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  • From: Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth - R. Buckminster Fuller
  • Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2015 12:41:10 -0400

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth - R. Buckminster Fuller
http://designsciencelab.com/resources/OperatingManual_BF.pdf

Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth
By Richard Buckminster Fuller
• 1969 •
• 1 •
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========1========

1. comprehensive propensities I am enthusiastic over humanity’s
extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a
shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep
you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is
not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a
piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in
accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means
for solving a given problem. Our brains deal exclusively with special-case
experiences. Only our minds are able to discover the generalized principles
operating without exception in each and every special-experience case which
if detected and mastered will give knowledgeable advantage in all
instances. Because our spontaneous initiative has been frustrated, too
often inadvertently, in earliest childhood we do not tend, customarily, to
dare to think competently regarding our potentials. We find it socially
easier to go on with our narrow, shortsighted specialization’s and leave it
to others---primarily to the politicians---to find some way of resolving
our common dilemmas. Countering that spontaneous grownup trend to
narrowness I will do my, hopefully "childish," best to confront as many of
our problems as possible by employing the longest-distance thinking of
which I am capable---though that may not take us very far into the future.
Having been trained at the U. S. Naval Academy and practically experienced
in the powerfully effective forecasting arts of celestial navigation,
pilotage, ballistics, and logistics, and in the long-range, anticipatory,
design science governing yesterday’s naval mastery of the world from which
our present day’s general systems theory has been derived, I recall that in
1927 I set about deliberately exploring to see how far ahead we could make
competent forecasts regarding the direction in which all humanity is
trending and to see how effectively we could interpret the physical details
of what comprehensive evolution might be portending as disclosed by the
available data. I came to the conclusion that it is possible to make a
fairly reasonable forecast of about twenty-five years. That seems to be
about one industrial "tooling" generation. On the average, all inventions
seem to get melted up about every twenty-five years, after which the metals
come back into recirculation in new and usually more effective uses. At any
rate, in 1927 I evolved a forecast. Most of my 1927’S prognosticating went
only to 1952---that is, for a quarter-century, but some of it went on for a
half-century, to 1977. In 1927 when people had occasion to ask me about my
prognostications and I told them what I thought it would be appropriate to
do about what I could see ahead for the 1950’S, 1960’S, and 1970’s people
used to say to me, "Very amusing‹--you are a thousand years ahead of your
time." Having myself studied the increments in which we can think forwardly
I was amazed at the ease with which the rest of society seemed to be able
to see a thousand years ahead while I could see only one-fortieth of that
time distance. As time went on people began to tell me that I was a hundred
years ahead, and now they tell me that I’m a little behind the times. But I
have learned about public reaction to the unfamiliar and also about the
ease and speed with which the transformed reality becomes so "natural" as
misseemingly to have been always obvious. So I knew that their last
observations were made only because the evolutionary events I had foreseen
have occurred on schedule. However, all that experience gives me confidence
in discussing the next quarter-century’s events. First, I’d like to explore
a few thoughts about the vital data confronting us right now - • 2 •
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========2========

such as the fact that more than half of humanity as yet exists in miserable
poverty, prematurely doomed, unless we alter our comprehensive physical
circumstances. It is certainly no solution to evict the poor, replacing
their squalid housing with much more expensive buildings which the original
tenants can’t afford to reoccupy. Our society adopts many such superficial
palliatives. Because yesterday’s negatives are moved out of sight from
their familiar locations many persons are willing to pretend to themselves
that the problems have been solved. I feel that one of the reasons why we
are struggling inadequately today is that we reckon our costs on too
shortsighted a basis and are later overwhelmed with the unexpected costs
brought about by our shortsightedness.
Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one
of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that
specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization
precludes comprehensive thinking. This means that the
potentially-integratable-techno-economic advantages accruing to society
from the myriad specializations are not comprehended integratively and
therefore are not realized, or they are realized only in negative ways, in
new weaponry or the industrial support only of war faring.
All universities have been progressively organized for ever finer
specialization. Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable,
and desirable. Yet in observing a little child, we find it is interested in
everything and spontaneously apprehends, comprehends, and co- ordinates an
ever expending inventory of experiences. Children are enthusiastic
planetarium audiences. Nothing seems to be more prominent about human life
than its wanting to understand all and put everything together.
One of humanity’s prime drives is to understand and be understood. All
other living creatures are designed for highly specialized tasks. Man seems
unique as the comprehensive comprehender and coordinator of local universe
affairs. If the total scheme of nature required man to be a specialist she
would have made him so by having him born with one eye and a microscope
attached to it.
What nature needed man to be was adaptive in many if not any direction;
wherefore she gave man a mind as well as a coordinating switchboard brain.
Mind apprehends and comprehends the general principles governing flight and
deep sea diving, and man puts on his wings or his lungs, then takes them
off when not using them. The specialist bird is greatly impeded by its
wings when trying to walk. The fish cannot come out of the sea and walk
upon land, for birds and fish are specialists.
Of course, we are beginning to learn a little in the behavioral sciences
regarding how little we know about children and the educational processes.
We had assumed the child to be an empty brain receptacle into which we
could inject our methodically-gained wisdom until that child, too, became
educated. In the light of modern behavioral science experiments that was
not a good working assumption.
• 3 •
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========3========

Inasmuch as the new life always manifests comprehensive propensities I
would like to know why it is that we have disregarded all children’s
significantly spontaneous and comprehensive curiosity and in our formal
education have deliberately instituted processes leading only to narrow
specialization. We do not have to go very far back in history for the
answer. We get back to great, powerful men of the sword, exploiting their
prowess fortuitously and ambitiously, surrounded by the abysmal ignorance
of world society. We find early society struggling under economic
conditions wherein less than I per cent of humanity seemed able to live its
full span of years. This forlorn economic prospect resulted from the
seeming inadequacy of vital resources and from an illiterate society’s
inability to cope successfully with the environment, while saddled also
with preconditioned instincts which inadvertently produced many new human
babies. Amongst the strugglers we had cunning leaders who said, "Follow me,
and we’ll make out better than the others." It was the most powerful and
shrewd of these leaders who, as we shall see, invented and developed
specialization.
Looking at the total historical pattern of man around the Earth and
observing that three quarters of the Earth is water, it seems obvious why
men, unaware that they would some day contrive to fly and penetrate the
ocean in submarines, thought of themselves exclusively as pedestrians as
dry land specialists. Confined to the quarter of the Earth’s surface which
is dry land it is easy to see how they came to specialize further as
farmers or hunters-or, commanded by their leader, became specialized as
soldiers. Less than half of the dry 25 per cent of the

Earth’s surface was immediately favorable to the support of human life.
Thus, throughout history 99.9 per cent of humanity has occupied only 10 per
cent of the total Earth surface, dwelling only where life support was
visibly obvious. The favorable land was not in one piece, but consisted of
a myriad of relatively small parcels widely dispersed over the surface of
the enormous Earth sphere. The small isolated groups of humanity were
utterly unaware of one another’s existence. They were everywhere ignorant
of the vast variety of very different environments and resource patterns
occurring other than where they dwelt.
But there were a few human beings who gradually, through the process of
invention and experiment, built and operated, first, local river and bay,
next, along-shore, then off-shore rafts, dugouts, grass boats, and
outrigger sailing canoes. Finally, they developed voluminous rib- bellied
fishing vessels, and thereby ventured out to sea for progressively longer
periods. Developing ever larger and more capable ships, the seafarers
eventually were able to remain for months on the high seas. Thus, these
venturers came to live normally at sea. This led them inevitably into
world-around, swift, fortune-producing enterprise. Thus they became the
first world men.
The men who were able to establish themselves on the oceans had also to be
extraordinarily effective with the sword upon both land and sea. They had
also to have great anticipatory vision, great ship designing capability,
and original scientific conceptioning, mathematical skill in navigation and
exploration techniques for coping in fog, night, and storm with the
invisible hazards of rocks, shoals, and currents. The great sea venturers
had to be able to command all the people in their dry land realm in order
to commandeer the adequate metalworking, woodworking, weaving, and other
skills necessary to produce their large, complex ships. They had to
establish and maintain their authority in order that they themselves and
the craftsmen preoccupied in producing the ship be adequately fed by the
food-producing hunters and farmers of their realm. Here we see the
specialization being greatly amplified under the supreme authority of the
comprehensively visionary and brilliantly coordinated top swordsman, sea
venturer. If his "ship came in" ‹that is, returned safely from its years’
long venturing all the people in his realm prospered and their leader’s
power was vastly amplified.
• 4 •
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========4========

There were very few of these top power men. But as they went on their sea
ventures they gradually found that the waters interconnected all the
world’s people and lands. They learned this unbeknownst to their illiterate
sailors, who, often as not, having been hit over the head in a saloon and
dragged aboard to wake up at sea, saw only a lot of water and, without
navigational knowledge, had no idea where they had traveled.
The sea masters soon found that the people in each of the different places
visited knew nothing of people in other places. The great venturers found
the resources of Earth very unevenly distributed, and discovered that by
bringing together various resources occurring remotely from one another one
complemented the other in producing tools, services, and consumables of
high advantage and value. Thus resources in one place which previously had
seemed to be absolutely worthless suddenly became highly valued. Enormous
wealth was generated by what the sea venturers could do in the way of
integrating resources and distributing the products to the, everywhere
around the world, amazed and eager customers. The ship owning captains
found that they could carry fantastically large cargoes in their ships, due
to nature’s floatability-cargoes so large they could not possibly be
carried on the backs of animals or the backs of men. Furthermore, the ships
could sail across a bay or sea, traveling shorter distances in much less
time than it took to go around the shores and over the intervening
mountains. So these very few masters of the water world became incalculably
rich and powerful.
To understand the development of intellectual specialization, which is our
first objective, we must study further the comprehensive intellectual
capabilities of the sea leaders in

contradistinction to the myriad of physical, muscle, and craft-skill
specializations which their intellect and their skillful swordplay
commanded. The great sea venturers thought always in terms of the world,
because the world’s waters are continuous and cover three-quarters of the
Earth planet. This meant that before the invention and use of cables and
wireless 99.9 per cent of humanity thought only in the terms of their own
local terrain. Despite our recently developed communications intimacy and
popular awareness of total Earth we, too, in 1969 are as yet politically
organized entirely in the terms of exclusive and utterly obsolete sovereign

separateness.
This "sovereign--meaning top-weapons enforced‹"national" claim upon humans
born in various lands leads to ever more severely specialized servitude and
highly personalized identity classification. As a consequence of the
slavish "categoryitis" the scientifically illogical, and as we shall see,
often meaningless questions "Where do you live?" "What are you?" "What
religion?" "What race?" ’"What nationality?" are all thought of today as
logical questions. By the twenty- first century it either will have become
evident to humanity that these questions are absurd and anti-evolutionary
or men will no longer be living on Earth. If you don’t comprehend why that
is so, listen to me closely.
• 5 •
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========5========

1. origins of specialization Obviously we need to pursue further the
origins of specialization into deep history, hoping thereby to correct or
eliminate our erroneous concepts. Historically we can say that average
human beings throughout pre-twentieth-century history had each seen only
about one-millionth of the surface of their spherical Earth. This limited
experience gave humans a locally-focused, specialized viewpoint. Not
surprisingly, humanity thought the world was flat, and not surprisingly
humans thought its horizontally extended plane went circularly outward to
infinity. In our schools today we still start off the education of our
children by giving them planes and lines that go on, incomprehensibly
"forever" toward a meaningless infinity. Such oversimplified viewpoints are
misleading, blinding, and debilitating, because they preclude possible
discovery of the significance of our integrated experiences. Under these
everyday, knowledge-thwarting or limiting circumstances of humanity, the
comprehensively-informed master venturers of history who went to sea soon
realized that the only real competition they had was that of other powerful
outlaws who might also know or hope to learn through experience "what it is
all about." I call these sea mastering people the great outlaws or Great
Pirates-the G. P.’s‹ simply because the arbitrary laws enacted or edicted
by men on the land could not be extended effectively to control humans
beyond their shores and out upon the seas. So the world men who lived on
the seas were inherently outlaws, and the only laws that could and did rule
them were the natural laws-the physical laws of universe which when
tempestuous were often cruelly devastating. High seas combined with
nature’s fog and night-hidden rocks were uncompromising. And it followed
that these Great Pirates came into mortal battle with one another to see
who was going to control the vast sea routes and eventually the world.
Their battles took place out of sight of landed humanity. Most of the
losers went to the bottom utterly unbeknownst to historians. Those who
stayed on the top of the waters and prospered did so because of their
comprehensive capability. That is they were the antithesis of specialists.
They had high proficiency in dealing with celestial navigation, the storms,
the sea, the men, the ship, economics, biology, geography, history, and
science. The wider and more long distanced their anticipatory strategy, the
more successful they became. But these hard, powerful, brilliantly
resourceful sea masters had to sleep occasionally, and therefore found it
necessary to surround themselves with super-loyal, muscular but
dull-brained illiterates who could not see nor savvy their masters’
stratagems. There was great safety in the mental dullness of these
henchmen. The Great Pirates realized that the only people who could
possibly contrive to displace them were the truly bright people. For this
reason their number- one strategy was secrecy. If the other powerful
pirates did not know where you were going, nor when you had gone, nor when
you were coming back, they would not know how to waylay you. If anyone knew
when you were coming home, "small-timers" could come out in small boats and
waylay you in the dark and take you over-just before you got home tiredly
after a two-year treasure-harvesting voyage. Thus hijacking and second-rate
piracy became a popular activity around the world’s shores and harbors.
Thus secrecy became the essence of the lives of the successful pirates;
ergo, how little is known today of that which I am relating. Leonardo da
Vinci is the outstanding example of the comprehensively anticipatory design
scientist. Operating under the patronage of the Duke of Milan he designed
the fortified defenses
• 6 • Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth

========6========

and weaponry as well as the tools of peaceful production. Many other great
military powers had their comprehensive design scientist-artist inventors;
Michelangelo was one of them.
Many persons wonder why we do not have such men today. It is a mistake to
think we cannot. What happened at the time of Leonardo and Galileo was that
mathematics was so improved by the advent of the zero that not only was
much more scientific shipbuilding made possible but also much more reliable
navigation. Immediately thereafter truly large-scale venturing on the
world’s oceans commenced, and the strong sword-leader patrons as admirals
put their Leonardos to work, first in designing their new and more powerful
world-girdling ships. Next they took their Leonardos to sea with them as
their seagoing Merlins to invent ever more powerful tools and strategies on
a world-around basis to implement their great campaigns to best all the
other great pirates, thereby enabling them to become masters of the world
and of all its people and wealth. The required and scientifically designed
secrecy of the sea operations thus pulled a curtain that hid the Leonardos
from public view, popular ken, and recorded history.
Finally, the sea-dwelling Leonardos became Captains of the ships or even
Admirals of Fleets, or Commandants of the Navy yards where they designed
and built the fleets, or they became the commandants of the naval war
colleges where they designed and developed the

comprehensive strategy for running the world for a century to come. This
included not only the designing of the network of world-around voyaging and
of the ships for each task but also the designing of the industrial
establishments and world-around mining operations and naval base- building
for production and maintenance of the ships. This Leonardo-type planning
inaugurated today’s large-scale, world-around industrialization’s vast
scale of thinking. When the Great Pirates came to building steel steamships
and blast furnaces and railroad tracks to handle the logistics, the
Leonardos appeared momentarily again in such men as Telford who built the
railroads, tunnels, and bridges of England, as well as the first great
steamship.
You may say, "Aren’t you talking about the British Empire?" I answer, No
The so-called British Empire was a manifest of the world-around
misconception of who ran things and a disclosure of the popular ignorance
of the Great Pirates’ absolute world-controlling through their local-stooge
sovereigns and their prime ministers, as only innocuously and locally
modified here and there by the separate sovereignties’ internal democratic
processes. As we soon shall see, the British Isles lying off the coast of
Europe constituted in effect a fleet of unsinkable ships and naval bases
commanding all the great harbours of Europe. Those islands were the
possession of the topmost Pirates. Since the Great Pirates were building,
maintaining, supplying their ships on those islands, they also logically
made up their crews out of the native islanders who were simply seized or
commanded aboard by imperial edict. Seeing these British Islanders aboard
the top pirate ships the people around the world mistakenly assumed that
the world conquest by the Great Pirates was a conquest by the will,
ambition, and organization of the British people. Thus was the G. P.’s
grand deception victorious. But the people of those islands never had the
ambition to go out and conquer the world. As a people they were manipulated
by the top pirates and learned to cheer as they were told of their nation’s
world prowess.
The topmost Great Pirates’ Leonardos discovered -both in their careful,
long-distance planning and in their anticipatory inventing‹that the grand
strategies of sea power made it experimentally clear that a plurality of
ships could usually outmaneuver one ship. So the Great Pirates’ Leonardos
invented navies. Then, of course, they had to control various resource-
• 7 •
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supplying mines, forests, and lands with which and upon which to build the
ships and establish the industries essential to building, supplying, and
maintaining their navy’s ships.
Then came the grand strategy which said, "divide and conquer." You divide
up the other man’s ships in battle or you best him when several of his
ships are hauled out on the land for repairs. They also had a grand
strategy of anticipatory divide and conquer. Anticipatory divide and
conquer was much more effective than tardy divide and conquer, since it
enabled those who employed it to surprise the other pirate under conditions
unfavorable to the latter, So the great top pirates of the world, realizing
that dull people were innocuous and that the only people who could contrive
to displace the supreme pirates were the bright ones, set about to apply
their grand strategy of anticipatory divide and conquer to solve that
situation comprehensively.
The Great Pirate came into each of the various lands where he either
acquired or sold goods profitably and picked the strongest man there to be
his local head man. The Pirate’s picked man became the Pirate’s general
manager of the local realm. If the Great Pirate’s local strong man in a
given land had not already done so, the Great Pirate told him to proclaim
himself king. Despite the local head man’s secret subservience to him, the
Great Pirate allowed and counted upon his king-stooge to convince his
countrymen that he, the local king, was indeed the head man of all men ‹the
god-ordained ruler. To guarantee that sovereign claim the Pirates gave
their stooge-kings secret lines of supplies which provided everything
required to enforce the sovereign claim. The more massively bejeweled the
kings gold crown, and the more visible his court and castle, the less
visible was his pirate master.
The Great Pirates said to all their lieutenants around the world, "Any time
bright young people show up, I’d like to know about it, because we need
bright men." So each time the Pirate came into port the local king-ruler
would mention that he had some bright, young men whose capabilities and
thinking shone out in the community. The Great Pirate would say to the
king, "All right, you summon them and deal with them as follows: As each
young man is brought forward you say to him, ’Young man, you are very
bright. I’m going to assign you to a great history tutor and in due course
if you study well and learn enough I’m going to make you my Royal
Historian, but you’ve got to pass many examinations by both your teacher
and myself.’" And when the next bright boy was brought before him the King
was to say, "I’m going to make you my Royal Treasurer," and so forth. Then
the Pirate said to the king, "You will finally say to all of them: But each
of you must mind your own business or off go your heads. I’m the only one
who minds everybody’s business.’ "
And this is the way schools began as the royal tutorial schools. You
realize, I hope, that I am not being facetious. That is it. This is the
beginning of schools and colleges and the beginning of intellectual
specialization. Of course, it took great wealth to start schools, to have
great teachers, and to house, clothe, feed, and cultivate both teachers and
students. Only the Great- Pirate-protected robber-barons and the
Pirate-protected and secret intelligence-exploited international religious
organizations could afford such scholarship investment. And the development
of the bright ones into specialists gave the king very great brain power,
and made him and his kingdom the most powerful in the land and thus,
secretly and greatly, advantaged his patron Pirate in the world competition
with the other Great Pirates.
• 8 •
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========8========

But specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the
"expert" is fooled into accepting his slavery by making him feel that in
return he is in a socially and culturally preferred, ergo, highly secure,
lifelong position. But only the king’s son received the Kingdom- wide scope
of training.
However, the big thinking in general of a spherical Earth and celestial
navigation was retained exclusively by the Great Pirates, in
contradistinction to a four-cornered, flat world concept, with empire and
kingdom circumscribed knowledge, constricted to only that which could be
learned through localized preoccupations. Knowledge of the world and its
resources was enjoyed exclusively by the Great Pirates, as were also the
arts of navigation, shipbuilding and handling, and of grand logistical
strategies and of nationally-undetectable, therefore effectively deceptive,
international exchange media and trade balancing tricks by which the top
pirate, as (in gambler’s parlance) "the house," always won.
• 9 •
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========9========

1. comprehensively commanded automation Then there came a time, which
was World War I, when the most powerful out-pirates challenged the
in-pirates with the scientific and technological innovation of an entirely
new geometry of thinking. The out-pirates attack went under and above the
sea surface and into the invisible realm of electronics and chemical war
faring. Caught off-guard, the in-pirates, in order to save themselves, had
to allow their scientists to go to work on their own inscrutable terms.
Thus, in saving themselves, the Great Pirates allowed the scientists to
plunge their grand, industrial logistics, support strategy into the vast
ranges of the electro-magnetic spectrum that were utterly invisible to the
pirates. The pirates until then had ruled the world through their
extraordinarily keen senses. They judged things for themselves, and they
didn’t trust anyone else’s eyes. They trusted only that which they could
personally smell, hear, touch, or see. But the Great Pirates couldn’t see
what was going on in the vast ranges of the electro-magnetic reality.
Technology was going from wire to wireless, from track to trackless, from
pipe to pipeless, and from visible structural muscle to the invisible
chemical element strengths of metallic alloys and electro-magnetics. The
Great Pirates came out of that first world war unable to cope knowledgeably
with what was going on in the advanced scientific frontiers of industry.
The pirates delegated inspection to their "troubleshooter" experts, but had
to content themselves with relayed second-hand information. This forced
them to appraise blindly-ergo, only opinionatedly‹ whether this or that man
really knew what he was talking about, for the G. P.’s couldn’t judge for
themselves. Thus the Great Pirates were no longer the masters. That was the
end. The Great Pirates became extinct. But because the G. P.’s had always
operated secretly, and because they hoped they were not through, they of
course did not announce or allow it to be announced that they were extinct.
And because the public had never known of them and had been fooled into
thinking of their kingly stooges and local politicians as being in reality
the head men, society was and is as yet unaware either that the Great
Pirates once ran the world or that they are now utterly extinct. Though the
pirates are extinct, all of our international trade balancing and money
ratings, as well as all economic accounting, in both the capitalistic and
communistic countries, hold strictly to the rules, value systems,
terminology, and concepts established by those Great Pirates. Powerful
though many successors to the Great Pirates’ fragmented dominions may be,
no one government, religion, or enterprise now holds the world’s physical
or metaphysical initiatives. The metaphysical initiative, too, has gone
into competitive confusion between old religions and more recent political
or scientific ideologies. These competitors are already so heavily weighted
with physical investments and proprietary expediencies as to vitiate any
metaphysical initiative. A new, physically uncompromised, metaphysical
initiative of unbiased integrity could unify the world. It could and
probably will be provided by the utterly impersonal problem solutions of
the computers. Only to their superhuman range of calculative capabilities
can and may all political, scientific, and religious leaders face-savingly
acquiesce. • 10 • Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth

========10========

Abraham Lincoln’s concept of "right triumphing over might" was realized
when Einstein as metaphysical intellect wrote the equation of physical
universe E = Mc2 and thus comprehended it. Thus the metaphysical took the
measure of, and mastered, the physical. That relationship seems by
experience to be irreversible. Nothing in our experience suggests that
energy could comprehend and write the equation of intellect. That equation
is operating inexorably, and the metaphysical is now manifesting its
ability to reign over the physical.
This is the essence of human evolution upon Spaceship Earth. If the present
planting of humanity upon Spaceship Earth cannot comprehend this inexorable
process and discipline itself to serve exclusively that function of
metaphysical mastering of the physical it will be discontinued, and its
potential mission in universe will be carried on by the metaphysically
endowed capabilities of other beings on other spaceship planets of
universe.
The Great Pirates did run the world. They were the first and last to do so.
They were world men, and they ran the world with ruthless and brilliant
pragmatism based on the mis-seemingly "fundamental" information of their
scientifically specialized servants. First came their Royal Society
scientific servants, with their "Great" Second Law of thermodynamics, whose
"entropy" showed that every energy machine kept losing energy and
eventually "ran down." In their pre- speed-of-light-measurement
misconceptioning of an omnisimultaneous-instant universe" that universe, as
an energy machine was thought, also to be "running down." And thus the
energy wealth and life support were erroneously thought to be in continuous
depletion-orginating the misconception of "spending."
Next came Thomas Malthus, professor of political economics of the Great
Pirate’s East India Company, who said that man was multiplying himself at a
geometrical rate and that food was multiplying only at an arithmetical
rate. And lastly, thirty-five years later, came the G. P.’s biological
specialist servant, Charles Darwin, who, explaining his theory of animate
evolution, said that survival was only for the fittest.
Quite clearly to the Great Pirates it was a scientific fact that not only
was there not enough to go around but apparently not enough to go around
for even I per cent of humanity to live at a satisfactorily-sustaining
standard of living. And because of entropy the inadequacy would always
increase. Hence, said the G. P.’s, survival was obviously a cruel and
almost hopeless battle. They ran the world on the basis that these
Malthusian-Darwinian entropy concepts were absolute scientific laws, for
that was what their scientifically respected, intellectual slave
specialists had told them.
Then we have the great pragmatic ideologist Marx running into that
entropic-Malthusian- Darwinian information and saying, "Well, the workers
who produce things are the fittest because they are the only ones who know
how to physically produce and therefore they ought to be the ones to
survive." That was the beginning of the great "class warfare." All of the
ideologies range somewhere between the Great Pirates and the Marxists. But
all of them assume that there is not enough to go around. And that’s been
the rationalized working hypothesis of all the great sovereign claims to
great areas of the Earth. Because of their respective exclusivities, all
the class warfare ideologies have become extinct. Capitalism and socialism
are mutually extinct. Why? Because science now finds there can be ample for
all, but

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only if the sovereign fences are completely removed. The basic
you-or-me-not-enough-for-both ergo, someone-must-die- tenets of the class
warfaring are extinct.
Now let us examine more closely what we know scientifically about
extinction. At the annual Congress of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, as held approximately ten years ago in
Philadelphia, two papers were presented in widely-separated parts of the
Congress. One was presented in anthropology and the other in biology, and
though the two author-scientists knew nothing of each other’s efforts they
were closely related. The one in anthropology examined the case histories
of all the known human tribes that had become extinct. The biological paper
investigated the case histories of all the known biological species that
had become extinct. Both scientists sought for a common cause of
extinction. Both of them found a cause, and when the two papers were
accidentally brought together it was discovered that the researchers had
found the same causes. Extinction in both cases was the consequence of
over-specialization. How does that come about?
We can develop faster and faster running horses as specialists. To do so we
inbreed by mating two fast-running horses. By concentrating certain genes
the probability of their dominance is increased. But in doing so we breed
out or sacrifice general adaptability. Inbreeding and specialization always
do away with general adaptability.
There’s a major pattern of energy in universe wherein the very large
events, earthquakes, and so forth, occur in any one area of universe very
much less frequently than do the small energy events. Around the Earth
insects occur more often than do earthquakes. In the patterning of total
evolutionary events, there comes a time, once in a while, amongst the
myriad of low energy events, when a large energy event transpires and is so
disturbing that with their general adaptability lost, the ultra-specialized
creatures perish. I will give you a typical history-that of a type of bird
which lived on a special variety of micro-marine life. Flying around, these
birds gradually discovered that there were certain places in which that
particular marine life tended to pocket-in the marshes along certain ocean
shores of certain lands. So, instead of flying aimlessly for chance finding
of that marine life they went to where it was concentrated in bayside
marshes. After a while, the water began to recede in the marshes, because
the Earth’s polar ice cap was beginning to increase. Only the birds with
very long beaks could reach deeply enough in the marsh holes to get at the
marine life. The unfed, short- billed birds died off. This left only the
long-beakers. When the birds’ inborn drive to reproduce occurred there were
only other long-beakers surviving with whom to breed. This concentrated
their long-beak genes. So, with continually receding waters and generation
to generation inbreeding, longer and longer beaked birds were produced. The
waters kept receding, and the beaks of successive generations of the birds
grew bigger and bigger. The long-beakers seemed to be prospering when all
at once there was a great fire in the marshes. It was discovered that
because their beaks had become so heavy these birds could no longer fly.
They could not escape the flames by flying out of the marsh. Waddling on
their legs they were too slow to escape, and so they perished. This is
typical of the way in which extinction occurs through over- specialization.
When, as we have seen, the Great Pirates let their scientists have free
rein in World War I the Pirates themselves became so preoccupied with
enormous wealth harvesting that they not only lost track of what the
scientists were doing within the vast invisible world but they
inadvertently abandoned their own comprehensivity and they, too, became
severe specialists as industrial production money makers, and thus they
compounded their own acceleration to

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extinction in the world-paralyzing economic crash of 1929. But society, as
we have seen, never knew that the Great Pirates had been running the world.
Nor did society realize in 1929 that the Great Pirates had become extinct.
However, world’ society was fully and painfully aware of the economic
paralysis. Society consisted then, as now, almost entirely of specialized
slaves in education, management, science, office routines, craft, farming,
pick-and-shovel labour, and their families. Our world society now has none
of the comprehensive and realistic world knowledge that the Great Pirates
had.
Because world societies thought mistakenly of their local politicians, who
were only the stooges of the Great Pirates, as being realistically the head
men, society went to them to get the industrial and economic machinery
going again. Because industry is inherently world- coordinate these world
economic depression events of the 1920’S and 1930’S meant that each of the
local head politicians of a number of countries were asked separately to
make the world work. On this basis the world-around inventory of resources
was no longer integratable. Each of the political leaders’ mandates were
given from different ideological groups, and their differing viewpoints and
resource difficulties led inevitably to World War II.
The politicians, having an automatic bias, were committed to defend and
advantage only their own side. Each assumed the validity of the
Malthusian-Darwin-you-or-me-to-the-death struggle. Because of the working
concept that there was not enough to go around, the most aggressive
political leaders exercised their political leadership by heading their
countries into war to overcome the rest of the world, thus to dispose of
the unsupportable excess population through decimation and starvation-the
age-old, lethal formula of ignorant men. Thus we had all our world society
specializing, whether under fascism, communism, or capitalism. All the
great ideological groups assumed Armageddon.
Getting ready for the assumed inexorable Armageddon, each applied science
and all of the great scientific specialization capabilities only toward
weaponry, thus developing the ability to destroy themselves totally with no
comprehensively organized oppositional thinking capability and initiative
powerful enough to co-ordinate and prevent it. Thus by 1946, we were on the
swift way to extinction despite the inauguration of the United Nations, to
which none of the exclusive sovereign prerogatives were surrendered.
Suddenly, all unrecognized as such by society, the evolutionary antibody to
the extinction of humanity through specialization appeared in the form of
the computer and its comprehensively commanded automation which made man
obsolete as a physical production and control specialist-and just in time.
The computer as super specialist can persevere, day and night, day after
day, in picking out the pink from the blue at superhumanly sustainable
speeds. The computer can also operate in degrees of cold or heat at which
man would perish. Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist
by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and
enjoy his innate "comprehensivlty." Coping with the totality of Spaceship
Earth and universe is ahead for all of us. Evolution is apparently intent
that man fulfill a much greater destiny than that of being a simple muscle
and reflex machine-a slave automaton-automation displaces the automatons.
Evolution consists of many great revolutionary events taking place quite
independently of man’s consciously attempting to bring them about. Man is
very vain; he likes to feel that he is responsible for all the favorable
things that happen, and he is innocent of all the unfavorable

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happenings. But all the larger evolutionary patternings seeming favorable
or unfavorable to man’s conditioned reflexing are transpiring
transcendentally to any of man’s conscious planning or contriving.
To disclose to you your own vanity of reflexing, I remind you quickly that
none of you is consciously routing the fish and potato you ate for lunch
into this and that specific gland to make hair, skin, or anything like
that. None of you are aware of how you came to grow from 7 pounds to 70
pounds and then to I70 pounds, and so forth. All of this is automated, and
always has been. There is a great deal that is automated regarding our
total salvation on Earth, and I would like to get in that frame of mind
right now in order to be useful in the short time we have.
Let us now exercise our intellectual faculties as best we can to apprehend
the evolutionary patternings transcending our spontaneous cognitions and
recognitions. We may first note an evolutionary trend that countered all of
the educational systems and the deliberately increased professional
specialization of scientists. This contradiction occurred at the beginning
of World War II, when extraordinary new scientific instruments had been
developed and the biologists and chemists and physicists were meeting in
Washington, D. C., on special war missions. Those scientists began to
realize that whereas a biologist used to think he was dealing only in cells
and that a chemist was dealing only in molecules and the physicist was
dealing only in atoms, they now found their new powerful instrumentation
and contiguous operations overlapping. Each specialist suddenly realized
that he was concerned alike with atoms, molecules, and cells. They found
there was no real dividing line between their professional interests. They
hadn’t meant to do this, but their professional fields were being
integrated ‹inadvertently, on their part, but apparently purposefully-by
inexorable evolution. So, as of World War II, the scientists began to
invert new professional designations: the bio-chemist, the bio-physicist,
and so forth. They were forced to. Despite their deliberate attempts only
to specialize, they were being merged into ever more inclusive fields of
consideration. Thus was deliberately specializing man led back unwittingly
once more to reemploy his innately comprehensive capabilities.
I find it very important in disembarrassing ourselves of our vanity,
short-sightedness, biases, and ignorance in general, in respect to
universal evolution, to think in the following manner. I’ve often heard
people say, ’I wonder what it would be like to be on board a spaceship,"
and the answer is very simple. What does it feel like? That’s all we have
ever experienced. We are all astronauts.
I know you are paying attention, but I’m sure you don’t immediately agree
and say, "Yes, that’s right, I am an astronaut." I’m sure that you don’t
really sense yourself to be aboard a fantastically real spaceship our
spherical Spaceship Earth. Of our little sphere you have seen only small
portions. However, you have viewed more than did pre-twentieth-century man,
for in his entire lifetime he saw only one-millionth of the Earth’s
surface. You’ve seen a lot more. If you are a veteran world airlines pilot
you may have seen one one-hundredth of Earth’s surface. But even that is
sum totally not enough to see and feel Earth to be a sphere unless,

unbeknownst to me, one of you happens to be a Cape Kennedy capsuler.
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1. spaceship earth Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand
miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great
vastness of space. Our nearest star our energy-supplying mother-ship, the
Sun‹is ninety-two million miles away, and the nearest star is one hundred
thousand times further away. It takes approximately four and one third
years for light to get to us from the next nearest energy supply ship star.
That is the kind of space-distanced pattern we are flying. Our little
Spaceship Earth is right now travelling at sixty thousand miles an hour
around the around the sun and is also spinning axially, which, at the
latitude of Washington, D. C., adds approximately one thousand miles per
hour to our motion. Each minute we both spin at one hundred miles and zip
in orbit at one thousand miles. That is a whole lot of spin and zip. When
we launch our rocketed space capsules at fifteen thousand miles an hour,
that additional acceleration speed we give the rocket to attain its own
orbit around our speeding Spaceship Earth is only one-fourth greater than
the speed of our big planetary spaceship.
Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that
to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not
even knowing that they were on board a ship. And our spaceship is so
superbly designed as to be able to keep life regenerating on board despite
the phenomenon, entropy, by which all local physical systems lose energy.
So we have to obtain our biological life-regenerating energy from another
spaceship the sun. Our sun is flying in company with us, within the vast
reaches of the Galactic system, at just the right distance to give us
enough radiation to keep us alive, yet not close enough to burn us up. And
the whole scheme of Spaceship Earth and its live passengers is so superbly
designed that the Van Allen belts, which we didn’t even know we had until
yesterday, filter the sun and other star radiation which as it impinges
upon our spherical ramparts is so concentrated that if we went nakedly
outside the Van Allen belts it would kill us. Our Spaceship Earth’s
designed infusion of that radiant energy of the stars is processed in such
a way that you and I can carry on safely. You and I can go out and take a
sunbath, but are unable to take in enough energy through our skins to keep
alive. So part of the invention of the Spaceship Earth and its biological
life-sustaining is that the vegetation on the land and the algae in the
sea, employing photosynthesis, are designed to impound the
life-regenerating energy for us to adequate amount. But we can’t eat all
the vegetation. As a matter of fact, we can eat very little of it. We can’t
eat the bark nor wood of the trees nor the grasses. But insects can eat
these, and there are many other animals and creatures that can. We get the
energy relayed to us by taking the milk and meat from the animals. The
animals can eat the vegetation, and there are a few of the fruits and
tender vegetation petals and seeds that we can eat. We have learned to
cultivate more of those botanical edibles by genetical inbreeding. That we
are endowed with such intuitive and intellectual capabilities as that of
discovering the genes and the R.N.A. and D.N.A. and other fundamental
principles governing the fundamental design controls of life systems as
well as of nuclear energy and chemical structuring is part of the
extraordinary design of the Spaceship Earth, its equipment, passengers, and
internal support systems. It is therefore paradoxical but strategically
explicable, as we shall see, that up to now we have been misusing, abusing,
and polluting this
• 15 • Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth

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extraordinary chemical energy-interchanging system for successfully
regenerating all life aboard our planetary spaceship.
One of the interesting things to me about our spaceship is that it is a
mechanical vehicle, just as is an automobile. If you own an automobile, you
realize that you must put oil and gas into it, and you must put water in
the radiator and take care of the car as a whole. You begin to develop
quite a little thermodynamic sense. You know that you’re either going to
have to keep the machine in good order or it’s going to be in trouble and
fail to function. We have not been seeing our Spaceship Earth as an
integrally-designed machine which to be persistently successful must be
comprehended and serviced in total.
Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth,
and that is that no instruction book came with it. I think it’s very
significant that there is no instruction book for successfully operating
our ship. In view of the infinite attention to all other details displayed
by our ship, it must be taken as deliberate and purposeful that an
instruction book was omitted. Lack of instruction has forced us to find
that there are two kinds of berries-red berries that will kill us and red
berries that will nourish us. And we had to find out ways of telling
which-was- which red berry before we ate it or otherwise we would die. So
we were forced, because of a lack of an instruction book, to use our
intellect, which is our supreme faculty, to devise scientific experimental
procedures and to interpret effectively the significance of the
experimental findings. Thus, because the instruction manual was missing we
are learning how we safely can anticipate the consequences of an increasing
number of alternative ways of extending our satisfactory survival and
growth-both physical and metaphysical.
Quite clearly, all of life as designed and born is utterly helpless at the
moment of birth. The human child stays helpless longer than does the young
of any other species. Apparently it is part of the invention "man" that he
is meant to be utterly helpless through certain

anthropological phases and that, when he begins to be able to get on a
little better, he is meant to discover some of the physical
leverage-multiplying principles inherent in universe as well as the many no
obvious resources around him which will further compoundingly multiply his
knowledge-regenerating and life-fostering advantages.
I would say that designed into this Spaceship Earth’s total wealth was a
big safety factor which allowed man to be very ignorant for a long time
until he had amassed enough experiences from which to extract progressively
the system of generalized principles governing the increases of energy
managing advantages over environment. The designed omission of the
instruction book on how to operate and maintain Spaceship Earth and its
complex life- supporting and regenerating systems has forced man to
discover retrospectively just what his most important forward capabilities
are. His intellect had to discover itself. Intellect in turn had to
compound the facts of his experience. Comprehensive reviews of the
compounded facts of experiences by intellect brought forth awareness of the
generalized principles underlying all special and only superficially-sensed
experiences. Objective employment of those generalized principles in
rearranging the physical resources of environment seems to be leading to
humanity’s eventually total success and readiness to cope with far vaster
problems of universe.
To comprehend this total scheme we note that long ago a man went through
the woods, as you may have done, and I certainly have, trying to find the
shortest way through the woods in

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a given direction. He found trees fallen across his path. He climbed over
those crisscrossed trees and suddenly found himself poised on a tree that
was slowly teetering. It happened to be lying across another great tree,
and the other end of the tree on which he found himself teetering lay under
a third great fallen tree. As he teetered he saw the third big tree
lifting. It seemed impossible to him. He went over and tried using his own
muscles to lift that great tree. He couldn’t budge it. Then he climbed back
atop the first smaller tree, purposefully teetering it, and surely enough
it again elevated the larger tree. I’m certain that the first man who found
such a tree thought that it was a magic tree, and may have dragged it home
and erected it as man’s first totem. It was probably a long time before he
learned that any stout tree would do, and thus extracted the concept of the
generalized principle of leverage out of all his earlier successive
special-case experiences with such accidental discoveries. Only as he
learned to generalize fundamental principles of physical universe did man
learn to use his intellect effectively.
Once man comprehended that any tree would serve as a lever his intellectual
advantages accelerated. Man freed of special-case superstition by intellect
has had his survival potentials multiplied millions fold. By virtue of the
leverage principles in gears, pulleys, transistors, and so forth, it is
literally possible to do more with less in a multitude of physio-chemical
ways. Possibly it was this intellectual augmentation of humanity’s survival
and success through the

metaphysical perception of generalized principles which may be objectively
employed that Christ was trying to teach in the obscurely told story of the
loaves and the fishes.
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1. general systems theory How may we use our intellectual capability to
higher advantage? Our muscle is very meager as compared to the muscles of
many animals. Our integral muscles are as nothing compared to the power of
a tornado or the atom bomb which society contrived-in fear-out of the
intellect’s fearless discoveries of generalized principles governing the
fundamental energy behaviors of physical universe. In organizing our grand
strategy we must first discover where we are now; that is, what our present
navigational position in the universal scheme of evolution is. To begin our
position- fixing aboard our Spaceship Earth we must first acknowledge that
the abundance of immediately consumable, obviously desirable or utterly
essential resources have been sufficient until now to allow us to carry on
despite our ignorance. Being eventually exhaustible and spoilable, they
have been adequate only up to this critical moment. This cushion-for-error
of humanity’s survival and growth up to now was apparently provided just as
a bird inside of the egg is provided with liquid nutriment to develop it to
a certain point. But then by design the nutriment is exhausted at just the
time when the chick is large enough to be able to loco mote on its own
legs. And so as the chick pecks at the shell seeking more nutriment it
inadvertently breaks open the shell. Stepping forth from its initial
sanctuary, the young bird must now forage on its own legs and wings to
discover the next phase of its regenerative sustenance. My own picture of
humanity today finds us just about to step out from amongst the pieces of
our just one-second-ago broken eggshell. Our innocent,
trial-and-error-sustaining nutriment is exhausted. We are faced with an
entirely new relationship to the universe. We are going to have to spread
our wings of intellect and fly or perish; that is, we must dare immediately
to fly by the generalized principles governing universe and not by the
ground rules of yesterday’s superstitious and erroneously conditioned
reflexes. And as we attempt competent thinking we immediately begin to
reemploy our innate drive for comprehensive understanding. The architects
and planners, particularly the planners, though rated as specialists, have
a little wider focus than do the other professions. Also as human beings
they often battle the narrow views of specialists-in particular, their
patrons-the politicians, and the financial and other legal, but no longer
comprehensively effective, heirs to the great pirates’-now only ghostly
prerogatives. At least the planners are allowed to look at all of
Philadelphia, and not just to peek through a hole at one house or through
one door at one room in that house. So I think it’s appropriate that we
assume the role of planners and begin to do the largest scale comprehensive
thinking of which we are capable. We begin by eschewing the role of
specialists who deal only in parts. Becoming deliberately expansive instead
of contractive, we ask, "How do we think in terms of wholes?" If it is true
that the bigger the thinking becomes the more lastingly effective it is, we
must ask, "How big can we think?" One of the modern tools of high
intellectual advantage is the development of what is called general systems
theory. Employing it we begin to think of the largest and most
comprehensive
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systems, and try to do so scientifically. We start by inventorying all the
important, known variables that are operative in the problem. But if we
don’t really know how big "big" is, we may not start big enough, and are
thus likely to leave unknown, but critical, variables outside the system
which will continue to plague us. Interaction of the unknown variables
inside and outside the arbitrarily chosen limits of the system are probably
going to generate misleading or outrightly wrong answers. If we are to be
effective, we are going to have to think in both the biggest and most
minutely-incisive ways permitted by intellect and by the information thus
far won through experience.
Can we think of, and state adequately and incisively, what we mean by
universe? For universe is, inferentially, the biggest system. If we could
start with universe, we would automatically avoid leaving out any
strategically critical variables. We find no record as yet of man having
successfully defined the universe-scientifically and comprehensively-to
include the nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping, micro-macro,
always and everywhere transforming, physical and metaphysical,
omni-complementary but nonidentical events.
Man has failed thus far, as a specialist, to define the microcosmic limits
of divisibility of the nucleus of the atom, but, epochally, as accomplished
by Einstein, has been able to define successfully the physical universe but
not the metaphysical universe; nor has he, as yet, defined total universe
itself as combining both the physical and metaphysical. The scientist was
able to define physical universe by virtue of the experimentally-verified
discovery that energy can neither be created nor lost and, therefore, that
energy is conserved and is therefore finite. That means it is equatable.
Einstein successfully equated the physical universe as E = Mc2. His
definition was only a hypothetical venture until fission proved it to be
true. The physical universe of associative and disassociative energy was
found to be a closed, but nonsimultaneously occurring, system-its
separately occurring events being mathematically measurable; i.e.,
weighable and equatable. But the finite physical universe did not include
the metaphysical weightless experiences of universe. All the unweighables,
such as any and all our thoughts and all the abstract mathematics, are
weightless. The metaphysical aspects of universe have been thought by the
physical scientists to defy "closed system’s" analysis. I have found,
however, as we shall soon witness, that total universe including both its
physical and metaphysical behaviors and aspects are scientifically
definable.
Einstein and others have spoken exclusively about the physical department
of universe in words which may be integrated and digested as the aggregate
of nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping, nonidentical, but always
complementary, omni-transforming, and weighable energy events. Eddington
defines science as "the earnest attempt to set in order the facts of
experience." Einstein and many other first-rank scientists noted that
science is concerned exclusively with "facts of experience."
Holding to the scientists’ experiences as all important, I define universe,
including both the physical and metaphysical, as follows: The universe is
the aggregate of all of humanity’s consciously-apprehended and communicated
experience with the nonsimultaneous, nonidentical, and only partially
overlapping, always complementary, weighable and unweighable, ever
omni-transforming, event sequences.
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Each experience begins and ends-ergo, is finite. Because our apprehending
is packaged, both physically and metaphysically, into time increments of
alternate awakeness and asleepness as well as into separate finite
conceptions such as the discrete energy quanta and the atomic nucleus
components of the fundamental physical discontinuity, all experiences are
finite. Physical experiments have found no solids, no continuous surfaces
or lines only discontinuous constellations of individual events. An
aggregate of finites is finite. Therefore, universe as experientially
defined, including both the physical and metaphysical, is finite.
It is therefore possible to initiate our general systems formulation at the
all inclusive level of universe whereby no strategic variables will be
omitted. There is an operational grand strategy of General Systems Analysis
that proceeds from here. It is played somewhat like the game of "Twenty
Questions," but G. S. A. is more efficient-that is, is more economical‹ in
reaching its answers. It is the same procedural strategy that is used by
the computer to weed out al1 the wrong answers until only the right answer
is left.
Having adequately defined the whole system we may proceed to subdivide
progressively. This is accomplished through progressive division into two
parts one of which, by definition, could not contain the answer-and
discarding of the sterile part. Each progressively -retained live part is
called a "bit" because of its being produced by the progressive binary
"yes" or "no" bi- section of the previously residual live part. The
magnitude of such weeding operations is determined by the number of
successive bits necessary to isolate the answer.
How many "bi-secting bits" does it take to get rid of all the irrelevancies
and leave in lucid isolation that specific information you are seeking? We
find that the first subdividing of the concept of universe-bit one‹is into
what we call a system. A system subdivides universe into all the universe
outside the system (macrocosm) and all the rest of the universe which is
inside the system (microcosm) with the exception of the minor fraction of
universe which constitutes the system itself. The system divides universe
not only into macrocosm and microcosm but also coincidentally into typical
conceptual and nonconceptual aspects of universe-that is, an
overlappingly-associable consideration, on the one hand, and, on the other
hand, all the nonassociable, nonoverlappingly-considerable,
nonsimultaneously-transforming events of nonsynchronizable disparate wave
frequency rate ranges.
A thought is a system, and is inherently conceptual-though often only dimly
and confusedly conceptual at the moment of first awareness of the as yet
only vaguely describable thinking activity. Because total universe is
nonsimultaneous it is not conceptual. Conceptuality is produced by
isolation, such as in the instance of one single, static picture held out
from a moving-picture film’s continuity, or scenario. Universe is an
evolutionary-process scenario without beginning or end, because the shown
part is continually transformed chemically into fresh film and reexposed to
the ever self-reorganizing process of latest thought realizations which
must continually introduce new significance into the freshly written
description of the ever-transforming events before splicing the film in
again for its next projection phase.
Heisenberg’s principle of "indeterminism" which recognized the experimental
discovery that the act of measuring always alters that which was being
measured turns experience into a

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continuous and never-repeatable evolutionary scenario. One picture of the
scenario about the caterpillar phase does not communicate its
transformation into the butterfly phase, etc. The question, "I wonder what
is outside the outside-of-universe?" is a request for a single picture
description of a scenario of transformations and is an inherently invalid
question. It is the same as looking at a dictionary and saying, ’"Which
word is the dictionary?" It is a meaningless question.
It is characteristic of "all" thinking of all system’s conceptioning-that
all the lines of thought interrelationships must return cyclically upon
themselves in a plurality of directions, as do various great circles around
spheres. Thus may we interrelatedly comprehend the constellation- or
system-of experiences under consideration. Thus may we comprehend how the
special-case economy demonstrated by the particular system considered also
discloses the generalized law of energy conservation of physical universe.
To hit a duck in flight a hunter does not fire his gun at the bird where
the gunner sees him but ahead of the bird, so that the bird and the bullet
will meet each other at a point not in line between the gunner and the bird
at time of firing. Gravity and wind also pull the bullet in two different
directions which altogether impart a mild corkscrew trajectory to the
bullet. Two airplanes in nighttime dogfights of World War II firing at each
other with tracer bullets and photographed by a third plane show clearly
the corkscrew trajectories as one hits the other. Einstein and Reiman, the
Hindu mathematician, gave the name geodesic lines to these curvilinear and
most economical lines of interrelationship between two independently moving
events" the events in this case being the two airplanes.
A great circle is a line formed on a sphere’s surface by a plane going
through the sphere’s centre. Lesser circles are formed on the surfaces of
spheres by planes cutting through spheres but not passing through the
sphere’s centre. When a lesser circle is superimposed on a great circle it
cuts across the latter at two points, A and B. It is a shorter distance
between A and B on the great circle’s shortest arc than it is on the lesser
circle’s shortest arc. Great circles are geodesic lines because they
provide the most economical (energy, effort) distances between any two
points on a spherical system’s surface; therefore, nature, which always
employs only the most economical realizations, must use those great circles
which, unlike spiral lines, always return upon themselves in the most
economical manner. All the system’s paths must be topologically and
circularly interrelated for conceptually definitive, locally transformable,
polyhedronal understanding to be attained in our spontaneous-ergo, most
economical- geodesicly structured thoughts.
Thinking itself consists of self-disciplined dismissal of both the
macrocosmic and microcosmic irrelevancies which leaves only the
lucidly-relevant considerations. The macrocosmic

irrelevancies are all the events too large and too infrequent to be
synchronizably tuneable in any possible way with our consideration (a
beautiful word meaning putting stars together). The microcosmic
irrelevancies are all the events which are obviously too small and too
frequent to be differentially resolved in any way or to be
synchronizably-tuneable within the lucidly-relevant wave-frequency limits
of the system we are considering.
How many stages of dismissal of irrelevancies does it take-that is,
proceeding from "universe" as I defined it, how many bits does it
take-lucidly to isolate all the geodesic

• 21 •
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interrelations of all the "star" identities in the constellation under
consideration? The answer is the formula (redo in finished text) where N is
the number of stars in the thought-discerned constellation of focal point
entities comprising the problem.
"Comprehension" means identifying all the most uniquely economical
inter-relationships of the focal point entities involved. We may say then
that:
Comprehension = (redo in finished text)
This is the way in which thought processes operate with mathematical logic.
The

mathematics involved consist of topology, combined with vectorial geometry,
which

combination I call "synergetics"-which word I will define while clarifying
its use. By questioning many audiences, I have discovered that only about
one in three hundred are familiar with synergy. The word is obviously not a
popular word. Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior
of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of
the system’s separate parts or any subassembly of the system’s parts. There
is nothing in the chemistry of a toenail that predicts the existence of a
human being.
I once asked an audience of the National Honors Society in chemistry, "How
many of you are familiar with the word, synergy?" and all hands went up.
Synergy is the essence of chemistry. The tensile strength of
chrome-nickel-steel, which is approximately 350,000 pounds per square inch,
is 100,OOO P.S.I. greater than the sum of the tensile strengths of each of
all its alloyed together, component, metallic elements. Here is a "chain"
that is 50 per cent stronger than the sum of the strengths of all its
links. We think popularly only in the terms of a chain being no stronger
than its weakest link, which concept fails to consider, for instance, the
case of an endlessly interlinked chain of atomically self-renewing links of
omni-equal strength or of an omni-directionally interlinked chain matrix of
ever renewed atomic links in which one broken link would be, only
momentarily, a local cavern within the whole mass having no weakening
effect on the whole, for every link within the matrix is a high frequency,
recurring, break-and-make restructuring of the system.
Since synergy is the only word in our language meaning behavior of wholes
unpredicted by behavior of their parts, it is clear that society does not
think there are behaviors of whole systems unpredicted by their separate
parts. This means that society’s formally-accredited thoughts and ways of
accrediting others are grossly inadequate in comprehending the
nonconceptual qualities of the scenario "universal evolution."
There is nothing about an electron alone that forecasts the proton, nor is
there anything about the Earth or the Moon that forecasts the co-existence
of the Sun. The solar system is synergetic-unpredicted by its separate
parts. But the interplay of Sun as supply ship of Earth and the Moon’s
gravitationally produced tidal pulsations on Earth all interact to produce
the biosphere’s chemical conditions which permit but do not cause the
regeneration of life on Spaceship Earth. This is all synergetic. There is
nothing about the gases given off respiratorily by Earth’s green vegetation
that predicts that those gases will be essential to the life support of

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all mammals aboard Spaceship Earth, and nothing about the mammals that
predicts that the gases which they give off respiratorily are essential to
the support of the vegetation aboard our Spaceship Earth. Universe is
synergetic. Life is synergetic.
Summarizing synergetically I may conclude that since my experimental
interrogation of more than one hundred audiences all around the world has
shown that less than one in three hundred university students has ever
heard of the word synergy, and since it is the only word that has that
meaning it is obvious that the world has not thought there are any
behaviors of whole systems unpredictable by their parts. This is partially
the consequence of over- specialization and of leaving the business of the
whole to the old pirates to be visibly conducted by their stooges, the
feudal kings or local politicians.
There is a corollary of synergy which says that the known behavior of the
whole and the known behavior of a minimum of known parts often makes
possible the discovery of the values of the remaining parts as does the
known sum of the angles of a triangle plus the known behavior of three of
its six parts make possible evaluating the others. Topology provides the
synergetic means of ascertaining the values of any system of experiences.
Topology is the science of fundamental pattern and structural relationships
of event constellations. It was discovered and developed by the
mathematician Euler. He discovered that all patterns can be reduced to
three prime conceptual characteristics: to lines; points where two lines
cross or the same line crosses itself; and areas, bound by lines. He found
that there is a constant relative abundance of these three fundamentally
unique and no further reducible aspects of all patterning
P + A = L + 2
This reads: the number of points plus the number of areas always equals the
number of lines plus the number constant two. There are times when one area
happens to coincide with others. When the faces of polyhedra coincide
illusionarily the congruently hidden faces must be accounted arithmetically
in formula.
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1. synergy We will now tackle our present world problems with the family
of powerful thought tools: topology, geodesics, synergetics, general
systems theory, and the computer’s operational "bitting." To insure our
inclusion of all the variables with which we must eventually deal, we will
always start synergetically with universe -now that universe is defined and
thus provides us with the master containment. We will then state our unique
problem and divest ourselves progressively and definitively of all the
micromacro irrelevancies. Are humans necessary? Are there experiential
clues that human intellect has an integral function in regenerative
universe as has gravity? How can Earthians fulfill their function and thus
avoid extinction as unfit? To start with, we will now progressively
subdivide universe and isolate the thinkable concept by bits through
progressively dismissing residual irrelevancies. Our first isolated bit is
the system, which at maximum is the starry macrocosmic and at minimum the
atomic nucleus; the second bit reduces the macrocosmic limit to that of the
galactic nebula; the third bit separates out cosmic radiation, gravity and
the solar system; and the fourth bit isolates the cosmic radiation,
gravity, sun, its energized, life-bearing Spaceship Earth, together WITH
the Earth’s Moon as the most prominent components of the life regeneration
on Spaceship Earth. I would like to inventory rapidly the system variables
which I find to be by far the most powerful in the consideration of our
present life -regenerating evolution aboard our spaceship as it is
continually refueled radiationally by the Sun and other cosmic radiation.
Thus we may, by due process, suddenly and excitingly discover why we are
here alive in universe and identify ourselves as presently operating here,
aboard our spaceship, and situated aboard its spherical deck at, for
example, Washington, D. C., on the North American continent, thinking
effectively regarding the relevant contemporary and local experiences
germane to the solution of humanity’s successful and happy survival aboard
our planet. We may thus discover not only what needs to be done in a
fundamental way but also we may discover how it may be accomplished by our
own directly-seized initiative, undertaken and sustained without any
further authority than that of our function in universe, where the most
ideal is the most realistically practical. Thus we may avoid all the
heretofore frustrating factors of uninspired patron guidance of our work
such as the patron’s supine concessions to the nonsynergetical thinking,
and therefore ignorantly conditioned reflexes, of the least well advised of
the potential mass customers. Typical of the subsidiary problems within the
whole human survival problem, whose ramifications now go beyond the
prerogatives of planners and must be solved, is the problem of pollution in
general-pollution not only of our air and water but also of the information
stored in our brains. We will soon have to rename our planet "Poluto." In
respect to our planet’s life sustaining atmosphere we find that, yes, we do
have technically feasible ways of precipitating the fumes, and after this
we say, "But it costs too much." There are also ways of desalinating sea
water, and we say, "But it costs too much." This too narrow treatment of
the problem never faces the inexorably-evolving and solution-insistent
problem of what it will cost when we don’t have the air and water with
which to survive. It takes months to starve to death, weeks to thirst to
death, but only minutes to suffocate. We cannot survive without water for
the length of time it takes to produce and install desalinization equipment
adequate to supply, for instance, all of New York City. A sustained, and
often threatened, water shortage in New York City could mean death for
millions of humans. Each time the threat passes the old statement "it costs
too much" again blocks realization of the desalinization capability. • 24 •
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Anybody who has been in Washington (and approximately everyone else
everywhere today) is familiar with governmental budgeting and with the
modes of developing public recognition of problems and of bringing about
official determination to do something about solutions. In the end, the
problems are rarely solved, not because we don’t know how but because it is
discovered either that it is said by those in authority that "it costs too
much" or that when we identify the fundamental factors of the environmental
problems‹and laws are enacted to cope incisively with those factors that
there are no funds presently known to be available with which to implement
the law. There comes a money bill a year later for implementation and with
it the political criteria of assessing wealth by which the previous year’s
bill would now seemingly "cost too much." So compromises follow
compromises. Frequently, nothing but political promises or under-budgeted
solutions result. The original legislation partially stills the demands.
The pressures on the politicians are lowered, and the lack of
implementation is expeditiously shrugged off because of seemingly more
pressing, seemingly higher priority, new demands for the money. The most
pressing of those demands is for war, for which the politicians suddenly
accredit weaponry acquisitions and military tasks costing many times their
previously asserted concepts of what we can afford.
Thus under lethal emergencies vast new magnitudes of wealth come
mysteriously into effective operation. We don’t seem to be able to afford
to do peacefully the logical things we say we ought to be doing to
forestall warring-by producing enough to satisfy all the world needs. Under
pressure we always find that we can afford to wage the wars brought about
by the vital struggle of "have-nots" to share or take over the bounty of
the "haves." Simply because it had seemed, theretofore, to cost too much to
provide vital support of those "have- nots." The "haves" are thus forced in
self-defense suddenly to articulate and realize productive wealth
capabilities worth many times the amounts of monetary units they had known
themselves to possess and, far more importantly, many times what it would
have cost to give adequate economic support to the particular "have-nots"
involved in the warring and, in fact, to all the world’s ’have-nots."
The adequately macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive solutions to any and
all vital problems never cost too much. The production of heretofore
nonexistent production tools and industrial networks of harnessed energy to
do more work does not cost anything but human time which is refunded in
time gained minutes after the inanimate machinery goes to work. Nothing is
spent. Potential wealth has become real wealth. As it is cliched "in the
end" problem solutions always cost the least if paid for adequately at
outset of the vital problem’s recognition. Being vital, the problems are
evolutionary, inexorable, and ultimately unavoidable by humanity. The
constantly put-off or under-met costs and society’s official bumbling of
them clearly prove that man does not know at present what wealth is nor how
much of whatever it may be is progressively available to him.
We have now flushed out a major variable in our general systems problem of
man aboard Spaceship Earth. The question ’What is wealth?" commands our
prime consideration.
The Wall Sheet Journal reported the September-October 1967 deliberations of
the International Monetary Fund held at Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Many years
and millions of dollars were spent maneuvering for and assembling this
monetary convention, and the net result was the weak opinion that it would
soon be time to consider doing something about money. The

• 25 •
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convention felt our international balance of payments and its gold demand
system to be inadequate. They decided that the old pirate’s gold was still
irreplaceable but that after a few years they might have to introduce some
new "gimmick" to augment the gold as an international monetary base.
At present there is about seventy billion dollars of mined gold known to
exist on board our Spaceship Earth. A little more than half of it-about
forty billion-is classified as being "monetary"; that is, it exists in the
forms of various national coinages or in the form of officially banked gold
bullion bars. The remaining thirty billion is in private metallic hordes,
jewelry, gold teeth, etc.
Since banks have no money of their own and only our deposits on which they
earn "interest," bank wealth or money consists only of accrued bank income.
Income represents an average return of 5 per cent on capital invested. We
may assume therefore from an estimate of the world’s annual gross product
that the capital assets, in the form of industrial production, on board our
Spaceship Earth are at present worth in excess of a quadrillion dollars.
The world’s total of seventy billion dollars in gold represents only three
one-thousandths of I per cent of the value of the world’s organized
industrial production resources. The gold supply is so negligible as to
make it pure voodoo to attempt to valve the world’s economic evolution
traffic through the gold-sized needle’s "eye."
Gold was used for trading by the Great Pirates in lieu of any good faith
whatsoever‹ and in lieu of any mutual literacy, scientific knowledge,
intelligence, or scientific and technical know- how on both sides of the
trading. Gold trading assumed universal rascality to exist. Yet the
realization of the planners’ earnest conceptioning and feasible work on
behalf of the ill-fated 60 per cent of humanity are entirely frustrated by
this kind of nonsense.
We therefore proceed ever more earnestly with our general systems analysis
of the problems of human survival, with the premise that at present neither
the world’s political officials nor its bankers know what wealth is. In
organizing our thoughts to discover and clarify what wealth is we also will
attempt to establish an effective means to develop immediate working
procedures for solution of such big problems.
I have tried out the following intellectual filtering procedure with both
multi-thousand general public audiences and with audiences of only a
hundred or so advanced scholars and have never experienced disagreement
with my progression of residual conclusions. I proceed as follows: I am
going to make a series of analytical statements to you, and if anyone
disagrees with me on any statement we will discard that statement. Only
those of all my statements which remain 100 per cent unprotected will we
rate as being acceptable to all of us.
First, I say, "No matter what you think wealth may be and no matter how
much you have of it, you cannot alter one iota of yesterday." No protest?
We’ve learned some lessons. We can say that wealth is irreversible in
evolutionary processes. Is there anyone who disagrees with any of my
statements thus far about what wealth is or is not? Good-no disagreement
-we will go on.
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Now, I’m going to have a man in a shipwreck. He’s rated as a very rich man,
worth over a billion dollars by all of society’s accredited conceptions of
real wealth. He has taken with him on his voyage all his stocks and bonds,
all his property deeds, all his checkbooks, and, to play it safe, has
brought along a lot of diamonds and gold bullion. The ship burns and sinks,
and there are no lifeboats, for they, too, have burned. If our billionaire
holds on to his gold, he’s going to sink a little faster than the others.
So I would say he hadn’t much left either of now or tomorrow in which to
articulate his wealth, and since wealth cannot work backwardly his kind of
wealth is vitally powerless. It is really a worthless pile of chips of an
arbitrary game which we are playing and does not correspond to the
accounting processes of our real universe’s evolutionary transactions.
Obviously the catastrophied billionaire’s kind of wealth has no control
over either yesterday, now, or tomorrow. He can’t extend his life with that
kind of wealth unless he can persuade the one passenger who has a
life-jacket to yield that only means of extending one life in exchange for
one crazy moment’s sense of possession of all the billionaire’s
sovereign-powers-backed legal tender, all of which the
catastrophy-disillusioned and only moments earlier "powerfully rich" and
now desperately helpless man would thankfully trade for the physical means
of extending the years of his life; or of his wife.
It is also worth remembering that the validity of what our reputedly rich
man in the shipwreck had in those real estate equities went back only to
the validity "in the eyes of God" of the original muscle, cunning, and
weapons-established-sovereign-claimed lands and their subsequent legal
re-deedings as "legal" properties protected by the moral-or-no, weapons-
enforced laws of the sovereign nations and their subsequent abstraction
into limited-liability- corporation equities printed on paper stocks and
bonds. The procedure we are pursuing is that of true democracy.
Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its
arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient
experiment and unanimous acknowledgement what the laws of nature or
universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of
the human intellect’s function in universe.
I now go on to speculate that I think that what we all really mean by
wealth is as follows: "Wealth is our organized capability to cope
effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and
decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward
days of our lives."
Is there any disagreement? Well, having first disposed of what wealth is
not we now have produced a culled-out statement that roughly contains
somewhere within it a precise definition of what wealth is. Now we can
account wealth more precisely as the number of forward days for a specific
number of people we are physically prepared to sustain at a physically
stated time and space liberating level of metabolic and metaphysical
regeneration.
We are getting sharper. Inasmuch as we now are learning more intimately
about our Spaceship Earth and its radiation supply ship Sun on the one hand
and on the other its Moon acting as the Earth’s gravitationally pulsing
"alternator" which together constitute the prime generator and regenerator
of our life supporting system, I must observe also that we’re not going to
sustain life at all except by our successful impoundment of more of the
Sun’s radiant energy aboard our spaceship than we are losing from Earth in
the energies of radiation or outwardly rocketed physical matter. We could
burn up the Spaceship Earth itself to provide energy, but that would give
us very little future. Our space vehicle is similar to a human child. It

• 27 •
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is an increasing aggregate of physical and metaphysical processes in
contradistinction to a withering, decomposing corpse.
It is obvious that the real wealth of life aboard our planet is a
forwardly-operative, metabolic, and intellectual regenerating system. Quite
clearly we have vast amounts of income wealth as Sun radiation and Moon
gravity to implement our forward success. Wherefore living only on our
energy savings by burning up the fossil fuels which took billions of years
to impound from the Sun or living on our capital by burning up our Earth’s
atoms is lethally ignorant and also utterly irresponsible to our coming
generations and their forward days. Our children and their children are our
future days. If we do not comprehend and realize our potential ability to
support all life forever we are cosmicly bankrupt.
Having identified the ignorance of society regarding its wealth
capabilities to be a major factor in the frustration of effective planning
and having roughly identified the meaning of wealth to which everyone can
realistically subscribe, and intending later to sharpen its identity, we
will now tackle the next phase of humanity’s total survival, prosperity,
happiness, and regenerative inspiration with the problem-solving power of
General Systems Theory as combined with both computer strategy-which is
known as cybernetics-and with synergetics -the latter consisting of the
solving of problems by starting with known behaviors of whole systems plus
the known behaviors of some of the systems’ parts, which advantageous
information makes possible the discovery of other parts of the system and
their respective behaviors, as for instance in geometry the known sum-180
degrees-of a triangle’s angles, plus the known behavior of any two sides
and their included angle and vice versa, enables the discovery and use of
the precise values of the other three parts.
Synergetics discloses that wealth, which represents our ability to deal
successfully with our forward energetic regeneration and provide increased
degrees of freedom of initiation and no interfering actions, breaks down
cybernetically into two main parts: physical energy and metaphysical
know-how. Physical energy in turn divides into two interchangeable phases:
associative and disassociative energy associative as matter and energy
disassociative as radiation.
Stating first that physical universe is all energy and symbolizing energy
by E, Einstein formulated his famous equation E = M (matter’s mass,
explained in the terms of C2‹speed of an omni-directional [radiant] surface
wave’s expansion, unfettered, in a vacuum). Energy as matter and energy as
radiation, as Einstein had generalized hypothetically, were explicitly
proven by fission to be interchangeable covariants.
Physicists also have discovered experimentally that energy can neither be
exhausted nor originated. Energy is finite and infinitely conserved. This
experimentally proven realization of some prime facts of physical universe
contradicts the thoughts of cosmologists, cosmogonists, and society’s
economics expressed before the speed of light was measured at the beginning
of the twentieth century.
• 28 •
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I came to Harvard University in the beginning of the century-just before
World War I. At that time, it was as yet the consensus of scholarly
thinking that because the universe itself was seemingly a system it, too,
must be subject to entropy, by which every (local) system was found
experimentally to be continually losing energy. Hence, the universe itself
was thought to be losing energy. This indicated that the universe was
"running down," at which time evolution would abandon its abnormal
energetic behavior and all would return to Newton’s norm of "at rest." This
being so, it was also assumed that all those who expended energy were
recklessly speeding the end. This was the basis of yesterday’s
conservatism. All who expended energy in bringing about further
evolutionary changes were to be abhorred. They were to be known as reckless
spenders.
All this was assumed to be true before experiments at the beginning of the
twentieth century gave scientists knowledge of the speed of light and of
radiation in general. Thus, we suddenly discovered it took eight minutes
for the light to get to us from the sun, two and one- half years from the
next nearest star beyond the sun, and many years for it to reach us from
other stars. We learned only two-thirds of a century ago that many stars we
considered as instantly there had burned out thousands of years ago.
Universe is not simultaneous.
Then Einstein, Planck, and other leading scientists said, "We’re going to
have to reassess and redefine the physical universe.- They defined the
physical universe as "an aggregate of non-simultaneous and only partially
overlapping transformation events." And they then said: "We must discover
what it is we see when we observe new life forming. It could be that when
energy disassociates here it always may be reassociating somewhere else."
And that in all subsequent experimentation proved to be the case. The
scientists found that the energy redistributions always added up to 100 per
cent. The scientists then formulated a new description of the physical
universe which they called the new "law of conservation of energy," which
said that "physical experiments disclose that energy can neither be created
nor lost.. Energy is not only conserved but it is also finite. It is a
closed system. The universe is a mammoth perpetual motion process. We then
see that the part of our wealth which is physical energy is conserved. It
cannot be exhausted, cannot be spent, which means exhausted. We realize
that the word "spending" is now scientifically meaningless and is therefore
obsolete.
I referred earlier to man’s discovery of the lever. Having used levers for
millenniums, man thought of taking a series of bucket-ended levers and of
inserting the nonbucket end of each lever perpendicularly into a shaft
arranged one after another like spokes around a wheel. He mounted that
shaft in bearings, put it under a waterfall, and let gravity fill each
bucket in turn and then pull each filled bucket toward the center of the
planet Earth, thus progressively rotating all the levers and making the
wheel and its shaft rotate with great power. Then man connected this
revolving shaft by pulley belts to other pulleys on other shafts which
drove machines to do many metabolically-regenerating tasks in a way
unmatchable by man’s muscle power alone. Man thus began for the first time
to really employ his intellect in the most important way. He discovered how
to use energy as matter in the form of levers, shafts, gear trains, and
dams, and how to take advantage of and use the energy as Sun radiation
which vaporized and elevated water as atmospheric cloud, allowing it then
to be precipitated and pulled back toward the center of the spherical Earth
from the spherical mantle of clouds in the form of water molecules
collected in droplets. From this moment of comprehending energy circuits,
and thenceforth, man’s really important function in universe was his
intellection, which taught him to intercept and redirect local energy
patternings in universe and thus to reorganize and shunt those flow
patterns so that they would impinge on levers to increase humanity’s
capabilities to do the manifold tasks leading directly and indirectly
toward humanity’s forward metabolic regeneration.
• 29 •
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What we now have demonstrated metaphysically is that every time man makes a
new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less. He may learn
that what he thought was true was not true. By the elimination of a false
premise, his basic capital wealth which in his given lifetime is
disembarrassed of further preoccupation with considerations of how to
employ a worthless time-consuming hypothesis. Freeing his time for its more
effective exploratory investment is to give man increased wealth.
We find experimentally, regarding the metaphysical phenomenon, intellect,
which we call know-how, that every time we employ and test our intellectual
know-how by experimental rearrangement of physical energy interactions
(either associated as mass or disassociated as radiation, free energy) we
always learn more. The know-how can only increase. Very interesting. Now we
have carefully examined and experimented with the two basic constituents of
wealth-the physical and the metaphysical.
Sum-totally, we find that the physical constituent of wealth-energy-cannot
decrease and that the metaphysical constituent-know-how-can only increase.
This is to say that every time we use our wealth it increases. This is to
say that, countering entropy, wealth can only increase. Whereas entropy is
increasing disorder evoked by dispersion of energy, wealth locally is
increased order-that is to say, the increasingly orderly concentration of
physical power in our ever-expanding locally explored and comprehended
universe by the metaphysical capability of man, as informed by repeated
experiences from which he happens in an unscheduled manner to progressively
distill the ever-increasing inventory of omni-interrelated and omni-
interaccommodative generalized principles found to be operative in all the
special-case experiences. Irreversible wealth is the so far attained
effective magnitude of our physically organized ordering of the use of
those generalized principles.
Wealth is anti-entropy at a most exquisite degree of concentration. The
difference between mind and brain is that brain deals only with memorized,
subjective, special-case experiences and objective experiments, while mind
extracts and employs the generalized principles and integrates and
interrelates their effective employment. Brain deals exclusively with the
physical, and mind exclusively with the metaphysical. Wealth is the product
of the progressive mastery of matter by mind, and is specifically
accountable in forward man-days of established metabolic regeneration
advantages spelt out in hours of life for specific numbers of individuals
released from formerly prescribed entropy-preoccupying tasks for their
respectively individual yet inherently co-operative elective investment in
further anti-entropic effectiveness.
Because our wealth is continually multiplying in vast degree unbeknownst and

unacknowledged formally by human society, our economic accounting systems
are

unrealistically identifying wealth only as matter and are entering know-how
on the books only as salary liabilities; therefore, all that we are
discovering mutually here regarding the true nature of wealth comes as a
complete surprise to world society to both communism and to capitalism
alike. Both social co-operation and individual enterprise interact to
produce increasing wealth, all unrecognized by ignorantly assumed lethally
competitive systems. All our formal accounting is anti-synergetic,
depreciative, and entropic mortgagization, meaning death by inversally
compounding interest. Wealth as anti-entropy developes compound interest
through synergy, which growth is as yet entirely unaccounted anywhere
around Earth in any of its political economic systems. We give an intrinsic
value to the material. To this we add the

• 30 •
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costs of manufacturing which include energy, labor, overhead, and profit.
We then start depreciating this figure assuming swift obsolescence of the
value of the product. With the exception of small royalties, which are
usually avoided, no value is given for the inventiveness or for the
synergistic value given by one product to another by virtue of their
complementarity as team components whose teamwork produces results of
enormous advantage, as for instance do the invention of alloyed drill bits
of oil rigs bring petroleum from nonuse to use.
As a consequence of true wealth’s unaccounted, inexorably synergistic
multiplication of ever- increasing numbers of humanity’s ever-increasing
forward days, in this century alone we have gone from less than I per cent
of humanity being able to survive in any important kind of health and
comfort to 44 per cent of humanity surviving at a standard of living
unexperienced or undreamed of before. This utterly unpredicted synergistic
success occurred within only two - thirds of a century despite continually
decreasing metallic resources per each world person. It happened without
being consciously and specifically attempted by any government or business.
It also happened only as a consequence of man’s inadvertently becoming
equipped

synergistically to do progressively more with less.
As we have learned, synergy is the only word in our language which
identifies the meaning for which it stands. Since the word is unknown to
the average public, as I have already pointed out, it is not at all
surprising that synergy has not been included in the economic accounting of
our wealth transactions or in assessing our common wealth capabilities. The
synergetic aspect of industry’s doing ever more work with ever less
investment of time and energy per each unit of performance of each and
every function of the weapons carriers of the sea, air, and outer space has
never been formally accounted as a capital gain of land-situated society.
The synergistic effectiveness of a world-around integrated industrial
process is inherently vastly greater than the confined synergistic effect
of sovereignly operating separate systems. Ergo, only complete world
desovereignization can permit the realization of an all humanity high
standard support. But the scientific facts are that simple tools that make
complex tools are synergetically augmented by progressively more effective
and previously unpredicted chemical elements alloying. The whole history of
world industrialization demonstrates constantly surprising new capabilities
resulting from various synergetic interactions amongst both the family of
ninety-two regenerative and the trans-uranium members of the
uniquely-behaving chemical elements family.
Complex environmental evolution is synergetically produced by the
biologicals and their tools as well as by the great inanimate physiological
complex of events such as earthquakes and storms which have constant
challenging effect upon the individual biological inventiveness wherein
both the challenges and the cause are regenerative. Our common wealth is
also multiplied in further degree by experimentally-derived information
which is both multiplying and integrating the wealth advantage at an
exponential rate. The synergetic effect upon the rate of growth of our
incipient world common wealth augmentation has been entirely overlooked
throughout all the accounting systems of all the ideologically-divergent
political systems. Our wealth is inherently common wealth and our common
wealth can only increase, and it is increasing at a constantly
self-accelerating synergetic rate.
However, we inadvertently dip into our real, unaccountedly fabulous wealth
in a very meager way only when our political leaders become scared enough
by the challenge of an impressively threatening enemy. Then only do
socialism and capitalism alike find that they have to afford whatever they
need. The only limitation in the realization of further wealth is that

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production engineers must be able to envision and reduce to design and
practice the production-multiplying steps to be taken, which progressive
envisioning depends both on the individual and on the experimentally
proven, but as yet untapped, state of the pertinent metaphysical arts, as
well as upon the range of resources strategically available at the time and
in particular upon the inventory of as yet unemployed but relevant
inventions.
In respect to physical resources, until recently man had assumed that he
could produce his buildings, machinery, and other products only out of the
known materials. From time to time in the past, scientists discovered new
alloys which changed the production engineering prospects. But now in the
aerospace technology man has developed his metaphysical capabilities to so
advanced a degree that he is evolving utterly unique materials "on order."
Those new materials satisfy the prespecified physical behavior
characteristics which transcend those of any substance previously known to
exist anywhere in the universe. Thus, the re-entry nose-cones of the
man-launched and rocketed satellites were developed. Synergy is of the
essence. Only under the stresses of total social emergencies as thus far
demonstrated by man do the effectively adequate alternative technical
strategies synergetically emerge. Here we witness mind over matter and
humanity’s escape from the limitations of his exclusive identity only with
some sovereignized circumscribed geographical locality.
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1. integral functions The first census of population in the United
States was taken in 1790. In I8IO the United States Treasury conducted the
first economic census of the young democracy. There were at that time one
million families in this country. There were also one million human slaves.
This did not mean that each family had a human slave; far from it. The
slaves were owned by relatively few. The Treasury adjudged the monetary
value of the average American homestead, lands, buildings, furnishings, and
tools to be worth sum-totaIly $350 per family. The Treasury appraised the
average worth of each slave as $400. It was estimated that the wilderness
hinterlands of America were worth $1,500 per family. The foregoing assets
plus the canals and toll roads brought the equity of each family to a total
of $3,000. This made the national wealth of the United States, as
recognized by man, worth three billion dollars. Let us assume that,
practicing supreme wisdom, the united American citizens of I8IO had
convened their most reliably esteemed and farsighted leaders and had asked
them to undertake a 150-year, grand economic and technical plan for most
effectively and swiftly developing America’s and the world’s life-support
system-to be fully realized by 1960. At that time, it must be remembered,
the telegraph had not been invented. There were no electro-magnetics or
mass-produced steel. Railroads were as yet undreamed of, let alone
wireless, X-ray, electric light, power by wire and electric motors. There
was no conception of the periodic table of the atoms or of the existence of
an electron. Had any of our forefathers committed our wealth of I8IO toward
bouncing radar impulses off the Moon he would have been placed in a lunatic
asylum. Under those I8IO circumstances of an assumed capital wealth of the
united American states, both public and private, amounting to only three
billion dollars, it is preposterous to think of humanity’s most brilliant
and powerful leaders electing to invest their "all" of three billion
dollars in a "thousand times more expensive" ten-trillion-dollar adventure
such, however, as has since transpired, but only under the war-enforced
threat of disintegration of the meager rights won thus far by common man
from history-long tyrannical powers of a techno-illiterate and often cruel
few. In I8IO it was also unthinkable by even the most brilliant leaders of
humanity that I60 years hence, in 1970, the gross national product of the
United States would reach one trillion dollars per year. (This is to be
compared with the meager forty billion of the world’s total monetary gold
supply.) Assuming a 10 per cent rate of earnings, this 1970 trillion-dollar
product would mean that a capital base of ten trillion dollars was
operative within the United States alone where the 18IO national leaders
had accredited only three billion dollars of national assets. The wisest
humans recognized in I8IO only one three-hundredth of I per cent of the
immediately thereafter "proven value" of the United States’ share of the
world’s wealth-generating potentials. Of course, those wisest men of the
times would have seen little they could afford to do. • 33 • Operating
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Our most reliable, visionary, and well-informed great-grandfathers of I8IO
could not have foreseen that in the meager century and one-half of all the
billionsfold greater reaches of known universal time that human life-span
would be trebled, that the yearly real income of the individual would be
"enfolded, that the majority of diseases would be banished, and human
freedom of realized travel one-hundred-folded; that humans would be able to
whisper effortlessly in one another’s ear from anywhere around the world
apart and at a speed of seven hundred million miles an hour, their
audibility clearly reaching to the planet Venus; and that human vision
around Earth’s spherical deck would be increased to see local pebbles and
grains of sand on the moon.
Now in 1969, 99.9 per cent of the accelerating accelerations of the
physical environment changes effecting all humanity’s evolution are
transpiring in the realms of the electromagnetic spectrum realities which
are undetectable directly by the human senses. Because they are gestating
invisibly it is approximately impossible for world society to comprehend
that the changes in the next thirty-five years-ushering in the twenty-first
century-will be far greater than in our just completed century and one-half
since the first United States economic census. We are engulfed in an
invisible tidal wave which, as it draws away, will leave humanity, if it
survives, cast up upon an island of universal success uncomprehending how
it has all happened.
But we can scientifically assume that by the twenty-first century either
humanity will not be living aboard Spaceship Earth or, if approximately our
present numbers as yet remain aboard, that humanity then will have
recognized and organized itself to realize effectively the fact that
humanity can afford to do anything it needs and wishes to do and that it
cannot afford anything else. As a consequence Earth-planet-based humanity
will be physically and economically successful and individually free in the
most important sense. While all enjoy total Earth no human will be
interfering with the other, and none will be profiting at the expense of
the other. Humans will be free in the sense that 99.9 per cent of their
waking hours will be freely investable at their own discretion. They will
be free in the sense that they will not struggle for survival on a `’you"
or "me" basis, and will therefore be able to trust one another and be free
to co-operate in spontaneous and logical ways.
It is also probable that during that one-third of a century of the curtain
raising of the twenty-first century that the number of boo-boo’s, biased
blunders, short-sighted

misjudgments, opinionated self-deceits of humanity will total, at minimum,
six hundred trillion errors. Clearly, man will have backed into his future
while evolution, operating as inexorably as fertilized ovaries gestate in
the womb, will have brought about his success in ways as synergetically
unforeseeable to us today as were the ten-trillion-dollar developments of
the last I50 years unforeseen by our wisest great-grandfathers of 1810.
All of this does not add up to say that man is stupidly ignorant and does
not deserve to prosper. It adds up to the realization that in the design of
universal evolution man was given an enormous safety factor as an economic
cushion, within which to learn by trial and error to dare to use his most
sensitively intuited intellectual conceptioning and greatest vision in
joining forces with all of humanity to advance into the future in full
accreditation of the individual human intellect’s most powerfully loving
conceptions of the potential functioning of man in universe. All the
foregoing is to say also that the opinions of any negatively conditioned
reflexes regarding what I am saying and am about to say are unrealistically
inconsequential.
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I have so far introduced to you a whole new synergetic assessment of wealth
and have asked that you indicate your disagreement if you detected
fallacies in the progressively-stated concepts of our common wealth. Thus
we have discovered together that we are unanimous in saying that we can
afford to do anything we need or wish to do.
It is utterly clear to me that the highest priority need of world society
at the present moment is a realistic economic accounting system which will
rectify, for instance, such nonsense as the fact that a top toolmaker in
India, the highest paid of all craftsmen, gets only as much per month for
his work in India as he could earn per day for the same work if he were
employed in Detroit, Michigan. How can India develop a favorable trade
balance under those circumstances? If it can’t have a workable, let alone
favorable balance, how can these half-billion people participate in world
intercourse? Millions of Hindus have never heard of America, let alone the
international monetary system. Said Kipling "East is east and west is west
and never the twain shall meet."
As a consequence of the Great Pirates’ robbing Indo-China for centuries and
cashing in their booty in Europe, so abysmally impoverished, underfed and
physically afflicted have India’s and Ceylon’s billions of humans been
throughout so many centuries that it is their religious belief that life on
Earth is meant to be exclusively a hellish trial and that the worse the
conditions encountered by the individual the quicker his entry into heaven.
For this reason attempts to help India in any realistic way are looked upon
by a vast number of India’s population as an attempt to prevent their entry
into heaven. All this because they have had no other way to explain life’s
hopelessness. On the other hand, they are extremely capable thinkers, and
free intercourse with the world could change their views and fate. It is
paradoxical that India’s population should starve as one beef cattle for
every three people wander through India’s streets, blocking traffic as
sacred symbols of nonsense. Probably some earlier conquerors intent to
reserve the animals for their exclusive consumption as did later the kings
of European nations decreed that God had informed the king that he alone
was to eat animal meat and therefore God forbade the common people under
penalty of death from killing a beef cattle for their own consumption.
One of the myths of the moment suggest that wealth comes from individual
bankers and capitalists. This concept is manifest in the myriad of
charities that have to beg for alms for the poor, disabled, and helpless
young and old in general. These charities are a hold-over from the old
pirate days, when it was thought that there would never be enough to go
around. They also are necessitated by our working assumption that we cannot
afford to take care of all the helpless ones. Counseled by our bankers, our
politicians say we can’t afford the warring and the great society, too. And
because of the mythical concept that the wealth which is disbursed is
coming from some magically-secret private source, no free and healthy
individual wants that "hand out" from the other man, whoever he may be. Nor
does the individual wish to be on the publicly degrading "dole" line.
After World War II several million of our well-trained, healthiest young
people came suddenly out of the military service. Because we had automated
during the war to a very considerable degree to meet the "war challenges"
there were but few jobs to offer them. Our society could not say
realistically that the millions of their healthiest, best informed young
were unfit because they couldn’t get a job, which had until that historical
moment been the criteria of

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demonstrated fitness in Darwin’s "survival only of the fittest" struggle.
In that emergency we legislated the GI Bill and sent them all to schools,
colleges, and universities. This act was politically rationalized as a
humanly dignified fellowship reward of their war service and not as a "hand
out." It produced billions of dollars of new wealth through the increased
know-how and intelligence thus released, which synergetically augmented the
spontaneous initiative of that younger generation. In legislating this
"reckless spending" of wealth we didn’t know that we had produced a
synergetic condition that would and did open the greatest prosperity
humanity has ever known.
Through all pre-twentieth century history wars were devastating to both
winners and losers. The pre-industrial wars took the men from the fields,
and the fields where the exclusively agricultural-wealth germinated, were
devastated. It came as a complete surprise, therefore, that the first World
War, which was the first full-fledged industrial-era war, ended with the
United States in particular but Germany, England, France, Belgium, Italy,
Japan, and Russia in lesser degree all coming out of the war with much
greater industrial production capabilities than those with which they had
entered. That wealth was soon misguidedly invested in the second World War,
from which all the industrial countries emerged with even greater wealth
producing capabilities, despite the superficial knockdown of the already
obsolete buildings. It was irrefutably proven that the destruction of the
buildings by bombing, shell fire, and flames left the machinery almost
unharmed. The productive tooling capabilities multiplied unchecked, as did
their value.
This unexpected increase in wealth by industrial world wars was caused by
several facts, but most prominently by the fact that in the progressive
acquisition of instruments and tools which produce the even more effective
complex of industrial tools, the number of special purpose tools that made
the end-product armaments and ammunition was negligible in comparison with
the redirectable productivity of the majority of the general-purpose tools
that constituted the synergistic tool complex. Second, the wars destroyed
the obsolete tool-enclosing brick-and- wood structures whose factual
availability, despite their obsolescence, had persuaded their owners to
over extend the structures’ usefulness and exploitability. This drive to
keep milking the old proven cow not risking the production of new cows had
blocked the acquisition of up-to- date tools. Third, there was the
synergetic surprise of alternative or "substitute" technologies which were
developed to bypass destroyed facilities. The latter often proved to be
more efficient than the tools that were destroyed. Fourth, the metals
themselves not only were not destroyed but were acceleratingly reinvested
in new, vastly higher-performance per pound tools. It was thus that the
world war losers such as Germany and Japan became overnight the postwar
industrial winners. Their success documented the fallacy of the whole
economic evaluation system now extant.
Thus again we see that, through gradually increasing use of his intuition
and intellect, man has discovered many of the generalized principles that
are operative in the universe and has employed them objectively but
separately in extending his internal metabolic regeneration by his invented
and detached tool extensions and their remote operation affected by
harnessing inanimate energy. Instead of trying to survive only with his
integral set of tool capabilities-his hands-to pour water into his mouth,
he invents a more effective wooden, stone, or ceramic vessel so that he not
only can drink from it but carry water with him and extend his hunting and
berry picking. All tools are externalizations of originally integral
functions. But in developing each tool man also extends the limits of its
usefulness, since he can make bigger cups hold liquids too hot or
chemically destructive for his hands. Tools do not introduce new principles
but they greatly extend the range of conditions under which the discovered
control principle may be effectively employed by man. There is nothing new
in world technology’s growth. It is only the

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vast increase of its effective ranges that are startling man. The computer
is an imitation human brain. There is nothing new about it, but its
capacity, speed of operation, and tirelessness, as well as its ability to
operate under environmental conditions intolerable to the human anatomy,
make it far more effective in performing special tasks than is the skull
and tissue encased human brain, minus the computer.
What is really unique about man is the magnitude to which he has detached,
deployed, amplified, and made more incisive all of his many organic
functionings. Man is unique among all the living phenomena as the most
adaptable omni-environment penetrating, exploring, and operating organism
being initially equipped to invent intellectually and self-disciplined,
dexterously, to make the tools with which thus to extend himself. The bird,
the fish, the tree are all specialized, and their special
capability-functioning tools are attached integrally with their bodies,
making them incapable of penetrating hostile environments. Man
externalizes, separates out, and increases each of his specialized function
capabilities by inventing tools as soon as he discovers the need through
oft-repeated experiences with unfriendly environmental challenges. Thus,
man only temporarily employs his integral equipment as a specialist, and
soon shifts that function to detached tools. Man cannot compete physically
as a muscle and brained automaton ‹as a machine-against the automated power
tools which he can invent while metaphysically mastering the energy income
from universe with which evermore powerfully to actuate these evermore
precise mass-production tools. What man has done is to decentralize his
functions into a world-around-energy-networked complex of tools which
altogether constitute what we refer to as world industrialization.
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1. the regenerative landscape Thus man has developed an externalized
metabolic regeneration organism involving the whole of Spaceship Earth and
all its resources. Any human being can physically employ that organism,
whereas only one human can employ the organically integral craft tool. All
9I of the 92 chemical elements thus far found aboard our spaceship are
completely involved in the world- around industrial network. The full
family of chemical elements is unevenly distributed, and therefore our
total planet is at all times involved in the industrial integration of the
unique physical behaviors of each of all the elements. Paradoxically, at
the present moment our Spaceship Earth is in the perilous condition of
having the Russians sitting at one set of the co- pilot’s flying controls
while the Americans sit at the other. France controls the starboard
engines, and the Chinese control the port engines, while the United Nations
controls the passenger operation. The result is an increasing number of U.
F. O. hallucinations of sovereign states darting backwards and forwards and
around in circles, getting nowhere, at an incredibly accelerating rate of
speed. All of humanity’s tool extensions are divisible into two main
groups: the craft and the industrial tools. I define the craft tools as all
those tools which could be invented by one man starting all alone, naked in
the wilderness, using only his own experience and his own integral
facilities. Under these isolated conditions he could and did invent spears,
slings, bows, and arrows, etc. By industrial tools I mean all the tools
that cannot be produced by one man, as for instance the S.S. Queen Mary.
With this definition, we find that the spoken word, which took a minimum of
two humans to develop, was the first industrial tool. It brought about the
progressive integration of all individual generation-to-generation
experiences and thoughts of all humanity everywhere and every when. The
Bible says, "In the beginning was the word"; I say to you, "In the
beginning of industrialization was the spoken word." With the graphic
writing of the words and ideas we have the beginning of the computer, for
the computer stores and retrieves information. The written word, dictionary
and the book were the first information storing and retrieving systems. The
craft tools are used initially by man to make the first industrial tools.
Man is using his hands today most informatively and expertly only to press
the buttons that set in action the further action of the tools which
reproduce other tools which may be used informatively to make other tools.
In the craft economies craftsman artists make only end- or consumer -
products. In the industrial economy the craftsman artists make the tools
and the tools make the end- or consumer -products. In this industrial
development the mechanical advantages of men are pyramided rapidly and
synergetically into invisible magnitudes of ever more incisive and
inclusive tooling which produces ever more with ever less resource
investment per each unit of end-product, or service, performance. As we
study industrialization, we see that we cannot have mass production unless
we have mass consumption. This was effected evolutionarily by the great
social struggles of labor to increase wages and spread the benefits and
prevent the reduction of the numbers of workers employed. The labor
movement made possible mass purchasing; ergo, mass production; ergo, low
prices on vastly improved products and services, which have altogether
established entirely new and higher standards of humanity’s living. • 38 •
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Our labor world and all salaried workers, including school teachers and
college professors, are now, at least subconsciously if not consciously,
afraid that automation will take away their jobs. They are afraid they
won’t be able to do what is called "earning a living," which is short for
earning the right to live. This term implies that normally we are supposed
to die prematurely and that it is abnormal to be able to earn a living. It
is paradoxical that only the abnormal or exceptional are entitled to
prosper. Yesterday the term even inferred that success was so very abnormal
that only divinely ordained kings and nobles were entitled to eat fairly
regularly.
It is easy to demonstrate to those who will take the time and the trouble
to unbias their thoughts that automation swiftly can multiply the physical
energy part of wealth much more rapidly and profusely than can man’s muscle
and brain-reflexed-manually-controlled production. On the other hand humans
alone can foresee, integrate, and anticipate the new tasks to be done by
the progressively automated wealth-producing machinery. To take advantage
of the fabulous magnitudes of real wealth waiting to be employed
intelligently by humans and unblock automation’s postponement by organized
labor we must give each human who is or becomes unemployed a life
fellowship in research and development or in just simple thinking. Man must
be able to dare to think truthfully and to act accordingly without fear of
losing his franchise to live. The use of mind fellowships will permit
humans comprehensively to expand and accelerate scientific exploration and
experimental prototype development. For every 100,OOO employed in research
and development, or just plain thinking, one probably will make a
breakthrough that will more than pay for the other 99,999 fellowships.
Thus, production will no longer be impeded by humans trying to do what
machines can do better. Contrariwise, omni-automated and inanimately
powered production will unleash humanity’s unique capability-its
metaphysical capability. Historically speaking, these steps will be taken
within the next decade. There is no doubt about it. But not without much
social crisis and consequent educational experience and discovery
concerning the nature of our unlimited wealth.
Through the universal research and development fellowships, we’re going to
start emancipating humanity from being muscle and reflex machines. We’re
going to give everybody a chance to develop their most powerful mental and
intuitive faculties. Given their research and development fellowship, many
who have been frustrated during their younger years may feel like going
fishing. Fishing provides an excellent opportunity to think clearly; to
review one’s life; to recall one’s earlier frustrated and abandoned
longings and curiosities. What we want everybody to do is to think clearly.
We soon will begin to generate wealth so rapidly that we can do very great
things. I would like you to think what this may do realistically for living
without spoiling the landscape, or the antiquities or the trails of
humanity throughout the ages, or despoiling the integrity of romance,
vision, and harmonic creativity. All the great office buildings will be
emptied of earned living workers, and the automated office-processing of
information will be centralized in the basements of a few buildings. This
will permit all the modernly mechanized office buildings to be used as
dwelling facilities.
When we approach our problems on a universal, general systems basis and
progressively eliminate the irrelevancies, somewhat as we peel petals from
an artichoke, at each move we leave in full visibility the next most
important layer of factors with which we must deal. We gradually uncover
you and me in the heart of now. But evolution requires that we comprehend
each layer in order to unpeel it. We have now updated our definitions of
universe by conforming them with the most recent and erudite scientific
findings such as -those of Einstein

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and Planck. Earlier in our thinking we discovered man’s function in
universe to be that of the most effective metaphysical capability
experimentally evidenced thus far within our locally observable phases and
time zones of universe. We have also discovered that it is humanity’s task
to comprehend and set in order the special case facts of human experience
and to win therefrom knowledge of the a priori existence of a complex of
generalized, abstract principles which apparently altogether govern all
physically evolving phenomena of universe.
We have learned that only and exclusively through use of his mind can man
inventively employ the generalized principles further to conserve the
locally available physical energy of the only universally unlimited supply.
Only thus can man put to orderly advantage the various, local, and
otherwise disorderly behaviors of the entropic, physical universe. Man can
and may metaphysically comprehend, anticipate, shunt, and meteringly
introduce the evolutionarily organized environment events in the magnitudes
and frequencies that best synchronize with the patterns of his successful
and metaphysical metabolic regeneration while ever increasing the degrees
of humanity’s space and time freedoms from yesterday’s ignorance sustaining
survival procedure chores and their personal time capital wasting.
Now we have comprehended and peeled off the layers of petals which
disclosed not only that physical energy is conserved but also that it is
ever increasingly deposited as a fossil-fuel savings account aboard our
Spaceship Earth through photosynthesis and progressive, complex, topsoil
fossilization buried ever deeper within Earth’s crust by frost, wind,
flood, volcanoes, and earthquake upheavals. We have thus discovered also
that we can make all of humanity successful through science’s
world-engulfing industrial evolution provided that we are not so foolish as
to continue to exhaust in a split second of astronomical history the
orderly energy savings of billions of years’ energy conservation aboard our
Spaceship Earth. These energy savings have been put into our Spaceship’s
life-regeneration-guaranteeing bank account for use only in self-starter
functions.
The fossil fuel deposits of our Spaceship Earth correspond to our
automobile’s storage battery which must be conserved to turn over our main
engine’s self-starter. Thereafter, our "main engine," the life regenerating
processes, must operate exclusively on our vast daily energy income from
the powers of wind, tide, water, and the direct Sun radiation energy. The
fossil-fuel savings account has been put aboard Spaceship Earth for the
exclusive function of getting the new machinery built with which to support
life and humanity at ever more effective standards of vital physical energy
and reinspiring metaphysical sustenance to be sustained exclusively on our
Sun radiation’s and Moon pull gravity’s tidal, wind, and rainfall generated
pulsating and therefore harness able energies. The daily income energies
are excessively adequate for the operation of our main industrial engines
and their automated productions. The energy expended in one minute of a
tropical hurricane equals the combined energy of all the U.S.A. and
U.S.S.R. nuclear weapons. Only by understanding this scheme may we continue
for all time ahead to enjoy and explore universe as we progressively
harness evermore of the celestially generated tidal and storm generated
wind, water, and electrical power

concentrations. We cannot afford to expend our fossil fuels faster than we
are "recharging our battery," which means precisely the rate at which the
fossil fuels are being continually deposited within Earth’s spherical
crust.
We have discovered that it is highly feasible for all the human passengers
aboard Spaceship Earth to enjoy the whole ship without any individual
interfering with another and without any individual being advantaged at the
expense of another, provided that we are not so foolish as

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to burn up our ship and its operating equipment by powering our prime
operations exclusively on atomic reactor generated energy. The
too-shortsighted and debilitating exploitation of fossil fuels and atomic
energy are similar to running our automobiles only on the self-starters and
batteries and as the latter become exhausted replenishing the batteries
only by starting the chain reaction consumption of the atoms with which the
automobiles are constituted.
We have discovered also why we were given our intellectual faculties and
physical extension facilities. We have discovered that we have the inherent
capability and inferentially the responsibility of making humanity
comprehensively and sustainably successful. We have learned the difference
between brain and mind capabilities. We have learned of the superstitions
and inferiority complexes built into all humanity through all of history’s
yesterdays of slavish survival under conditions of abysmal illiteracy and
ignorance wherein only the most ruthless, shrewd, and eventually brutish
could sustain existence, and then for no more than a third of its known
potential life span.
This all brings us to a realization of the enormous educational task which
must be successfully accomplished right now in a hurry in order to convert
man’s spin-dive toward oblivion into an intellectually mastered power
pullout into safe and level flight of physical and metaphysical success,
whereafter he may turn his Spaceship Earth’s occupancy into a universe
exploring advantage. If it comprehends and reacts effectively, humanity
will open an entirely new chapter of the experiences and the thoughts and
drives thereby stimulated.
Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or
for none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that "unity is plural
and at minimum two" the complementary but not mirror-imaged proton and
neutron. You and I are inherently different and

complementary. Together we average as zero-that is, as eternity.
Now having attained that cosmic degree of orbital conceptioning we will use
our retrorocket controls to negotiate our reentry of our Spaceship Earth’s
atmosphere and return to our omni - befuddled present. Here we find
ourselves maintaining the fiction that our crossbreeding World Man consists
fundamentally of innately different nations and races which are the
antithesis of that crossbreeding. Nations are products of many generations
of local in-breeding in a myriad of remote human enclaves. With grandfather
chiefs often marrying incestuously the gene concentrations brought about
hybrid nationally-unique physiological characteristics which in the extreme
northern hibernations bleached out the human skin and in the equatorial
casting off of all clothing inbred darkly tanned pigmentation. All are the
consequence only of unique local environment conditions and super
inbreeding.
The crossbreeding world people on the North American continent consist of
two separate input sets. The first era input set consists of those who came
with the prevailing winds and ocean currents eastward to the North, South,
and Central Americas by raft and by boat from across the Pacific, primarily
during an age which started at least thirty thousand years ago, possibly
millions of years ago, and terminated three hundred years ago. The
eastbound trans- Pacific migration peopled the west coasts of both South
and North America and migrated inland towards the two continents’ middle
ground in Central America and Mexico. In Mexico today will be found every
type of human characteristic and every known physiognomy, each of which
occur in such a variety of skin shades from black to white that they do not
permit the

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ignorance-invented "race" distinctions predicated only superficially on
extreme limits of skin color. The second or westbound input era set of
crossbreeding world man now peopling the Americas consists of the gradual
and slower migration around the world from the Pacific Ocean westward into
the wind, "following the sun," and travelling both by sea through Malaysia,
across the Indian Ocean up the Persian Gulf into Mesopotamia and overland
into the Mediterranean, up the Nile from East Africa into the South and
North Atlantic to America-or over the Chinese, Mongolian, Siberian, and
European hinterlands to the Atlantic and to the Americas.
Now both east and westbound era sets are crossbreeding with one another in
ever- accelerating degree on America’s continental middle ground. This omni
reintegration of world man from all the diverse hybrids is producing a
crossbred people on the Pacific Coast of North America. Here with its
aerospace and oceans penetrating capabilities, a world type of humanity is
taking the springboard into all of the hitherto hostile environments of
universe into the ocean depths and into the sky and all around the Earth.
Returning you again to our omni-befuddled present, we realize that
reorganization of humanity’s economic accounting system and its
implementation of the total commonwealth capability by total world society,
aided by the computer’s vast memory and high speed recall comes first of
all of the first-things-first that we must attend to to make our space
vehicle Earth a successful man operation. We may now raise our sights, in
fact must raise our sights, to take the initiative in planning the
world-around industrial retooling revolution. We must undertake to increase
the performance per pound of the world’s resources until they provide all
of humanity a high standard of living. We can no longer wait to see whose
biased political system should prevail over the world.
You may not feel very confident about how you are going to earn your right
to live under such world-around patron-less conditions. But I say to you
the sooner you do the better chance we have of pulling out of humanity’s
otherwise fatal nose dive into oblivion. As the world political economic
emergencies increase, remember that we have discovered a way to make the
total world work. It must be initiated and in strong momentum before we
pass the point of no return. You may gain great confidence from the fact
that your fellow men, some of them your great labor leaders, are already
aware and eager to educate their own rank and file on the fallacy of
opposition to automation.
I have visited more than three hundred universities and colleges around the
world as an invited and appointed professor and have found an increasing
number of students who understand all that we have been reviewing. They are
comprehending increasingly that elimination of war can only be realized
through a design and invention revolution. When it is realized by society
that wealth is as much everybody’s as is the air and sunlight, it no longer
will be rated as a personal handout for anyone to accept a high standard of
living in the form of an annual research and development fellowship.
I have owned successively, since boyhood, fifty-four automobiles. I will
never own another. I have not given up driving. I began to leave my cars at
airports-never or only infrequently getting back to them. My new pattern
requires renting new cars at the airports as needed. I am progressively
ceasing to own things, not on a political-schism basis, as for instance
Henry

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George’s ideology, but simply on a practical basis. Possession is becoming
progressively burdensome and wasteful and therefore obsolete.
Why accumulate mementos of far away places when you are much more
frequently in those places than at your yesterday’s home, nation, state,
city, and street identified residences, as required for passport, taxing,
and voting functions? Why not completely restore the great cities and
buildings of antiquity and send back to them all their fragmented treasures
now deployed in the world’s museums? Thus, may whole eras be reinhabited
and experienced by an ever increasingly interested, well-informed, and
inspired humanity. Thus, may all the world regain or retain its
regenerative metaphysical mysteries.
I travel between Southern and Northern hemispheres and around the world so
frequently that I no longer have any so-called normal winter and summer,
nor normal night and day, for I fly in and out of the shaded or sun-flooded
areas of the spinning, orbiting Earth with ever- increased frequency. I
wear three watches to tell me what time it is at my "home" office, so that
I can call them by long distance telephone. One is set for the time of day
in the place to which I am next going, and one is set temporarily for the
locality in which I happen to be. I now see the Earth realistically as a
sphere and think of it as a spaceship. It is big, but it is comprehensible.
I no longer think in terms of "weeks" except as I stumble over their
antiquated stop-and-go habits. Nature has no "weeks." Quite clearly the
peak traffic patterns exploited by businessmen who are eager to make the
most profit in order to prove their right to live causes everybody to go in
and out of the airport during two short moments in the twenty-four hours
with all the main facilities shut down two-thirds of the time. All our beds
around the world are empty for two-thirds of the time. Our living rooms are
empty seven-eighths of the time.
The population explosion is a myth. As we industrialize, down goes the
annual birth rate. If we survive, by 1985, the whole world will be
industrialized, and, as with the United States, and as with all Europe and
Russia and Japan today, the birth rate will be dwindling and the bulge in
population will be recognized as accounted for exclusively by those who are
living longer.
When world realization of its unlimited wealth has been established there
as yet will be room for the whole of humanity to stand indoors in greater
New York City, with more room for each human than at an average cocktail
party.
We will oscillate progressively between social concentrations in cultural
centers and in multi- deployment in greater areas of our Spaceship Earth’s
as yet very ample accommodations. The same humans will increasingly
converge for metaphysical intercourse and deploy for physical experiences.
Each of our four billion humans’ shares of the Spaceship Earth’s resources
as yet today amount to two-hundred billion tons.
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It is also to be remembered that despite the fact that you are accustomed
to thinking only in dots and lines and a little bit in areas does not
defeat the fact that we live in omnidirectional space-time and that a four
dimensional universe provides ample individual freedoms for any
contingencies.
You may very appropriately want to ask me how we are going to resolve the
ever- acceleratingly dangerous impasse of world-opposed politicians and
ideological dogmas. I answer, it will be resolved by the computer. Man has
ever-increasing confidence in the computer; witness his unconcerned
landings as airtransport passengers coming in for a landing in the combined
invisibility of fog and night. While no politician or political system can
ever afford to yield understandably and enthusiastically to their
adversaries and opposers, all politicians can and will yield
enthusiastically to the computers safe flight-controlling capabilities in
bringing all of humanity in for a happy landing.
So, planners, architects, and engineers take the initiative. Go to work,
and above all co- operate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain
at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be
increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is
employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They
are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity
governing universe.
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--
Lawrence F. London
lfljvenaura@gmail.com
https://sites.google.com/site/avantgeared/



  • [permaculture] Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth - R. Buckminster Fuller, Lawrence London, 09/23/2015

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