length of a vertically suspended chain consisting of 2000 head-to-foot-linked hu- mans. The world's oceans seem so deep to people that the amount of water in Universe is thought of by them as unlimited. Rut on a twelve-inch-diameter Earth globe the proportional depth of the ocean to Earth's diameter would be only three one-thousandths of an inch, which means that the absorption depth of the blue ink into the thin paper cover of the globe upon which the oceans are printed is far deeper in respect to the miniature Earth globe than is the real world ocean in respect to the real Earth's globe.

Vital fact number three is that water freezes and boils within close limits. Anywhere in Universe except inside Earth's biosphere the water (of which we too consist) would be either frozen, boiling, evaporated, or incandescent.

These facts integrate to tell us that our terrestrial biosphere is a unique environment essential to the survival of human organisms, not only on our planet, but anywhere within the thus-far-discovered Universe. To keep humans alive outside our biosphere requires reproducing and maintaining our exact biospherical conditions within a physically powerful and superbly insulated, into-space-rocketable container.

Before the continental networks of reinforced-concrete highways commenced half a century ago, human civilization, as seen from a low-flying airplane, was always strung out. along the brooks, rivers, ponds, lakes, seas, and oceanfronts. Vast real estate developments and their underground-hidden, long-distance pipelines now tend to obscure this absolute dependence of humans upon water.

Vital fact number four is that water gains and loses heat more slowly than any other known profusely available substance. The South Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls were formed on the ocean-surface rims of both extinct and active volcanoes, broken through the ocean-bottom crust of the Earth. The volcanoes and the radiation from the Sun brought the water temperature to a level compatible with humans' normal 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and the tropical ocean's temperature was maintainable thereafter by the Sun alone. The world ocean's thermal stability keeps the world's temperature changes at minimum.

All humans in all history have always been born naked, helpless for months, hungry, thirsty, curious, and ignorant. They could not have survived if born where they would freeze, be dehydrated, or burn to death. The most logically propitious place for humans to survive and prosper within our planetary biosphere was on the coral atolls, of the South Pacific and North Indian oceans. Here the barrier reefs effectively intercepted the great seas. The temperature of the almost-still water inside the lagoons was so compatible with life that head-above-water humans could stay in them continuously without any unfavorable effect. The lagoons abounded in fish, and there were mildly sloping, easy-to-walk-in-or-out-upon beaches of white sand. Crystal fresh waters poured down the mountainsides, and coconuts full of milk fell to the ground around the humans. Fruits were plentiful, and there were no wild animals threatening to eat the helpless baby humans.

Discovering that they themselves could not drink the salt water, these island-atoll people soon learned that the edible vegetation and fruits grew only from fresh water and Sunlight. Noting that the fresh water came either from the sky or from springs, the atollers came to invent shoal, freshwater-paddies- filling, parallelly contoured, intertiered-one-above-the-other terraces at human-waist-height distances above one another. This terraced water-ditching started high on the hillsides. Down and through this inter-dammed valving the fresh waters slowly flowed -- so slowly as to usually appear to be motionless. Ultimately they leached into the sea.

The atollers made small and large· freshwater vessels of animal skins, wood, and stone -- vessels that held water inside and dug-out log vessels that excluded the water. Living half in the water, they became natural hydraulic inventors.

• • •

It is relevant to our speculative prehistory reviewing of all known clues that, in common only with water-dwelling mammals such as whales and porpoises, humans shed salt water tears, as do none of the other primates.

Marrying a fast-running horse with another fast-running horse increases the mathematical probability of "concentrating" the fast-running genes -- ergo, has high probability of producing an even faster-running horse, which high-bred needs much care, having lost its general capability to cope with the wide range of hostile environmental events.

Through the mathematical probability consequent to sorting out and concentrating special behavioral-capability genes and isolated pairing and inbreeding of parents manifestly rich in those special physical capabilities, we humans have learned how to accomplish the development of ever-more-highly- specialized biological species. We note that inbreeding of special, frequently employed capabilities has always been accomplished only at the cost of outbreeding general adaptability to cope with the infrequently occurring, high-energy-concentrating events. Humans geographically isolated for many generations (for instance, in a high-mountains-enclosed valley), inevitably inbreed those of their numbers most successfully and lengthily surviving under those special environmental conditions because the surviving types are the only ones left with which to cohabitate. This automatically concentrates the most favorable genes for local survival. The highly inbred progeny become specialists in surviving under the locally prevailing special-environmental conditions.

We have no experimental evidence of successfully interbreeding highly divergent special biological species and their unique capabilities to produce completely effective general adaptability. If, on the other hand, we continued successively to inbreed generation after generation of champion Olympic gymnasts, we would soon come to super-inter-tree-jumping-and- swinging monkeys with no more intellectual talent and general-adaptability usefulness than that of the bright chimpanzees.

For this and other persuasive reasons my speculative prehistory has assumed (since 1927) Darwin's evolution of life from the simple to the complex, accomplished through progressive agglomeration of single-cell amoebas, to be in reverse of the facts.

When Darwin was a young man, at the time of the voyage of the Beagle. Dalton was among the world's leading physicists. Mendeleyev's periodic table of the elements had not as yet been conceived of. Dalton favored the concept that all atoms were produced by combinations of the hydrogen atoms. This concept and Darwin's single-cell concept fitted neatly into humanity's propensity for looking for "THE building block of the Universe" -- people's imagination is childishly stimulated at the idea of finding "THE KEY." Spontaneously, we are simplistically inclined -- it feeds the ego. "Oh, boy! If I had the key -- what couldn't I do?"

Today it is eminently clear that human beings' physiological composition consists of a relative abundance of the ninety-two regenerative chemical elements' atoms similar to the relative abundance of chemical elements in Universe, which Universe consists of a plurality of individually unique generalized principles. In 1922 came physics' demonstration of a fundamental complementarity of inherently different components of physical phenomena. In 1956 the Nobel Prize in physics was given for the proof that the complementaries were not "mirror images" -- one of the other. The number of chemical elements present in the amoeba will not accommodate the chemical elements' complexity of Universe. Universe is inherently complex and eternally regenerative. It can have no "beginning" or "ending." Vast numbers of scientists as yet labor vainly to account for the misconception of beginnings and endings. We have at minimum the neutron and the proton, which always and only coexist, the electron and the positron, the neutrino, antineutrino, and all. There is no single building block -- there are only complexes of complex systems.

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FIGURE 2.

As the great mathematician Leonhard Euler discovered with his topology, all visual experiences consist of three inherently different and unique phenomena: (1) lines; (2) when lines cross, we get vertexes (comers, fixes, points); (3) when several lines intercross, we get an area (window or face), or, as we call them in synergetics: (1) trajectories, (2) crossings, (3) openings. (See §§ 1007.11-15, Synergetics, vol. 1; §§ 1007.22-31, Synergetics. vol. 2.) A system divides all of the Universe into (a) all of the Universe outside the system, (b) all of the Universe inside the system, and (c) the little bit of remaining Universe which comprises the system that separates the macrocosm from the microcosm. The minimum system of Universe (4) is com- plex -- four corners, four windows, and six edges. "Thank you, Euler -- that will do, Darwin."

We see it as highly feasible to have telescanned from elsewhere in Universe the DNA-RNA-like coding of a complex angle-and-frequency programming together of terrestrially occurring chemical elements into their molecule-combining chemistries to successively produce a variety of species such as trilobites, dinosaurs, etc., as a progression of elsewhere-controlled Earth-landing tests. We see it as also highly feasible that these landings were used to discover the most suitable types of local-in-Universe information-harvesters and problem-solvers. The critical-limit experiences of the successive creature landings we see thereafter being sent back to some cosmic headquarters, thereby to guide the improvement of the design of the landings of thick-skinned creatures able to cope with greater annual temperature ranges than are humanly tolerable. And after further millions of years have passed and the environmental conditions have become auspicious, we see it becoming feasible to telescan the assembling of humans on Earth, thereafter inbreeding some of them into the ape stages.

We can comprehend how South Sea-atoll, lagoon-frolicking male and female human swimmers gradually inbred pairs of underwater swimmers who held their breath in their lungs for ever-longer periods, and after many inbreedings of largest lungers and as many outbreedings of general adaptabil- ity organic equipment, the progeny evolved into porpoises and later into whales.

Intimately relevant to these fundamental reorientings of our speculative prehistory of humans present aboard planet Earth, we have the following hard-fact scientific discoveries:

1. Vitamin D from Sunlight is essential to humans because milk-provided calcium is essential to the human bone structure. Vitamin D functions in the conversion of calcium into bone structure.

2. Humans synthesize vitamin D through the action of the Sun's ultraviolet rays on. the skin. This biochemical function is a zoological counterpart of botanical photosynthesis of Sun radiation into hydrocarbon molecules.

3. But vitamin D is one of those vitamins of which humans can have an overdose.

4. In warmer and tropical climes, where vitamin D from the Sun is adequate or excessive, humans' subconsciously functioning organisms, employing their chemical process options, develop Sunlight filters in the skin consisting of darker and darker pigments, which prevent excess absorption of radiation and avoid the overdose of vitamin D.

5. Where there is not much Sunlight, as in the Far North, human organisms had to progressively remove their skin pigment filters, which left only blond skin permitting maximum synthesis of vitamin D from the Sun.

6. Vitamin D is not naturally present in most foods. The one food in which it is significantly present is whale blubber-a food of the Eskimos. Because of long periods of darkness and the large amounts of clothing the Eskimos wear to protect them from the cold, Sunlight-synthesized vitamin D is not available in enough quantity to the Eskimos.

7. The two chief, human-organism-supplied skin pigments that filter the Sun's rays are:

Melanin: brown and black skin

Carotin: oriental (yellow) skin


In confirmation of all the foregoing we note th.e white and pink skin bottoms of the feet and palms of hands of otherwise dark or black-skinned individuals -- white because not exposed to Sun and therefore unable to photosynthesize vitamin D from the Sun, therefore not protectively colored by melanin or carotin filters.

Biology demonstrates a botanical counterpart of the foregoing zoological Sun-utilizing and -filtering strategies for the Sun-intensity filtering strategies manifest in the Earth's hardwoods. The most northerly are white oak, southward of which we come to the pink oak and light-yellow birch. As we go farther south, we see the pink pearl maple and gray ash, then the deep red-yellow southern pine, south of which occur the brown mahoganies and dark-gray teak, and farther south the dark-brown rosewoods, with the spectrum change terminating at the Equator in the black ebony.

Compound this information with the fact that only for the last short decade in all of human history have we learned through incontrovertible scientific evidence that undernourishment of a child during its gestation in the womb or in its first year of life most frequently results in damage to the human brain. The damage may often be just a mild dulling or slowness of wit of an otherwise seemingly healthy human.

Throughout all known history the powerful fighting kings and noble stock reserved exclusively to themselves all animal flesh derived from their hunting. The poor people had to make do with the local roots, nuts, and fruits, which, due to vagaries of special environments, often contained a range of chemical ingredients inadequate to healthy nourishment. The animals, on the other hand, ate of the vegetation in general and of other animals' flesh, sum-totally acquiring a comprehensively broad input of the full gamut of chemistries essential to a healthy diet.

Karl Marx, bespeaking the workers, assumed the working class to be innately different from the noble class. He and the other defenders of the working class assumed that the workers and the nobles were of different organic and blood stock. The nobles also assumed this to be true and required that the nobles intermarry with other nobles. Both nobles and workers assumed that experience taught them that there is a fundamental inadequacy of life support in this world.

The workers' leaders assumed that the spontaneous familiarization of the workers with tools and farming made them the fittest to survive. They considered the nobles to be parasites. Finding themselves on the "top of the heap," the nobles assumed that their venturesomeness, wit, courage, muscle, and skill at arms had obviously rendered them the "fittest to survive." The workers' leaders assumed that if the workers could successfully organize themselves to be the class to survive, they must exterminate all those of the aristocratic blood.

Since the discovery that infantile undernourishment was alone responsible for the dulling of the human workers' brains, we have discovered that there is no organic blood class or species differentiation of humans. Compounding the latter information and that governing skin pigmentation, we discover that, by scientific evidence, there is neither race nor class differentiation of humans. All humans are of the same family.

All physiognomic and other physiological differentiations in human appearance are the exclusive consequences of multigenerations of unplanned inbreeding of those types that survived most successfully under unique environmental conditions, within which local geographies, tribes or nations dwelt for protracted periods. The U.S.S.R. had 146 different nations to integrate into their republic. Those "nations" had been geographically isolated and inbred so long that their local survival types looked physically different from members of the other nations.

• • •

We have had four known ice ages. They average a million years apiece. The intervals between them average a quarter of a million years. Together they cover a known total of four and three-quarter million years. The Leakey family's proofs of the presence of humans on our planet for over three million years take us back through two ice ages and two inter-ice-age intervals to the end of the second ice age.

As an ice age develops, more and more of the Earth's water is frozen, which greatly lowers the ocean level and reveals previously hidden, interconnecting land masses. At the time of the last ice age's occurrence the sea-hidden, interisland connections revealed themselves as continental isthmuses and peninsulas. The great islands of Java, Sumatra, Borneo, the Philippines, Sulawesi, and Bali became integral parts of the Malay Peninsula. New Guinea was part of continental Australia. Alaska and Siberia were connected.

The expanding ice mantle drove the northern continents' fur-skinned wild animals southward into the new peninsular extensions of the Asiatic mainland. The surprised once-islanded natives learned gradually to cope with these animals -- hunted some, domesticated others (such as sheep and goats), and mounted, rode, or directed some, such as horses, mules, elephants, and water buffaloes. As the ice age withdrew, melting ice filled the oceans and seas, and the islands became once more isolated, but they were now inhabited with wild animals. Tigers as yet are found in western Bali.

At great mountain altitudes, where the temperatures were low, the ice caps remained, most notably on the High Himalaya range. In the vast ice cap of the Himalayas water melted to produce great rivers that flowed seaward from the five-mile-high frozen reservoir.

Because the atoll-incubated original human life had come naturally to invent rafts and boats that became their natural transport, when the waters receded they used those boats to bridge the increasing distance between the once-interconnected lands. Boats being their natural transport, they dug canals into the muddy mainland coast as it became progressively uncovered. Flying above the coast of Thailand and Cambodia today one can see the myriad of geometrically neat ancient canals that penetrated their seacoast.

These two primitive conditions, (A) ocean water covering or permeating the land and (B) the melted waters flowing seaward from the ice-topped mountains, produced in the course of history two very different kinds of hydrocultures -- those of the islanded sea-people and those of the inland and upland traveled and settled people. The sea-people's major waters were salty; the inland and upland peoples' major waters were fresh. The inland people frequently came to fresh water, whereas the boat and island people only infrequently came upon freshwater sources. The sea, boat, and island people tended to anticipate their freshwater needs more than the inland and mountain people.

The atoll people, it must be remembered, had an absolute necessity for potable fresh water, and fortunately, from time to time, they found it coursing down their mountainsides from high-altitude, rain-filled lakes. We note that the island people were the original, planet-landed peoples who explored widely with their paddled canoes and gradually settled inland and upland, being able to cope with the mountain coldness because of their new animal-skin clothing and tents fashioned from the skins of wild animals that roamed into their peninsula-interbridged "islands" during the last ice age.

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[i]Bali-gateway

FIGURE 3.

The great architectural feature of Bali is that of the narrow vertical gap in the gateways of their walled-in dwelling compounds, a gap they explain as representing the gap that occurred long ago between once-united Bali and Java. This occurred only 30,000 years ago, when the last ice age began to melt away and its waters once again separated the islands. The Balinese architectural legend-supported memory thus goes back 30,000 years.

Whenever I fly over Cambodia and Thailand and see the canal patterns penetrating for hundreds of miles into the land, I cannot suppress the intuition that, in addition to being the atoll-water-people's first entry into the main river mouths, these canals were also where these people began to work the mainlands. Having learned so much about hydraulic flows with the come and go of tides into island lagoons and basins, those first inland and upland paddlers were able to carry their hydraulic thinking up into the mainland hills and mountains.

Of course, the Sun also was always elevating fresh water into the sky, first by evaporation and then by "condensation" at the cold heights, whereafter gravity pulled it again earthward, distributing it over wide areas as wind-propelled rain clouds. "Condensation" is electrolytic.

The atoll-water-people learned millions of years ago that wood floated, that one log rolled over in the water, and that two logs with their branches intertwined no longer rolled in the water. From this they learned that two parallel logs properly boomed and tied together at a little distance not only produced a stable craft but one that, with the leaves of its branches sewn together and intuitively angled, would sail almost into the wind. In learning to tie their logs and spars together to withstand great strains imposed by winds and waves, those atoll people learned that triangles are the only structurally stable patterns for the interbracings, outriggings, and sparring of their sailing canoes and catamarans.

These fishing people had great need for strong baskets to contain their fish and other vital supplies when trafficking between islands -- and later to capture and secure the animals when the latter invaded them during the ice ages. It is historically noteworthy that amongst all the South Pacific islands peoples and all the coastal peoples from Japan southward to Burma, all their baskets, small and large, are triangularly sixty-degree (three-way) woven, while all the basketry of all the rest of the world is square, or ninety-degree (two-way) woven. The sole exception is the three-way woven baskets found at the northern end of the Andes in South America just inland from where the Japanese current would have carried the water-peoples' drifting rafts.

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Two-way weaves are spreadable, ergo distortable, ergo unstable.

FIGURE 4. Two-way versus three-way weave.


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FIGURE 4a. Strip X cannot be spread above A points nor lowered below B points -- ergo, three-way weaves are unspreadable, therefore provide stable pattern and stable structure.

None of these same water-people (as a great Austronesian observer, Austin Coates, [ii] brilliantly discovered) understand the Western world's banking- and credit-financed business. As a consequence four Chinese families run all the banking businesses of Java and Sumatra and Indonesia in general. These Southeast Asians say the banker cannot lend them the wind before the wind blows. They are right, as the world's bankers are about to learn to the unprecedented discomfort of all humanity.

Everyone who has visited the rice cultures of Japan and Southeast Asia has witnessed the vast and meticulous hydraulic engineering of the mountain- and valley-side rice paddy system flowing horizontally and multi-directionally at each level as the waters are gradually brought seaward from great heights with never a chance missed to make foods and flowers grow along the way. These beautiful levelings and infinitely delicate controllings of water flow must have been of the greatest importance to human survival over many millennia, if not for millions of years.

* * *

Our "speculative prehistory" identifies the terraced rice paddy development as the most complete in the world, occurring as a consequence of there being boat and island people who have learned by experience the critical function fresh water plays in life. Their experience has taught them to become most anticipatorily effective through artifacts (the rice paddy being an artifact) in avoiding lack of fresh water. This leads to our prognostication that the next era of important anthropological research will occur in coral reefs.

Up to a decade ago archeologists, anthropologists, geologists, biologists, and historians of world-around affairs placed the beginnings of human life on Earth (and Scriptures' Garden of Eden) somewhere east of Suez, close to but aeons before ancient Babylon, which itself is in the heart of the great valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in ancient Mesopotamia.

The historical experts assumed that humanity's graduation from the Stone Age into the Bronze Age also occurred in Asia Minor. This assumption rested largely on the copper found on the large, historically strategic island of Cyprus lying just off the eastern Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor.

The name "Cyprus" comes from the Latin cuprus, meaning "copper." Bronze, however, is made of copper and tin. Copper as a metal is soft and not very good for weapons or tools; so, too, is tin. Bronze is hard, resilient, and excellent for weapons and tools. Historians and archeologists seem to be extraordinarily poor metallurgists. Because early bronze items were found in Asia Minor in the vicinity of Cyprus, they misconcluded that it was there that the Bronze Age began. But the oldest metals-discovering, -developing, and -trading records known to humanity on our planet are the meticulously accurate data of the Phoenicians. Their detailed records tell us that they had to sail hundreds of miles westward out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic and thence northward for more hundreds of miles to what we call today the British Isles to get the tin occurring exclusively on those islands, then bringing it back to Asia Minor, where it was combined with Cyprus copper to make bronze.

Until 1950 there is no historical record of humanity inventing metallurgical alloys. All metallurgical alloys have always been accidentally discovered. The alloys occur as symmetrically stable arrangements of atoms -- invisible to naked human eyes -- happen to come into critical proximity under the right heat conditions to produce their common liquidity. No one could foresee that combining soft copper with even softer tin could and would produce stiff, hard, resilient bronze. Tin and copper had to co-occur geologically in the same geographical area to be subject to accidental melting together.

To me it is absolutely impossible that the beginnings of the Bronze Age could have occurred in Asia Minor. That bronze was produced there tells us that some Asia Minor people learned about bronze-making from others, who earlier and elsewhere had discovered it accidentally. Overland caravans from the Orient to Asia Minor experienced the uses of bronze and learned that it was an alloy of copper and tin. Then, having learned from overseas explorers and traders that tin occurred in the British Isles, the Cyprus-neighboring Phoenicians set about to import it to Asia Minor. It was, incidentally, the tin in the British Isles that induced Julius Caesar to build a highway all the way from Rome to the English Channel and, thereafter, to settle Romans in England until the tin was nearly exhausted. In this connection it is importantly relevant to note that we now know that much earlier in history the Phoenicians navigated and traded the Indian Ocean and visited Thailand, which as we now know was where bronze was first produced.

Approximately seventeen years ago (1964) highly artful bronze castings were discovered in northeast Thailand, in an area called Ban Chiang. In that area tin and copper co-occur abundantly. There the two could have been melted together accidentally. In Ban Chiang we have found early pottery of unprecedented and artfully delighting design. This pottery required the magnitude of heat necessary to alloy copper and tin (both have low melting points). The same metallurgically naive historians already mentioned had assumed the Bronze Age civilization to have traveled eastward from Asia Minor all the way to China. Thereafter the Chinese, whom those mistaken historians admit were very smart and apparently caught on fast to the cultural attainments of Asia Minor, swiftly developed a highly cultivated civilization of their own involving an enormous production of fine art bronzes. Then, said yesterday's experts, the bronze artists of northern China found their way down into Southeast Asia -- a region considered by them to be a cultural Johnnie-come-lately!

You cannot use carbon 14 to prove the age of bronzes, but in 1977 metallurgists discovered ways of dating the ages of bronzes. In 1975 the Thai government placed the diggings at Ban Chiang in the charge of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, with the latter's archeologist Dr. Chet Gorman in command. Dr. Gorman took many of the bronzes to Philadelphia and in due course developed ingenious means for arriving at the age of bronze objects -- and did so to the satisfaction of metallurgical scientists in general. These proofs showed that the bronzes of Ban Chiang are the earliest known on planet Earth. This news was published on the front page of The New York Times in the summer of 1977. We now know that the Bronze Age began in Southeast Asia. This reversal of historical theory greatly enhances our own speculative hypothesis that humanity originated in the Austronesian islands and came out into the (Asian) mainland in separate stages, each occurring after one of the last ice ages. This reversal of the basic history of civilization also lends further credence to my reversed Darwinian theory of evolution on planet Earth.

• • •

The last human exodus from the islands of Austronesia onto the mainland occurred after the last ice age, about 30,000 years ago. On the first such exodus, two ice ages ago (which was two and one-half million years ago), those humans who had mastered horses mounted them and, leaving their on-foot rice-growing, sheep-and-goat-herding, and on-foot hunting brethren behind, rode northwest to hunt wild animals, until the next ice age forced them to endure survival in caves of nonglaciated Western Europe. With skin and hair all bleached they emerged and mounted horses 30,000 years ago to confront the westward on-foot or on-camel caravaning of the earliest Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations of written history. The latter civilization probably developed from the Indian Ocean and Austronesian island- atoll people blown westward on rafts to (A) Queen Hatshepsut's source of pitches for her Egyptian shipbuilding, which source the Egyptians called the "Land of Pun" -- which we now know to have been Somaliland (the Leakeys' Olduvai Gorge country -- and (B) to Arabia, blown by the tween-monsoon easterlies of the Indian Ocean and the Arabian sea. (The word pun in South African coloreds' language means "red" -- the Red Sea is the Pun Sea, the Pun as the Pun of Pun-icians, or later Phoenicians, of Carthage's and Rome's Pun-ic Wars.)

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FIGURE 5. Dymaxion Map with 100 Population Dots

Note: Each dot represents 44 million people
South America 6%
Central America 1%
North America 7%
Africa 11%
Europe 16%
Asia (Land 54%, Water 7%) 61%


If you look at my Dymaxion World Map (in which, as we have noted be- fore, there is no visible distortion of the relative shape or size of any of the land or water patterning), you will find one hundred dots, each representing 1 percent of humanity as of 1980 A.D.; that is, each dot represents forty-four million human beings. Each 1 percent is carefully located in the demographic center of each forty-four-million grouping of the Earth's total people. You can see on my map that within an area that is only about 8 percent of the Earth's total surface, known as the Orient (which contains India, China, and Southeast Asia), 54 percent of humanity exists; of this 54 percent, 8 percent are the as-yet-islanded (or peninsulaed) water-people: Japan, 3 percent; Philippines, 1 percent; Java, Sumatra, etc., 3 percent; Singapore and the lower Malay Peninsula, 1 percent. Going on the globe westward, "following the . Sun" and facing into the prevailing north and southwesterly winds, we observe Asia Minor, Africa, and Europe with 32 percent, and then "the West," the Americas, with 14 percent of all humanity.

Kipling wrote in 1900, "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." All who read him thought Kipling was obviously correct. No one in 1900 could foresee the as-yet-uninvented airplanes, let alone 350- passenger-carrying, 500-mph, intercontinental and around-the-world-flying jet airplanes, nor satellite-relayed intercontinental telephony, etc.

You can see on my map the enormous concentration of humanity in Java, Malaysia, and the Indonesian islands, as well as along the original "waterfront" areas of the Asian mainland. Together Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam are the beachheads of Austronesian islanders "landing" upon the Asian continent. Clearly that is where humanity first went inland and upland to the Himalayas, exploring the Mekong River toward its source. This extraordinary fact relates also to the last ice age and uniquely to the 8 percent of my world map known as the Orient, which contains the 54 percent of humanity.

Looking closely at this area we see the Indus River rising in the Himalayas and flowing westward to Karachi and then into the Arabian Sea. Then, starting in almost the same High Himalayan place as the Indus, we see the Ganges flowing initially westward, then turning eastward and flowing south of the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. Next we note the Brahmaputra River, originating within 100 miles of the sources of the Indus and Ganges and flowing first eastward, then southward, to penetrate the Himalayas, whence it flows also to the Bay of Bengal. Then we note the Salween, the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the Yellow rivers, all starting from approximately the same geographical source atop the Himalaya Mountains (an area so small that my forefinger tip can cover it on my map). Thus 54 percent of humanity (over eight times the population of North America) is "watered" from the same "reservoir"- -- he frozen Himalayan reservoir, which melts just fast enough to keep things growing and life going on through ages and ages and ages.

As the water-people came out of the ocean-island habitats and began to ascend those rivers and "carried aloft" their "canoes" around and above the rapids and waterfalls, they could not help eventually discovering the common regional source of this comprehensive life-support water.

In the present critical unrest of our world, where we find the greatest ideologically warring powers on our planet puppeting, through Vietnam, the dissensions into warrings of Cambodians, Laotians, Thais, and Burmese, it is clearly seen that the only differences between those Southeast Asian peoples are the rivers by which they go inland and upland -- to the same source of life-supporting water. It is easy to understand why the Dalai Lama was located in Tibet, at the source of all their water. That source epitomized God as the physical life-giver and -taker.

* * *

Looking at Southeast Asia on a metallurgical resource display map and coming north in the Gulf of Siam to the mouth of the Chao Phraya River, we note that in the Malay Peninsula there are vast amounts of tin ore all the way from Singapore to Burma and northward inland in Thailand along the Chao Phraya River to northern Thailand. Then, altering our direction, we go a short way eastward and descend from the mountains of Laos, which are everywhere rich in copper ore. Everywhere along the east bank of the Chao Phraya River lies copper ore, and everywhere along its west bank lies tin ore.

At Bangkok, on the Chao Phraya River, I find the most extraordinary history of the development of wooden boatbuilding as yet manifest on our planet. I remember how back in 1958, as I went along canals leading off from the Chao Phraya River, I kept discovering shipyards. In all America there are less than fifty boatbuilding yards now in operation. But in Greater Bangkok alone I saw more than 100 boatyards.

To the boatyards of the Chao Phraya River and its canals the logging people inland and upstream bring seaward (with the current and tides) great teak logs, which are towed together in enormous intertied rafts. As we get into the Bangkok region, we see the great teak log rafts moored wherever there is spare waterfront.

The shipbuilders usually keep the logs soaking for up to 100 years before using them in their ships' hulls. After a century of soaking the teak becomes highly stabilized structurally. They then haul out and dry the logs sufficiently for their shipbuilders to work them into long planks and frames with their metal tools. In all my boatbuilding experience -- of which I have had a lot -- have not found any craftsman sawing out long, delicately curved ship's plankings and planing them with greater accuracy than in Bangkok. They make their planks so carefully that they fit watertightly together without any caulking. They dry the teak just enough to fashion it into ship's planks, but the minute the ships are launched (for instance, as great rice-freighting hulls), enough moisture gets back into the wood to swell the planks water-tightly together. (What also fascinates is the incredible amount of rice being brought out to feed civilization -- stored sometimes for months in boats' bellyholds, which are absolutely dry-tight and never painted.)

The Thais have had thousands of years of such boatbuilding experience. The entire evolutionary history of great boatbuilding is as yet manifestly alive on the Chao Phraya River. Every instance of the progressive stages of its evolution -- from watertight teak bins mounted on rafts to the big-ribbed, deep-belly ships found in use there today -- is in live operation.

Anyone who is a sailor knows that ships have to have powerful and enduring fastenings of many kinds -- nails, screws, and rivets -- to hold fast the teak planking to the ribs, and myriads of rope cleatings, chain plates, etc. Nothing could better serve as fastenings than nonrusting bronze. Those Thai sailors and boatbuilders were the first to accidentally marry copper and tin to produce bronze and thereafter to use it purposefully in shipbuilding. Copper's first great structural functioning came when combined with tin as bronze fastenings in ships.

I am absolutely confident that Bangkok is the center of the beginnings of the best ship technology and design engineering of world-around civilization. Prototypes of every type of hull from gondolas to barges are there, including the prototypes of the powerfully ribbed, deep-bellied ships that the Phoenicians sailed across the Indian Ocean and to Mesopotamia, where the "Garden of Eden" story is played. When they attained big-rib ships, their sailors went readily out to sea whence their islanded forebears came. These improvements allowed them to go more directly into the wind. They could "beat" at a twenty-two-and-one-half-degree angle either side of the wind and "work to windward" rapidly.

The sea-going traffic extended at first to the Malay Straits, then spread out into the Indian Ocean. As the interchange between different nationalities increased, so also each began to copy the best features of the others' craft. The ships became composites of the sum-total experience gained throughout that general area. The merchants moved westward into the Indian Ocean (which has reverse winds during the monsoon), but by this time they could go counter to the breeze.

Thus it was that the dhow of the western Indian Ocean reached the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the east coast of Africa. The men who as yet handle these dhows are extraordinary. They assume that their trade has been in continuous existence for at least 10,000 years. Their navigation must be meticulous. Considering the period that it would of necessity take to develop such vessels as theirs and to establish such a circulation, there is no reason at all to doubt their estimates.

Among ships the dhow still sails the sharpest angle into the wind. This is the advantage of the triangular lateen sail, with its long spar attached to its short mast in such a manner that their angle of incidence is forty-five degrees. The front of the spar is heavier than the rear end, which projects into the sky. The balance is so exacting, however, that the sheeting does not have to be very rigid and the mast can act as a fulcrum.

The dhow enabled sailors to go against the wind to a greater degree than they had ever done before. They could now sail to westward over great distances -- against prevailing currents. Out of this remarkable skill came a new phase of "world" seafarers. No longer subject to the vagaries of the elements, they could make headway against them.

After many thousands of years eastbound man became westbound. The former gave rise to the Eastern philosophy of "acceptance," which still persists. The latter was a new development and fundamentally altered humanity's thinking. To the sailor God seems to be the prevailing winds and currents that carry one in a particular direction. To go against the wind or current, to "beat to windward," is therefore a deliberate act against Him. Here began a concept of man being contrary to his God.

In the early drifting-with-the-current-and-prevailing-wind days a large migrating of humanity occurred within the Pacific. The rafting colonists were swept along the coast of China into the Bering Straits by the Japan Current. There a bridge of land between the continents contributed considerably to the overland migration from the Orient to the coast of North America. The Japan Current carried the rafters to Alaska. It carried them to Mexico and Central America. It carried them to Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru. Thereafter the same current swept them back westward across the Pacific back to Austronesia, as Thor Heyerdahl proved with his raft Kon Tiki.

As sailing-into-the-wind people headed westward from the Malay Straits, they crossed· the Indian Ocean, arriving in Mesopotamia and on the east coast of Africa. From there they traveled overland to the Nile. Over 10,000 years of continuous voyaging across the Indian Ocean by the dhow sea captains evidences the deep-bellied, heavily keeled and ribbed engineering of their craft and its seaworthiness -- and locates the origins of sea technology in the area of Ban Chiang.

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FIGURE 6. Dhow -- ship with a continuous 10,000-year history of Indian Ocean crossings.

All civilization had its origins in the network of maritime interlinkages of early cultures. Tension-capability is newly manifest in seagoing-born tensional skill and intellectual capability. Compressional capability is manifest of the land-born stone ages and the inertia of stone walls. At sea humanity entered into true technology -- that of powerful tension-interfastening capability. Bangkok itself is the prototype of all canal cities developed by later water-people around the world -- for example, Venice and Amsterdam. Sampans are prototypes of Venetian gondolas later brought, covered, by the Phoenicians to Venice. (See map, page 42.) Bangkok seems to be the prototyping locale of the big-keel, big-ribbed, deep-bellied ships of both the China Sea and the Indian Ocean.

_______________

Notes:

i. See W. Farnsworth Loomis, "Skin Pigment Regulation of Vitamin D Biosynthesis in Man," Science (Aug. 4, 1967), vol. 157, pp. 501-506.

ii. Austin Coates, Islands o/the South (London, Heinemann, 1974).
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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Postby admin » Tue Jul 28, 2015 6:05 am

PART 1 OF 2

CHAPTER 2: Humans in Universe

BEFORE THE PICTORIALLY GRAPHIC RECORD of the presence of humanity aboard our planet began, there was no way for individuals to record their feelings and thoughts except as manifest in their tool-inventing. People must have been in critical life-sustaining need to have invented words. Words are tools, but their sounds could not be made to last under early history's conditions. Individually identifiable humans had no line of communication reaching directly to us today, other than the evidence of humanity's massive group work in carving, shaping, and building with stones, plus the nonidentifiable individual's profuse handicrafting of small artifacts such as pottery, arrowheads, and beads.

From the beginning of the pictorially recorded history -- on walls, vases, jewelry -- we gain more and more information regarding general human experiences, capabilities, thoughts, and motivations. For instance, it is evidenced that throughout all earlier times until yesterday, the ruling social powers assumed the human masses to be universally ignorant and accredited them with having only muscle and dexterity value. The illiteracy of the masses was mistakenly interpreted as meaning that the commoner was inherently lacking in intellect -- just a "poor wretch." As "the exception that proved the rule," once in a rare while-by command of some "god" -- a commoner apparently was endowed with creative powers and insights. The ease with which the erroneous assumption could be made that the masses are stupid is manifest when we realize how easily present-day humans, conditioned to speak only Americanese, could deceive themselves into mistaking for an "inherently illiterate Mongol" an ill-clothed, war-bruised, Chinese communist Ph.D. physicist, unable to speak Americanese or the local dialect.

During only the last few decades of the three and a half million years within which humans now are known to have been living aboard our planet Earth have the behavioral clues been increasingly sufficient to suggest that all humans, including the assumed-to-be "illiterates" and "spastics," are born with a comprehensive and superb inventory of subjectively apprehending and synergetically comprehending faculties -- as well as objectively articulating capabilities. This has not yet been formally acknowledged to be the case by the present educational establishments' "capability accrediting boards." Awareness of the foregoing has not as yet dawned amongst the politico- social pressure groups such as the labor unions, veterans' organizations, or parent-teacher associations.

We may soon discover that all babies are born geniuses and only become degeniused by the erosive effects of unthinkingly maintained false assumptions of the grown-ups, with their conventional ways of "bringing up" and "educating" their young. We now know that schools are the least favorable environment for learning. The home TV is far more effective, but we are allowing the big money-making advertisers to poison the information children assimilate in their four to five hours a day of spontaneous turning-on, looking at and listening to the TV.

It is possible to identify some of the known faculties that we generally assumed to be coordinate in those whom society does concede to be adult geniuses. The publicly accredited characteristics of genius consist, for instance, of an actively self-attended intuition. The intuition, in turn, opens the conceptual and perceptual doors. With those doors self-opened, the innate faculties frequently combine and employ the individual's scientific, artistic, philosophical, and idealistic imaginings in producing physically talented, logical, far-sighted, and practical articulations. Leonardo da Vinci, who fortunately weathered the genius-eroding susceptibilities of childhood, manifested and coordinatingly employed all and more of such conceptual faculties and articulative capabilities.

In the graphically recorded history of the last eight, millennia, as well as in the dim twilight of pre-Indo-Chinese, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and South and Central American graphic documentations of history, there have appeared, from time to time, individuals who grew to maturity without losing the full inventory of their innate, intuitive, and spontaneously coordinate faculties. These unscathed individuals inaugurated whole new eras of physical environmental transformation so important as, in due course, to affect the lives of all ensuing humanity. We shall hereafter identify such unscathed, comprehensively effective, and largely unidentified individual articulators as the artist-scientists of history.

Since the dawn of the most meagerly revealed human history there have been a number of importantly distinct periods of historical transformation of both the physical and cosmological environments of society. Each of these eras has been opened by the artist-scientist. The invisible power structures behind-the-visible-king first patronize and help to develop the artist-scientists' advanced-environment breakthroughs, but always go on, ever more selfishly, to overexploit the breakthroughs.

The environment -- everything that is "not me" -- is subdivisible into two parts, physical and metaphysical. The metaphysical environment consists of human thoughts, generalized principles and customs. The artist-scientist types seem to have avoided attempting to reform the metaphysical environment. They are documented only by their employment of the cosmic laws -- generalized principles -- to reorganize the physical constituents of the livingry and the scenery. The artist-scientists apparently assumed intuitively that a more man-favoring rearrangement of the environment would be conducive to humanity's spontaneous self-realization of its higher potentials. Human travelers coming to a river and finding a bridge across it spontaneously use the bridge instead of hazarding themselves in the torrents.

Scientist-artists originally conceived and designed the bridges. The power-structure- behind-the-king, seeing great exploitability of the bridge for their own advantaging, accredited the workers and materials to build the bridges.

Physiology and biology make it clear that at the outset of graphically recorded history a universally illiterate -- but probably not unintelligent -- humanity was endowed with innate and spontaneously self-regenerative drives of hunger, thirst, and species regeneration. The a priori chemical, electromagnetic, atomistic, genetic, and synergetic designing of these innate drives apparently was instituted by a wisdom -- a formulative capability inherent in Universe-higher than that possessed by any known living humans. These drives probably were designed into humans to ensure that human life and the human mind -- long unacknowledged as humanity's highest faculty -- ultimately would discover its own significance and would become established and most importantly operative not only aboard planet Earth, but also in respect to vast, locally evidenced aspects of Universe. As such, mind may come not only to demonstrate supremacy over humanity's physical muscle but also to render forevermore utterly innocuous and impotent the muscle-augmented weapons and the latter's ballistic hitting powers. Mind possibly may serve as the essential, anti-entropic (syntropic) function for eternally conserving the omni-interaccommodative, nonsimultaneous, and only partially overlapping, omni-intertransforming, self-regenerating scenario -- which we speak of as "Universe."

Mind, operative aboard our planet Earth and probably elsewhere in Universe in a myriad of effective circumstances, can and may perform the paramount function of conserving the scenario "Universe." If so, it will have to be accomplished by apprehending, comprehending, and teleologically employing the metaphysical, weightless, omni-intercooperative generalized principles of Universe in strategically effective degree and within a critical time limit.

This can be accomplished in progressively more effective ways -- for instance, by Earthians competently "fielding" all those physical energy increments entropically broadcast by the stars, which happen to impinge kinetically upon our Earth as it orbits the Sun. Employing the appropriate biological and physiological principles, these receipts must be collected, sorted, analyzed, synergetically comprehended, and symmetrically combined into complex but orderly, macro-and-micro-cohering aggregates. Therewith, they must be added into the Earth biosphere's resource-conserving and -storing inventory. It is seemingly manifest by the comprehensively considered record that the task of metaphysical intellect is to cooperate with evolution as a major syntropic factor by collecting, sorting, and symmetrically combining information into ever more advantageous and orderly patterns, i.e., designs, to offset the physical Universe's macrocosmic proclivities of becoming locally ever more dissynchronous, asymmetric, diffuse, and multiplyingly expansive.

The kinetic intercomplementarity of finite Universe requires that what disassociates here must associate there -- and also there. High-pressure conditions at one point are balanced by low pressures elsewhere. The stars are all radiantly dissipating energy. The Earth, however, is a celestial center where energies from the stars are being collected and photosynthetically combined in an orderly molecular assembly as hydrocarbons, which, are consumed by orderly designed species, and then self-multiply to make these biological species grow," undergo transformations, and eventually be buried deeply beneath the Earth's surface. When, after many billions of years, enough orderly-molecule energy has been impounded aboard our spherical space vehicle Earth, the Earth itself will become a radiant star, as the discards of other burned-out and dissipated stars are concurrently aggregated in billions of local elsewheres -- some trillions of years hence also to become stars.

No factor operative aboard our planet is so effective in aggregating, reorganizing, concentrating, and refining the disorderly, random resource receipts as is the human mind. Human mind has discovered a number of cosmic laws -- generalized scientific principles. Objectively employing a plurality of the cosmic laws, human mind developed the computer, whose combined information storage and retrieval vastly augmented human brain's information storing, retrieving, and formulative disclosings -- ergo, magnificently augmenting human mind's local Universe problem-solving task and rendering that cosmic functioning of human mind highly effective.

Mathematics constitutes human mind's most cosmically powerful faculty. How did human mind develop progressively its mathematical functioning?

• • •

Trigonometry had to start with sea-people. It is the conclusion of British, German, and U.S.A. navies' experts that celestial -- offshore -- navigation began with the South Pacific's island peoples. Much has been published on this subject. What is not as well published is the fact that the navigators on all those islands live entirely apart from the other humans in their native groups.

When the supposedly God-ordained chieftain of those islands finds his prestige and popular credence declining, he can go to the navigator and ask him to produce a miracle. The chieftain does not know of the navigator as such. The chieftain knows naught of navigation. He thinks of the navigator as a magician or miracle-maker. All the chieftain knows is that his miracle-producer goes off to sea sailing his catamaran out of sight on the ocean. The navigator, using his well remembered, unique patternings of the stars and the ocean currents, water temperatures, and major "old-seas" patterns, goes to another far-off island where there exist shells or trees or stones or other items such as have never been and probably never will be found on the home island. The navigator brings this foreign item back to the island king-chieftain, who displays it before the people, who spontaneously assume that the chieftain has conjured the strange object into existence with his divine powers -- and the chieftain's accreditation as being divinely instituted is restored.

We can now comprehend the succession of events by which, generations later, prehistory's successors of the ancient navigators eventually became the high priests of Egypt, Babylon, and other great civilizations. Both their evolutingly developed mathematical calculating capability and their navigational intuiting ultimately led to their discovery that the Earth is a circumnavigatable sphere. This knowledge made them more powerful than the physically powerful fighting kings.

Offshore, with no familiar landmarks to guide them, early water-peoples learned through necessity and invention how to sail their ships on courses running between any two well-recognized stars co-occurring diametrically opposite one another above the sky's circular horizon at various given times of the night and reliably reappearing in the same pattern in any geographical area on any given day of the year. Any two prominent, easy-to-recognize stars in the sky gave the unique course for the ship to follow. The point on the mast, B, at which the bright star in the sky toward which they sailed occurred at any given time of observation, and the point C, at which the boom of their sail contacted the mast, and the point A, at which the stern- standing or -sitting helmsman's eye occurs, gave the three comer points of a right triangle whose three angles, A, B, and C, always sum-totalled 180 degrees. This 180-degree sum-total angular constancy of any plane triangle formed the basis of all plane trigonometry.

If one of the three angles of a triangle is a right angle, then all the variation takes place only between the two other angles, whose angular sum will always equal that of the constant right angle (ninety degrees).

With their ship's (or raft's) masts mounted perpendicularly (at right angles, vertically) to their ship's or hull's waterline, they steered the ship at night by keeping the mast always lined on the approached star -- as long as the Earth's rotation allowed the sight of that star to remain in a usable line of sight. The angle of elevation of the approached star could be sightingly measured by the helmsman observing, from the stem, the star's ever-changing height on the mast as sigh tingly identified, for instance, by the mast's sail-luff rings, which elevation altered as the Earth revolved during the· night within the spheric array of Universe stars. With days, months, years, and lifetimes of such observing, measuring, and calculating, the sea-people gradually evolved trigonometry. (See Fig. 7.)

Their ten fingers and ten toes, the ankles of their two legs, the slender wrists of their two arms and their necks served as rods on which to slide bracelets or necklaces or rings of bone, rope, bent wood, or dried seaweed. The number of bracelets on their right-side ankles, wrists, and fingers could be made to correspond to the human-foot-length-spaced-apart vertical intervals on their masts occurring between the rings holding their sails to the mast, and the number of bracelets on their left-side ankles, wrists, and fingers could be made to correspond to the number of ribs of their ship, which also occurred horizontally a foot-length apart, between the foot of the mast and where the observing helmsman sat in the stem of the ship or raft. That's one of the ways in which sailors learned how to calculate the relative lengths of the two right-angle-forming edges of their triangular sail. The right angle of their triangle occurred between the mast and the ship's horizontal plane. The vertical and horizontal lines represented the two measurable sides a and b of the right triangle.

You and I learned at school that if we multiply a number by itself we obtain the second power of that number (N X N = N2). We also learned that the sum of the second power of sides a and b of our right triangle always equals the second power of the third side c -- the hypotenuse of our right triangle.

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FIGURE 7. Using Ship Mast for Navigational Trigonometry.

With this information and the ankle, wrist, and finger rings with which to multiply and divide, the sailor-navigator could learn the exact lengths of all three edges of his right triangle, and he soon learned that the angles opposite each edge of the triangle were proportioned to the angles opposite them (A/a = B/b = C/c). Thus, these sailor-navigators learned of the constancy of the angle above the horizon of any given observed star as seen from any given geographical position at any given time of any given night of the year. From these crude beginnings they gradually evolved formalized frames of shell beads mounted slidably on wooden rods with which to record their observed measurement numbers and to carry out the calculations. These devices eventually developed into the abacus, with which they could swiftly multiply and divide.

The earliest sailor-navigators also made complex ocean maps by superimposing straight bamboo sticks on one another, horizontally in a flat plane, each stick representing the North-Star-referenced ocean-course direction running between any two known geographical points as progressively referenced to the prominent star points visible at the beginning of their voyage. The complex of sticks showed the relative angular interrelationships of the different ocean courses running between the well-known stars sightable above the circular horizon and opposite one another.

In its westward voyaging-trendings from its South Pacific and Indian Ocean beginnings (among water-peoples) to overland traveling in India and caravaning in China and Southeast Asia, mathematics gradually lost much of its earlier natural cosmic grandeur and that grandeur's intuition-inspiring discovery of relevant environment interrelationships.

Subsequently the abacus provided a facile means of accumulating progressive products of multiplication by moving those products ever further leftward, column-by-column, as the operator filled the available bead spaces one by one and moved the excess over ten into the successive right-to-leftward columns.

Obviously, number products in even tens (such as the number 20) leave the first right-hand column empty. When the expert abacus-user lost his abacus overboard or by accidental burial in the desert sand, he could remember and visualize its operation so clearly that all he needed to know was the problem-developed content of each column in order to develop any multiplication or division. He then invented symbols for the content of ~ach column to replace drawing a picture of the number of beads -- the symbol 3 was quicker than making three pictures. Having developed symbols to express the contents of each column, he had to invent a symbol for the numberless content of the empty column -- that symbol became known to the Arabs as the sifr; to the Romans as cifra; and to the English as cipher (our modem zero).

Prior to the appearance of the cipher, Roman numerals had been invented to enable completely illiterate servants to keep "scores" of one-by-one occurring events-for example, a man would stand by a gate and make a mark every time a lamb was driven through the lamb-size gate. The more complex Roman numerals were those used by the supervisors, keeping count by their fingers -- a V for five (the angle between his thumb and the other four fingers) and X for ten (representing the supervisor's crossed index fingers.) Since one cannot see "no sheep" and cannot eat "no sheep," the Roman world seemingly had no need for a symbol for nothing. Only an abacus's empty column could produce the human experience that called for the invention of the ciphra -- the symbol for "nothing."

When I first attended school, the older tradespeople in my town -- the drugstore man, the butcher, the hardware man -- who had known me since my babyhood and were my natural friends, each asked me, "Have you learned to do your ciphers yet?" The discovery of the symbol for nothing became everything to humanity. The cipher alone made possible humanity's escape from the 1700-year monopoly of all its calculating functions by the power structure operating invisibly behind the church's ordained few.

The from-the-Indian-Ocean-landed navigator-priests' 3000 B.C. Babylonian geometry is spherical -- omnidirectional. Apparently seeking to discover nature's time-inclusive, four-dimensionally comprehensive, mathematical coordinate system, the Babylonians failed only in their early attempt to correlate their 36O-degree great circle's central-angle-determined arcs' subdivisions into degrees, minutes, and seconds with time's hours, minutes, and seconds, but they did discover that the cosmically generalized, closed-spherical- surface system was maximally divisible into 120 spherical right triangles, 60 positive and 60 negative. This greatest-common-denominator sixtyness probably occasioned the Babylonians' adoption of 60 minutes and 60 seconds as the arithmetically absolute, numerically maximum common divisor of all finite systems and of their subsystems. It was factorable by all four of the first prime numbers, 1, 2, 3, 5.

For reasons unknown to us a retrogression in mathematical conceptioning emerges, possibly as a consequence of the navigator-priests foreseeing that their power would deteriorate if the kings or other people caught on to too much of their calculating capability. Egypt's artists visually portrayed all humans and animals only as one-plane, flat silhouettes. In a similar way the Greek and Egyptian geometers -- as, for instance, Euclid in 300 B.C. -- retrogressed into two-dimensional plane geometry from the Babylonians' omnidimensional, finite-system, experience-invoked time dimension. The Greeks and Egyptians became concerned only with omnilaterally, infinitely extensible plane geometry and its "square"-unit of areal subdivision. Superimposed upon this plane, two-dimensional base the Greek and Egyptian geometers subsequently developed a timeless, weightless, temperatureless, three-dimensional, cubical coordinate system whose squares and cubes were geometrically irreconcilable with a spherical Earth and all the other radiationally and gravitationally divergent-convergent, inherently nucleated, finite, spherical systems' growths and shrinkages -- electromagnetic and acoustical, spherically gradient wave propagations.

All geometrical proofs of the Euclidean Greeks had to originate in the two-dimensional plane geometry and not in the three-dimensional configuration or four-dimensional temperatured, weighted, and lengthed reality. While some individual scholars were evolving their geometry, others were evolving nongeometrical methods of communication.

The ability of humans to write in vertical or horizontal lines of symbolic forms -- i.e., Tartarian picto-linguistic, hieroglyphics, cuneiform, Linear A, Linear B, and so on -- required great expertise and was not commonly useful. In 1500 B.C. the Phoenicians invented letters for each known mouth-and- lungs-articulated sound. Having developed phonetic pronunciation of each letter, they therefrom evolved combined pronunciation of each word. Five hundrc::d years later, in 1000 B.C., the Greek language, employing the Phoenician phonetic spelling concept, developed the twenty-four pronounceable letters which are the same as those used in the Greek writing of present-day -- late-twentieth-century-A.D. -- Greece. This phonetic form made practical the individual scientists' own recording of their own thoughts as well as the thoughts of others.

As yet convergently-divergently omniconsiderate, in the manner of the Babylonians, and thinking microcosmically, the Greek Democritus in 460 B.C. was the first known human to conceive of a smallest cosmic entity. He named it the "atom."

Thinking macrocosmically, the Greek Pythagorean scientists of 600 to 400 B.C., situated to the north of Athens, were the first people known and recorded to think of our world as a spherical entity. In 410 B.C. the Pythagorean Philolaeus was the first to describe the Earth as a spherical body in motion around a central cosmic fire. He also conceived of the stars, the Sun, the Moon, and five planets -- Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn -- as spherical bodies. His Sun was not at the center of the planetary system's motion. There is a possibility that he was thinking in galactic, rather than in solar-centered, terms.

In 350 B.C. the latter-day Pythagorean Heraclides was the first to conceive of the Earth sphere as spinning west to east. But Heraclides' cosmos was as yet geocentric. His Earth spun at the center of the fixed-stars Universe.

Another Greek, Aristarchus, conceived around 200 B.C. of the spherical Sun as the center of the spherical planets' orbital system as each planet revolved individually around its own axis at its own unique rate while also orbiting the Sun in greater orbital time periods. For him all the stars were fixed, and the Moon revolved around the Earth. His unprecedented thoughts almost got him killed.

Eratosthenes, in 200 B.C., measuringly calculated the circumference of Earth within 1.5-percent accuracy. He also made a map of the world running from clearly identifiable England on the northwest to the (not so convincingly identified) mouth of the Ganges in the southeast. His map included all of Africa on the south (with a reasonably accurate foreshortened profiling of South Africa, which outline could not have been included by him had not such an around-Africa-voyaging been already accomplished and reported).

It was also around 200 B.C. -- as we learned authoritatively only five years ago -- that the Phoenicians sailed from the Aegean Sea to both the east and west coasts of South America. Because of the prevailing winds the west coast of South America would be much more naturally reached from the Mediterranean by first sailing southward, rounding the southern tip of Africa, crossing the Indian Ocean northeastwardly on its main current to pass just north of Australia, then turning northward with the Japan Current and the prevailing winds to transit China, Japan, and the Aleutian Islands to Alaska, and then on the same current southwardly to the west coasts of both North and South America, where the most recent deciphering of the prephonetic Phoenician code makes clear that the Phoenicians had landed. Locally documented in stone carving, this occurred circa 200 B.C. -- ergo, was contemporary with Eratosthenes' map-making. Then, after stopping on the west coast of South America, the Phoenicians probably followed the coast southward until the "Roaring Forties" winds and current swept them around the Horn into the South Atlantic, whence the northerly current took them along South America's east coast. Here they made another stone-carving- recorded stop. Thereafter the Atlantic Gulf Stream swept them northwardly, then westwardly, along the northern coast of South America, through the Lesser and Greater Antilles, all the way westward to the Panama Isthmus, then north from Yucatan into the Gulf of Mexico, then southward north of Cuba around Florida, then with the Gulf Stream, diverted northward by the Virgin and Bahama islands into the swiftly flowing North Atlantic Gulf Stream, past Cape Hatteras, Nova Scotia, south of Greenland, Iceland, and Spitzbergen, where the ice forced them to go westward until they discovered their familiar Scandinavia, British Isles, etc., from which they returned home to the Mediterranean and to Carthage on the north coast of Africa or to their capital port of Biblos on the eastern Mediterranean shore.

I feel confident that Eratosthenes had knowledge of their circumnavigation. Without a magnetic compass, sextant, or chronometer the Phoenicians were guided only by their familiarity with star constellations and driven by prevailing ocean currents, trade winds, and angular-pattern-informative-following- of-coastlines. They kept recorded accounts of all changes in their course angularly as plotted against the star pattern and of the whole sky. The Phoenicians obviously had to subsist on fish and rainwater.

As a sailor-navigator myself, I am confident that Eratosthenes would not have closed his map along its top edge if he had no knowledge of the fact that the Earth had been circumnavigated. The almost-closed, circular bay shown along the top edge of his map, which showed that such an experience occurred midway on the trips, is probably occasioned by the fact that the South and North Atlantic Gulf Stream sweeps deeply into the Caribbean Sea all the way to the isthmus of Panama and then through the Gulf of Mexico, as already recounted. (See Figs. 8 and 9.)

Around the same year, 200 B.C., the Stoic philosopher Crates developed the first terrestrial globe -- celestial globes preceded it.

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FIGURE 8. Eratosthenes' map. 200 B.C.

It is clear that a special chain of Greek scientist-philosopher-cosmologists consisting of Philolaeus (410 B.C.), Heraclides (350 B.C.), and Aristarchus (200 B.C.) had successively evolved a concept of the solar system that was in fair agreement with that of Copernicus and Kepler 1700 years later (1543 A.D.) and even with our late-twentieth-century conceptioning.

It is also clear that beginning with Plato's pupil Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) and the latter's practical philosophy, the geocentric concept of the celestial system was, after 200 B.C., becoming more and more formally adopted by the "world's" flat-minded power-structure "authorities," despite contradictory complexities. The difficultly explained geocentric cosmic systems' planetary behaviors and Sun motion was not considered by the authorities to be an objection since, as they rationalized it, these matters seemingly had no "practical" bearing on everyday affairs. It seems almost equally clear that between 200 B.C. and 200 A.D. a deliberately planned policy was adopted by the combined supreme political and religious power structure of that period, which undertook the conditioning of the human reflexes to misconceive and mis-see (or mostly not see at all) the macro-micro-cosmic systems in which we live. Their success drew the curtains on science for 1700 years -- until 1500 A.D. That curtain would never again have been raised had· it not been for the discovery of that something-called-nothing -- the cipher. Because it was "nothing," the information-monopolizing, physical-property-coveting power structure had overlooked it.

Only the learned-from-others knowledge of the unlimited multiplying and dividing -- and thereby ratioing -- and the relative-experiences-evaluating capability provided exclusively by the cipher and its leftward positioning of numbers in increments of ten integers, could make possible individual human's knowledge of how to escape from the prison of ignorance successfully established by the church-state hierarchy. If you have never been taught about the cipher and its functioning, there is almost no possibility of your accidentally discovering the computationally operative functioning of "nothing" -- much less feel the necessity of inventing a symbol for that invisible, senseless nothingness. If the positioning of numbers and its computation- facilitating capability had been known by the Alexandrian Greeks, all chances that you might discover this were seemingly banished when the emperors of the Roman Empire usurped and amalgamated the vast religious priesthood power with their already-established military supremacy.

It was the Asiatic, 800 A.D. publishing of the function of the cipher by al-Khwarizmi the Arab that ultimately saved the day when, in about 1200 A.D., knowledge of it reached northern Italy and southern Germany by way of Carthage in North Africa.

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FIGURE 9. Probable voyage in 200 B.C. of Phoenicians going with prevailing ocean currents and trade winds before days of magnetic compass-using, using only interstar lines of interrelationships.

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FIGURE 10. Possible if not probable voyaging of Phoenicians in 250 B.C. to both west and east coasts of South America from Levantine Biblos.

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FIGURE 11. Early Circumnavigations

Following the death of Christ and the preaching by his disciples, the promised prospect of salvation for all believers raised the Christian priesthood to unprecedentedly powerful popularity. The combined religious and martial emperorship found its authoritarianly formulated credo (meaning "I believe") threatened by the B.C. Greek scientists' ever-unorthodox thinking and discovering. "Science," as Sir James Jeans said two millennia later, "is the earnest attempt to set in order the facts of experience." Scientific thinking constantly discovered experimental evidence of the erroneous conceptioning of nonscientific authority. The emperor-pope did not want any of his subjects "attempting to set in order the facts of their own experiences."

To cope with the scientists' persuasive, experience-supported logic, the emperor needed popularly plausible divine authority. Though all acknowledged the emperor to be the unquestioned military leader, with absolute physical power, he needed also the only-by-God-to-be-given metaphysical dispensation assertedly relayed to the ordained priests by the succession of popes, an authority that was originally received from the disciples and by the disciples from the son of God and his direct authority from God. Thus "officially authorized," the pope-emperor could require all believers to secretly confess their sins to his officials. He could also ordain universal adoption of the most-useful-to-him explanations of the causality of all human experiences. The emperor-pope could tell his people how to behave, how to gain God's favor.

If the emperor-pope accredited the Alexandrian Greeks' development of the Sun-centered planetary system, he obviously could not maintain the logic of the concept of a two-dimensional, fiat-out world sandwiched in parallel between Heaven above and Hell below. The concept of God in Heaven above, with a seat beside Him to which Christ had ascended, could not be maintained except in a world of commonly parallel-to-one-another, up-and-down, perpendicular trees and people on an infinitely, omnilaterally extended, fiat-world plane -- around which the Sun and stars set and rose. This cosmology put the emperor-pope and his God at the center of Universe.

The total overall evolutionary events of 400 to 200 B.C. in the eastern Mediterranean world saw all the extraordinary Greek intellectual activity transpiring almost exclusively in the city of Alexandria -- founded by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. on the delta at the westernmost mouth of Egypt's River Nile. In 100 B.C. the Alexandrian library was said to have contained 700,000 volumes, or manuscript scrolls. Fortunately some of those volumes in Alexandria were meticulously copied and distributed to libraries around the civilized world of that time, for over 40,000 volumes of the Alexandrian library were burned in 47 B.C. during a siege in the war between Caesar and Pompey.
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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Postby admin » Tue Jul 28, 2015 6:05 am

PART 2 OF 2

In the second century A.D. Ptolemy conceived his conic, latitude-and-longitude world map, reading from the British Isles in the west to China in the east. His Almagest publication contained a storehouse of navigational data. In the Almagest Ptolemy published his catalog of over 1000 stars.

In 272 A.D. a Roman emperor burned the Alexandrian library for a second time. The third burning of the Alexandrian library was accomplished by a later Roman emperor in 391 A.D. In 529 A.D. all the Mediterranean universities were closed. In 642 A.D. occurred the final complete burning of the library of Alexandria by Muslims.

As we have already described, the earliest known world maps are Eratosthenes' surprisingly informative 200 B.C. map and the 200 A.D., latitude-and- longitude-divided, fanlike, cylindrical stretch-out of Ptolemy, which dropped out the south African territory of Eratosthenes but included China, Arabia, and India.

We have studied Eratosthenes' world map of 200 B.C. in connection with the fact that we now know reliably that the Phoenicians reached both coasts of South America at about that time and that the Phoenicians sailed from and returned to Carthage on the north coast of Africa, or to their sovereign's eastern Mediterranean port just north of Beirut, Lebanon. From there cedars were shipped to Eratosthenes' Alexandria in Egypt, to build the big-bellied, stoutly ribbed sailing ships. It is quite evident to us that Eratosthenes had great confidence that his world had been circumnavigated. He knew that we live on a spherical planet. Why else would he have been inspired to make his remarkably accurate measurement of the Earth's circumference, etc.?

The 200 B.C. coincidence of Eratosthenes' world map, Crates' world. globe, and the Phoenicians' sky-star-globe-advantaged circumnavigation is highly visible only when using my Dymaxion world map. Using Mercator's, the polyconics, or other world projections, it would never have been logically revealed. Of course, neither Eratosthenes nor the Phoenicians used the geographical names I employ.

With the exception of the B.C. Greek, spherically informed world mapping, all the post-Roman emperor-pope's and pre-1500 A.D. comprehensive maps show the world as a flat-out system surrounded by an infinitely extendable, planar wilderness.

All the great pre-sixteenth-century empires -- such as those of Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, and Rome -- employed that flat concept, with civilization centered around the Mediterranean, which means "sea in the middle of the land." The people, in the times of Alexander the Great or of Caesar or of Saladin, all thought in that flat way. As yet today "simple, elementary, plane geometry" is used by and taught to beginners; "solid" is considered more difficult, and "spherical trig" even more advanced and difficult.

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FIGURE 12. Ptolemy Map, 200 B.C.

The real consequences of that -- psychologically, philosophically, and mathematically -- are devastating. It means that "inside" the empire we have something we call civilization, while "outside" the empire begins the unknown wilderness peopled with brutes and worse, and outside of that, live dragons, and beyond the dragons, flat infinity. What we have in flat-land is an only local definability, surrounded by flat-outward infinity -- undefinability.

This meant, then, that the Greeks, in, attempting to communicate their mathematical conceptioning, defined the circle as "an area bound by a closed line of equal radius from one point," the triangle as "an area bound by a closed line of three angles, three edges, and three vertices." The Greeks talked only of the area that was "bound" as having validity and identity, while outside (on the other side of the boundary) existed only treacherous terrain leading outward to boundless infinity -- an unknown and unknowable wilderness. The feedback from this world view has ingrained fundamental biases into our present-day thinking. We can conceive only of one side of a line as definable, organized, and valid. "Our side" is natural and right -- "God's country" -- and vice versa. All, humanity has thought of its own local area as being familiar, organized, and a priori, with all else remote and unthinkable. The Greeks oversimplified conceptioning with their misassumption that geometry could begin with plane geometry which they said employed only three tools: the straightedge, the scribe, and dividers. They failed altogether to include the surface on which they scribed as constituting an' equally essential component of their otherwise experimentally demonstrated proofs of their various propositions. Because the earth of the Earth on which they scribed was so large and its limits were unknown to them, they concluded that it was an infinitely extended surface. They failed altogether to recognize the fact that you cannot have a surface of nothing. Any surface on which they scribed had to be a topological feature of a system. They obviously knew naught of Euler's topology nor of my systems geometry (see Chapter 4, Synergetics, vol. 1). Systems always divide all Universe outside the system from all of the Universe inside the system. All systems are finite subdividers of macro- and micro-Universe. Not knowing that they were always scribing on a closed, finite system, the Greeks defined a plane geometrical polygon as "an area bound by a closed line of so many angles and edges." They assumed that the area on the "outer" side of the line continued laterally to infinity and was therefore undefinable. What their closed lines always did was to divide all the finite surface area of the polyhedronal system on which they scribed into two finite areas both of which were exactly bound by the surface-drawn polygon's perimeter. Draw a triangle on the sand of a beach. You inadvertently divide all the surface of planet Earth into two areas, A and B -- "A" the triangle which you consciously and visually drew and "B" the enormous area on the "outside" of the consciously drawn triangle, consisting of all the rest of the surface of our spherical planet Earth. All that remaining surface of our spherical-surface Earth is bound by the closed-perimeter figure of "three angles and three edges" which you scribed in the sand. Unbeknownst to them, the Greek Euclideans were always dealing in polyhedra of "system geometry." Humans could not make a local Earth-surface triangle without inherently making a vast terrestrial-size triangle. The two terrestrial triangles, little A and vast B, in turn brought inherently into play the almost spherical, vastly high-frequency-triangulated polyhedronal system on whose surface they were scribing. This in tum and unbeknownst to them affected the rest of the Universe -- the macro-Universe outside the system upon which they scribed and the micro-Universe inside the system upon which they scribed. Thus humans have always unknowingly affected all Universe by every act and thought they articulate or even consider.

Fortunately the unrealistic thinking of humans has had little effect on Universe and evolution whereas realistic thinking has cosmic effectiveness in pure principle. Realistic, comprehensively responsible, omnisystem-considerate, unselfish thinking on the part of humans does absolutely affect human destiny. If the realistic thinking can conceive of technically feasible options facilitating satisfactorily effective human fulfillment of its designed functioning as local Universe information inventorying and local Universe problem-solving in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe, then the accomplishment of that realistic conceptioning is realistically effective in satisfying Universe that human mind is accomplishing its designed evolutionary role.

* * *

In our comprehensive reviewing of published, academically accepted history we continually explore for the invisible power structure behind the visible kings, prime ministers, czars, emperors, presidents, and other official head men, as well as for the underlying, hidden causes of individual wars and their long, drawn-out compaigns not disclosed by the widely published and popularly accepted causes of those wars.

There may be great significance in the fact that Pythagoras in Greece and Buddha in the Orient occur at the same time -- in the sixth century B.C. Both are powerfully, perceptively thinking and acting human individuals who, coming out of a past in which only the mystically ordained kings counted and humans were omniexpendable pawns, produced mathematical tools and philosophic breakthroughs for individual humans forever thereafter to employ. Their scientific and philosophic gifts to humanity were in marked contrast to the self-advantaging military conquests of kings. Pythagoras, in a little town north of Athens in the Near East, and Buddha, in the Far East, utterly unknown to one another, co-occur as a vast amount of moral and spiritual thinking is taking place in the Near East as recorded in the Old Testament of the "prophets." Historical research indicates a succession of "Isaiahs" starting at about the same time as Pythagoras and Buddha and as the Greek school of scientists and scientific thinkers, running to 200 B.C. Isaiah the Second speaks of "turning the swords into plowshares and spears into pruning knives" and "leopard lying down with the lamb" and prophesies "a little child shall lead them."

Nonrural, nonmilitary humans had words and mathematical tools and writing ability with which to initiate a breakthrough toward ultimate emancipation of all humans.

Such individuals as Pythagoras and Buddha were unanticipated by the behind-the-scenes physical power structures. They were probably unnoticed at first. The ever-advancing scientific conceptioning of the Greeks between 600 B.C. and 200 B.C., as well as the comprehension and thoroughness of the scriptural writers, suggest that not until about 200 B.C. did the great power structures operating behind the official states' officers begin to find ways of putting brakes on the individual's metaphysical breakthrough. The power structure then began to enter into the cosmological formulations and began to cut the ramifications of human conceptioning and cope-with-able magnitude. Humans had found that each one had a private "hotline" to God. What the power structures needed was a way to put in a control switchboard so that the individuals would have to "call up" God only through officialdom's censor-supervised switchboard.

For example, the Roman Catholic church, fortifying its proclaimed "divine mandate" as intermediary between the individual and God, attacked technology because it could eliminate the stresses of poverty, and much of Roman Catholic business and prosperity was founded on the exploitation of misery. The business strategists of the Vatican were inherently against abortion -- pregnancy being the single greatest source of confessional and donation money to the Church. Herein lies the source of the Church's persistent maintenance of its dogma and authority in the face of a technologically emergent and potentially powerful humanity.

* * *

As described, before recording graphically its presence aboard our planet, humanity had no line of communication reaching directly to us today other than the physical sea and land building arts and handicrafting of small artifacts, as well as their "designed" interrelationships to be read in the burial positions of the skeletons and their artifacts, etc.

Everyone "knows" that as one goes inland from the sea, one comes to ever-higher mountains. It was thought that if one went far enough inland, one would come to a mountain reaching to Heaven -- and occupied at its highest point by God. More and more durable cosmological models of this world view were built -- with living god-kings assumedly to occupy the lesser heights after their death. How strong the king might be would govern the height of his mountain as surmounted by ever-higher central "mountain" pinnacles. These square-based cosmological models are the gats and wats of Southeast Asia, the pyramids of Central American Mayas and Incas, the Babylonian ziggurats and Egyptian pyramids.

The design authority for the wats was probably that of the priest-navigators, whose architectural skills derived from their knowledge of the principles of boatbuilding. The world-around priest-navigator's cosmological authority was responsible for the astronomical observatory structures as yet standing in India, Mesopotamia, Crete, Egypt, England, and Central America.

In the early dawning of graphically chronicled civilization the wats involve gods of the sea and gods of the sky as well as gods of the underground land. The fire, smoke, and lava of volcanoes, well known to men, indicated that "down" led through the horizontal plane of the world into a Hell of brimstone and fire, just as "up" led everywhere exclusively toward the serene blue Heaven of the highest God. These cosmological-symbol edifices -- the wats and gats -- had no interior spaces for religious or royal-court ceremonies or for occupation by any living human except as an astronomer. They were developed by designer-priests and constructed by slaves only for the convenience of the livingly visible god-king's after-death physical reascension from Earth to become once more an invisible god of Heaven, capable of returning at any future time to resume human or any other convenient form. Like animals, ordinary humans (and human life) were absolutely expendable (either as slaves or as sacrifices).

As recorded in the stone carvings of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the history of world society begins with humanity at large knowing nothing of physics, chemistry, or biology. Humans recognized but few safe edibles. Humans had witnessed many lethal poisonings by superficially attractive items plucked from the mysterious scenery. Infection was rampant. Average survival was in the neighborhood of twenty-two years, or about one-third of the once-in-a-rare-while-demonstrated, biblically mentioned "three score and ten" -year life-span. Life was so fundamentally awful that no logic could persuade humanity to believe that the living experience was intended by the great God of Universe to be desirable in its own right. The only tenable assumption was that life on Earth was suffered only in preparation for a life hereafter. It was reasoned that the worse life on Earth proved to be, the better would be the suffering-earned life hereafter. Experience seemed to show that adequate sustenance in general was so fundamentally scarce that even in the hereafter none could conceive of there being adequate life support for other than the pharaoh.

This being evident to all, it was commonly assumed that if the pharaoh -- the people's leader -- could be safely delivered into the next world with all his sovereign equipment, thereafter he might be able to get all his people safely delivered to him in the afterlife paradise.

Because life in this world was so torturously devoid of life support, desperation drove humans to thievery and vandalism as a general way of life. To get the pharaoh and all his equipment and riches safely into the next world involved building a stone mountain on top of his burial chamber in the superstable form of the pyramid. This called for supreme engineering, designing, and large-scale building capability. Thus it came about that the economic-authority/patronage that employed and subsidized the pyramid-designing, architectural, engineering, and building efforts of the intuitive artist-scientist, poet, inventor, engineer, and initiator of the early Egyptian pyramid was exclusively the life hereafter of the pharaoh.

The authority -- to employ whatever technological capabilities he could muster from the nonobvious but intellectually conceptual resources hidden in the scenery -- went to the artist-scientist-inventor to support his reorganization of environmental potentials for the advantage of the life hereafter of the pharaoh -- and his most faithful servants.

With all building there is a temporary, "make-ready," structural scaffolding. The artist-scientist-inventors existing in the times of the earliest pharaoh needed to elevate and move gargantuan, rectilinearly chiseled stone blocks into place. They could readily see that the thousands of slaves available could shovel together great-approach hills of rock and sand, upon which they could first lay parallel tracks of delimbed tree trunks and thereafter, with other tree trunks, could pry forward the wood-roller-mounted blocks of stone. The pharaoh's creative architect may have been the first human in history to conceive of the principle of the lever and its ability to move great rocks. Whoever he was, he proved that with ever longer and stouter levers he could vastly augment the musc1ework of whole armies of slaves; moreover, he discovered that the degree of work-advantage to be realized with various-size levers could be mathematically calculated. The pharaoh died. They entombed him, and he supposedly went to the world of eternal hereafter accompanied by all his riches. When the pharaoh died, his artist-scientist-inventor was rewarded by being entombed with the pharaoh (along with the other most faithful servants) so that they could be the first of the pharaoh's people to enjoy the blessings of the "hereafter." But knowledge of the levering effectiveness remained in this world.

The next architect-engineer genius for the next pharaoh, using the levers, wood-log rollers, and wood-log tracks invented by his predecessors, discovered that many of his army of slave workers were dying or unable to work for lack of adequate food. To correct this condition he conceived of shunting the waters of the Nile into slave-produced irrigation ditches, which led the Nile into the potentially fertile floodlands bordering the river. The artist-scientist rearranged the living environment in ways that technologically increased the human advantage of the "antechamber," make-ready for the hereafter world.

After each pharaoh's entombment the principles first discovered and objectively employed by the succession of Leonardo-type architect-engineers of the pyramids, the "scaffold" -phase tools such as the lever, were not forgotten amongst the as-yet-living people. The departed architect-engineers left behind the irrigation ditches, which continued to irrigate and grow more food in this "antechamber-to-Heaven" world. The irrigation ditches did not disappear by going over into the hereafter. Use of these physical "scaffolding" capabilities in this pre-Heaven world by the living society persisted and multiplied, pharaoh by pharaoh. The technological inventiveness of the pharaohs' respective scientist-artist-architects became evolution's comprehensive environment advancers.

Finally, the inventory of technological "scaffolding equipment" employed in this rearranged-environment world in the predeath days of the pharaoh altered the spontaneous thinking of the living. The work effectiveness of the living slaves, as inventively led by the era's artist-scientists, became so prodigious that it became obviously possible not only to prepare magnificently for the most favorable afterlife of the living pharaoh but also to prepare magnificent, vandal-thwarting, stone-edifice-covered tombs for guarding the sub-pharaoh· nobles' entry into the afterlife. During the next succession of dynasties the progressively ever more prodigious inventory of environment-controlling technology, currently available in this world to serve as scaffolding for enshrinement of the eternal afterlife of the pharaoh and nobles, multiplied to such accelerating degree that in due course it became spontaneously apparent to all concerned that the total of now-workable technology made possible accommodating the safe entry into the afterlife of the rich, middle-class society.

The afterlife enshrinement of the prosperous middle class that occurred in the Greek and early Roman B.C. period brought about the development of carved marble mausoleums and burial urns.

Eventually the environment-altering technological capability in this (for- 99-percent-of-humanity-miserable) temporal activity, being conducted in this life to ensure the exclusive afterlife enjoyment only of kings, 'nobles, and middle-class-wealthy, became so vast that new human perception inspired the prophets Buddha, Christ, and Mohammed and probably vast numbers of other unknown, intelligent, and inspired humans to assume that there now existed adequate technical know-how and materials to build in-this-world- physical-"scaffolding" structures that would provide for safe entry into the afterlife not only of the king, nobles, and middle class, but also of all humanity, including the most lowly commoners and slaves.

This did not occur in one day. There was a gradual dawning awareness on the part of a few that the changing technological capability vis-a-vis the environment promised a vast change in human affairs. This bred an era of prophets and thinkers heralding general human qualifications in this life for entry into the next life. The Old Testament is dramatic manifest of this period.

For millennia, the progeny of the South Pacific island navigators, the navigator-priests of the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia and Egypt had only the pharaohs to ferry over into Heaven. For another millennium they had only the nobles and the rich middle class to prepare for safe entry into the afterlife. The priests' beneficiaries constituted less than 1 percent of humanity. But, when everybody had potential entry into Heaven, we see the long-ago South' Seas navigator-priests' successors becoming very powerful popular authorities.

The by-word-of-mouth news swiftly went round that all humanity could now be accommodated in the next world and would be welcomed there if individually qualifying in this world through devout acts and thoughts. The officially accredited representatives of God in this world gained enormous power through their function of tutoring for and passing on the qualifications of individual humans in this world for passage into Heaven -- the alternative being Hell. This power became swiftly annexed by the Holy Roman emperor-pope and, as we earlier described, gave rise to the vast European church-state empire and 1500 years of the Dark Ages.

During the Dark Ages those individuals endowed with creative powers and insights seem by and large to have carefully avoided attempting to reform the political, religious, or scientific status quo. The record shows the original thinkers and skilled artists to have employed only architecture, painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and dance to express their inspiration by their intuitively conceived, metaphysically generalized principles. The inventive individuals seem to have confined their inventiveness to technically facilitating the accepted customs -- for instance, the development of movable type to augment the religious publishing.

The highly organized physical-resource capabilities -- to house the priests' activities of getting everyone worthy into the next world -- witnessed the construction of chapels, churches, cathedrals, synagogues, mosques, temples, and vast monasteries in Europe and Asia Minor. Eventually the magnitude of in-this-life-physical-"scaffolding" 's technological development proliferated to such an extent that society began to realize that not only the afterlife of the king, the nobles, the rich middle class, and all the people, but also the living life of the king in this world, could be accommodated -- and thus developed the divine-right-of-kings time.

Next, the accommodation of living-life enjoyment, as well as of a glorious afterlife, was extended to certain invisible behind-the-throne-power-structure individuals as well as the king.

Next, the bounteous this-life as well as guaranteed next-life glory was extended to the nobles -- the Magna Carta time.

With ever-accelerating technological development in preparing for everyone's next life as well as the king's and nobles' this-life enjoyment, the time arrived when it became evident and was spontaneously realized that in addition to attending to getting everyone but the unfortunate "to-Hell-bound sinners" into Heaven and providing the enjoyment of this life by both the king and the nobles, it was possible to take care of the enjoyment of this life by the rich middle-class society. This gave rise to the Victorian Age. Sometimes spoken of as the Industrial Revolution, this technological advantaging of the rich middle class was enormously advantaged by the circa- 1500 A.D. introduction of the cipher-permitted-engineering-and-scientific calculation.

All the foregoing human-mind-invented scaffolding, technological advantaging, and the all-history recording of the total accumulated inventory of artifacts and scientific discoveries, led to the opening of the twentieth century, when a handful of perceptive individuals, such as Henry Ford, saw that the total environment-advantaging technology had become so effectively developed that it made possible the advantaging not only of the afterlives but also of the lives of all humanity. Through the use of inanimate-power-driven industrial tools and mass-production techniques, the end products of these perceptive individuals' designing could be made to advantage all humanity.

Henry Ford, inspired by the farmer's transportation needs, inaugurated the mass use of the invisible and ever-higher-performance-per-pound alloys and the invisible controls of ever-closer measuring of invisibly operating parts of the machinery, structure, and production tooling of his automobiles. Ford developed the use of moving assembly lines. He concerned himself directly as the prime designer not only of his end product -- the automobile -- but also of his evolving machinery and structural technology and all the other supporting activities of final pertinence to the success of the massively reproductive industry -- factories, tools, mining, transporting of raw materials all around the world, his own railroads and ships, massive-objects- loading equipment, communications, and information handling.

All the foregoing physical-environmental rearrangements-advantaging both the afterlife and the living lives of all humanity -- occurred under the conditions of humanity's thinking of reality as consisting only of the phenomena that could be apprehended directly by humanity's senses of sight, touch, hearing, smelling. and tasting. All invisible occurrences and phenomena were considered to be either mystical, magical, or trickery.

Then came man's discovery of electromagnetics, atomic physics, metallurgy, and chemistry, and the whole new world of invisible, nonsensorially contactable -- ergo, only instrumentally or only mathematically apprehensible -- reality. Thereby, all of previous time's mysteries were either logically explained or dismissed. Technology expanded reality 999-fold to include the whole range of the invisible events of Universe. These had been held previously by humans to be magical and superstitiously mystical. Now they had become the realities of everyday pure and applied science. With the inclusion of this 99-percent invisible world of reality, along with its as yet myriad of unsolved problems, into our everyday strictly sensual reality came the radio-introduced concepts of tuning-in and tuning-out. In yesterday's two-universe -- (1) life and (2) Heaven -- thinking we had things and nothings. Things and space. "Life" and "Death." Now we have tuned-in and tuned-out. "Tuned-out" does not mean dead. Without anyone saying so humanity's need for two universes, "This Life" and "The Afterlife," began to fade out as it realized that this life and its vast mysteries were all one.

• • •

In all the cosmological models of early civilizations, a wide, four-cornered planar Earth was surrounded by infinitely extensive waters, surmounted by ever-higher central "mountain" pinnacles. This discloses how the early humans explained to themselves the sum of their experiences regarding the structure and operating scheme of their real world from out of whose eastern watery extremity the Sun and stars rose, passed over, descended, plunged in under and out -- then repeated. Because the Sun and stars quite obviously passed "over," and returned "under," it, the world was implied to be a thick but penetrable watery slab extending horizontally to infinity in all planar directions. All the perpendiculars then were extended in only two directions in relation to man's erroneously conceived flat Earth. Those two exactly opposite, positive and negative, exclusively perpendicular directions in respect to the horizontal Earth plane were the seemingly obvious concepts of "up" and "down."

This flat conceptioning is manifest right up to the present in such everyday expressions as "the wide, wide world" and "the four corners of the Earth." As mentioned before, "up" and "down" are the parallel perpendiculars impinging upon this flat-out world. Only a flat-out world could have a Heaven to which to ascend and a Hell into which to descend. Both Christ and Mohammed, their followers said, ascended into Heaven from Jerusalem.

Scientifically speaking (which is truthfully speaking), there are no directions of "up" or "down" in Universe -- there are only the angularly specifiable directions "in," "out," and "around." Out from Earth and into the Moon -- or into Mars. IN is always a specific direction -- IN is point-to-able. OUT is any direction.

Don't let these facts of comprehensive, human misorientation give you a personal inferiority complex. My own direct questioning of many large scientific audiences proves that all scientists as yet realistically "see" the Sun going "down" in the evening -- though science has known for 500 years that this is untrue. Around the world nothing has ever been formally instituted in our educational systems to gear the human senses into spontaneous accord with our scientific knowledge. In fact, much has been done and much has been left undone by powerful world institutions that prevents such reorientation of our misconditioned reflexes. Our own misconditioned reflexes are powerful deterrents to our successful self-reorientation of our apprehending faculties to accord with the emerging truths. Though I have been trying for fifty-three years to rid myself of the words up and down, I find them popping out in my speech.

We now know that we do not live on a flat-slab Earth. We do live on board an 8000-mile-in-diameter spherical spaceship speeding around the Sun at 60,000 miles per hour, spinning axially as it orbits. None of the perpendiculars to a sphere are parallel to one another. The first aviators flying completely around the Earth within its atmospheric mantle and gravitationally cohered to the planet, having completed half their circuit, did not feel "up-side-down." They had to employ other words to correctly explain their experiences. So, aviators evolved the terms "coming-in" for a landing and "going-out," not "down" and "up." Those are the scientifically accreditable words-:-in and out. We can go only in, out, and around.

The Astrodome of Houston has a spherical diameter of 800 feet. The planet Earth has a diameter of about 8000 miles. A nautical mile is approximately 6000 feet. So, the Earth's diameter is forty-eight million feet, which is 60,000 times the diameter of the sphere of which the Astrodome's spherical roof is a segment. The height of the Earth's highest mountain, Mt. Everest, is only one sixteen-hundredths the diameter of the real Earth.

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New York City's Verrazana Narrows Bridge towers' tops are 1-5/8 inches farther apart than their bases.

New York City's two World Trade Center Buildings are so close as to appear to be parallel to one another, though their tops are 1 inch farther apart than their bases.

The Parthenon's Athens, Greece, vertical marble columns are seemingly parallel to one another.

Rectilinear Greek marble blocks and today's rectilinear bricks are laid-"up" in so locally tiered a manner as seeming to "prove" the Earth to be flat and that rectilinear blocks or cubes could fill all space.

FIGURE 13. Bridge, Trade Center, Parthenon


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FIGURE 14. The around-the-world Hilton Hotels are clearly not parallel to one another.

Houston's Astrodome may be considered to be a one sixty-thousandth -- l/60,000th --- scale model of a corresponding spherical segment of the real Earth. Mount Everest at the same 1/60,000th scale would make only a six-inch- high mound on the Astrodome. At the same scale a human being standing on the Astrodome would be only one two-thousandths of an inch high -- i.e., .002 inch. The smallest dimension you and I can see (with our naked eye) is one one-hundredth, .01, of an inch. So you and I are only one-fifth of the height necessary to be visible at the scale of the Astrodome, used as a 1160,000 scale model of a corresponding central-angle spherical section of the planet Earth's surface. It would require a dome five times the diameter of the Astrodome to make a scale model of the Earth on which you and I would appear as the smallest speck you and I can see. The Earth is so big in comparison to you and me that it is physically impossible for humans to see their Earth as other than flat.

I have now flown entirely around the Earth forty-seven times by many different airline routes, and looking out the plane's windows at the circular horizon and having never felt myself to be upside-down, I am beginning to realistically feel our Earth to be a sphere -- but a very, very big sphere.

• • •

I clearly remember New Year's Eve, December 31, 1899. I was four and a half. I had just received my eyeglasses and was deeply excited at all that I could now see. At 11:45 P.M. my father opened a window of our New England home to let in the twentieth century. I remember with what earnest thinking he tried to envision the coming years in which I would live beyond his time. The British Empire was at its height of power and splendor. The "world," as we know of it in 1980 after two official world wars and a third much more prolonged and ruthlessly vicious, unofficial world war, was utterly inconceivable. H. G. Wells was writing about a war in the air but he did not conceive of automobiles or electrons. About 99 percent of humanity was illiterate. Few, if any, individuals thought in world terms because the conceptual world of humanity at large was "infinite" -- ergo, realistically unthink- about-able. Everyone "knew" that humans would never reach the Moon. Any who wasted their time thinking about doing so were dismissed as luna-tics.

The British Empire was commanded from the British Isles by great business venturers -- the world men who ruled the world's oceans. The British Isles were found to be the most easily defendable shipbuilding bases and were conveniently positioned to rule the whole waterfront of all the European customers of the venturers' Oriental booty. Observing so many ships loaded with so many British sailors (shanghaied out of the British pubs), the world came to identify history's most successful world-outlaw organization as "the British Empire."

This was the first empire of man to occur after we knew that the Earth was a sphere. A sphere is a mathematically finite, omnisymmetrical, closed system. A sphere is finite unity. (See §§ 224.07 Synergetics, vol. 1.)

As we described in our Introduction, Thomas Malthus, professor of political economics of the East India Company College, was the first economist ever to receive all the vital statistics and economic data from a closed-system world. Once the world is conceived of as a sphere -- a finitely closed system-there was no longer an infinite number of possibilities, such as accompanied the misconception of the infinitely extended flat-out world. In an infinite world, with its infinity of possibilities, praying was felt to be "worthwhile."

Because Earth had been discovered by its high-seas masters to be a closed and finite system, the great pirate venturers who controlled the seas took their scientists around the world to discover and disclose to them its exploitable resources. Only because the Earth constituted a closed system could the scientists inspect, in effect, all the species~ and only thus was Charles Darwin able to develop the closed-system theory of "evolution of species." Such a theory could not have existed before that. It would have had to include dragons and sea serpents. All the people in all the previous open-edged empires lived in a system within whose infinity anything could happen or exist. Paganism (or peasantism) wasn't illogical. Geometrically speaking, the pagans could have an infinite number of gods. There were also an infinite number of chances of upsetting the local pattern, which was a most satisfying idea if it happened that the individual didn't like the prevailing local pattern.

It seems strange that we were not taught about the historical, philosophical, and economic significance of the foregoing transition from an open-flat to a closed-sphere world system. Because the churches were strong and the great pirates wished to obscure both their monopoly of the riches of the now limited system and their grand world ocean strategy for its control, the significance of the concept of a closed world system was popularly unrealized. The power structure and its patronized educational systems "let well enough alone."
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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Postby admin » Tue Jul 28, 2015 6:19 am

PART 1 OF 3

CHAPTER 3: Legally Piggily

I'M GOING TO REVIEW my prehistory's speculative assumptions regarding the origins of human power structures.

In a herd of wild horses there's a king stallion. Once in a while a young stallion is born bigger than the others. Immediately upon his attaining full growth, the king stallion gives him battle. Whichever one wins inseminates the herd. Darwin saw this as the way in which nature contrives to keep the strongest strains going. This battling for herd kingship is operative amongst almost all species of animal herds as well as in the "pecking order" of flocking bird types.

I'm sure that amongst the earliest of human beings, every once in a while a man was born much bigger than the others. He didn't ask to be -- but there he was. And because he was bigger, people would say -- each in their own esoteric language -- "Mister, will you please reach one of those bananas for me, because I can't reach them." The big one obliges. Later the little people would say, "Mister, people over there have lost all of their bananas and they are dying of starvation, and they say they are going to come over here and kill us to get our bananas. You're big -- you get out in front and protect us." And he would say, "OK," and successfully protect them.

The big one found his bigness continually being exploited. He would say to the littles, "Between these battles protecting you, I would like to get ready for the next battle. We could make up some weapons and things." The people said, "All right. We'll make you king. Now you tell us what to do." So the big man becomes king quite logically. He could have become so in either a bullying or good-natured way, but the fact is that he was king simply because he was not only the biggest and the most physically powerful but also the most skillful and clever big one.

Every once in a while along would come another big man. "Mr. King, you've got things too easy around here. I'm going to take it away from you." A big battle ensues between the two, and after the king has his challenger pinned down on his back, he says, "Mister, you were trying to kill me to take away my kingdom. But I'm not going to kill you because you'd make a good fighter, and I need fighters around here to cope with the enemies who keep coming. So I'm going to let you up now if you promise to fight for me. But don't you ever forget -- I can kill you. OK?" The man assents, so the king lets him up.

But instinctively the king says secretly to himself, "I mustn't ever allow two of those big guys to come at me together. I can lick anyone of them, but only one by one." The most important initial instinct of the most powerful individual or of his organized power structure is, "Divide to conquer, and to keep conquered, keep divided."

So our special-case king has now successfully defended his position against two or more big guys who are all good fighters. He makes one the "Duke of Hill A," the second "Duke of Hill B," and the third "Duke of Hill C," and tells each one to "mind your own business" because "only the king minds everybody's business," and he has his spies watch them so that they can't gang up on him. Thus, our considered king is doing very well in his tribe-defending battles.

However, there are a lot of little nonfighting people who are not obeying the king regarding preparations for the next fighting period. The king says to his henchmen, "Seize that mischievous little character over there who is really being a nuisance around here." To the prisoner the king says, "I'm going to have to cut your head off." The man says, "Mr. King, you'd make a big mistake to cut my head off." The king asks, "Why?" "Well, I'll tell you, Mr. King, I understand the language of your enemy over the hill, and you don't. And I heard him say what he is going to do to you and when he's going to do it." "Young man, you've got a good idea at last. You let me know every day what my enemy over the hill says he is going to do and so forth, and your head is going to stay on. In addition, you're going to do something else you've never done before. You're going to eat regularly right up here in the castle near me. And I'm going to have you wear a royal purple jacket (so that I can keep track of you)." The king now has that little man under control and useful. Then another little man makes trouble for the king. As he is about to be beheaded, he shows the king that he understands metallurgy and can make better swords than anybody else. The king says, "You better make a good sword in a hurry." The man makes a beautiful, superstrong, and sharp sword -- there's no question about that. So the king says, "OK, your head stays on. You, too, are to live here at the castle."

Next, under the threat of beheadment, another man making trouble for the king says, "The reason I am able to steal from you is because I understand arithmetic, which you don't. If I do the arithmetic around here, people won't be able to steal from you." The king makes him court mathematician.

As each of these men are given those special tasks to do for life, the king says to all of them, "Each of you miud only your own business. You, Mr. Languageman, mind only your own business; and you, Mr. Swordmaker, mind only your own business; and you, Mr. Arithmetic, mind only your own business. Each one minds only his own business. I'm the only one that minds everyone's business. Is that perfectly clear?" "Yes sir." "Yes sir." "Yes sir."

The king now has his kingdom operating very well. He has great fighters, superior metallurgy, better arithmetic and logistics, better spying and intelligence. His kingdom is growing ever bigger. Years go by, and these experts are getting old. The king says, "I want to leave this kingdom to my grandson. Mr. Languageman, I want you to pick out and teach some younger person about language. You, Mr. Swordmaker, I want you to pick out and teach somebody about metallurgy. You, Mr. Arithmetic, I want you to pick out and teach someone about arithmetic." And his total strategy became the pattern for the ultimate founding of Oxford University.

The way the power structure keeps the wit and cunning of the intelligentsia -- who are not musclemen, who cannot do the physical fighting -- from making trouble for the power structure (if the intelligentsia are too broadly informed, unwatched, and with time of their own in which to think) is to make each one a specialist with tools and an office or lab. That is exactly why bright people today have become streamlined into specialists.

Nobody is born a specialist. Every child is born with comprehensive interests, asking the most comprehensively logical and relevant questions. Pointing to the logs burning in the fireplace, one child asked me, "What is fire?" I answered, "Fire is the Sun unwinding from the tree's log. The Earth revolves and the trees revolve as the radiation from the Sun's flame reaches the revolving planet Earth. By photosynthesis the green buds and leaves of the tree convert that Sun radiation into hydrocarbon molecules. Which form into the bio-cells of the green, outer, cambium layer of the tree. The tree is a tetrahedron that makes a cone as it revolves. The tree's three tetrahedral roots spread out into the ground to anchor the tree and get water. Each year the new, outer-layer, green-tree cone revolves 365 turns, and every year the tree grows its new tender-green, bio-cell cone layer just under the bark and over the accumulating cones of previous years. Each ring of the many rings of the saw-cut log is one year's Sun-energy impoundment. So the fire is the many-years-of-Sun-flame-winding now unwinding from the tree. When the log fire pop-sparks, it is letting go a very sunny day long ago, and doing so in a hurry." Conventionally educated grown-ups rarely know how to answer such questions. They're all too specialized.

If nature wanted humans to be specialists, she would, for instance, have given them a microscope on one eye, which is what nature has done with all other living organisms -- other than humans. Each has special, organically integral equipment with which to cope successfully with special conditions in special environments. The low-slung hound to follow the Earth-top scent of another creature through the thickets and woods ... the little vine that can grow only along certain stretches of the Amazon River ... the bird with beautiful wings with which to fly, which bird however, when landed and in need of walking, is greatly hampered by its integral but now useless wings.

Humans are not unique in possessing brains that always and only are coordinating and storing for later retrieval the integrated information coming in from each and all the creature's senses -- visual, aural, tactile, and olfactory. Humans are unique in respect to all other creatures in that they also have minds that can discover constantly varying interrelationships existing only between a number of special case experiences as individually apprehended by their brains, which covarying interrelationship rates can only be expressed mathematically. For example, human minds discovered the law of relative interattractiveness of celestial bodies, whose initial intensity is the product of the masses of any two such celestial bodies, while the force of whose interattractiveness varies inversely as the second power of the arithmetical interdistancing increases.

The human mind of Bernoulli discovered the mathematical expression of the laws of intercovarying pressure differentials in gases under varying conditions of shape and velocity of gas flow around and by interfering bodies. 'The. Wright brothers' wing foils provided human flight, but not the information controlling the mathematics of varying wing foil conformations. Bernoulli's work made possible the mathematical improvement in speed and energy efficiency of various wing designs. Human mind's access to the mathematics of generalized scientific laws governing physical phenomena in general made possible humanity's production of its own detached-from-self wings to outfly all birds in speed and altitude, while being able to loan one another those wings and modify them to produce even better wings.

* * *

I'm sure our human forebears went through quite a period of giants and giant-affairs evolution. These probably led to all sorts of truth-founded legends from which fairy stories were developed, many of which are probably quite close to the facts of unwritten history. Then humans developed to the point at which a small man made a weapon, a stone-slinger, such as in the story of David and Goliath, with which the little man slays the big man by virtue of a muscle-impelled missile. At the U.S. Naval Academy "ballistics" is defined as: the art and science of controlling the trajectory of an explosively hurled missile. After the sling and spear we got the bow and arrow with which a small man could kill a big man at much greater distance than with spear or sling. So skill and human-muscle-impelled weapons ended the era of giants.

Discovery of energetic principles, and human inventiveness in using those principles, such as the invention of catapults and mechanically contracted, steel-spring-coil arrow impelment, advanced the art of weapons. The human power structures that could best organize and marshal the complex of interessential "best" weapons and support an army of best-trained people with each of the special types of weapons were the ones who now won the battles and ran the big human "show." The discovery of gunpowder by the Chinese and the invention of guns introduced the era of ballistics, or as the Navy terms it, "explosively hurled missiles."

Going back to the stone-sling, bow-and-arrow, spear, club, and knife era of weapons, we find that territorial battles between American Indian nations were fought over the local hunting and fishing rights, but the land itself always belonged to the Great Spirit. To the Indians it was obvious that humans could not own the land. There was never any idea that the people could own land -- owning was an eternal, omniscient omnipotence unique to the greatness, universality, and integrity of the forever-to-humans-mysterious Great Spirit. Until a special human-produced change in the evolution of power structures occurred, the ownership of anything being unique to the Great Spirit-in whatever way that might be designated by local humans -- was held by all people around our planet.

In 1851 Seattle, chief of the Suquamish and other Indian tribes around Washington's Puget Sound, delivered what is considered to be one of the most beautiful and profound environmental statements ever made. The city of Seattle is named for the chief, whose speech was in response to a proposed treaty under which the Indians were persuaded to sell two million acres of land for $150,000.

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us.

If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.

The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man -- all belong to the same family.

So, when the Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land, he asks much of us. The Great Chief sends word he will reserve us a place so that we can live comfortably to ourselves. He will be our father and we will be his children.

So we will consider your offer to buy our land. But it will not be easy. For this land is sacred to us. This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father.

The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.

We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father's grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care. His father's grave, and his children's birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert.

I do not know. Our ways are different from your ways. The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the red man. There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring or the rustle of the insect's wings. The clatter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if a man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs around the pond at night? I am a red man and do not understand. The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of a pond and the smell of the wind itself, cleansed by a midday rain, or scented with pinon pine.

The air is precious to the red man for all things share the same breath, the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days he is numb to the stench. But if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.

The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred as a place where even the white man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow's flowers.

You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children that we have taught our children that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.

This we know: the earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. All things are connected. We may be brothers after all. We shall see. One thing we know which the white man may one day discover: our God is the same God.

You may think now that you own Him as you wish to own our land; but you cannot. He is the God of man, and His compassion is equal for the red man and the white. This earth is precious to Him, arid to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator. The whites too shall pass; perhaps sooner than all other tribes. Contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.

But in your perishing you will shine brightly fired by the strength of the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man.

That destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tame, the secret corners of the forest heavy with scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires.

Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone.

The end of living and the beginning of survival."


* * *

In my prehistory accounting I talk about the time when each ice age is engaging an enormous amount of the oceans' water, lowering the waterfront and bringing together the islands of Borneo, the Philippines, and others, all to become part of the Malay Peninsula. I also spoke of the ice cap pushing the furry animals southward until they were suddenly pushed into the land of the previous islands now formed into the new peninsula -- into land they could never before reach. This is how animals like tigers got out to now-reislanded places like Bali. Human beings suddenly confronted with these wild animals learned how to cope, hunting some and taming others. In following the evolution of human power structures we are now particularly interested in the humans who found themselves confronted with a tidal wave of wild animals. Those who were overwhelmed became aggressive hunters, and those who were not overwhelmed became peaceful domesticators of the animals. Some of the most aggressive men mounted horses, moved faster than all others, and went out to seek the beasts.

We have learned in the last decade from our behavioral science studies that aggression is a secondary behavior of humans -- that when they get what they need, when they need it, and are not overwhelmed, they are spontaneously benevolent; it is only when they become desperate that they become aggressive because what they have relied on is no longer working. There are two kinds of social behavior manifest today around the world -- the benign and the aggressive. It is probable that this dichotomy occurred in the human-versus-animal confrontation in the ice age time.

When an ice age starts to recede, the horsemen start north -- hunting with clubs and spears. At the same time, moving much more slowly, we have the beginnings of great tribes of humans following their flocks of goats and sheep as the latter lead them to the best pastures -- sometimes high on mountainsides, sometimes on great plains. With the big man as king -- the head shepherd-we have humanity migrating off into a wilderness that seemed to have no limits. The land belonged to the Great Spirit. The people lived on the flesh of their animals and the encountered fruits, berries, nuts, and herbs. They kept themselves warm with clothing made of the skins of the animals and also with environment-controlling tents made of local saplings and the animal skins.

We have a king shepherd, from the day of the giants, tending his people and his flock, when along comes a little man on a horse, with a club hanging by his side. He rides up to the king shepherd and, towering above him, says, "Well, Mr. Shepherd, those are very beautiful sheep you have there. You know, it's very dangerous to have such beautiful sheep out here in the wilderness. The wilderness is very dangerous." The shepherd responds, "We've been out in the wilderness for generations and we've had no trouble at all."

Night after night thereafter sheep begin to disappear. Each day along comes the man on the horse. He says, "Isn't-that too bad. I told you it was very dangerous out here. Sheep disappear out in the wilderness, you know." Finally, there is so much trouble that the shepherd agrees to accept and pay in sheep for the horseman's "protection" and to operate exclusively within the horseman's self-claimed land.

No one dared question the horseman's claim that he owned the land on which the horseman said the shepherd was trespassing. The horseman had his club with which to prove that he was the power structure of that locale; he stood high above the shepherd and could ride in at speed to strike the shepherd's head with his club. This was how, multimillennia ago, twentieth-century racketeers' "protection" and territorial "ownership" began. For the first time little people learned how to become the power structure and how thereby to live on the productivity of others.

Then there came great battles between other individuals on horses to determine who could realistically say, "I own this land." Ownership changed frequently. The ownership-claiming strategy soon evolved into horse-mounted warfare as each gang sought to overwhelm the other. Then the horse-mounted gangs, led by a most wily leader, used easily captured human prisoners to build them stone citadels at strategic points. Surrounded by prisoner-built moats rigged with drawbridges and drawgates, they would come pouring out to overwhelm caravans and others crossing their domains. "Deeds" to land evolved from deeds of arms. Then came enormous battles of gangs of gangs, and the beginning of the great land barons. Finally we get to power-structure mergers and acquisitions, topped by the most wily and powerful of all -- the great emperor.

This is how humans came to own land. The sovereign paid off his promises- to powerful supporters by signing deeds to land earned by the physical deeds of fighting in shrewd support of the right leader. Thereafter emperors psychologically fortified the cosmic aspect of their awesome power by having priests of the prevailing religions sanctify their land-claiming as accounted simply either by discovery or by arms.

In another set of events that opportuned the power structure the land barons discovered the most geographically logical trading points for caravaning: a place where one caravan trail would cross another caravan trail; where, for instance, the caravaners came to an oasis or maybe to a seaport harbor and transfer some of their goods from the camel caravans to the boats. The caravaners would say, "Let's exchange goods right here. Fine. You need something; I have it."

One day they're exchanging goods when along comes a troop of armed brigands on horseback. The head horseman says, "It's pretty dangerous exchanging valuable things out here in the wilderness." The caravaners' leader says, "No, we never have any trouble out here. We have been doing this for many generations." Then their goods begin to be stolen nightly, and finally the merchants agree to accept and pay for "protection." That was the beginning of the walled city. The horse-mounted gangsters brought prisoners along to build the city's walls and saw to it that all trading was carried on inside the walls. The lead baton then gave each of his supporters control of different parts ofthat city so that each could collect his share of the "taxes."

This is how we came to what is called, archeologically, the city-state, which was to become a very powerful affair. There were two kinds: the agrarian-productivity-exploiting type and the trade-route-confluence-exploiting type. These produced all the great walled cities such as Jericho and Babylon.

The agrarian-supported city-state works in the following manner: For example, we have Mycenae in Greece, a beautiful and fertile valley. It is ringed around with mountains. You can see the mountain passes from the high hill in the center of the valley. At the foot of the high central hill there is a very good well. So they build a wall around the citadel on the top of that mid-valley hill and walls leading down to and around the well so that they can get their water. When they see the enemy coming through the passes, the Mycenaeans bring all the food inside their walls and into their already-built masonry grain bins. What they can't bring inside the walls, they burn -- which act was called "scorching the fields." The enemy enters the fertile valley, but there's nothing left for them to eat. The enemy army has to "live on its belly"-which means on the foods found along their route of travel -- and is hungry on arrival in the valley. The people inside have all the food. The people outside try to break into the walled city, but they are overwhelmed by its height and its successfully defended walls. Finally the people outside -- only able to go for about thirty days without food -- get weaker and weaker, then the people inside come out and decimate them.

This was the city-state. It was a successful invention for a very long period in history. At the trade-route convergences city-states operated in much the same way but on a much larger scale with the siege-resisting supplies brought in by caravans or ships. The city-states were approximately invincible until the siege of Troy. Troy was the city-state controlling the integrated water-and-caravaning traffic between Asia and Europe near the Bosporus. It had marvelous walls. Everything seemed to be favorable for its people.

Meanwhile in history, we have millennia of people venturing forth on the world's waters -- developing the first rafts, which had to go where the ocean currents took them; then the dugouts, with which they paddled or catamaraned and sailed in preferred directions; and finally the ribbed-and-planked ship, suggested to them by the stout spine and rib cage of the whales, seals and humans -- stoutly keeled and ribbed, deep-bellied ships. With their large ships made possible by this type of construction, sailors came to cross the great seas carrying enormous cargoes -- vastly greater cargoes than could be carried on the backs of humans or animals. Ships could take the short across-the-bay route instead of the around-the-bay mountain route.

The Phoenicians, Cretans, and the Mycenaeans, together, in fleets of these big-ribbed and heavily planked ships, went to Troy and besieged it. Up to this time the besiegers of Troy had come overland, and they soon ran out of food. But the Troy-besieging Greeks and Cretans came to Troy in ships, which they could send back for more supplies. This terminally-turned- around voyaging back to the supply sources and return to the line of battle was called their "line of supply." The new line-of-supply masters -- the Greeks-starved out the Trojans. The Trojans thought they had enough food but had not reckoned on the people besieging them having these large ships. The Trojan horse was the large wooden ship -- that did the task of horses -- out of whose belly poured armed troops.

At this time the power structure of world affairs shifts from control by the city-state to the masters of the lines of supply. At this point in the history of swiftly evolving, multibanked, oar- and sail-driven fighting ships, the world power-structure control shifts westward to Italy. While historians place prime emphasis on the Roman legions as establishing the power of the Roman Empire, it was in fact the development of ships and the overseas line of supply upon which its power was built -- by transporting those legions and keeping them ·supplied. Go to Italy, and you will see all the incredibly lovely valleys and great castellos commanding each of those valleys such as you saw in the typical city-states, and you can see that none of those walls has ever been breached. Also in Italy -- in the northeastern corner -- is Venice, the headquarters of the water-people. The Phoenicians-phonetically the Venetians -- had their south Mediterranean headquarters in Carthage in northern Africa. In their western Mediterranean and Atlantic venturings the Phoenicians became the Veekings. The Phoenicians -- Venetians -- in their ships voyaged around the whole coast of Italy and sent in their people to each castello, one by one. The Venetians had an unlimited line of supply, and the people inside each castello did not. The people inside were starved out. Thus, all of the regional masters of the people in Italy hated the Venetians- Phoenicians-Veekings who were able to do this.

There being as yet no Suez Canal, the new world power structure centered in the ship mastery of the line of supply finally forcing the Roman Empire to shift its headquarters to Constantinople some ten centuries after . the fall of Troy. The Roman emperor-pope's bodyguards were the Veekings-Vikings, the water-peoples' most powerful frontier fighters. The line of supply from Asia to Constantinople was partially caravan-borne and partially water-borne via Sinkiang-Khyber Pass-Afghanistan or via the Sea of Azov, the Caspian and the Black seas. From Constantinople, the western Europe-bound traffic was rerouted from overland to waterway routes. Because the Asia-to-Constantinople half of the trading was more land-borne-via- caravans, whose routes were dominated by the city-state-mastering Turks. Constantinople in due course was taken over by the Turks who established the Byzantine Empire in the Aegean Sea and Asia Minor.

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[i]FIGURE 15. Water and caravan routes between Asia and Europe

Before leaving the subject of the great power-structure struggle for control of the most important, greatest cargo-tonnage-transporting, most profitable, Asia-to-Europe trade routes, we must note that the strength of the Egyptian Empire was predicated upon its pre-Suez function as a trade route link between Asia and Europe via the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, overland caravan to the Nile, and then water-borne to Alexandria, or via Somaliland, overland to the headwaters of the Nile, and thence to Alexandria. The latter route was not economically competitive but was the route of travel of the ship-designing and -building arts that in due course brought the stoutly keeled, heavily ribbed, big-bellied ships into the Mediterranean.

We have seen the Greek Alexander the Great crossing Persia and reaching the Indian Ocean, thus connecting with the Phoenician trading to Asia. A thousand years later the Crusaders -- ostensibly fighting for holy reasons -- were the Indian Ocean-Phoenician-Venetian-Veeking water-borne power structure fighting the older overland-Khyber Pass power structure over mastery of the trade route between Asia and Europe.

In our "Humans in Universe" chapter we spoke about the 600-200 B.C. Greeks' discovery that our Earth is a sphere and a planet of the solar system. This was the typical scientific product of a water-navigation people. We witnessed also the originally horse-mounted Roman Empire's destruction of such knowledge, as their earlier grand strategy sought to reestablish the Asia-to-Europe trade pattern via Constantinople and the inland, overland, Khyber Pass route. This explains why the power structure saw fit to Dark-Age-out the mariners' spherical concept. It explains Ptolemy's 200 A.D. conic map's cutting off the around-Africa route mapped by Eratosthenes 400 years earlier.

With the world three-quarters water the bigger ship-producing capability was the beginning of a complete change in the control of human affairs. Bigger and better engineering was developed. The rival power structures were focused on the water supply lines. The Romans' overland road to England became obsolete. The Phoenician ships sailing out through Gibraltar into the Atlantic outperformed them. This shifted the battles among the world trade-route power structures from on-the-land popular visibility to popularly unwitnessed seascape. Long years of great battles of the corsairs, the pirates of the Barbary Coast, and so forth were unwitnessed and unknown to the land people. Who the power structures might be became popularly invisible.

Finally, bigger ships got out of the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic, around Africa to the Orient, and then around the world. Thus, "those in the know" rediscovered that the world is a sphere and not an infinitely extended lateral plane. Great battles ensued -- waged under the flags of England, France, and Spain -- to determine who would become supreme master of the world's high-seas line of supply. These great nations were simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery. Always their victories were in the name of some powerful sovereign-ruled country. The real power structures were always the invisible ones behind the visible sovereign powers.

Because the building of superior fleets of ships involved a complex of materials to produce not only the wooden hulls but the metal fastenings and the iron anchors and chains and the fiber ropes and cloth sails, and because woods from many parts of the world excelled in various functions of hull, masts, spars, oars, etc., large money credits for foreign purchase of these and other critical supplies brought control of the sea enterprising into the hands of international bankers.

The building of invisible world-power-structure controls operates in the following manner. Suppose you know how and have the ambition, vision, and daring to build one of these great ships. You have the mathematics. You have the positioning of numbers that enables you -- or your servants -- to calculate the engineering data governing the design of hulls, spars, rigging, etc., and all the other necessary calculations for the building of a ship capable of sailing all the way to the Orient and returning with the incredible treasures that you have learned from travelers are to be found there. One trip to the Orient -- and a safe return to Europe -- could make you a fortune. "There are fabulous stores of treasures in the Orient to be cashed in -- if my ship comes in!"

The building of a ship required that you be so physically powerful a fighting man -- commanding so many other fighting men as to have a large regiment of people under your control -- that you must have the acknowledged power to command all the people in your nation who are carpenters to work on your ship; all your nation's metalworkers to work on the fastenings, chain plates, chains, and anchors of your ship; all thos~ who can make rope and all the people who grow fibers for your rope; all the people who grow, spin, and weave together the fabrics for your sails. Thus, all the skilled people of the nation had to be employed in the building and outfitting of your ship. In addition you had to command all the farmers who produced the food to feed not only themselves but also to feed all those skilled people while they built the ship -- and to feed all your army and all your court. So there was no way you could possibly produce one of these great ships unless you were very, very powerful.

Even then, in building ships, there were many essential materials that you didn't have in your own nation and so had to purchase from others. You also needed working cash -- money to cope with any and all unforeseen events that could not be coped with by use of muscle or the sword -- money to trade with. It was at this stage of your enterprise that the banker entered into the equation of power.

Up until 1500 B.C. all money was cattle, lambs, goats, or pigs -- live money that was real life-support wealth, wealth you could actually eat. Steers were by far the biggest food animal, and so they were the highest denomination of money. The Phoenicians carried their cattle with them for trading, but these big creatures proved to be very cumbersome on long voyages. This was the time when Crete was the headquarters of the big-boat people and their new supreme weapon -- the lines-of-supply-control ship. Crete was called the Minoan civilization, the bull civilization, worshippers of the male fertility god.

The pair of joined bull's horns symbolized that the particular ship carried real-wealth traders -- that there were cattle on board to be exchanged for local- wealth items. The Norsemen with their paired-horn headdress were the Phoenician, Veenetian, Veeking (spelled Viking but pronounced "Veeking" by the Vikings). Veenetians, Phoenicians. (Punitians, Puntits, Pundits. Punic Wars. Punt = boat = the boat people. Pun in some African Colored languages means "red," as in Red Sea.). The Veekings were simply the northernmost European traders. The Veekings, Veenitians, Feenicians, Friesians -- i.e., Phoenicians, Portuguese -- were cross-breeding water-world people.

Image

Minoan Bull; Viking; Phoenician Money FIGURE 16.

Graduating from carrying cattle along for trading in 1500 B.C. the Phoenicians invented metal money, which they first formed into iron half-rings that looked like a pair of bull's horns. (Many today mistake them for bracelets.) Soon the traders found that those in previously unvisited foreign countries had no memory of the cattle-on-board trading days and didn't recognize the miniature iron bull horn. If metal was being used for trading, then there were other kinds of metal they preferred trading with people -- silver, copper, and gold were easy to judge by hefting and were more aesthetically pleasing than the forged iron bull horn symbols.

This soon brought metal coinage into the game of world trading, with the first coin bearing the image of the sovereign o 'the homeland of the Phoenicians.

This switch to coinage occurred coincidentally at just about the same time as the great changeover from city-state dominance to line-of-supply dominance of the power-structure group controlling most of world affairs. This was the time when the Phoenicians began trading with people of so many different languages that, in need of a means of recording the different word sounds made by people around the world, the Phoenicians invented phonetic spelling -- Phoenician spelling -- which pronounced each successive sound separately and invented letter symbols for each sound. With phonetic spelling human written communication changed very much -- from the visual-metaphor- concept writing of the Orient, accomplished with complex ideagraphics (ideographs), several of which frequently experienced, generalized cartoons told the whole story visually. It was a big change from ideographs to the Phoenicians' phonetic spelling, wherein each letter is a single sound -- having no meaning in itself -- and whereby it took several sounds to make a whole word and many such words to make any sense -- i.e., a sentence. This is the historical event that Ezra Pound says coincides with the story of the Tower of Babel. Pound says that humanity was split into a babble of individually meaningless sounds while losing the conceptual symbols of whole ideas -- powerful generalizations. You had to become an expert to understand the phonetic letter code. The spelling of words excluded a great many people from communicating, people who had been doing so successfully with ideographs.

This gradual alteration of world trading devices from cattle to gold brought about the world-around development of pirates who; building small but swift craft, could on a dark night board one of the great merchant ships just before it reached home, richly laden after a two-year trip to the Orient, and take over the ship and, above all, its gold. With the gold captured, the pirates often burned the vanquished ship.

As already mentioned in our Introduction, it was in 1805, 200 years after the founding of the East India Company, that the British won the Battle of Trafalgar, giving them dominance of all the world's lines of supply. They now controlled the seas of the world. It was said by world people that the British Empire became the first empire in history upon which "the sun never set." In order to get their gold off the sea and out of reach of the pirates, the British made deals with the sovereigns of all the countries around the world with whom they traded, by which it was agreed from then on to keep annual accounts of their intertrading and at the end of the year to move the gold from the debtor's bank in London to the creditor's bank in London to balance the accounts. In this way they kept the gold off the ocean and immune to sea pirate raiding. This brought about what is now called the "balance of trade" accounting.

The international trading became the most profitable of all enterprises, and great land-"owners" with clear-cut king's "deeds" to their land went often to international gold moneylenders. The great land barons underwrote the building of enterprisers' ships with their cattle or other real wealth, the regenerative products of their lands, turned over to the lender as collateral.

If the ship did come back, both the enterpriser and the bankers realized a great gain. The successful ship venturer paid the banker back, and the banker who had been holding the cattle as collateral returned them to their original proprietor. But during the voyage (usually two years to the Orient and back to Europe) the pledged cattle had calves, "kind" (German for "child"), and this is where the concept of interest originated, which was payable "in kind" -- the cattle that were born while the collateral was held by the banker were to belong to the banker.

When the Phoenicians shifted their trading strategy from carrying cattle to carrying metal money, the metal money didn't have little money -- kind" -- but the idea of earned interest persisted. This meant that the interest was deducted from the original money value, and this of course depreciated the capital equity of the borrower. Thus, metallic equity banking became a different kind of game from the original concept.

In twentieth-century banking the depositors assume that their money is safely guarded in the vaulted bank, especially so in a savings bank, whereas their money is loaned out, within seconds after its depositing, at interest payable to the banker which is greater than the interest paid to the savings account depositor and, since the metal or paper money does not produce children -- "kind" -- the banker's so-called earned share must, in reality, be deducted from the depositor's true-wealth deposit.

The merchant bankers of Venice came to underwrite the Venetians' (the Phoenicians') voyaging ventures. Such international trade financing swiftly became the big thing in the banking game. The "Merchant of Venice" -- Shylock and his "pound of flesh forfeit" of the debtor -- was Shakespeare's way of calling attention to the fact that the bankers' "interest" was in reality depleting the life-support equity of both the depositors and the borrowers.

It was the financing of such international voyaging, trading, and individual travel as well as of vaster games of governmental takeovers that built the enormous wealth-controlling fortunes of early European private banking families. It was under analogous circumstances of financing inter-American-European trade that, in the late nineteenth century, J. P. Morgan became a man of great power. By having his banking houses in Paris and London, Philadelphia and New York, he was able not only to finance people's foreign travel, all their intershipment of goods, and to give letters of credit, but also to finance and control major "new era" railroading, shipbuilding, mining, manufacturing, and energy-generating enterprises in general.

Such powerful banking gave insights regarding the degrees of risks that could be taken. The people doing the risking came to the banker for advice. In such a manner J. P. Morgan developed the most powerful financing position in America, as society went from wooden ships to steel ships and the concomitant iron mining, blast furnace building, and steel rolling mill development, as well as the making of boilers and engines, electric generators, and air conditioning systems.

To better understand the coming of world power structure into North American affairs, we will switch back from the nineteenth to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the opening up of North America and the American socioeconomic scene. The European colonization occurred in several major ways.

The Spanish way was accomplished with vast haciendas -- grants from the king to powerful supporters. The hacienda development began in Central America and Mexico and expanded northward into California.

The British king also gave vast plantation grants to royal favorites on the North American southeastern coast, below the freezing line.

The French came to two parts of North America: (1) to the Gulf of Mexico- Mississippi delta, where exiled prisoners were dumped, and (2) to the St. Lawrence area of Canada, whence they moved westward via the Great Lakes, then southward on the Mississippi to join with these lower Mississippi colonists exploring northward and westward on the Mississippi.

British sovereign grants were also being given on the northeastern coast, where it was much colder and where existence was much more difficult. Because it was much more difficult to colonize, the royal favorites who received large land grants from the British king in the north did everything they could to encourage colonization of any kind by others, who bought their land from their landlords. The Pilgrims and other people of religious conviction found the freedom of thought-and-act to warrant hazarding their lives in that cold-winter wilderness. On the northeast coast of North America the individuals who did the colonizing were not the landowners, who remained safely in Europe. In the south the royal-favorite landowners themselves occupied and personally operated many of the great plantations.

Though motivated by distinctly different northern and southern reasons for doing so, we have the east-coast North American British-blood people breaking away from the Old World through the American Revolution.

In our tracing of the now completely invisible world power structures it is important to note that, while the British Empire as a world government lost the American Revolution, the power structure behind it did not lose the war. The most visible of the power-structure identities was the East India Company, an entirely private enterprise whose flag as adopted by Queen Elizabeth in 1600 happened to have thirteen red and white horizontal stripes with a blue rectangle in its upper lefthand comer. The blue rectangle bore in red and white the superimposed crosses of St. Andrew and St. George. When the Boston Tea Party occurred, the colonists dressed as Indians boarded the East India Company's three ships and threw overboard their entire cargoes of high-tax tea. They also took the flag from the masthead of the largest of the "East Indiamen" -- the Dartmouth.

George Washington took command of the U.S. Continental Army under an elm tree in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The flag used for that occasion was the East India Company's flag, which by pure coincidence had the thirteen red and white stripes. Though it was only coincidence, most of those present thought the thirteen red and white stripes did represent the thirteen American colonies -- ergo, was very appropriate -- but they complained about the included British flag's superimposed crosses in the blue rectangle in the top comer. George Washington conferred with Betsy Ross, after which came the thirteen white, five-pointed stars in the blue field with the thirteen red and white horizontal stripes. While the British government lost the 1776 war, the East India Company's owners who constituted the invisible power structure behind the British government not only did not lose but moved right into the new U.S.A. economy along with the latter's most powerful landowners.

By pure chance I happened to uncover this popularly unknown episode of American history. Commissioned in 1970 by the Indian government to design new airports in Bombay, New Delhi, and Madras, I was visiting the grand palace of the British fortress in Madras, where the English first established themselves in India in 1600. There I saw a picture of Queen Elizabeth I and the flag of the East India Company of 1600 A.D., with its thirteen red and white horizontal stripes and its superimposed crosses in the upper comer. What astonished me was that this flag (which seemed to be the American flag) was apparently being used in 1600 A.D., 175 years before the American Revolution. Displayed on the stairway landing wall together with the portrait of Queen Elizabeth I painted on canvas, the flag was painted on the wall itself, as was the seal of the East India Company.
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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Postby admin » Tue Jul 28, 2015 6:22 am

PART 2 OF 3

The supreme leaders of the American Revolution were of the southern type -- George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Both were great landowners with direct royal grants for their lands, in contradistinction to the relatively meager individual landholdings of the individual northern Puritan colonists.

With the Revolution over we have Alexander Hamilton arguing before the Congress that it was not the intention of the signers of the Declaration of Independence that the nation so formed should have any wealth. Wealth, Hamilton argued -- as supported by Adam Smith -- is the land, which is something that belonged entirely to private individuals, preponderantly the great landowners with king-granted deeds to hundreds and sometimes thousands of square miles, as contrasted to the ordinary colonists' few hundreds of acres of homestead farms.

Hamilton went on to argue that the United States government so formed would, of course, need money from time to time and must borrow that money from the rich landowners' banks and must pay the banks back with interest. Assuming that the people would be benefited by what their representative government did with the money it borrowed, the people gladly would be taxed in order to pay the money back to the landowners with interest. This is where a century-and-a-half-Iong game of "wealth"-poker began -- with the cards dealt only to the great landowners by the world power structure.

Obviously, very powerful people had their land given to them by the king and not by God, but the king, with the church's approbation, asserted it was with God's blessing. This deed-processing produced a vast number of court decisions and legal precedent based on centuries and centuries of deed inheritances. Thus, landlord's deeds evolved from deeds originally dispensed from deeds of war. Then the great landlords loaned parcels of their lands to sharecropping farmers, who had to pay the landlord a tithe, or rent, and "interest" out of the wealth produced by nature within the confines of the deeded land. The landlord had his "tithing" barn within which to store the grains collected in the baskets (fiscus is Latin for "basket"; thus the fiscal year is that which winds up within the basketed measuring of the net grains harvested). The real payoff, of course, was in regenerative metabolic increments of the botanical photosynthetic impoundment of Sun radiation and hydrocarbon molecules' structuring and proliferation through other hydrogenic and biological interaccommodations. Obviously none of this natural wealth-regenerating and -multiplying process was accreditable to the landlords.

When I was young, there were people whom everybody knew to be very "wealthy." Nobody had the slightest idea of what that "wealth" consisted, other than the visible land and the complex of buildings in which the wealthy lived, plus their horses, carriages and yachts. The only thing that counted was that they were "known to be" enormously wealthy. The wealthy could do approximately anything they wanted to do. Many owned cargo ships. However, the richest were often prone to live in very unostentatious ways.

Of course, money was coined and the paper equivalents of metallic coinage were issued by the officers of banks of variously ventured private-capital- ban king-type land systems. Enterprises were underwritten by wealthy landowners, to whom shares in the enterprises were issued and, when fortunate, dividends were paid. "Rich" people sometimes had their own private banks -- as, for Instance, J. P. Morgan and Company. Ordinary people rushed to deposit their earnings in the wealthy people's banks.

For all the foregoing reasons nobody knew of what the wealth of the wealthy really consisted, nor how much there was of it. There were no income taxes until after World War I. But the income tax did not disclose capital wealth. It disclosed only the declared income of the wealthy. The banks were capitalized in various substantial amounts considered obviously adequate to cover any and all deposits by other than the bankers involved in proclaiming the capital values. These capital values were agreed upon privately between great landowners based on equities well within the marketable values of small fractions of their vast king-deeded landholdings.

"The rich get richer and the poor get children" was a popular song of the early 1920s. Wages were incredibly low, and the rich could get their buildings built for a song and people them with many servants for another song. But, as with uncalled poker hands, nobody ever knew what the "wealthy" really had. I was a boy in a "comfortably off" family, not a "wealthy" family-not wealthy enough to buy and own horses and carriages. To me the wealthy seemed to be just "fantastically so."

This brings us to World War I. Why was it called the First World War? All wars until this time had been fought in the era when land was the primary wealth. The land was the wealth because it produced the food essential to life. In the land-wealth era of warring the opposing forces took the farmers froth the farms and made soldiers of them. They exhausted the farm-produced food supplies and trampled down the farms. War was local.

In 1810, only five years after Malthus's pronouncement of the fundamental inadequacy of life support on planet Earth, the telegraph was invented. It used copper wires to carry its messages. This was the beginning of a new age of advancing technology. The applied findings of science brought about an era in which there was a great increase of metals being interalloyed or interemployed mechanically, chemically, and electrolytically. Metals greatly increased the effectiveness of the land-produced foods. The development of nonrusting, hermetically sealed tin :ans made possible preservation and distribution of foods to all inhabited portions of our planet Earth. All the new technology of all the advancing industry, which was inaugurated by the production of steel in the mid-nineteenth century, required the use of all the known primary metallic elements in various intercomplementary alloyings. For instance tin cans involved tin from the Malay straits, iron from West Virginia mines, and manganese from southern Russia.

The metals were rarely found under the farmlands or in the lands that belonged to the old lords of the food-productive lands. Metals were found -- often, but not always, in mountains -- all around the world, in lands of countries remote from one another. Mine ownerships were granted by governments to the first to file claims.

It was the high-seas, intercontinental, international trafficking in these metals that made possible the life-support effectiveness of both farming and fishing. The high-seas trafficking was mastered by the world-around line-of-supply controllers -- the venturers and pirates known collectively as the British Empire. This world-around traffic was in turn financed, accounted, and maximally profited in by the international bankers and their letters of credit, bills of exchange, and similar pieces of paper. International banking greatly reduced the necessity for businessmen to travel with their exported goods to collect at the importer's end. Because the world-around-occurring metals were at the heart of this advance in standards of living for increasing numbers of humans all around the world, the struggle for mastery of this trade by the invisible, behind-the-scenes-contending world power structures ultimately brought about the breakout of the visible, international World War I.

The war was the consequence of the world-power-structure "outs" becoming realistically ambitious to take away from the British "ins" the control of the world's high-seas lines of supply. The "outs." saw that the British Navy was guarding only the surface of the sea and that there were proven new inventions -- the submarine, which could go under the water, and the airplane, which could fly above the water -- so the behind-the-scenes world-power- structure "outs" adopted their multidimensional offensive strategy against the two-dimensional world-power-structure "ins." The invisible-power- structure "outs" puppeted the Germans and their allies. The invisible- power-structure "ins" puppeted Great Britain and her allies. With their underwater strategies the "outs" did severely break down the "ins' " line of supply.

J. P. Morgan was the visible fiscal agent for the "in" power structure, operating through Great Britain and her allies. The 1914 industrial productivity in America was enormous, with an even more enormous amount of untapped U.S. metallic resources, particularly of iron and copper, as backup.

Throughout the nineteenth century all the contending invisible world power structures invested heavily in U.S.A.-enterprise equities. Throughout that nineteenth century, the vast resources of the U.S.A. plus the new array of imported European industrial tooling, the North American economy established productivity. The U.S.A. economy took all the industrial machinery that had been invented in England, Germany, France, and Europe in general and reproduced it in America with obvious experience-suggested improvements.

In 1914 World War I started in the Balkans and was "joined" in Belgium and France on the European continent. The British Isles represented the "unsinkable flagship" of the high-seas navy of the masters of the world oceans' lines of supply. The "unsinkable flagship" commanded the harbors of the European customers of the high-seas-line-of-supply control. If the line of supply that kept the war joined on the European continent broke down completely, then the "outs" would be able to take the British Isles themselves, which, as the "flagship" of the "ins," would mean the latter's defeat.

In 1914, three years before the U.S.A. entered the war, J. P. Morgan, as the "Allies' " fiscal agent, began to buy in the U.S.A. to offset the line-of-supply losses accomplished by the enemy submarines. Morgan kept buying and buying, but finally, on the basis of sound world-banking finance, which was predicated on the available gold reserve, came the point at which Morgan had bought for the British and their allies an amount of goods from the U.S.A. equaling all the monetary bullion gold in the world available to the "ins' " power structure. Despite this historically unprecedented magnitude of the Allied purchasing it had only fractionally tapped the productivity of the U.S.A. So Morgan, buying on behalf of England and her allies, exercised their borrowing "credit" to an extent that bought a total of goods worth twice the amount of gold and silver in the world available to the "ins." As yet the potential productivity of the U.S.A. was but fractionally articulated. Because the "ability to pay later" credit of the Allied nations could not be stretched any further, the only way to keep the U.S.A. productivity flowing and increasing was to get the U.S.A. itself into the war on the "ins' " side, so that it would buy its own productivity in support of its own war effort as well as that of its allies.

By skillful psychology and propaganda the "ins" persuaded America that they were fighting "to save democracy." I recall, as one of the youth of those times, how enthusiastic everyone became about "saving democracy." Immediately the U.S.A. government asked the British and their allies, "What do you need over there?" The "ins" replied, "A million trained and armed men, and the ships to carry them to France, and many, many new ships to replace the ships that have been sunk by submarines. We need them desperately to keep carrying the tanks and airplanes, weapons, and munitions to France." The "ins" also urgently requested that the U.S. Navy be increased in strength to equal the strength of the British Navy and therewith to cope with the German submarines, "while our British Navy keeps the German high-seas fleet bottled up. We want all of this from America."

America went to work, took over and newly implemented many of the U.S. industries, such as the telephone, telegraph, and power companies, and produced all that was wanted. For the first time in history, from 1914 to 1918, humanity entered upon a comprehensive program of industrial transformation and went from wire to wireless communications; from tracked to trackless transportation; from two-dimensional transport to four-dimensional; from visible structuring and mechanical techniques to invisible -- atomic and molecular -- structuring and mechanics.

Within one year the million armed and trained U.S.A. soldiers were safely transported to France without the loss of one soldier to the submarines. Arrived in France, they entered the line of battle. With the line of supply once more powerfully re-established by the U.S. Navy and its merchant fleet, it became clear that the "ins" were soon going to win.

J. P. Morgan, now representing the "allied" power structures' capitalist system's banks as well as serving as the Allies' purchasing agent, said to the American Congress, "How are you going to pay for it all?" The American Congress said, "What do you mean, pay for it? This is our own wealth. This is our war to save democracy. We will win the war and then stop the armaments production." Morgan said, "You have forgotten Alexander Hamilton. The U.S. government doesn't have any money. You're going to pay for it all right, but since you don't have any money, you're going to have to borrow it all from the banks. You're going to borrow from me, Mr. Morgan, in order to pay these vast war bills. Then you must raise the money by taxes to pay me back."

To finance these enormous payments Mr. Morgan 'and his army of lawyers invented -- for the U.S. government -- the Liberty Loans and Victory Loans. Then the U.S. Congress invented the income tax.

With the U.S. Congress's formulating of the legislation that set up the scheme of the annual income tax, "we the people" had, for the first time, a little peek into the poker hands of the wealthy. But only into the amount of their taxable income, not into the principal wealth cards of their poker game.

During World War I, U.S. industrial production had gone to $178 billion. With only $30 billion of monetary gold in the world, this monetary magnitude greatly exceeded any previously experienced controllability of the behind- the-scenes finance power structure of the European "Allies."

World War lover, won by the Allies, all the countries on both sides of the warring countries are deeply in debt to America. Because the debt to the U.S.A. was twice that of all the gold in the "ins' " world, all the countries involved in World War I paid all their gold to the U.S.A. Despite those enormous payments in gold all the countries were as yet deeply in debt to the U.S.A. Thereafter all those countries went off the gold standard.

All the monetary gold bullion paid to the U.S.A. was stored in the mountain vaults of Fort Knox, Kentucky. International trade became completely immobilized, and the U.S.A. found itself having unwittingly become the world's new financial master. Swiftly it arranged vast trading account loans to the foreign countries. This financing of foreign countries' purchasing by the U.S.A. credit loans started an import-export boom in the U.S.A., followed by an early 1920s recession and another boom; then, the Great Crash of 1929.

The reasons for the Great Crash go back to the swift technological evolution occurring in the U.S.A. between 1900 and the 1914 beginning of World War I and the U.S.A.'s entry into it in 1917. Most important amongst those techno-economic evolution events are those relating to electrical power. Gold is the most efficient conductor of electricity, silver is the next, and copper is a close third. Of these three gold is the scarcest, silver the next, then copper. Though relatively scarce, copper is the most plentiful of the good electrical conductors. Copper is also nonsparking and therefore makes a safe casing for gunpowder-packed bullets and big gun, shells. As a consequence of these conditions, in the one year, 1917, more copper was mined, refined, and manufactured into wire, tubing, sheet, and other end products than in the total cumulative production of all the years of all human history before 1917.

With the war over all the copper that had been mined and put into generators and conductors did not go back into the mines nor did it rot.

World War I was not an agrarian, but an inanimate-energy and power-driven, industrial-production war-with the generating power coming from Niagara and other waterfalls as well as from coal and petroleum. For the first time the U.S.A. was generating power with oil-burning steam turbines.

When the war was over, all this power-production equipment was still in prime operating condition. There was enormous potential productivity -- a wealth of wealth-producing capability that had never before existed, let alone as a consequence of war. The production capacity that had been established was so great as to have been able to produce, within a two-year span, all those ships, trucks, and armaments. What was the U.S.A. economy going to do with its new industrial gianthood? It was the vastness of this unexpected, government-funded production wealth and its ownership by corporate stockholders that generated many negative thoughts about the moral validity of war profiteering.

There were many desirable and useful items that could be mass-produced and successfully marketed. Young people wanted automobiles, but automobiles were capital equipment. In 1920 capital equipment was sold only for cash. There were enough affluent people in post-World-War-I U.S.A. to provide an easy market for a limited production of automobiles. In 1920 there were no bank-supported time payment sales in the retail trade. The banks would accept chattel mortgages and time payments on large mobile capital goods, such as trucking equipment, for large, rich corporations. Banks would not consider risking their money on such perishable, runaway- with-able capital equipment as the privately owned automobile.

Because the banks would not finance the buying of automobiles and so many money-earning but capital-less young people wanted them, shyster loaners appeared who were tough followers of their borrowers when they were in arrears. Between the ever-increasing time-payment patronage and the affluent, a market for automobiles was opening that could support mass production.

In 1922 there were about 125 independent automobile companies. They were mostly headed by colorful automobile-designing and -racing individuals for whom most of the companies were named. They survived by individually striving each year to produce an entirely new and better automobile, most of which were costly. Many accepted orders for more than they had the mechanical capability to produce. Their hometown financiers would back these auto-designing geniuses so that they could buy better production tooling and build larger factories. Wall Street sold swiftly increasing numbers of shares in auto companies. More and more of them went broke for lack of production, distribution, and maintenance experience on the part of the auto-designer managements.

In 1926 the Wall Street brokerage house of Dillon, Read and Co. made a comprehensive cost study of the auto-production field. They found that 130,000 cars a year was, in 1926, the minimum that could be accounted as mass production and sold at production prices. Any less production had to carry a much higher price tag. To warrant the latter, the cars had to be superlatively excellent. The English-built Rolls-Royce brought the highest price on the American market. There was fierce competition among Packard, Peerless, Cadillac, Pierce-Arrow, Locomobile, Lozier, Leland, and others for the top American car. All of those premium cars' frames, bodies, engines, and parts were manufactured within their own factories. There were several in-between classes, such as that of the Buick. Most of the 100 or so cars in this intermediate range were assembled from special engines, frames, and other parts made by independent manufacturers.

The mortality in auto companies was great. Dillon, Read led Wall Street out of its dilemma by buying several almost bankrupt companies, closely located to one another, such as those of the Dodge family, whose joint production capacity topped the 130,000 units per year mass-production figure. They named their new venture the Chrysler Company. Dillon, Read fired the auto company presidents, who were primarily interested in new-car-designing, and replaced them with production engineers. Wall Street followed suit and put in production engineers as presidents of all the auto companies -- except Ford, who owned his company outright and had no obligation to Wall Street and its legion of stock buyers. Old Henry himself was already the conceiver, initiator, and artist-master of mass production.

Because the American public was in love with the annual automobile shows, the Wall Street financiers who had thrown out all the colorful auto-designer presidents started a new game by setting up the Madison Avenue advertising industry, which hired artists who knew how to use the new (1920) airbrush to make beautiful drawings of only superficially -- not mechanically -- new dream cars. They made drawings of the new models, which required only superficial mudguard and radiator changes with no design changes in the hidden parts. Parts were purchased by the big companies from smaller, highly competitive parts manufacturers operating in the vicinity of Detroit.

This was the beginning of the downfall of the world-esteemed integrity of Yankee ingenuity, which was frequently, forthrightly, and often naively manifest in American business. Big business in the U.S.A. set out to make money deceitfully -- by fake "new models" -- and engineering design advance was replaced by "style" design change.

In the late twenties first Ford and then General Motors instituted their own time-financing corporations. The bankers of America said, "Let them have it, they'll be sorry -- autos, phew! We don't want to go around trying to recover these banged-up autos when the borrower is in default." The bankers said, "It is very immoral to buy automobiles 'on time.' They are just a luxury."

What the bankers did like to support in the new mass productivity was tractor-driven farm machinery. Farm machinery was easy to sell. As the farmer sat atop the demonstration plowing or harvesting equipment, with its power to go through the fields doing an amount of work in a day equal to what had previously taken him weeks, he said to himself, "I can make more money and also take it a little easier." So the bankers approved the financing of the production and marketing of the farm machinery. They held a chattel mortgage on the machinery and a mortgage on the farmland itself and all its buildings. The bankers loved that. There was enthusiastic bank acceptance of the selling of such equipment "on time" to the farmers. The bankers did not consider this "immoral." The farmer was "producing food wealth." The automobilist was "just joy riding."

Then there came a very bad hog market in 1926. Many farmers were unable to make the payments on their power-driven equipment. The local country banks foreclosed on the delinquent farmers' mortgages and took away their farms and machinery. The bankers had assumed that the farms were going to be readily saleable. It turned out, however, that there were not so many nonfarmers waiting to become farmers, and most of the real farmers had been put out of business by the bank foreclosures so they couldn't buy back their own farms. There were no city people eager to go out and buy one of those farms. "How you gonna keep them down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?" were the words of a popular World War I song.

So the dust bowls developed as the upturned, unsown soil began to blow off the farms. It is relevant to note that, in 1900, 90 percent of U.S.A. citizens were living and working on the farms; in 1979 only 7 percent were on the farms, mostly as local supervisors for big, absent-ownership corporations. The owners of the farmlands today are no longer "farmers" or even individual humans -- they are the great business conglomerates. What began in 1934 as government subsidies and loans to farmers for farm machinery, later to keep acreage out of production, would by 1978 result in President Carter making enormous payments to appease big corporations for cutting off vital grain and other strategic shipments to Russia. Next, the U.S. government would make enormous subsidies to bailout large corporations such as Lockheed and Chrysler, which as basic military suppliers the U.S. government could not allow to go bankrupt. Eventually the U.S. taxpayers will be asked to make "free-of-risk" bail-outs of "private" enterprises, corporations with initial physical assets worth over a billion dollars classified as risk enterprises.

We now return to the 1926-'27-'28-'29 sequence of events developing from selling the farmers' machinery on the bankers' drop-dead terms (mortgage means "on death terms"). In 1927 and 1928 the bigger Western city banks began to foreclose on their local country banks that had financed the farm machinery sales and had been borrowing from the bigger city banks to cover their unprecedentedly expanded loaning. First the little and then the successively bigger banks found that they had foreclosed on farmhouses that had no indoor toilets, many with roofs falling in, barns in poor condition, with the replevined farm machinery rusting out in the open -- and no customers.

Word of the bad news gradually went around; small bank "runs" began; and in 1929 came the Great Crash in the stock market. All business went from worse to worser. Unemployment multiplied. Prices steadily dropped. Nobody had money with which to buy. Bigger and bigger banks had to foreclose on smaller banks, until finally in early 1933 there came one day in which 5000 banks closed their doors to stop "the run" on their funds.

People were dismayed and both individually and collectively helpless to do anything to combat the economic collapse. The economy had gone to pieces. People did not parade and protest. They became so low in spirit and listless that they just sat around silently in their homes or in public places. The New York subway stations were filled with people sleeping on the concrete platforms and stairways. No religious organizations were willing to let people sleep in their churches.

There came a "pecking-order" point when the central Chicago banks foreclosed on all the other big Western city banks -- followed by the big New York City central banks foreclosing on Chicago's central banks. Finally came the denouement, when the big New York banks found themselves about to close because they were already behind-the-scenes insolvent. This occasioned the u.s. Congress voting to accelerate by four months the presidential inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, minutes after taking his oath of office, signed the Bank Moratorium, which momentarily suspended the acknowledgment of the death of the wealthy landowners' banking system that had lost all or much of its depositors' money. About a month later Congress voted to the President of the U.S.A. the ability to control all money. Months later again the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that legislation. The U.S.A. citizens themselves and their government had become the wealth resource "of last recourse." The underwriting wealth belongs to all the people and not to the few. That happened also to be the description of socialism.

The 150-year-Iong "infinite wealth" poker hand and its uncalled bluffing was over. The called hands were suddenly down. It turned out that the "wealthys'" wealth was nonexistent. Their marble-walled, steel-barred, visibly vaulted banks had been psychologically attractive to the depositors, who preferred to have their earnings and savings deposited along with the wealth of the powerfully rich. What the banks had been doing was to loan the people's deposits to other people. The banks had no money themselves. What they had done was to capitalize their land at their self-asserted value and had been credited with that value of stock in the bank's ownership.

In 1933, for the first time ever, the hands of the U.S. American wealthy were exposed (and by inference, all land-based capitalism everywhere around the world) -- most were money empty. Their land and multiservanted mansion values dropped to almost nothing. Nobody had the almost-nothing amount of money to buy those richly housed estates. There was one exception to the last statement -- the Vatican-administered Roman Catholic Church's world organization, which for a pittance acquired many extraordinary properties at that time, which it converted into monasteries and convents, colleges and schools.

The game of "deedable land wealth" had been a bluff from its very beginning -- multimillennia ago, when that little man on a horse, armed with a club, first rode up to the giant shepherd leader of a tribe and said, bluffingly, "It's very dangerous out here in the wilderness for beautiful sheep such as yours;" and the shepherd leader's ultimate coercion into accepting "protection" from the claiming and proclaiming "owner" of the land.

Landownership did not go back to an act of God. All the kings always had their priests present when the land claimage was made by their explorers. The priests planted their crosses to confirm that the king's ownership was blessed by God. The Roman Catholic Church, starting in its emperor-pope days, has been in the deeded-land business for "going on" 2000 years. It is as yet the world's largest real estate owner. Real, a Spanish word, means "royal" -- the succession of king-deeded estate lands.

With the bluff of wealth over in March 1933, almost all business in America stopped. On the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt the emergency was so absolute that Congress voted unanimously for whatever corrective measures the New Deal administration prescribed.

Roosevelt and his advisors said, "One thing is clear. Despite the emergency America abhors socialism. Americans don't like the assumption that everybody is equal. Americans are so independent, they don't feel at all equal. They don't like socialism, but," said the New Deal leaders, "the fact is that we, the American people, are going to have to guarantee our own bank accounts. People don't like to keep their money under their mattresses and prefer to put it into a bank, so we will have to do what we can to rehabilitate the banks. We the people acting unanimously through our government are going to have to guarantee the safety of each deposit in the banks to a convincingly substantial amount -- $5000. We will leave the bank in ownership of the management of the stockholders of those banks that, by virtue of the presidential moratorium, are as yet theoretically alive, and hope that, with our guaranteeing, regulation, and supervising, many of them will reopen and will be able to progressively accredit their depositors with some percentage of their original deposits.

"But let us not deceive ourselves. With the government of the people guaranteeing the bank accounts, it becomes, in operating fact, socialism. On the other hand people themselves know so little about banking, credit concepts, and the history of power structures that they will not know that they have adopted socialism, since the government has not taken 'possession' of the banks. Society will think well of 'we the people' as the government, guaranteeing the new deposits in the banks up to $5000."

Society likes the idea of a bank as a safekeeping device. People have always believed that when they put their money in the bank, it stayed there. They had no idea it went out on loan within minutes after it came in. They were completely hoodwinked by the appearance of the banks as safe, fireproof, and robberproof depositories of their earnings. Even today, in the last twenty years of the twentieth century, people know little more about banks than they did during the 1929 Crash or at the depth of the Depression in 1932, when all they knew was that they had lost their deposits in most of them.

In 1933, '34, '35, and '36 the New Deal and the U.S. Congress diligently investigated the banking system and the practices of its most powerful leaders. They found many malpractices, which we will discuss later. Most prominently they found the banks loaded with worthless mortgages on properties that were unsaleable because uninhabitable -- mortgages on buildings without roofs, bathrooms, etc.

The government said, "The first thing we must do is make those mortgages we've inherited worth something." At this point the American government dictated the banking strategy and started refinancing of the building industry. The so-called building "industry" was already 2000 years behind the arts of building ships of the sea and sky, which ships of the sea and sky are, in fact, environment-controlling structures in exactly the same sense that land buildings are environment-controlling structures.

While the design of the seagoing and airgoing environment controls are floatably and flyably weight-considerate and semiautonomous because they generate their own power, desalinate their own water, etc., there is no weight consideration in the designing of the land-anchored environment controls. They don't have to float or fly. They are utterly dependent on sewers, waterlines, electric lines, highway maintenance. 1'hey are utterly controlled by the prime landowners, their building codes and readily imposable legal restrictions -- all based on the real estates' ownership and control of the highways-sewers-waterlines -- the metabolic "guts" of all U.S.A. towns and cities.

When the government owns the wealth and controls the issuance of its money, it is socialism. The New Deal was not trying to deceive the people but was engaged in a rescue operation of the first order and was hopeful of not irritating the people psychologically by what it seemed was critically mandatory to accomplish.

Paradoxically, the first people they irritated -- greatly -- were yesterday's rich, in particular those who were as yet living on the dividends and interest of as yet solvent industrial corporations' stocks and bonds. In fear of the New Deal they sought to discredit Roosevelt by a word-of-mouth campaign. From 1933 to 1940 individual members of rich gentlemen's clubs of New York were ostracized from membership in the rudest manner by "the members" if they were not heard to speak frequently of "that son-of-a-bitch in the White House."

Franklin Roosevelt and his advisors said, in effect, "We've got to do what we feel is best for the people by whatever name the 'best' may bear. We've got them depositing again in the banks and are rehabilitating all those mortgaged properties which we have inherited by loaning the new owners of the properties funds at negative interest provided they will rehabilitate the property -- reroof or put in a bathroom, etc."

To those who understood some of its intricacies, everything was now out in the open about the world of banking. The New Deal said it was going to prohibit usurious rates of interest -- "the banks must earn enough to keep themselves going, but only can charge 1-1/2 percent for interest." Banks were regulated just like the Post Office. No banker had authority beyond that of a postmaster. The New Deal completely separated from banking what Morgan and many of the private banks had been doing-taking deposit money and putting it into common stocks and even into the bankers' own highly speculative private ventures. Thus came the New Deal's Securities and Exchange Commission and the complete separation of banking and initial risk financing -- or, at least, supposedly so. Banks' trust departments could as yet buy and sell corporate venture stocks for clients' accounts however.

There were a number of individual bankers who went far beyond unwise banking practices and who, as individuals, took personal advantage of the information they had of individual depositors' affairs and of their privilege as top bank officers to do truly inimical things to enrich their own positions. Few today remember that a half-century ago a number of New York and Chicago's top bankers were sentenced into penitentiaries -- the New Yorkers into Sing Sing -- the senior partner of J. P. Morgan and Company, the president of the National City Bank, the president of Chase Bank. Everyone of them had been found to be doing reprehensible financial tricks. They were selling their own friends short. They were opening their friends' mail and manipulating the stock market. They were manipulating everybody. They were way overstepping the moral limits of the privileges ethically existent for officers in the banking game, so a great housecleaning was done by the New Deal.

The banking story is best told by a poem that was, at that time, allegedly composed by Ogden Nash but was never to my knowledge formally published and copyrighted. It was, however, memorized and widely recited from copies often typewritten by those who remembered it:

"BUTCHER, BAKER, CANDLESTICK MAKER"

I'm an autocratic figure in these democratic states,
A dandy demonstration of hereditary traits.
As the children of the baker bake the most delicious breads,
As the sons of Casanova fill the most exclusive beds,
As the Barrymores and Roosevelts and others I could name
Inherited the talents that perpetuate their fame,
My position in the structure of society I owe
To the qualities my parents bequeathed me long ago.
My father was a gentleman and musical to boot.
He used to play piano in a house of ill repute.
The Madam was a lady and a credit to her cult,
She enjoyed my father's playing and I was the result.
So my Daddy and my Mummy are the ones I have to thank
That I'm Chairman of the Board of the National Silly Bank.

CHORUS: Oh, our parents forgot to get married.
Our parents forgot to get wed.
Did a wedding bell chime, it was always a time
When our parents were somewhere in bed.
Then all thanks to our kind loving parents.
We are kings in the land of the free.
Your banker, your broker, your Washington joker,
Three prominent bastards are we, tra la,
Three prominent bastards are we!

In a cozy little farmhouse in a cozy little dell
A dear old-fashioned farmer and his daughter used to dwell.
She was pretty, she was charming, she was tender, she was mild,
And her sympathy was such that she was frequently with child.
The year her hospitality attained a record high
She became a happy mother of an infant which was I.
Whenever she was gloomy, I could always make her grin,
By childishly inquiring who my daddy could have been.
The hired man was favored by the girls in Mummy's set,
And a traveling man from Scranton was an even money bet.
But such were Mother's motives and such was her allure,
That even Roger Babson wasn't absolutely sure.
Well, I took my mother's morals and I took my daddy's crust,
And I grew to be the founder of the New York Bankers Trust.

CHORUS: Oh, our parents forgot, etc.

In a torrid penal chain gang on a dusty southern road
My late lamented daddy had his permanent abode.
Now some were there for stealing, but my daddy's only fault
Was an overwhelming tendency for criminal assault.
His philosophy was simple and quite free from moral taint;
Seduction is for sissies, but a he-man wants his rape.
Daddy's total list of victims was embarrassingly rich,
And one of them was Mother, but he couldn't tell me which.
Well, I didn't go to college but I got me a degree.
I reckon I'm the model of a perfect S.O.B.,
I'm a debit to my country but a credit to my Dad,
The most expensive senator the country ever had.
I remember Daddy's warning -- that raping is a crime,
Unless you rape the voters, a million at a time.

CHORUS: Oh, our parents forgot, etc.

I'm an ordinary figure in these democratic states,
A pathetic demonstration of hereditary traits.
As the children of the cop possess the flattest kind of feet,
As the daughter of the floozie has a waggle to her seat,
My position at the bottom of society I owe
To the qualities my Parents bequeathed me long ago.
My father was a married man and, what is even more,
He was married to my mother -- a fact which I deplore.
I was born in holy wedlock, consequently by and by,
I was rooked by every bastard who had plunder in his eye.
I invested, I deposited, I voted every fall,
And I saved up every penny and the bastards took it all.
At last I've learned my lesson, and I'm on the proper track,
I'm a self-appointed bastard and I'M GOING TO GET IT
BACK.

CHORUS: Oh, our parents forgot to get married.
Our parents forgot to get wed.
Did a wedding bell chime, it was always a time
When our parents were somewhere in bed.
Then all thanks to our kind loving parents.
We are kings in the land of the free.
Your banker, your broker, your Washington joker,
Three prominent bastards are we, tra la,
Three prominent bastards are we!


• • •

To accomplish their restartings in all areas of the U.S.A. economic system the New Deal also set up the Works Progress Administration (to get people jobs) and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (to get the big industries going).

Amongst the first of the New Deal's emergency acts of 1933 was the establishment of the Works Progress Administration, which provided jobs for approximately anyone who wanted them -- artists, mathematicians, etc., as well as all white- and blue-collar workers and, of course, all day laborers and such.

Then, pressed by the labor unions and the political urge to avoid the characteristics of socialism and get the heretofore unemployed millions off WPA -- the New Deal's Works Progress Administration -- the government financed new buildings and granted mortgages for longer and longer periods to encourage people to undertake the production of much-needed homes and other buildings. It must be noted that the rejuvenated building industry was reset in motion as a concession to the building trades and 'a move to increase employment, not as a much-needed evolutionary advance in the art of human environment controlling. The unions were so strong as to be able to push the New Deal very hard in the direction of resuming only yesterday's multifoldedly inefficient "one-off" building design techniques and materials as the activity in which they could establish maximum employment. Technically ignorant bank officers became the authorities who alone judged the design validity of the structures and architectural acceptability of the building projects, funds for the building of which they authorized as mortgage- secured loans of their bank depositors' money.

The New Deal went on to rationalize its strategic acts by arguing to itself, "In order to continue as a nation we must have our national defense. Since it is established that there is nowhere nearly enough life support to go around in this world, if we don't have a formidable national defense, we're going to be successfully attacked by hungry enemies. Our national defense can't carry on without steel and the generation of electricity, the production of chemicals, and other imperative industrial items."

The FDR team soon concluded that the industries producing those absolute "defense" necessities were to be called our "prime contractors." The prime contractors must be kept going at any cost. "So we'll give war-production orders to the prime contractors to produce such-and-such goods. The contractors with signed government contracts can then go to the banks and borrow the money to pay their overhead and to buy the materials and power and to pay the wages to produce the goods. Then we the government will pay the producers for those finished goods and services, and they can payoff their loans from the bank. The money paid by the prime contractors as wages will give people buying power, which will allow them to start other economic production systems going." This became a monetary irrigation system (still in use today in 1980 U.S.A. affairs), which works at a rate providing about ten recirculations in a year following upon each major war order initiated by and paid for by the government.

In the depths of the Depression in 1932, when you could buy a meal for five cents and the finest of shirts for one dollar, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation went much further. It gave U.S. Steel $85 million worth of new rolling equipment (in 1980 U.S. currency that would be close to a billion dollars), etc., etc.

The U.S.A.'s Reconstruction Finance Corporation had a secondary government machinery-owning outfit that loaned all these prime contracting companies new equipment with which to fill their government orders. What the New Deal did in fact was to socialize the prime contractor corporations instead of the people. This hid the fact of socialism from the world in general. Socializing the prime contractor corporations indirectly benefited the, people themselves. In this way the New Deal seemingly didn't give money to the corporations -- just orders. The U.S.A.-established and-financed RFC loaned the prime contractors all the money they needed to buy all the equipment. But in the end the government rarely collected on the loans and finally just forgave the machinery borrowers altogether, selling them the equipment for very low "nominal" sums.

The New Deal had also pledged itself at outset to take care of the "forgotten man." The government voted minimum-wage limits of a substantial magnitude. The economy was going again. People were getting more and more jobs -- how many depended upon how many prime contracts the government gave out. World War II was clearly looming ahead. The New Deal said, "We have to be prepared" ... and their "preparedness" ordering increased. Jobs increased rapidly. Empty buildings filled.

There were a number of great corporations whose businesses had practically stopped by 1933, but those businesses had now been set in healthy motion once more under the New Deal's socializing of the prime contractors. Franklin Roosevelt said to the heads of the great corporations that had not gone "bust," "Everyone of you has a large surplus that you held on to, in fear, through the Depression. We want you to spend your surpluses in research and development of new equipment. Since the early clipper ship days, it has always been a function of a 'fundamental risk enterprise' that the enterprise use some of its profits to buy itself new and better equipment -- a new and better ship -- with the enterprise that is doing the prime risk-taking by investing in the new equipment, thereby requalifying for the privileges and rewards granted by governments for wise risking, daring execution, and good management."

FDR said, "We want you enterprisers to 'modernize.'" But U.S.A. big corporate management said, in unison, "We won't do that. It is much too risky a time to use any of our surplus." They knew the oncoming World War II was forcing the government to see that their plants were modernized, so by holding out they forced the government to take over both the risk and cost of modernizing. Heretofore in the history of private enterprise research and development -- of more efficient new plants and equipment -- had been funded from the enterprise's "surplus" earnings -- i.e., from earnings prudently withheld from distribution to stockholders to ensure the continuing strength of the enterprise.

Then FDR's U.S.A. Treasury, with all FDR's lawyers' advice, ruled that the large private-enterprise corporations could make their new plant expansion and equipment improvements and charge the costs to operating expenses, which expenses were then to be deducted from new earnings before calculating income taxes. This amounted, in fact, to an indirect subsidy to cover all new-equipment acquisition. The U.S.A. Treasury next ruled that all research and development -- "R and D" -- was thereafter also to be considered by the U.S.A. Treasury Department as "an operating expense" and also to be deducted from income before calculating income taxes. The U.S.A. thereby eliminated almost all the "risks" of private enterprise.

Next Henry Luce, representing news publishers in America -- the newspapers and magazines -- went to Roosevelt and said, "Your democracy needs its news. You have to have some way for the people to know what's going on." "Yes," said FDR. Luce went on, "We publishers can't afford to publish the news. The prices people are willing to pay for the news won't pay for the publications. The newspapers and magazines are only paid for by advertising, and the New Deal has no allowance for advertising in its operating procedures." The New Deal then ruled that advertising was henceforth to be classified as research and development, therefore deductible from gross income as an operating expense before calculating taxes. Thus advertising became a hidden subsidy of very great size -- about $7 billion a year at that time -- hidden in tax-calculation procedures. The subsidy was so great as to cover the founding of what has come to be known as "Madison Avenue."

While the government was doing all this, the Congress passed strict and comprehensive rent controls, bank-loan-interest controls, and price controls of every kind. It was pure socialism. It had to be done that way. There was no question.

The Securities and Exchange Commission reforms removed J. P. Morgan's two directors from the boards of almost every one of the U.S.A.'s great corporations -- except Henry Ford's -- whose interlocking directorships had formerly given Morgan prime control over U.S.A. industry. With the termination of Morgan's control of all the major corporation boards such as those of U.S. Steel and General Motors, these great corporations' managements found that they were no longer beholden to J. P. Morgan, and only to their stockholders. "All we have to do now to hold our jobs is to make money for the stockholders."

At this moment the U.S.A. had evolved into a managerial capitalism, in contradistinction to the now-defunct, invisible "finance capitalism" of which 1. P. Morgan had been the master.

What became noticeable at this time was the uniformity of position taken by all the great corporation managements in respect to actions taken by the New Deal -- for instance, the great corporations' across-the-board refusal to expend surplus on research and development.

To discover how that came about it first must be realized that the industrial- enterprise underwriting and expansion-financing of the private banking houses of Wall Street could not have been carried on without the advice, contract-writing services, and legal planning of the world's most powerful and most widely informed legal brains. As a consequence the corporation law firms of Wall Street, New York, were peopled with the most astute thinkers and tacticians of America-if not of the whole world. When the Great Crash of 1929 came and events of the Depression occurred, as already related (and the great poker hands were called, and the New Deal had prosecuted the guilty and housecleaned the system and socialized the prime contractors, etc.), it was the counsel of Wall Street lawyers that governed the positions taken by the new, self-perpetuating, industrial-giants' managements. It was the former 1. P. Morgan's and other financiers' lawyers who now counseled all the as-yet-solvent big-industry managements to guard their surplus and refuse to cooperate with the New Deal.

Furthermore the Wall Street lawyers could see clearly. what the public couldn't see -- i.e., that while the New Deal was unilaterally socializing the system, it was doing so without exacting any contractual obligation on the corporations to acknowledge the government's economic recovery strategies. The corporations gave no legal acknowledgment of their socialized status. It was clear to the Wall Street lawyers that without such contractual acknowledgment the government socializing was a one-sided, voluntary commitment on the part of the political party in power. Therefore, in fact, none of the big corporations had lost their free-enterprise independence by accepting the enormous government rehabilitation expenditures.

Since the Wall Street lawyers and brethren in other parts of the country were called upon to fill the Supreme Court bench from which body they could determine the province of "free enterprise," the lawyers reasoned somewhat as follows: "A socialized system -- as clearly manifest by the U.S.S.R. -- cannot tolerate free enterprise's freedom of initiative. There is no lucrative law practice in socialized states -- ergo, if we are to survive, we lawyers on Wall Street had best figure out how to go about keeping the fundamentals of capitalism alive amongst the few great industrial corporations that as yet remain solvent despite the 1929 and 1933 Depression events."

The Wall Street lawyers saw clearly that it was those surviving corporations' undistributed surplus which certified that capitalism had not gone entirely bankrupt despite its banking system's failure.

Operating invisibly behind the "skirts" of the as-yet-live corporations, the Wall Street lawyers very informally, but very seriously, organized far-ahead-in- time research-and-study teams consisting of the most astute corporation lawyers to be found in America. From these teams' realistic conceptioning they formulated a grand strategy that would keep capitalism's private enterprise alive and prospering indefinitely as run invisibly but absolutely legally by the lawyers.

The latter's research discovered that they would not soon be able to popularly and legally overthrow the New Deal. It was clear that not until World War II was over might they find conditions suitable for untying all the economic controls established by the New Deal.

It is appropriate at this point to do some reviewing of evolutionary changes that had been transpiring in the nature of capitalism.

It all starts with the land-based capitalism, a capitalism maintained by whoever seized, successfully defended, and controlled the land -- ergo, owned the land. Those producing food and life support on the lands were all subservient to, and paid tribute to, the great landowners. In land capitalism whoever owned the fertile fields controlled all the wealth to be made from that land. Land capitalism dealt with nature's own metabolic productivity.
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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Postby admin » Tue Jul 28, 2015 6:22 am

PART 3 OF 3

Then private enterprise and finance capitalism came to discover what could be done with mass-produced metals to multiply the value of the land-produced, life-support metabolics.

In the mid-nineteenth century mass production of steel, for the first time in history, suddenly gave humans the capability of producing long-span beams, whereby they were able to produce large-enough, semifireproof, and powerful structures to move more and more wealth-production work under cover. Western-world capitalism began to produce wealth under cover in addition to that produced out in the field. To make the tin cans in the factory to can the food produced in the fields, or to take the cotton produced in the fields and mass-produce cotton cloth, became known as "value-added- by-manufacture." Value-added-by-manufacturing was accomplished primarily with metals -- metal buildings, metal machinery, metal tools, metal sea and land transportation systems, and, ofttimes, metal end products.

As already mentioned, it was the new, world-around, metals sources that brought about the name World War I.

Suddenly we had a completely new form of capitalism, which required both the large-scale financing and integration of metals, mines and mineowners, metals refining and shaping into wholesaleable forms, all to be established around the world by the world masters of the great line of supply. The world line of metals-and-alloy supply was essential in producing all the extraordinarily productive new machinery and that machinery's delivery system, as was the generation and delivery of the unprecedentedly vast amounts of inanimate energy as electricity.

This new form of the world power structure's capitalism -- by ownership of the mines and metals working all around the world -- we call the metals and mining capitalism. Whoever owned the mines had incredible power, but never as great as those who controlled the line of their supply. Combining the two, (1) the mines and metals-producing industry and (2) the line of supply, we have the world power structure that operated as the first supranational, world-around-integrated, metals cartels. They were out of reach of the laws of anyone country, in a metals cartels capitalism. Combining these two with (3) the absolute need of the large financing and credit at magnitudes rarely affordable by anyone individual, we find finance capitalism integrating the world operation.

At any rate we now understand why the 1914-18 war was called World War I. It was inherently a war for mastery of the world's metallic resources and their world-around physical integration, controlling, and exploitation.

The amount of metal productivity of World War I was so great that, after the war, as the arms products became obsolete and were displaced by new design products, the metal contained in the ever vaster amounts of obsolete products began to come back into circulation as scrap. The scrap resources swiftly increased. The Morgan-escaped managerial capitalists said, "I'm going to keep my job if we pay our stockholders dividends -- the rate at which we can pay dividends is directly dependent upon the rate at Which our production wheels go around. To keep our wheels going around, we don't care whether we are using scrap metals or mined metals. As a matter of fact, the metals-as-scrap are usually more refined than the metals coming out of the mines. They cost less, so we're better off using the scrap-whether from obsolete buildings, machinery, armaments, railways, or ships." Formerly Morgan had insisted on all his controlled manufacturing corporations acquiring all their metal stocks only from newly mined, refined, and wholesale "shaped" stocks.

The mining companies found that industry would not buy ingots of their metals. They found that they had to turn their metals into tubes, bars, sheet, plate, wire, and a great variety of sizes and shapes. Wall Street's finance capitalism, therefore, underwrote the development of a host of metals-shaping industries who were the automatic customers of the only-ingot-producing, metals-mining corporations.

The post-World War I mineowner-capitalists began gradually to be washed out of the game by virtue of the Morgan-emancipated managerial capitalists saying, "Our job is to keep the wheels going around." Wheels-going- around producing saleable goods from scrap metals became strategic.

Up to the time of World War I the owners of the factories (Mr. Morgan et al.) said, "We put you in as management to make a profit out of this factory." If the management said, "Give us a new piece of machinery," the owners said, "New piece of machinery! What are you talking about? We put you in to make money out of our machinery. You are fired." Change was anathema to the J. P. Morgan-type of financier. Scientists would come to Mr. Morgan and say, "Mr. Morgan, I can show you how to make steel so that it won't rust." "Young man! The more it rusts, the more I sell. How crazy you must be! Get the doctor to look this man over, he's obviously a lunatic -- take those mad papers out of his pocket and put them in my desk drawer."

But change was welcomed by the late-1930s' managerial capitalism. New designs called for more whirling of their production wheels. The change came in the form of many new armament designs for the clearly approaching World War II. The new designs released as "scrap" the metals from obsolete designs.

Concurrently, with the New Deal's reforms and controls, the wage-earners were now getting a fairer share of the national income, and the economy was prospering -- particularly so as the New Deal began officially to remember the "forgotten man." Congress put a dollar cellar under the wages and elevated worker earnings enough to produce minor affluence and security for labor in general.

Just before the U.S.A. entered World War II, the Wall Street lawyers instructed the heads of great corporations to say to Roosevelt, "We heads of the corporations of America were not elected by the American people. We were chosen by our stockholders. Our job is to make profits for our stockholders. At the time of World War I a lot of business people were called 'profiteers.' As we enter into World War II war production, we don't want to be called 'immoral profiteers.' If you want cooperation from us, Mr. Roosevelt, you ,as government are going to have to be the one to initiate our corporations' being properly rewarded for our cooperation."

Mr. Roosevelt said, "I agree. You are beholden to your stockholders, so you are going to have to pay them dividends." Coping with this dilemma, the United States Treasury Department agreed that it was legitimate for the industrial corporations to make up to 12-percent profit per each product turnover. The New Deal said, "We the people, as government, are, however, going to renegotiate with you all the time, continually inspect you, to be sure you are really earning your profits." As a consequence of all the continuous renegotiation by the government, those U.S.A. corporations earned an average of 10 percent on every turnover. This meant that in World War II for every annual war budget -- running at first at $70 billion per year -- 10 percent, or $7 billion, was earmarked for distribution to the stockholders of the corporations. Complete socialization of the stockholders of the prime U.S.A. corporations was accomplished.

Amongst the prime contractors identified by the New Deal were all the leading automobile companies. For example, Chrysler was picked out to produce the war tanks. With their powerful position established with the government, the U.S.A. automobile manufacturers, on being asked to convert all of their productivity to war armaments, agreed amongst themselves to put into storage all of their production tooling and to resume their postwar auto production with the models they were last-producing at outset of war. New production tooling would cost them several billions of dollars. They had their Madison Avenue companies grind out advertisements showing the G.I. soldiers saying, "Please keep everything the same at home until I return."

Because Germany's, Italy's, and Japan's production equipment was destroyed during World War II, they were free after the war to start using the newest war-advanced technology in both the designing and the production of their automobiles. That was the beginning of the end for the U.S.A.'s prestige as the world's technological leader. The U.S.A. post-World War II cars were inherently seven years passe in contrast to the smaller, faster foreign cars. The "Big Three" American auto producers undertook to manufacture while keeping the foreign cars off the market and while they themselves exploited America's market need for a geographically expanding economy's transportation.

In the late 1960s the "Big Three" automobile companies of America found that their distributors were disenchanted with decreasing financial returns and with frequent bankruptcy. To hold their distributors G.M., Ford and Chrysler deliberately manufactured a few of their mechanically well-designed parts with inferior materials that were guaranteed to deteriorate electrolytically or otherwise. The replacement of these parts guaranteed that all the distributors' car buyers would have to return to them for service on a high-frequency basis, at which time the distributor would replace the parts catalogue-priced so high that the distributor was guaranteed a profitable business. This continuing deceit of the customers -- we the people -- was the beginning of the end of the American automobile business and the once-great world esteem for Uncle Sam. U.S.A. discreditation has been brought about without the U.S.A. people's knowledge of the money-maker-world's invisible cheating.

Throughout all pre-World War II years employers had maintained that unemployed people were unemployed because they were unqualified for survival, socially expendable. Then World War II saw young people deployed on war tasks all around the world. In view of this loss of labor vast amounts of automation were incorporated in the U.S.A.'s home-front war production. With the war over, the government found the cream of its youth all unemployed, and because of the automation there were no jobs in sight. Because they were the proven "cream of the youth," no one could say they were unemployed because they were unqualified, so the as-yet-operative New Deal created the G.I. Bill, which sent all those young people to prepaid college and university educations.

By World War II's end labor was earning so much that, for the first time, it was feeling truly secure, affluent, and successful. Emulating the pattern of the rich, individuals of labor were becoming little capitalists, with many enjoying the realization of their own home and land, with two shiny new post-World War II cars in the garage, their kids going to college, and some savings in the bank. The workers began buying shares in IBM and other superpromising private enterprise companies.

The Wall Street lawyers, being astute observers of such matters, realized that this labor affluence had brought about a psychological reorientation of the body politic. People no longer remembered or felt the depression of spirit that was experienced in the Great Depression of social economics following the Great Crash. The Wall Street lawyers' grand strategists saw this as the time for breaking through the New Deal's hold on government, an event which, up to that time, seemed impossible. The lawyers said, "Whoever can get the victorious, supreme-command American general of World War II as their candidate for President will be able to get the presidency." They captured Eisenhower. Eisenhower had no political conviction, one way or the other. His vanity was excited at the idea of becoming president of his country.

The Wall Street lawyers explained to Eisenhower the prevailing new psychology of affluence and convinced him that the new affluent majority would elect a Republican. Thus they successfully persuaded him to be a Republican. With the healthy economy the new wage-earner capitalists, with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, readily voted for Eisenhower on the Republican ticket. Eisenhower's Wall Street lawyer-managers explained to him that he had been able to win the war because of the vision, courage, and ingenuity and the productive power of American free enterprise. They convinced Eisenhower that "the U.S.A. is, in fact, free enterprise." They also convinced him that the Democrats' New Deal was socialism and therefore the inherent enemy of free enterprise.

As soon as the Wall Street lawyers had Eisenhower in office in 1952, they instructed him to break loose all the economic controls of the New Deal. They had him cut all price controls, all rent controls, all interest-rate controls; they had him terminate anything that was stymieing the making of big money by big business. For instance, they persuaded Eisenhower to allow the insurance companies to invest their vast funds in common stocks. Before Ike's liberation of the insurance companies they were allowed to put their funds only in "Class A" bonds and similar investments. Cheered by the capitalist- owned sector of the press, his Wall Street lawyer-advisors for a long time had Ike feeling like a great liberator.

The Wall Street lawyers' grand strategists put the Wall Street lawyer John Foster Dulles in as Ike's Secretary of State to dictate the American foreign policy of "Soviet containment," and Foster Dulles's Wall Street lawyer brother Allen Dulles was put in as head of a new brand of absolutely invisible, U.S.A.-financed, capitalistic welfare department, the CIA, established ostensibly to cold-war-cope with the secret-agent operations of our enemies. So secret was their operation that the people of the United States and its Congressional lawmakers had no idea of the size of the unlimited funds given to the CIA, nor for what those unknown funds were expended. The CIA and Allen Dulles had a U.S.A.-signed blank check for X amount of money to do X tasks. I call the CIA, "Capitalism's Invisible Army."

The great U.S.A. corporations, having been saved in 1933 by being only "unilaterally socialized," and having in the subsequent fifteen years become powerfully healthy from enormous war orders, immediately after Eisenhower's election started escalating prices. Their logic was that the first corporation head to increase prices in a given field of production would be the first to be able to distribute that "upping" as profits to his stockholders and thereby to gain for himself greater economic management status and personal wealth.

* * *

As a long-time student of foreign investment I saw a pattern developing. Between 1938 and 1940 I was on the editorial staff of Fortune magazine as its science and technology consultant, and my researchers harvested all the statistics for Fortune's tenth-anniversary issue, "U.S.A. and the World." In that issue I uncovered and was able to prove several new socioeconomic facts -- for the first time in the history of industrial economics: (1) the economic health of the American -- or any industrial -- economy was no longer disclosed (as in the past) by the total tonnage of its product output, but by the amount of electrical energy generated by that activity; tonnage had ceased to be the criterion because (2) we were doing so much more given work with so much less pounds of materials, ergs of energy, and seconds of time per given function as to occasion ever newer, lighter, and stronger metallic alloys, chemicals, and electronics. Though at that time universally used as the number-one guide to the state of economic health of any world nation, tonnage no longer represented prosperity. The amount of energy being electrically generated and consumed became the most sensitive telltale of economic health. Furthermore, I was able in that issue to study carefully all the foreign investments made in America all the way back to its colonization in the early seventeenth century.

The ramifications of my studies in foreign investments in America and elsewhere are wide. An example of my findings included discovery of the swift, post-American Revolution investment in U.S.A. ventures by the British (East India Company-advised) financial world as already mentioned.

I found a similar situation to be existent in World War II. As head mechanical engineer of the U.S.A. Board of Economic Warfare I had available to me copies of any so-called intercepts I wanted. Those were transcriptions of censor-listened-to intercontinental telephone conversations, along with letters and cables that were opened by the censor and often deciphered, and so forth. As a student of patents I asked for and received all the intercept information relating to strategic patents held by both our enemies and our own big corporations, and I found the same money was often operative on both sides in World War II.

The East India Company, whose flag I have shown to be the origin of ours, was a private enterprise chartered by the British. Quite clearly the East India Company didn't lose the American Revolution. The British government lost the Revolution, and the East India Company swiftly moved large amounts of its capital into U.S. America.

With World War II over I began to watch very closely the foreign investments patterning and the strategic metals movements, especially of copper, but those of silver and gold as well. In 1942 America had all the monetary bullion gold in the world in the Kentucky hills. During World War II what was called "the China Bloc" -- which was the Sung family and others backing Chiang Kai-shek -- were able to persuade the American Congress that China had always been corrupt 8.nd was eternally corruptible; to completely avoid communism in China Congress should let them have $100 million worth of gold bullion ($2 billion at January 1980 gold pricing) to be taken out of the Kentucky hills. Personally I don't think that gold ever went anywhere near China. I think it went right' into the Swiss bank accounts of some clever thieves. But with that much gold out of the Pandora's box of the U.S.A. Kentucky hills vaults, it provided a "gold lever" with which to progressively pry loose more and more gold to be reintroduced into the "lifeblood" of world economic accounting.

After World War II, with only the one exception of the $100 million worth of monetary gold bullion of the China Bloc, all the rest of the world's international monetary gold bullion was residing in the Kentucky hills, U.S.A., vaults. All countries outside America had gone off the gold standard. In the course of international monetary negotiating that accompanied the U.S.A.'s post-World War I inadvertent ascendency into being the master economic state, and the U.S.A.'s post-World War II attempts to rehabilitate the leading economies around the world by' rehabilitating the economies of its vanquished nations and thereby increasing international trading, the U.S.A. was persuaded to re-establish the gold standard for accounting the international balances of trade.

Gold is the super-helicopter of the open world-market-trading stratagems of the makers-of-money-for-self by the legalized manipulation of the money equity of others, all unbeknownst to the initial wealth equity-owning others. In 1934 Roosevelt's New Deal prohibited the further use of gold by U.S.A. citizens or U.S.A. businesses.

By 1953 it became apparent that the Wall Street lawyers were moving the major American corporations out of America. Of the 100 largest corporations in America four out of five of their annual investment dollars in new machinery and buildings for 1953 went exclusively into their foreign operations. This four-fifths rate persisted for a score of years.

The Wall Street lawyers told Mr. Eisenhower that they didn't like the overaltruistic social viewpoint of the Marshall Plan for helping underdeveloped countries. They liked foreign aid, but not exclusively for the development of underdeveloped countries. The Wall Street lawyers approved of the "foreign aid" wherefore the U.S.A. continued with annual foreign-aid commitments by Congress. The average annual foreign-aid appropriation has been $4 billion (1950 value) per year over the twenty-seven-year period from 1952 to 1979, which amounted to a $100 billion total. Each new year's foreign-aid bill had a rider that said that if American companies were present in the country being aided, the money had to be spent through those American companies. In the foreign countries the corporations and individuals could again deal in gold.

Foreign aid paid for all the new factories and machinery of all the American corporations moving out of America. This became a fundamental pattern: first the 100 largest corporations, then the 200 largest corporations followed, then what Fortune calls the 500 largest corporations. Moving out of America could be done readily because a corporation is only a legal entity -- it is not a human being. It had no physical body to pass through immigration or emigration. You and I cannot move out of America because we are physical -- we need a passport. A corporation does not.

So the Wall Street lawyers simply moved their prime corporate operations elsewhere. It was clearly evident that with only 7 percent of the world's population in the U.S.A., and with two cars already in many U.S.A. garages, by far the major portion of further exploitation of the world's peoples' needs and desires would develop outside of the U.S. of America. But the main objective of the Wall Street lawyers was for the corporations to get out from under the tax control of the American government. In 1933 the American people had saved the corporations by subsidizing them; then, twenty years later, the Wall Street lawyers moved them out of America, getting the American people to pay for the move. This allowed the corporations to acquire gold equities while the U.S.A. citizens and small domestic businesses could not do so.

Soon after Eisenhower's 1952 election to the presidency, the lawyers reminded him once more that America clearly had won the war only through his brilliant generalship backed up by American free enterprise, and said, "We want you to stop the welfare-state-inclined American government from competing with free enterprise. You must cut out all the navy yards and the arsenals. They compete against the free-enterprise corporations, which are quite capable of doing the' same work as the navy yards, but of doing it much more efficiently. You must turn all such production over to private industry, cut out the U.S.A. post office and turn that over to private enterprise, cut out the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and turn that over to the insurance industry." Although much of this transfer of production from government to private enterprise control was never completed, Eisenhower goaded on by his lawyers initiated the flow of taxpayer-financed, highly trained personnel and especially their technical know-how to private enterprise. This irreversible trend continues on to the present day, as can be show~ by the history of the whole of the atomic energy field.

Those acquainted with the story of the atomic bomb development remember the momentous occasion when theoretical fission was discovered in 1939 by Hahn and Stresemann in Germany and secretly communicated by them to American physicists, who checked out their calculations and found them correct and then persuaded Einstein to go to Roosevelt to tell him that this was so and that Hitler's scientists were hot on the trail.

Franklin Roosevelt, exercising war powers given him by Congress, in effect instantly appropriated $80 billion for what became known later as the Manhattan Project. Later, that initial $80 billion appropriation was supplemented by an additional $75 billion for a total of $155 billion of the American people's money that went into developing atomic energy.

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FIGURE 17. Price Index for All Items

The Wall Street lawyers' grand strategists sent a man named Lewis Strauss to Washington to "join in the World War II effort." Strauss was a partner in the Wall Street banking house of Kuhn, Loeb. He was also a brilliant son-in-law of Adolph Ochs, president of The New York Times. Strauss was made an admiral in gratitude for his forsaking Wall Street to help America win the war. After the war Admiral Strauss was appointed to the Atomic Energy Commission; in 1953 Eisenhower named him commission chairman. Strauss and the Wall Street lawyers persuaded Eisenhower that the Atomic Energy Commission must not be in competition with capitalism and must be turned over to private enterprise. So it was -- $155 billion worth of it, all of which had been paid for by the American public -- but it consisted of work so secret that only the scientists who were intimate with the work understood it.

All that was necessary to correct the situation was to give contracts to private enterprise to carry on the atomic work and to let the government's scientists go to work for the private-enterprise corporations.

At this point the Wall Street lawyers and Strauss persuaded Eisenhower that the United States Bureau of Standards' scientists were in competition with private enterprise and must be curbed. Strauss assured Eisenhower that the corporations would take on all the bureau's discarded scientists. What the Wall Street lawyers' grand strategists realized was something momentous -- to wit ... that in the new 99.9-percent invisible reality of alloys, chemistry, electronics, and atomics, scientific and technical know-how was everything. Physical land and buildings were of no further interest to capitalism. Metaphysical know-how was the magic wand of the second half of the twentieth-century world power structures. Physical properties were subject to deterioration, taxable, and cumbersome. Advised to do so by their lawyers, capitalism and private enterprise set about after World War II to monopolize all strategic technological know-how -- i.e., all metaphysical properties -- and to dump all physical properties. They called for an economic program by which people would be forced to buy the apartments and houses -- to get all physical properties off capitalism's hands.

The post-Eisenhower era becomes most suitably identified as that of lawyer capitalism and of "no-risk," sure-thing, free enterprise.

The whole of atomic development was know-how. Scientists had the know-how, and anybody without their technical information could not even speak their language. The Know-How Club, monopolized by lawyer capitalism, was a very tight club. Furthermore, the nonmember four billion plus human beings on planet Earth knew nothing about the invisible micro-macro, non-sensorially-tune-in-able reality. Large private enterprise had now hired 'all the know-how scientists and engineers. They seemingly could keep the public out of their affairs forever. The world power structure had the U.S. government completely emasculate the Bureau of Standards. There was an earnest and concerned battle by a few responsible scientists to keep the bureau intact, but they were overwhelmed. Henceforth all science must be done by the private corporations themselves or under their subsidized university-college and private laboratory work. To appreciate the extent of this know-how monopoly of the big corporations, one need only look over the wording of the scientist and engineering help-wanted advertisements of the big corporations in the many pages of The New York Times Sunday business section or of their counterpart publications in other big cities.

In the invisible, esoteric world of today's science there is no way for the American government or public, without the U.S.A. Bureau of Standards' scientists, to follow the closely held technical secrets of the big, profit-oriented corporations. To a small extent such popular journals as Scientific American help people follow details of this-and-that special case science without learning of the significance of the information in respect to comprehensive socioeconomic evolution.

No economic accounting books list metaphysical assets. Metaphysics is held to be insubstantial -- meaning in Latin "nothing on which to stand." Patents can be granted only for special cases -- i.e., limited physical-practice applications of abstract generalized principles, which principles alone are inherently metaphysical and unpatentable, being only "discovered" and not "invented." But physical patents are capital.

We have two fundamental realities in our Universe -- the physical and the metaphysical. Physicists identify all physical phenomena as the exclusive manifest of energy: energy associative as matter or disassociative as electromagnetic behavior, radiation. Both of these energy states are reconvertible one into the other. Because there is no experimental evidence of energy being either created or lost, world scientist-philosophers now concede it to be in evidence that Universe is eternally regenerative.

The physicists have found that energy will always articulate levers electromagnetically, gravitationally, chemically by reactive forces, by vibratory waves, etc. Metaphysics consists only of weightless, dimensionless, abstract thoughts and mathematical\ principles that cannot lever physical needles in respect to instrument dials. Energy in either of its states, being physical, can be entered into the capital account ledgers.

The large issue today is the technical know-how that governs the transformations of energy between its two states. "Know-how" is metaphysics. Metaphysics now rules. When the head of one of the U.S.A.'s largest banks was asked what "commodities" were involved in that bank's import-export dealings with the rest of the world on behalf of the Chinese government, he answered that know-how was the prime commodity being acquired by the Chinese through that bank.

I have spent a great deal of time since World War II in Japan, dealing with their industrialists, and have personally witnessed the Japanese acquisition by contracts of a whole complex of exquisitely specific packages of industrial know-how, together with the respective follow-through educational services -- all acquired from, and performed by, engineering and business-administration teams of many of the leading American corporations.

The post-World War II Japanese had already perceived that they did not need to own the physical mines of metallic ores because they had learned also how to carry on exclusively with the melting down and recirculating of the world's metals, particularly those poured into the Orient and Western Pacific islands by the U.S.A. during World War II in the form of now-obsolete -- ergo, "scrapped" -- armaments. The essence of Japan's recent decades' economic success has been the acquisition and realization of the industrial-technology-know-how wealth existent exclusively in metaphysical know-how, in contradistinction to strictly physical land properties, tools, and end products. With all their pre-World War II machinery smashed the Japanese and Germans acquired new, vastly improved industrial equipment with which to realize their know-how production, whereas the World-War-II- winning U.S.A. and European Allies using their old technology became more preoccupied with making money than in producing superior products.

Because of the foregoing it was now possible to maintain that hidden know-how capability within private corporate walls. Since 99 percent of humanity does not as yet understand science's mathematical language, less than 1 percent of humanity is scientifically literate--ergo, the lawyers' strategy of tight monopolization of scientific know-how within the scientifically staffed corporations was highly feasible.

In 1929, at the time of the Great Wall Street Crash, only about 1 percent of the U.S.A.'s big corporations had research departments. Now, half a century later, all the big corporations have all the powerful research departments, other than those in which pure scientists are engaged in academic work under some corporate or government subsidy. Through the national defense budget's armaments development, all the once risky research and development costs of enterprise are paid for by the public through taxation.

The big oil companies knew long ago that humanity would ultimately run out of an adequate supply of petroleum and other fossil fuels, though coal may last a thousand years. That's why, by the means we have reviewed, the oil companies acquired control of the know-how on atomic energy as well as all the atomic plants and equipment paid for originally by the U.S.A. government. The power structure's only interest is in selling energy -- and only energy that they can run through a meter. They're not in the least interested in anyone getting windpower -- except themselves. Very rich men love having their sailing yachts wind-driven to Europe or the South Seas, but this is not for the people. People's power must be piped or wired to them only through meters.

When in 1972 all the power-structure capital had converted its dollars into gold, oil, or other highly concentrated and mobile equities, then-President Richard Nixon severed the U.S.A. dollar from its government-guaranteed gold equity value of $35 per ounce, the U.S.A. people's dollar buying power plummeted -- now, in 1980, being worth only 5 cents of the 1971 U.S.A. dollar.

By 1974 much of the world's buying power landed in the lap of the Arabs, who also sat atop the chief petroleum source of the world. In effect they had both the money with which to buy their petroleum and the largest reserves to be bought. If someone wanted to buy their petroleum, often they couldn't do so, because few in the world had the monetary resources remaining with which to do so. The Arabs realized they would have to lend out their money to work, but they had no experience in such investment matters. The Arabs had no knowledge of the vast industrial production and distribution technical and administrative requirements. Nor had they any experience in the exploitation of the world-energy industry prior to their own lands' exploitation by others before the onslaught of the petroleum company giants. The Arabs had not known how to discover, drill for, refine, and distribute the petroleum upon which they had been sitting unwittingly for thousands of· years.

So content were the Arab monarchs with the gratification of their every physical desire -- artfully heaped upon them personally by the capitalist world's foreign-oil-exploiting functionaries -- that they would never have taken over the direct mastery of their petroleum affairs had not the psycho-guerilla warfare between the capitalist and communist powers deliberately aroused the Arabian peoples themselves, bringing pressure upon their leaders to take over the foreigners' operations. Since their subsequent epochal enrichment, the Arabs' political leaders as well as the monarchs and sheiks have bought everything of which they could dream, as stimulated by the affluent acquisitions patterns in other economies. After vast stock and bond investments, real estate and new building ventures in foreign countries, they found that they could expend only a fraction of their monetary wealth. The Arabs have now reached the dilemma of how to turn their monetary gold fortune to important and lasting advantage.

In 1977 the king of Saudi Arabia said to a leading American banker with large oil interests, "My banks don't know anything about international banking and major industrial accommodation." The American banker said, "Would you like me to run your banks?" The king said, "Of course." So the American banker did, and in the process he taught them international and transnational industrial-finance management.

There's no question that the few who have title to Arabian oil find it essential to amalgamate their operations with the world's great oil companies, which own the vast equipment of world-around distribution and interaccounting capabilities as well as the vast majority of refineries and petrochemical industries. The great oil companies control it all. In general they and noncommunist Arabia are one and the same. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries' (OPEC) officialdom, regardless of national political differences, is very probably run entirely by the oil corporations' trillions of dollars of persuasiveness.

It is relevant at this point to note that the Arabs' inadvertent isolation of both the physical-wealth items -- (1) the underlying monetary gold and (2) the prime negotiable energy commodity, petroleum -- and their concurrent discovery of their utter lack of know-how, clearly differentiated out the relative values of (A) the purely physical petroleum and gold, and (B) the exclusively metaphysical know-how wealth. It turned out that B was most in demand as well as scarcest. The physical wealth was thus proved to be of approximately zero value, while the metaphysical know-how wealth proved to be the prime economic "good-health" constituent of wealth.

Moreover, those who own oil also own the atomic energy and have long ago assumed that, if humanity exhausts or abandons oil, it will automatically switch over to atomic energy. Humanity has had nothing to say about all this because the know-how was so obscure and the lawyers' stratagems so invisibly large. The lawyers' omnilegal international stratagems were and as yet are so obscure, in fact, that no government authorities -- let alone the public -- knew that the world energy monopoly's scientists had not taken into account earthquakes, for instance, in the construction of New England atomic energy plants, ~or had the public or government anticipated that the intuitive wisdom of humanity would develop such an antipathy to atomic energy as eventually to force lawyer capitalism to fall back on its "ownable" coal mines and shale for conversion into pipable and meterable liquid fuels. It is as yet inscrutable to the public, government, and lawyer capitalism just how strong literate humanity's intuitive wisdom will be in preventing the full-scale conversion of coal and shale into liquid energy fuel when it learns, as it has now been learned in a scientifically undeniable way, that this selfishly exploitable energy fuel strategy will inexorably destroy the atmosphere's capability of supporting biological life on planet Earth. Like all fossil fuels coal gives off carbon dioxide when burned, but coal gives off 25 percent more of it per unit of energy than oil and 50 percent more than natural gas. Although carbon dioxide comprises less than 1 percent of the Earth's atmospheric gases, this concentration has risen 17 percent since preindustrial times and is expected to rise an equivalent amount in the next twenty years. The "greenhouse" effect from the Sun's heat and increasing amounts of this otherwise harmless gas could send average global temperatures soaring by as much as 6 degrees Fahrenheit within fifty years according to a U.S. government study. This unprecedented global environmental catastrophe would be virtually irreversible for centuries.

No one knows whether the cessation of the waste radiation of atomic energy exploitation or the cessation of coal and shale conversion into fluid fuel will occur in time to permit the physical continuance of humans on planet Earth. What we do know however, as we have previously stated, is (1) that, with the unselfish use of technology, it is now possible to take care of all humanity at a higher standard of living than any have ever experienced and do so on a sustaining basis by employing only our daily energy income from Sun and gravity and (2) that we can do so in time to permit the healthy continuance of humans on planet Earth.

Now things are beginning to go wrong with atomic-power generation ... everywhere. To start off with, neither the scientists nor the atomic plant private-enterprise owners have any safe solution for what to do with radioactive atomic wastes. Humanity's intuitions are logically aroused, and public antipathy to atomic energy is rapidly expanding -- despite billions of dollars being spent by the world energy cartel in propaganda campaigns to make the vast majority of people "go for" atomic energy.

The second great gasoline-line "pinch" of June 1979 was put upon the public by the invisible energy-know-how cartel to painfully divert the public concern generated by the Three Mile Island radiation accident and threat of a reactor "meltdown." Though the public had reacted strongly against atomic plants, the sudden energy supply squeeze administered by the oil companies made the general public so energy hungry again that it stopped, for the moment, listening to those who were attempting to curtail atomic energy plants. The "gas crisis" re-established "rational" public yielding to governmental support of atomic energy as the "answer" to the energy crisis.

Today's (1980) world-power-structures struggle is one between the U.S.S.R. and big capitalism, which we now call lawyer capitalism, which deliberately took the world's private-enterprise corporations out of the fundamental jurisdiction of America. They have kept their U.S.A. operations going in a seemingly normal way, so people in U.S. America haven't realized that these companies are officially situated elsewhere despite the incredible amplification of those great corporations' annual profits, whose annual totals payable to these corporations' stockholders are of the same magnitude as the annual increase in the U.S.A.'s joint internal and external debt increases.

America is utterly bankrupt externally in terms of balance of trade due to its own oil companies now operating as Arabian business. The national debt at the time of the New Deal was $33 billion -- which was the cost of World War I. Before World War I we frequently had no national debt whatever. We have today a national debt that exceeds $800 billion -- 30 percent of that indebtedness came from underwriting of ever-longer-term mortgages. In 1934 the U.S.A. underwrote a completely obsolete building industry while Eisenhower allowed the banking world to make an incredible amount of money in interest rates and services [ii] in support of the building and real estate game, which building industry -- if it were any good -- would pay the U.S.A. back handsomely. The U.S.A. cannot even pay the annual interest on its $800 billion national debt. That is why the Nixon presidency and all those since have had to enter each year with a negative budget, acknowledging that at year's end the U.S.A. will be a $100 billion-magnitude unrecoverably deeper in debt. Our foreign-trade-balance indebtedness is (as of September 1979) $104 billion ($86 billion if foreign branches of U.S. banks are taken into account). Sum-totally, what has been taken from the people of the U.S.A. runs into many trillions of dollars. In the quarter of a century since Eisenhower America has become completely bankrupt, with its world leadership, its financial credit, and its reputation for courage, vision, and human leadership gone.

* * *

None of this was the American people's doing. It was all done in an absolutely legal but utterly invisible manner by the lawyer-capitalism. Individual bankers, industrial-corporation officers, et al. have had to do what their lawyers told them to do. No bad people have been involved. The lawyers were following their survival instinct -- and doing so completely legally.

Everything we have reported here has been published at one time or another, but with the individual items often so far apart from the last relevant item that the public has tended not to remember and associate the items. As a consequence the total picture presented here is approximately unknown to any but the Wall Street lawyers' grand strategists, most of whom are no longer alive.

* * *

One of my earliest books was Nine Chains to the Moon, written in 1935 and published by Lippincott in July 1938, and now being published by Doubleday. In it I referred so frequently to Finance Capitalism that I developed a contraction of those two words into FINCAP. FINCAP had died a lingering death between 1929 and 1934. In this book, Critical Path, I refer so often to the lawyer-resurrected "capitalism" that it is appropriate to refer henceforth to LAWCAP. LAWCAP's "capitalism" is paradoxically the most highly socialized organization in all history -- the citizens of LAWCAP's welfare-state -- the whole body of corporate stockholders -- having an annual average dole of $100,000 per capita without their even having to make a pretense of getting a job.

Image

FIGURE 18. Total National Debt of Individuals, Corporations, and Government- ederal, State, and Municipal. Source: 1918-70 Historical Statistics of the United States; 1970- 1978 Statistical Abstract; Survey of Current Business 1979

If we take the billions of dollars given in the 1930s to the great U.S.A. defense-industries corporations by the New Deal's Reconstruction Finance Corporation ... if we take the hidden tax-deduction subsidies to do research, development, and advertising given to all these companies in pre- 1942 dollars between 1933 and 1980 ... if we take the $100 billion in foreign aid that paid for the overseas establishment of the great corporations ... if we take the $155 billion of atomic know-how and development taken over by the oil companies ... and if we take the number of fine ounces of gold bullion taken out of America exclusively by the capitalist world's banking system ... and if we take a reasonably low estimate of the unknown billions of dollars taken out of the U.S.A. by the CIA to operate exclusively on behalf of international capitalism without the knowledge or authority of the people of the U.S. of America's quasi-democracy ... and if we multiply the sum of the foregoing figures by twenty-five, which is the amount to which our present U.S.A. dollars have been depreciated between the time of the appropriations and January 1, 1980, we come to a figure in the magnitude of $6 trillion that has been legally transferred from the U.S.A. people's national capital account over to the capital ownership account of the stockholders of the 1,000 largest, transnational, exclusively American-flag-flying corporations.

The transnationally operating LAWCAP in the early '50s resurrected the twenty-year-dead FINCAP and its "capitalist" world and left only its American-flag-flying storefronts in the U.S.A. to cover its comprehensive financial withdrawal from the U.S.A. LAWCAP silently and invisibly moved capitalism's big-time operations into the any-legally-propitious-elsewhere. With its invisibly operating CIA (Capitalism's Invisible Army) LAWCAP exploited the unwitting citizens of the U.S.A. in order -- they hoped -- to destroy socialism.

The 1947-50 LAWCAP decision to start a World War III had two objectives: (1) to keep capitalism in business, and (2) to prevent the Russians from employing their industrial productivity to produce a higher standard of living for their own people than that demonstrated in the U.S.A. LAWCAP's decision to start World War III inaugurated history's greatest game of poker, with the U.S.S.R. as a very reluctant player, worried about its "home-folks'" political agitation for a few "goodies." It became a poker game that called for each side adding approximately $100 billion per year into the "killingry kitty." They have now done so for thirty years. This amounts to $6 trillion. By complete coincidence $6 trillion happens to be approximately the same magnitude as that of the total mileage per year traveled by light operating at 186,000 miles each second of the year.

Throughout those thirty years, the U.S.A.-half of this $6 trillion (that is, $3 trillion) was redeposited at various turnover rates per year in the Western- world banks, and the latter continually reloaned those dollars, at historically unprecedentedly high rates, to armaments industry. The net of it all was to convert science and technology's highest capability into accomplishing the killing of ever more people at ever greater distances in ever shorter time.

LAWCAP's comprehensive grand strategy had its Achilles' heel.

Having successfully lifted $6 trillion from the mid-twentieth-century world's leading nation -- the U.S.A. and its people -- LAWCAP puppeted the U.S.A.'s people into expending another of their own $6 trillion in playing "the drop-dead killingry poker game" with the U.S.S.R. exclusively on behalf of invisible LAWCAP. The latter was sure that with its complete control of all the world's money to back the U.S.A., the latter could not lose the killingry poker game with the U.S.S.R. Counting on winning the poker game, LAWCAP started planning its own post-World War III future.

LAWCAP once more deceived its so-easy-to-deceive U.S.A. puppet with the kibitzing of the U.S.A.'s playing of its killingry poker hand. LAWCAP did so through its enormous media control and its election-funding and lobbying power of the American political game. LAWCAP had its political leaders convince the U.S.A. people that they were playing the poker game so satisfactorily that the U.S.A. assumed that it was far ahead in atomic bombs, which gave it complete national security and assumedly maintained its world-around power and prestige.

LAWCAP was confident that with ownership of all money and control of all the Western world's arms-producing facilities, they could outlast the U.S.S.R.'s ability to cope with its internal pressure for shifting its productivity toward its people's life-style -- as surreptitiously agitated for by the CIA's psycho-guerilla operations.

Because it was a "poker game" the Russians, realizing that intercontinentally delivered warheads with a twenty-minute lag between rocket blastoff and landing bang-off inadvertently provided a twenty-minute radar lead, that meant for the first time in the history of war that both sides would be able to see the other side shooting at them twenty minutes before the bullets would reach them, which gave both sides twenty minutes within which to get away all of both sides' atomic bombs, gases, germs, and death rays before the Big Bang, thus producing the first war in history in which both sides and all their allies would lose. To be a survivor of such a war would be worse than being killed by it. Planet Earth would be humanly untenable.

Because the Russians knew all this was so, and the American people did not seem to know it was so, the Russians assumed after the Khrushchev-Eisenhower Geneva Meeting of 1955 that atomic bomb warfare would never occur -- that is the way the U.S.S.R. played their poker hand. They assumed only enough atomic bomb-making to camouflage their strategy, while they counted on conventional arms, vast divisions of armed and trained men, and the greatest ever of world history's line-of-world-supply-controlling navies. The latter featured all of their now-perfected Vertol planes, being above-the-sea- surf ace-emitted, vertically ascending into the sky from enormous-bellied atomic submarines, moving far more swiftly submerged -- seventy knots -- than could the surface-battling, forty- to fifty-knot aircraft carriers. This the U.S.S.R. assessed to be the world-winning strategy.

The reason that LAWCAP's strategy kibitzed its U.S.A. players into holding four atomic bomb "aces" and an aircraft carrier "king" was because LAWCAP wanted to be sure that the atomic energy technology was so advanced and proliferated by World War Ill's end that they could employ its U.S.A.-peoples-paid-for basic equipment and widely developed uranium mines and production sources and its scientific personnel to produce the energy to run through their money-making meters after their fossil fuels were exhausted.

LAWCAP's cupidity outwitted its wisdom. LAWCAP's sense of evolutionary- event acceleration was faulty. They bluffed only the people of the U.S.A. -- not the Russians.

The Russians have now attained so commanding a lead in the killingry poker game that even the U.S.A. president concedes that it would take the U.S.A. a minimum of ten years to restrategy itself so that it could in any way cope with the Russians' "conventional" naval supremacy and its vastly greater numbers of modernly armed divisions of world-around warfaring capabilities.

In the meantime as already mentioned the United States has gone completely bankrupt internally, its national indebtedness coming very close to a trillion dollars and its balance of trade debt to $109 billion -- worsening at a horrendous rate due to LAWCAP's arranging to force the U.S.A. to obtain almost half its petroleum energy from the Near East. The U.S.A. has for eight years past been unable t.o meet even the interest on its internal debt as demonstrated by a negative balance of trade. Its future credit has been hypothecated thirty years beyond Armageddon. Nothing to stop the U.S. Treasury from issuing 2050 notes, but for how far into the future can LAWCAP keep selling U.S.A. promissory notes?

Unless God has something else in mind, it looks as though it will not be long before LAWCAP's kibitzing of the U.S.A. will have lost the $6-trillion killingry poker game. Russia will not hesitate to "call" the U.S.A. hand and rake in the winnings of omniworld, line-of-supply control -- maritime, aeronautical, and astronautical.

In one way the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. citizens . are in much the same socioeconomic position. The Communist party which runs the U.S.S.R. consists of about 1 percent of their total population, while the U.S.A. is controlled by about the same 1 percent, who are the LAWCAP strategists of the great U.S.A. corporations.

The U.S.A. is not run by its would-be "democratic" government. All the latter can do is try to adjust to the initiatives already taken by LAWCAP's great corporations. Nothing could be more pathetic than the role that has to be played by the President of the United States, whose power is approximately zero. Nevertheless, the news media and most over-thirty-years-ofage U.S.A. citizens carry on as if the president had supreme power. All that he and the Congress can do is adjust to what the "free-enterprise system" has already done. They are riding on the snapping end of the power-structure dragon's tail.

If I had not been studying and working for a half-century on the assumption that this present state of affairs would come about at about this moment in history, I would have to be very pessimistic now about the human affairs of the 7 percent of the world's population situated within the national boundaries of the U.S.A. let alone critically threatened omnihumanity.

But, in fact, I have been studying and working anticipatorily throughout all those intervening fifty-three years, and I know what I am talking about. The world now has an option to become comprehensively and sustainingly successful -- for all -- and that is what this book is about: How to do so ... and do so expeditiously enough to succeed within the time limit. "How to do so" is implicit in the chapters that follow starting with the manner in which I came to discover the critical options and the individual sel-fdisciplines that came naturally to disclose the grand strategy of human survival and successful functioning.

* * *

Only cosmic costing accounts for the entirely interdependent electrochemical and ecological relationships of Earth's biological evolution and cosmic intertransformative regeneration in general. Cosmic costing accounts as well for the parts played gravitationally and radiationally in the totality within which our minuscule planet Earth and its minuscule star the Sun are interfunctionally secreted. Cosmic costing makes utterly ludicrous the selfish and fearfully contrived "wealth" games being reverentially played by humanity aboard Earth.

Fortunately, the Sun does not demand payment for all the energy that it delivers by radiation to Earth in the overall cosmic scheme, which is trying to make humanity a success despite our overwhelming ignorance and fear. The stars are trying to tell humanity to awake and prosper and to consciously assume the important cosmic responsibilities for which it was designed. Since realization and fulfillment of that responsibility involve evolutionary discovery by humanity of the cosmic stature of its mind and the inconsequentiality of its muscle, the planting of humans on Earth may not bear fruit.

When Universe is developing important functional interdependencies, she does not put all her embryos in the same proverbial "basket," (or fiscus). So poor is the probability of self-discovery by humans of the infinite potential of the mind and the relative triviality of human musclepower (which is not even as capable as a grasshopper's) great nature must have planted a myriad of human-function-equivalent seedlings on a myriad of planets. In order to succeed as local-in-Universe critical information-gatherers and local-in-Universe problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative scenario Universe, the human-function equipment for local-in- Universe information-gathering will be as variable as the varied environments in Universe. Rarely will they have the appearance of human organisms -- such would be employed only under environmental conditions similar to those of planet Earth.

The first manifestation that humanity may make good on this planet will be the serious introduction of cosmic costing into the mainstream deliberations of Earthians.

Cosmic accounting completely eliminates the economic validity of bankruptcy accounting, except when humans make the mistake of trying to hoard or withdraw critical "capital" assets from production functioning. Withdrawal of capital assets is akin to attempting to withdraw one of the stars from the celestial system. Into what Universe, other than the cosmic totality, may the star be transferred? Every atom and electron is an essential part of the eternally regenerative -- ergo, totally inexhaustible (but always locally ebbing and ftooding) -- pulsative Universe.

_______________

Notes:

i. Chief Seattle's speech was submitted by Dr. Glenn T. Olds at Alaska's Future Frontiers conference in 1979.

ii. In 1978 over $1 billion just for transferring home-ownership deeds.
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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Postby admin » Tue Jul 28, 2015 6:28 am

PART 1 OF 2

PART II

CHAPTER 4: Self-Disciplines of Buckminster Fuller


1. My FATHER DIED when I was fifteen.

"Darling, never mind what you think. Listen. We are trying to teach you!"

My mother said it. My schoolteachers said it. All grown-up authorities of any kind -- the policeman, the druggist said it. "Thinking" was considered to be a process that is only teachable by the elders of the system. "That is why we have schools, dear." "Thinking" was considered to be an utterly unreliable process when spontaneously attempted by youth.

2. Grandmother taught us the Golden Rule: "Love thy neighbor as thy self -- do unto others as you would they should do unto you."

3. As we became older and more experienced, our uncles began to caution us to get over our sensitivity. "Life is hard," they explained. "There is nowhere nearly enough life support for everybody on our planet, let alone enough for a comfortable life support. If you want to raise a family and have a comfortable life for them, you are going to have to deprive many others of the opportunity to survive and the sooner, the better. Your grandmother's Golden Rule is beautiful, but it doesn't work."

4. Knowing that my mother and relatives loved me, I did my best not to pay any attention to my own thinking and trained myself to learn what seemed to me "the game of life" as you would train yourself to play football. The rules are all written by others.

5. Along came World War I. I did well in the Navy. I didn't have to "make money" with my ships. But when I entered the business world and had to make money over and above producing a good product, or when it had to be myself or somebody else who was to survive in the system, I was a spontaneous failure. I was always sure that I could cope with hardship better than the other guy, so I would yield.

6. In 1907, at the age of twelve, challenged by Robert Burns's "Oh wad some power the giftie gie us to see oursels as others see us," I sought to "see" myself as others might and to integrate that other self with my self-seen self and thereafter to deal as objectively as possible with the comprehensively integrated self. One of the techniques I adopted for doing this was to keep a come-as-it-may chronological -- rather than an alphabetical or a categorical -- record of my activities. In 1917, at age twenty-two, as commissioned line officer in the U.S. Navy, I named the record the "Chronofile." It consisted, and as yet consists, of all my "to and from" letters, programs, sketches, memoranda, doodles, etc., plus a few typical bills.

In 1917 Anne Hewlett and I were married. In 1918 our daughter Alexandra was born; she contracted infantile paralysis and spinal meningitis and died on her fourth birthday in 1922. Between 1922 and 1927 I developed a manufacturing and building business, designed and equipped four small factories for manufacturing new building components, and therewith successfully erected 240 residential buildings, but I failed to do so profitably and lost my friends' investments and became discredited and penniless. Coincidentally with my failure in business in 1927, our second daughter, Allegra, was born in pristine health.

7. In 1927, at age thirty-two, finding myself a "throwaway" in the business world, I sought to use myself as my scientific "guinea pig" (my most objectively considered research "subject") in a lifelong experiment designed to discover what -- if any thing -- a healthy young male human of average size, experience, and capability with an economically dependent wife and newborn child, starting without capital or any kind of wealth, cash savings, account monies, credit, or university degree, could effectively do that could not be done by great nations or great private enterprise to lastingly improve the physical protection and support of all human lives, at the same time removing undesirable restraints and improving individual initiatives of any and all humans aboard our planet Earth.

8. In 1927 I also committed all my productivity potentials toward dealing only with our whole planet Earth and all its resources and cumulative know-how, while undertaking to comprehensively protect, support, and advantage all humanity instead of committing my efforts to the exclusive advantages of my dependents, myself, my country, my team.

This decision was not taken on a recklessly altruistic do-gooder basis, but in response to the fact that my Chronofile clearly demonstrated that in my first thirty-two years of life I had been positively effective in producing life-advantage wealth -- which realistically protected, nurtured, and accommodated X numbers of human lives for Y numbers of forward days -- only when I was doing so entirely for others and not for myself.

Further Chronofile observation showed that the larger the number for whom I worked, the more positively effective I became. Thus it became obvious that if I worked always and only for all humanity, I would be optimally effective.

9. I sought to do my own thinking, confining it to only experientially gained information, and with the products of my own thinking and intuition to articulate my own innate motivational integrity instead of trying to accommodate everyone else's opinions, credos, educational theories, romances, and mores, as I had in my earlier life.

10. I sought to accomplish whatever was to be accomplished for anyone in such a manner that the advantage attained for anyone would never be secured at the cost of another. or others.

11. I sought to cope with all humanly unfavorable conditions, customs, and afflictions by searching for the family of relevant physical principles involved, and therewith through invention and technological development to solve all problems by physical data and devices that were so much more effective as to be spontaneously adopted by humans and thereby to result in producing more desirable life-styles and thus emancipate humans from the previously unfavorable circumstances.

I must always "reduce" my inventions to physically working models and must never talk about the inventions until physically proven -- or disproven.

The new favorable-to-humans environment constituted by the technological inventions and information must demonstrate that new inanimate technology could now accomplish what heretofore could not be accomplished by social reforms. I sought to reform the environment, not the humans. I determined never to try to persuade humanity to alter its customs and viewpoints.

12. I sought never to "promote" or "sell" either my ideas or artifacts or to pay others to do so. I must never hire any agents to produce publicity for me, nor engage any lecture, literary, or "idea-selling" agents, nor hire personnel who would solicit support of any kind on my behalf. All support must be spontaneously engendered by evolution's integrating of my inventions with the total evolution of human affairs.

13. I assumed that nature had its own unique gestation rates, not only for the birth of each new biological component of ecological intersupport, but also for each inanimate technological artifact invention of human inter-advantaging.

14. I sought to develop my artifacts with ample anticipatory time margins so that they would be ready for use by society when society discovered through evolutionary emergencies that they needed just what I had developed. I realized that if the new tools I had developed could provide valid human-advantage increases, then they would inevitably be adopted by society during the successive inexorable emergencies that occur in society, which evolution of emergence only through emergencies would dictate the proper rate of regenerative gestation of spontaneously adopted social advances.

15. I sought to learn the most from my mistakes.

16. I sought to decrease time wasted in worried procrastination and to increase time invested in discovery of technological effectiveness.

17. I sought to document my development in the official records of humanity by applying for and being granted government patents.

18. Above all I sought to comprehend the principles of eternally regenerative Universe and to discover human functioning therein, thereby to discover nature's governing complexes of generalized principles and to employ these principles in the development of the specific artifacts that would benefit humanity's fulfillment of its essential functioning in the cosmic scheme.

19. I sought to educate myself comprehensively regarding nature's inventory of chemical elements, their weights, performance characteristics, relative abundances, geographical whereabouts, metallurgical interalloyabilities, chemical associabilities and disassociabilities.

I sought to comprehend the full gamut of production tool capabilities, energy resources, and all relevant geological, meteorological, demographic, and economic data, as well as to comprehend the logistics and vital statistics thus far methodically amassed by humanity as derived from its all-history experiences.

20. I sought to operate only on a do-it-yourself basis and only on the basis of intuition.

21. I oriented what I called my "comprehensive, anticipatory design science strategies" toward primarily advantaging the new life to be born within the environment-controlling devices I was designing and developing, because the new lives would be unencumbered by conditioned reflexes that might otherwise blind them to the potential advantages newly existent within the new environment-control system in which they found themselves beginning life.

***

As already mentioned, our second child, Allegra, was born in 1927. Five years earlier her sister, Alexandra, had died on the eve of her birthday, having gone through four years of spinal meningitis and infantile paralysis.

Allegra's birth was a mysterious, awesome, and beautiful event, for my wife Anne and I realized that not only were w~ being again entrusted with a new life, but this time with that of a beautifully healthy life. At that moment I was penniless and, to the relatively few who knew me, discredited. I had proved myself to be a failure in a business that had been financially backed by many of my friends. I had only a rich inventory of experience. That experience made clear to me that there were critical problems to be solved regarding total humanity aboard planet Earth -- problems that would take at least a half-century to cope with successfully; problems as yet unattended to by anyone; problems that, if successfully solved, would bring lasting advantage to all humanity; problems that, if left unsolved, would find all humanity at ever-increasing disadvantage.

It was not that the problems could not be seen by others, but society was preoccupied with individual, national, state, and local business-survival problems, which forced its leaders into short-term, limited-scope considerations -- with no time for total world problems. The presidents of great corporations had to make good profits within a very few years or lose their jobs. The politicians, too, were preoccupied with short-range national, state, or municipal survival matters.

It seemed also clear to me that there had opened up a new avenue of approach to humanity's survival problems, an avenue that could be traversed only by an individual operating entirely on the individual's own economic and philosophic initiative.

All the world was preoccupied with intercompetitive survival, being spontaneously motivated by the working assumption of the existence of a fundamental inadequacy of life support on our planet. The leading ideologies said, "You may not like our system, but we are convinced that we are coping most wisely, justly, and practically with fundamental inadequacy of life support. We are the fittest to survive."

What my experience taught me was that if the physical laws thus far found by science to be governing Universe were intelligently and fearlessly employed in the production of ever higher performances per each pound of material, erg of energy, and second of time invested, it would be feasible to take care of all humanity at higher standards of living than had ever been known by any humans -- and to do so sustainingly. Evolution seemed to be operating in such a manner as to drive humans to inadvertent accomplishment of their own success.

Despite the fearful "you-or-me" survival preoccupations, it seemed clear to me that if an individual who had practical experience in engineering, marketing, aeronautics, vessels on the sea, building on the land, mass manufacturing arts, and naval ballistics, who also could discern the evolutionary potentials emerging in scientific discoveries and see what the priority of tasks might be in bringing about general economic success for all humanity, then if that individual were to address those problems, completely committing the balance of his life to the realization of such technical advantaging of humanity, then, if that individual was doing what nature was trying to do, he might find self -- and those dependent on self -- surviving and gaining in knowledge, capability, and experience relevant to the tasks to be accomplished.

Effective exploration requires effective record-keeping. I am confident of the accuracy of the record presented herewith. I am also confident that my personal record is pretty much the same as the record that would have been manifest by any healthy, well-informed individual who undertook the course I chose to steer upon the birth of Allegra in 1927. The fact that the individual who did pursue this course as a deliberate experiment (myself) found that it proved to be an economically tenable way of life and a technically effective way of approaching world problems may encourage others to address problems in the same manner.

* * *

As already related, in 1907 I started a chronological record of my life and in 1917 named it the "Chronofile." In 1917, at the age of twenty-two -- fortified with the already-thick Chronofile -- I determined to make myself "the special case guinea pig study" in a lifelong research project -- i.e., documenting the life of an individual born in the "Gay Nineties" -- 1895, the year automobiles were introduced, the wireless telegraph and the automatic screw machine were invented, and X rays were discovered -- having his boyhood around the turn of the century, and maturing during humanity's epochal graduation from the nineteenth century, which closed Sir Isaac Newton's "normally at rest" and myriadly isolated hybrid world cultures to which change was anathema, into the twentieth century and Einstein's normally "dynamic," omni-integrating world culture to which change has come to seefllt both essential and popularly acceptable.

Though I lived within seven miles of Boston's center, so new and rare an object was the automobile that I was seven years old when I first saw one. I first drove one when I was twelve. Operators' licenses and owners' registration certificates did not come into official use in any states until a decade later.

When I was nine years old, the airplane was invented, but I did not see one flying until I was fourteen, and I did not fly one until I was twenty-two, within which same year (1917) I heard the historically first human-voice conversation over the radio. Earlier in that extraordinary year the U.S.A. had entered World War I; I had entered the U.S. Navy; and Anne Hewlett had entered into marriage with me.

The cumulative effect of this swift succession of epochally surprising "first-ever" (for me) human and personal experiences precipitated my previously mentioned inauguration of the history of the evolution of "Guinea Pig B" ("B" for Bucky) -- the Chronofile.

Along with millions of other pre-Kitty Hawk juveniles I, too, had tried to invent the airplane, first with paper dart models and then with box-kite-like multiplaned gliders. Despite our elders' doubts and engineering's down-to- earth negatives, immanent invention of the "airplane" was everywhere present in the thought world of my pre-Wright Brothers, knee-breeches years. It is interesting that our latest supersonic and 2000-mile-per-hour planes are beginning to take on the overall shape perfection of those early paper darts. Children's intuitions are keen.

My extraordinary experiences with the U.S. Navy's World War I galaxy of new tools -- oil-burning turboelectric ships, aircraft, diesel-engined submarines, radios, automatic range-keepers, etc. -- convinced me that the experience pattern of my generation was not to be just one more duplicate generation in a succession of millions of generations of humanity, with an approximately imperceptible degree of environmental change, as compared to the immediately previous generation. I was convinced that, unannounced by any authority, a much greater environmental and ecological change was just beginning to take place in my generation's unfolding experience than had occurred cumulatively between my father's, grandfather's, great-, and great-great-grandfather's four previous generations. I had read their diaries, expense accounts, or letters containing descriptions of their lives in their successive undergraduate days in the Harvard classes of 1883, 1843, 1801, and 1760, respectively. They all told of days-long walking or driving trips between Cambridge and Boston. I realized intuitively that the subway, which opened in my 1913 freshman year to connect Harvard Square in Cambridge to Tremont and Park streets in Boston in seven minutes, was a harbinger of an entirely new space-time relationship of the individual and the environment.

It was clearly the environment and not the humans that was changing, and though the environmental changes might not alter human genes, changes in their external conditions might permit humans to realize many more of their innate capabilities than heretofore.

Humans are tool complexes -- hands for certain tasks, feet, ears, teeth, etc., for others. Using their human tool complexes, human minds, comprehending variable interrelationship principles, invent detached-from-self tools -- the bucket can lift out more water from the well than can a pair of cupped human hands -- that are more special-case-effective but not used as frequently as their organically integral tools. Humans invent craft tools and industrial tools. The latter are all the tools that cannot be invented or operated by one human. The first industrial tool was the spoken word. With words humans compounded their experience-won knowledge. (Most industrial tools are driven by inanimate energy rather than by human muscle.)

Dwellings are environment-controlling machines. So are automobiles. Automobiles are little part-time dwellings on wheels. Both autos and dwellings are complex tools. Both autos and dwellings are component tools within the far vaster tool complex of world-embracing industrialization. I use the word industrialization to include all intercoordinate humanity, all its artifacts, its evolving omni-interfunctioning and omni-integrating, omni-life-support- producing capability.

I do not demean the phenomenon of industrialization by identifying it as being the money-making business that exploits productivity for unilateral profit. I do not identify the biological complexity "cow" and its ecological support system as being a component of some dairy business. Industrialization is not business's mass production of weaponry and munitions for political proliferation and personal profit. Industrialization's productivity is exploited by business. But industrialization's coordinate productivity can be employed directly by spontaneous cooperation of humanity without business- profit-motivation.

Life continually alters the environment, and the altered environment in turn alters the potentials, realities, and challenges of life. Environment embraces a complex of nonsimultaneously occurring but omni-integrating mutations of humans' external, only-by-invention-realized, metabolic-regeneration organisms which we think and speak of as industrialization.

Our Harvard 1917 class of 700 had only three automobile-owning members at its 1913 freshman start, one of whom was Ray Stanley, whose father had invented and produced the Stanley Steamer. But it was even then at least wishfully clear that humans in general might sometime acquire automobiles. Since that time I have owned successively forty-three automobiles, three of which I invented and built, and have personally driven the forty-three cars a total of one and one-quarter million miles. I have lived long enough in various places to have had my cars registered in different years in ten different U.S.A. states. I have flown one and one-half million miles, part of that distance in three of my own planes. I have owned many boats, traveled in many others, and have commanded several craft in the United States Navy.

My total travel, by land, sea, and air, aggregates more than three and one-half million miles to date, and in the last twenty-two years my work has taken me completely around the world forty-seven times, making it more economical and efficient to rent automobiles locally than to own them and leave them sitting in airport parking lots. Consequently I have rented over 100 cars in addition to the forty-three I owned. This is in no wise a unique record. It is fairly average for millions of humans who have responsibilities in the general frontiers of evoluting world society. Three and one-half million is paltry mileage for any senior Pan American Airways pilot. Every astronaut with only two weeks away from Earth has traveled over three and one-half million miles.

Pre-1900 average world man covered only 30,000 miles in his entire lifetime, which is only one percent of my lifetime mileage to date.

In 1900 no human thought assumed that acceleration existed in human affairs, i.e., sociologically. In 1980 there is no longer valid dissent from the concept of an accelerating change in the affairs of humans on Earth. The average U.S.A. family now moves out of town every three years. My present official address for passports and taxation is in Maine. I have had successive voting privileges in eight states. Whether I am "in residence" or not, my land, my house, you too, and I whirl constantly around the Earth's axis together (at about 800 miles per hour in the latitude of New York City), as all the while our little Spaceship Earth zooms around the Sun at 60,000 miles per hour, while at the same time our solar system rotates in its nebular merry-go-round at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour-none of which celestial-arena traveling did I include in my previously stated lifetime mileages or in those of other Earthians.

In all reality I never "leave home." My backyard has just grown progressively bigger and more globular until now the whole world is my spherical backyard. "Where do you live?" and "What are you?" are progressively less sensible questions. "At present I am a passenger on Spaceship Earth," and "I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category, a highbred specialization. I am not a thing -- a noun. I am not flesh. At eighty-five, I have taken in over a thousand tons of air, food, and water, which temporarily became my flesh and which progressively dissassociated from me. You and I seem to be verbs -- evolutionary processes. Are we not integral functions of the Universe?"

In 1917, in the U.S. Navy, I had intuited that an intermultiplicative historical acceleration of technical events was beginning that would bring about a fundamental and cataclysmic reorientation of human life in Universe. Accelerating acceleration had been discovered by Galileo circa 1600 in respect to free-falling bodies, out of which, with other discoveries, he formulated his first laws of motion. But the first laws of motion had not been conceived of, initially or since, as being applicable to human sociology -- as accelerating our ecological evolution -- until I intuitively hailed it as doing just that in 1917.

Discussion of "acceleration" in economic, sociologic, and ecologic evolution did not begin in the intellectual publications until more than a decade later. Also, two decades before publication by others was my 1922-1927 discovery that ever higher tool performance per unit of pounds, time, and energy input (as metallurgical and electronic fallout from the weaponry industries into the domestic consumer economy) was resulting sum-totally in providing progressively ever more energetic performances with ever less weight and volume of material per function as well as ever less energy expenditure per each unit of overall performance in the domestic economy. I discovered this when erstwhile weaponry-support contractors sought to exploit their U.S.-government-paid, scientifically instrumented, and production- tooled "new factories" when those factories and all their government-developed tools were returned to the companies after World War I's armaments contracts were terminated.

In contradistinction to the successively greater performance gains with ever less pounds and volumes of materials, ergs of energy, and seconds of time per each unit of performance strategy employed in designing ships (environment controls) of the sea and sky for the military, the dry-land building economy had theretofore been prototyped by fortress and castle building. Increased environment security was to be accomplished only with more weight and masonry massiveness -- the heavier, higher, and thicker the walls, the more the security attained.

In 1917 this more performance with less weight and volume of materials, less ergs of energy, and less seconds of time investment per each accomplished unit of performance, manifested itself for the first time in the metallurgy, chemistry, and electronics of World War I sea and sky armaments developments. This newly observed phenomena seemed to me to put in question the absolute scientific validity of Malthus's 1805 discovery that humanity is multiplying its numbers at a geometrical rate while increasing its life-support capability only at "an arithmetical rate, as a consequence of which it was universally concluded by all eco-political power system masters that only a few humans are destined to survive successfully. Conversely, it seemed to me that it could come to pass through more-with-lessing that all of humanity might become both physically and economically successful even within the foreseeable future.

There is not a chapter in any book in economics anywhere about doing more with less. Economists traditionally try to maximize what you have, but the idea that you could go from wire to wireless or from visible structuring to invisible alloy structuring did not occur to them at all. It was outside their point of view -- beyond their range of vision. Economists are specialists trained to look only at one particular thing.

In my Shelter magazine of 1930-33 and in my 1938 book, Nine Chains to the Moon. I identified this progressive doing-more-with-less as ephemeralization. Though Fortune magazine also published my 1922 concept of ephemeralization in its tenth-anniversary issue of 1940 in a prominent manner, and despite ephemeralization having subsequently wrought epochal advancements in the standard of living for two billion previously deprived humans, ephemeralization is a phenomenon that in 1980 is as yet largely unknown to or overlooked by the world's professional economists. Nonetheless, the combination of accelerating acceleration and ephemeralization has now elevated 60 percent of all humanity from its year-1900 99-percent poverty level into realization of an everyday standard of living superior to that enjoyed by any kings, tycoons, or other power-commanding humans prior to the twentieth century.

Sailors watch for every clue nature may give to coming events -- cloud formations, temperature of the water, wind direction shiftings, etc. To survive, navigators must anticipate comprehensively. The sailor's subconscious as well as conscious faculties interact to inform his anticipatory decisions. Only intuiting the subsequently realized epochal significance of accelerating ephemeralization to be implicit, as already noted, I decided in 1917 to scientifically document its emergent realizations as they impinged upon the daily life of an individual, his family, and his world.

My 1917 "Project Guinea Pig B" was greatly advantaged by the Dymaxion Chronofile. As of June 1980 the Chronofile consists of 737 volumes, each containing 300-400 pages, or about 260,000 letters in all.

The first important regenerative effect upon me of keeping this active chronological record was that I learned to '''see myself' as others might -- and usually did -- see me.

Second, it persuaded me ten years later (1927 -- a decade after inception of "Project Guinea Pig B," in 1917) to start my life as nearly "anew" as it is humanly possible to do.

One basic tenet of my new 1927 volition, as already mentioned, was that whatever was to be accomplished for anyone must never be at the cost of another. Robin Hood, whose story my father read aloud to me when I was very young and not long before my father died, became my most influential early-years' mythical hero. This meant that in my "first life" I had improvised methods in general to effect swift moral and romantic justice for those I found in trouble or danger. Foolishly self-confident in my "first life," I had often rushed thoughtlessly to assume responsibilities beyond my physical, monetary, or legal means to fulfill. This rashness led me into complex dilemmas, for in attempting to keep my assumption of responsibilities legal, I inadvertently involved my unwitting family, dragging them into preposterous financial sacrifices.

In inaugurating my new life I took away Robin Hood's longbow, staff, and checkbook and gave him only scientific textbooks, microscopes, calculating machines, transits, and industrialization's network of tooling in general. I made him substitute new inanimate forms for animate reforms. I did not allow Robin any public relations professionals or managers or agents to "promote" or "sell" him. It seemed obvious that if the new tools that the "new" Robin Hood developed could provide valid human-advantaging increases, they would inevitably be adopted by society during the successive, inexorable economic emergencies -- which dictate the proper rate of regenerative gestations of evolution.

Along with the Dymaxion Chronofile I have kept all the tearsheets of newspapers, magazines, programs, etc., in which my work was reported. Until 1970 I could not afford to subscribe to a clipping service. Most of the clippings I have came into my hands by my own discovery or as a consequence of friends and acquaintances spontaneously sending clippings to me. This record now contains over 37,()(X) articles written and published by others about me or my work. It begins in 1917. Half of the 37,000 unique items have been published in the last twenty years. The record does not include the radio and television broadcasting about me or my work, which radio and TV broadcastings, both local and national, are ever increasing, averaging in 1979 at two per week for an annual total of 100 broadcasts, varying from one minute to an hour each.

Published herewith is a curve showing the precise number of separate and individually written items per annum appearing only in The New York Times from 1920 to date. It is a curve of many peaks and valleys. Altogether, it constitutes a wave pattern of ever-increasing magnitude. The cumulative record patterns into a ski-shaped curve -- an initially long, almost horizontal pattern, with its nose finally rising ever more swiftly. It is an accelerating- acceleration curve.

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[i]FIGURE 19. Dymaxion Clippings: The New York Times


The successive peaks relate to: my Navy days; my 1918 publication of Transport magazine; my 240 Stockade buildings of 1922-1927; the 4-0 monograph and the Oymaxion House of 1927-28; my 1930-32 publication of Shelter magazine; the 1927-35 Oymaxion Car; the 1927-38 Oymaxion Bathroom; my 1938 book Nine Chains to the Moon; the 1927 Industrial Man's Ecological Transformation Charts; Lifelong Energetic/Synergetic Geometry; the Dymaxion Deployment Unit produced by Butler Manufacturing Company of Kansas City in 1940; the 1930-Dymaxion Sky-Ocean World Map, first published in multicolor in an eighteen-page section in Life in March 1943; 1946 O-Volving-book-shelved, Underground Silo Library; 1947 Geodesic Domes; my world-around Geodesic Radomes for the Defense Early Warning system; my 1954 Marine Corps Air-Delivered Geodesic Domes; my U.S.A. Moscow Pavilion Dome; my U.S.A. pavilion for the 1967 Montreal World's Fair; my 1967 Triton (tetrahedronal) Floating City for the U.S. Housing Authority; the 1965-1975 World Students' Design Science Decade; 1927 Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs; my 1969 World Games -- i.e., "How to Make the World Work," as conducted that year at the New York Studio School, Yale University, Southern Illinois University, University of Southern California, University of Pennsylvania, University of Massachusetts, New York University; my 1970 two-and-a-half-mile-high (Mount Fuji-high) housing-sightseeing tower, completely engineered (but never built) for Matsutaro Shoriki, late owner of Nippon Television Network and the Yomiuri Shimbun -- Japan's largest-circulation daily newspaper; the 1960-73 "World Man Territory Trusteeship" inaugurated on Cyprus under joint auspices of Archbishop Makarios, Caress Crosby, the World Academy of Science and Art, and myself; my large-scale tensegrity projects; my eighteen books, especially Synergetics, volumes 1 and 2; scientific publications by others identifying my work with discoveries at various levels of the microcosmic structuring of nature; and most latterly to a general admixture of editorial realizations that my separately reported inventions and fundamental concepts all relate to a total unified philosophy that now emerges as comprehensively pertinent to unfolding historical reality.

The preponderance of later items by others relate clearly to my general philosophy, to my fifty-year 1927 prognostications, and to my world-environment- redesigning stratagems. There is a dawning awareness that I am saying something realistic when I say we have been asking the politicians to do what only we can do ourselves, technologically, by cooperative use of our intellects and active initiatives plus our innate, politically transcendental integrity and artifact-inventing and mass-producing capabilities.

I have been consistently faithful to my 1917 determination to treat myself objectively as an historical guinea pig, and I assure any who may be interested that my files include as many unflattering items, such as notices from the sheriff, letters from those who thought me to be a crank, crook, charlatan, etc. I am glad that these negative charges are infrequent and to the best of my knowledge untrue, though the record discloses the ease with which items taken out of context can be negatively interrelated and interpreted.

Because my Chronofile and archive's data constitute a faithfully comprehensive record, I am now able to comment objectively regarding my subjectively disclosed guinea-pig self (and I am usually more critically incisive with myself than I am with studies of other humans).

When my subject is being effective, I am glad, and when it is worriedly procrastinating, I am sad. When it makes mistakes, I learn the most and am elated. That is the extent of my prejudice.

I think the curves plottable from my data are acceptable as demonstrating the realization of the scientific marshaling of my guinea pig's case history, as deliberately and methodically undertaken a half-century ago. The curves document that my 1927 working assumptions are approximately congruent with the ensuing fifty-two-year unfoldment of evolutionary patternings in economics, technology, sociology, and mathematics. My 1927 assumptions being well published and now actively reviewed not only are proving valid, but many are also trending to further accredit my present prognosticating. My 1961 prognostications covering world educational developments to 1982 -- as contained in Buckminster Fuller on Education, now published by University of Massachusetts Press -- are tending to be far more spontaneously accepted than were those of my 4-D monograph of 1928 (reissued as 4D Timelock by the Lama Foundation in 1972).

Possibly a more telling trend regarding "Guinea Pig B" is the acceleration in the curve of the rate at which books by others refer to my work. Books usually represent a greater amount of research work, rumor filtering, and retrospective processing than do newspaper or magazine writing. The curve of books with reference to me or my work is accelerating even more swiftly than is the curve of news items published about my work.

It has been an expensive and often cumbersome task to keep the records and to hold together the archives that document the half-century history of this experimental undertaking, which had often to passage penniless times. However, that record-keeping has been accomplished. As a consequence it may serve to encourage others to commit themselves to nature's precessional principles.

* * *

Few who know me or of m e-- over and above friends familiar with my 1917 resolution to faithfully document the life of an individual and my 1927 resolution to conduct a lifelong experiment with that individual -- are cognizant of the reasons governing adoption of several important stratagems within my personally conceived and adopted grand strategy of self-disciplines, though these have altogether governed the last half-century of my eighty-five years, and as yet continue to do so.

In 1927 I designed the experiment's strategies in a manner that seemed to me most probable to prove clearly that all the irreversible gains for all human individuals that I set about to produce could not be accomplished as conceived and initiated by business corporations, political states, academic, professional, labor, or any other social groups, no matter how powerfully rich, well-informed, well-intentioned, or well-armed they might be. I was concerned with the unique cerebral faculties, conceptual metaphysics, and physical articulatabilities integral to, and operative only within, the inventory of one single individual human's functioning.

As I initiated such a lifelong operation in 1927, it was evident to me that within the extant world-around, socioeconomic milieu, the physical resources essential to the reduction to physical realization and production of the individual's invented artifacts could only be legally acquired in three ways.

1. Within the U.S.S.R. only by first persuading the Communist party leaders that my concepts were either superior to or compatible with theirs, and thereafter waiting on their relative priority list for half a century until the first ten of their five-year plans had been completed.

In February 1933, five years after my strategic decision to rely on "socioeconomic precession" -- which I will explain a few paragraphs later -- an emissary of the U.S.S.R. planning authority (visiting the U.S.A. in connection with Henry Ford's Dearborn school for U.S.S.R. engineers) told me that the Soviets thought well of my industrially-to-be-produced, service-rented, air-deliverable, scientific dwelling machines -- the Dymaxion houses. But popular knowledge of their potential, before the time when production of the resources essential to their manufacture had been adequately supplied to inherently prior tasks in the sound organization of their industrial economy, would (if known of in Russia) generate impatience for their realization. This would be a psychologically upsetting factor -- ergo, Dymaxion houses would not be brought to public attention until after 1980; so, my 1927 decision to carry out their research and development in the U.S.A., where technological evolution permitted such an initiation, was valid.

2. Within one of the great dictatorships I might gain the physical means of realizing my technological artifacts by first persuading the dictator that his only militarily sustainable plans should be abandoned because they were diametrically opposed to my concepts (not pursued).

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FIGURE 20. Model of the Oymaxion 4-0 House

3. Within the remainder of the world I would acquire the means only in exchange for cash money or services. This brought me once more to the number-one strategic question: how could the initially moneyless, creditless, physical-facilities-lacking individual succeed in realistically demonstrating that the invented artifacts not only could be practically realized but that their use would substantially increase the economic, technological, and social advantaging of all world-around humanity and not be inherently limited to advantaging only minorities.

I saw that twentieth-century money was an economic invention that could be manipulated, for instance, through the Federal Reserve Bank and its control of its member banks' rediscount rate -- or again by the banks' loaning to already powerful organizations large blocks of the money of many small depositors to enhance the advantage only of the few through profitable exploitations of the many's needs. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, since Malthus (1810) it had been assumed by all the world's political ideologies -- as it is even today -- that there is a fundamental and lethal inadequacy of life support on our planet, wherefore, poverty and misery for vast millions of humans have been accepted as unavoidable. Wherefore, the also universally assumed law of "survival only of the fittest" had given historical rise to various political ideologies, as ways of coping with this fundamental inadequacy -- each convinced that the ultimate proof of which ideological group is fittest to survive can be resolved only by periodic trial of arms.

Politicians' effectiveness is dependent on the degree of growth of their ongoing authority. Since there is no sustainable equilibrium in a 100-percent efficient, ever-regenerating physical Universe, the politician of the moment who has gained greatest effectiveness is the one whose gained authority is as yet increasing -- i.e., the brightness of whose "star" is waxing. Once their authority becomes visibly less, they are "on the way out." The same is true of the money-making private-corporation executives. They must play company politics to ever progressively augment personal authority.

No matter how altruistic a public image they may attain and maintain, both the budding or full-bloom politicians and corporate executives must secretly have always on highest priority the increasing enhancement of their own public image as well as of their own financial credit. Whether public or private, professional or amateur, their own kudos-building or -maintenance requires that both the politicians and corporate executives forever be attempting to favorably reform the viewpoints of others regarding their particular organizations. To do so they are forever proposing to reform the organization commanded by those others whose prerogatives they hope to acquire.

Far different from the politicians', corporate executives', and religious leaders' strategies was the new noncompetitive course I took in 1927 -- i.e., that' of reforming only the physical environment through artifacts, such as increasing safety and decreasing accidents by engineering improvements of motor vehicles while also providing overpasses and banked turns for the vehicles to drive on, instead of trying to reform the vehicle drivers' behaviors.

I planned to employ the ever-increasing and -improving scientific knowledge and technology to produce ever more effective human life-improving results with ever less investment of weight of materials, ergs of energy, seconds of time per each measurable level of improved artifact performance. I was hopeful of finally doing so much with so little as to implement comprehensive and economically sustainable physical success for all humanity, thereby to eliminate the need for lethally biased politics and their ultimate recourse to hot or cold warring.

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FIGURE 21.

The big question remained: How do you obtain the money to live with and to acquire the materials and tools with which to work?

The answer was "precession." What precession is, and why it was the answer, requires some explaining.

When we pull away from one another the opposite rigid-disc ends of a flexible, water-filled rubber cylinder, the middle part of the overall cylinder contracts in a concentric series of circular planes of diminishing radius perpendicular (at right angles) to the line of our pulling.

When we push toward one another on the two opposite ends of the same flexible, water-filled, rubber, rigid-disk-ended cylinder, the center of the cylinder swells maximally outward in a circular plane perpendicular (at right angles) to the line of our pushing together.

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FIGURE 22.

When we drop a stone in the water, a circular wave is generated that moves outwardly in a plane perpendicular (at right angles) to the line of stone-dropping -- the outwardly expanding circular wave generates (at ninety degrees) a vertical wave that in turn generates an additional horizontally and outwardly expanding wave, and so on.

All these right-angle effects are processional effects. Precession is the effect of bodies in motion on other bodies in motion. The Sun and Earth are both in motion. Despite the 180-degree gravitational pull of the in-motion Sun upon the in-motion Earth, precession makes Earth orbit around the Sun in a direction that is at ninety degrees -- i.e., at a right angle -- to the direction of the Sun's gravitational pull upon Earth.

The successful regeneration of life growth on our planet Earth is ecologically accomplished always and only as the precessional -- right-angled -- side effect" of the biological species' chromosomically programmed individual- survival preoccupations -- the honeybees are chromosomically programmed to enter the flower blossoms in search of honey. Seemingly inadvertently (but realistically-precessionally) this occasions the bees' bumbling tail's becoming dusted with pollen (at ninety degrees to each bee's linear axis and flight path), whereafter the bees' further bumbling entries into other flowers inadvertently dusts off, pollenizes, and cross-fertilizes those flowers at right angles (precessionally) to the bees' operational axis -- so, too, do all the mobile creatures of Earth cross-fertilize all the different rooted botanicals in one or another precessional (right-angled), inadvertent way.

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FIGURE 23.

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FIGURE 24.

Humans, as honey-money-seeking bees, do many of nature's required tasks only inadvertently. They initially produce swords with metal-forging-developed capability, which capability is later used to make steel into farm plows. Humans -- in politically organized, group-fear-mandated acquisition of weaponry -- have inadvertently developed so-much-more-performance-with- so-much-less material, effort, and time investment per each technological task accomplished as now inadvertently to have established a level of technological capability which, if applied exclusively to peaceful purposes, can provide a sustainable high standard of living for all humanity, which accomplished fact makes war and all weaponry obsolete. Furthermore, all of this potential has happened only because of the at-ninety-degrees-realized generalized technology and science "side effects" or "fall-out" inadvertently discovered as special case manifest of the scientifically generalized principle of precession.

At the 1927 outset of project "Guinea Pig B" I assumed that humanity was designed to perform an important function in Universe, a function it would discover only after an initially innocent by-trial-and-error-discovered phase of capability development. During the initial phase humans, always born naked, helpless, and ignorant but with hunger, thirst, and curiosity to drive them, have been chromosomically programmed to operate successfully only by means of the general biological inadvertencies of bumbling "honey-seeking." Therefore, what humans called the side effects of their conscious drives in fact produced the main ecological effects of generalized technological regeneration. I therefore assumed that what humanity rated as "side effects" are nature's main effects. I adopted the precessional "side effects" as my prime objective.

So preoccupied with its honey-money bumbling has society been that the ninety-degree side effects of the century-old science of ecology remained long unnoticed by the populace. Ecology is the world-around complex intercomplementation of all the biological species' regenerative intercyclings with nature's geological and meteorological transformation recyclings. Society discovered ecology only when its economically sidewise discards of unprofitable substances became so prodigious as to pollutingly frustrate nature's regenerative mainstream intersupport. Society's surprise "discovery" of ecology in the 1960s constituted its as-yet-realistically-unresponded-to discovery of nature's main effects -- ergo, of precession. It is a safe guess that not more than one human in 10 million is conceptually familiar with and sensorially comprehending of the principle of "precession."

In 1927 I reasoned that if humans' experiences gave them insights into what nature's main objectives might be, and if humans committed themselves, their lifetimes, and even their dependents and all their assets toward direct, efficient, and expeditious realization of any of nature's comprehensive evolutionary objectives, nature might realistically support such a main precessional commitment and all the ramifications of the individual's developmental needs, provided that no one else was trying to do what the precessionally committed saw needed to be done. Precession cannot be accomplished competitively. Precession cannot respond to angularly redundant forces. It can, however, respond to several angularly nonredundant forces at a given time.

Since nature was clearly intent on making humans successful in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe, it seemed clear that if I undertook ever more humanly favorable physical-environment-producing artifact developments that in fact did improve the chances of all humanity's successful development, it was quite possible that nature would support my efforts, provided I were choosing the successively most efficient technical means of so doing. Nature was clearly supporting all her intercomplementary ecological regenerative tasks -- ergo, I must so commit myself and must depend upon nature providing the physical means of realization of my invented environment-advantaging artifacts. I noted that nature did not require hydrogen to "earn a living" before allowing hydrogen to behave in the unique manner in which it does. Nature does not require that any of its intercomplementing members "earn a living."
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