It is the author's working assumption that the words good and bad are meaningless.
This book is written with the conviction that there are no “good” or “bad” people, no matter how offensive or eccentric to society they may seem. I am confident that if I were born and reared under the same circumstances as any other known humans, I would have behaved much as they have.
One of the many wonderful human beings that I've known who has affected other human beings in a markedly inspiring degree was e. e. cummings, the poet.
He wrote a piece called “A Poet's Advice,” which I feel elucidates why “little I,” fifty-three years ago at age thirty-two, jettisoned all that I had ever been taught to believe and proceeded thereafter to reason and act only on the basis of direct personal experience. cumming's poem also explains why, acting entirely on my own initiative, I sought to discover what, if anything, can be effectively accomplished by a penniless, unknown individual—operating only on behalf of all humanity—in attempting to produce sustainingly favorable physical and metaphysical advancement of the integrity of all human life on our planet, which omnihuman advantaging task, attemptable by the individual, is inherently impossible of accomplishment by any nation, private enterprise, religion, or other multipeopled, bias-fostering combination thereof.
A Poet's Advice
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.
This may sound easy. It isn't.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel—but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling—not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time—and whenever we do it, we are not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world—unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn't.
It's the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.
Exploring, experiencing, feeling, and—to the best of my ability—acting strictly and only on my individual intuition, I became impelled to write this book.
I'm not claiming to be a poet or that this book is poetry, but I knew cummings well enough to be confident that he would feel happy that I had written it.
Humanity's cosmic-energy income account consists entirely of our gravity- and star (99 percent Sun)-distributed cosmic dividends of waterpower, tidal power, wavepower, windpower, vegetation-produced alcohols, methane gas, vulcanism, and so on. Humanity's present rate of total energy consumption amounts to only one four-millionth of one percent of the rate of its energy income.
Tax-hungry government and profit-hungry business, for the moment, find it insurmountably difficult to arrange to put meters between humanity and its cosmic energy income, and thus they do nothing realistic to help humanity enjoy its fabulous energy-income wealth—in fact, they send their government “revenooers” out into the mountain forest to fine and to destroy the equipment of any civilian so “treacherous” as to apply private enterprise in the alcohol-from-Sun-energy-photosynthesis harvesting to personal advantaging. If any citizens start making their own automobile-powering alcohol, the “revenooers” will have to pounce on them just as they do on those making moonshine “likker.”
Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to “make it” economically on this planet in the Universe. We do. It can only be accomplished, however, through a design science initiative and technological revolution.
For three-quarters of all the trillions of nights humans have been on board planet Earth, the Moon has been their most intimate sky companion. For millions of years humans assumed it to be obvious that no one would really touch the moon.
Now, in 1980, a large number of all humans ten years of age and under, all of whom were born after humans reached the Moon, have learned so much about the Apollo Project as to be quite familiar with its critical-path accomplishment. They have entered the evolutionary scenario at a spontaneous conceptual level twice as well informed initially as were any pre-Apollo Project humans, and they find it logical to think about the solution of major evolutionary challenges in the comprehensive terms of both the all-history critical-path lessons as well as those of the as-yet-clearly-remembered and -documented special-case lessons of the Apollo Project's one million additionally accomplished, critical-path tasks. The under-ten-year-old post-Moon-landers are saying, “Humans can do anything they need to do.” They are writing me letters saying so and asking why we don't make our world work satisfactorily for all humans. This is encouraging.
History shows that, only when the leaders of the world's great power structures have become convinced that their power structures are in danger of being destroyed, have the gargantuanly large, adequate funds been appropriated for accomplishing the necessary epoch-opening new technologies. It took preparation for World War III to make available the funds that have given us computers, transistors, rockets, and satellites to realistically explore the Universe. In the one hour of concentrated introductory reading about the critical path that must be accomplished in order to achieve understanding that we have the option to “make it,” the first thing is to understand what the world power structures are and of what their unique technical levers and strategies consist.
Those in supreme power politically and economically as of 1980 are as yet convinced that our planet Earth has nowhere nearly enough life support for all humanity. All books on economics have only one basic tenet—the fundamental scarcity of life support.
Neither the great political and financial power structures of the world, nor the specialization-blinded professionals, nor the population in general realize that sum-totally the omni-engineering-integratable, invisible revolution in the metallurgical, chemical, and electronic arts now makes it possible to do so much more with ever fewer pounds and volumes of material, ergs of energy, and seconds of time per given technological function that it is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a “higher standing of living than any have ever known.”
It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival. War is obsolete.
It could never have been done before. Only ten years ago the more-with-less technology reached the point where it could be done. Since then the invisible technological-capability revolution has made it ever easier to do so. It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry. The essence of livingry is human-life advantaging and environment controlling. With the highest aeronautical and engineering facilities of the world redirected from weaponry to livingry production, all humanity would have the option of becoming enduringly successful.
All previous revolutions have been political—in them the have-not majority has attempted revengefully to pull down the economically advantaged minority. If realized, this historically greatest design revolution will joyously elevate all humanity to unprecedented heights.
Those who make money with money deliberately keep it scarce. Money is not wealth. Wealth is the accomplished technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growful needs of life. Money is only an expediency-adopted means of interexchanging disparately sized, nonequatable items of real wealth.
A shoemaker has ten milk-drinking children. He wants to acquire a milk cow to convert grass into milk to take care of his children. The shoemaker makes his shoes out of cowhide, but that is not the reason he wants the cow. If and when the cow gets too old for milk production, he can butcher it for its meat and obtain a goodly supply of cowhide for his shoemaking.
A cow breeder wants a pair of shoes. He and the shoemaker agree that it takes much more time and individual inputs to produce a milk cow than it does to make a pair of shoes. They agree that you can't cut the cow up and still milk it. So they employ metal, which, being scarce and physically useful, has high and known exchange value and which could be cut apart into whatever fractions are necessary to implement the disparate values of interexchanging. That's how we got money.
All the strengths of all great politics and religion and most of business are derived from the promises they give of assuaging humanity's seemingly tragic dilemma of existing in an unalterable state of fundamental inadequacy of life support.
There are two more prime obstacles to all humanity's realization of its option to “make it.” One is the fact that humanity does not understand the language of science. Therefore it does not know that all that science has ever found out is that the physical Universe consists entirely of the most exquisitely interreciprocating technology. Ninety-nine percent of humanity thinks technology is a “new” phenomenon. The world populace identifies technology with (1) weapons and (2) machines that compete with them for their jobs. Most people therefore think they are against technology, not knowing that the technology they don't understand is their only means of exercising their option to “make it” on this planet and in this life.
The other prime obstacle to realization of the “great option” is the fact that the world's power structures have always “divided to conquer” and have always “kept divided to keep conquered.” As a consequence the power structure has so divided humanity—not only into special function categories, but into religious and language and color categories—that individual humans are now helplessly inarticulate in the face of the present crisis. They consider their political representation to be completely corrupted, therefore they feel almost utterly helpless.
Time and again in their short history computers have demonstrated their ability to reverse historically assumed-to-be-unalterable positions of both sides of the opposed political/economic power structure's directorates or committees. Computers can remember accurately and can cope with and integrate the vast amounts of all known, relevant information on complex problems, uncopable-with prior to the computer. What we had prior to the computer were respected opinions and only-selfishness-conditioned reflexes on how to cope. Though an opinion might be wrong, there was no practical and convincing way to prove it. Unchallenged, the opinions became respected precedent, then exceptionless concepts, and sometimes even civil and academically accepted social law.
Computers will be used more and more to produce the opinion-obsoleting answers to progressive crises-provoked questions about which way world society as a whole will enduringly profit the most. Computers will correct misinformed and disadvantaged conditioned reflexes, not only of the few officials who have heretofore blocked comprehensive techno-economic and political evolutionary advancement, but also of the vast majorities of heretofore-ignorant total humanity.
We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their 1980 jobs in their cars or buses, spending trillions of dollars' worth of petroleum daily to get to their no-wealth-producing jobs. It doesn't take a computer to tell you that it will save both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay home.
History's political and economic power structures have always fearfully abhorred “idle people” as potential troublemakers. Yet nature never abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails, coral reefs, and clouds in the sky.
One would hope that the at-home-staying humans will start thinking—“What was it I was thinking about when they told me I had to 'earn my living'—doing what someone else had decided needed to be done? What do I see that needs to be done that nobody else is attending to? What do I need to learn to be effective in attending to it in a highly efficient and inoffensive-to-others manner?”
Comprehensively and incisively programmed with all the relevant
data regarding education, it will be evidenced that the physical
and social costs will be far less for individual,
at-home-initiated, research-and-development-interned self-teaching
than having individual students going to schools, being bused, and
so on. This mass-production baby-sitting is only continued because
of the union-organized response to the fear of the teachers
about losing their jobs. Their political clout has for long been
strong enough to guarantee continuance of this inefficiency to the
present moment.
Freed of the necessity to earn a living, all humanity will want to exercise its fundamental drive first to comprehend “what it is all about” and second to demonstrate competence in respect to the challenges. The greatest privilege in human affairs will be to be allowed to join any one of the real wealth-production or maintenance teams.
We can sense that only God is the perfect—the exact truth. We can come ever nearer to God by progressively eliminating residual errors. The nearest each of us can come to God is by loving the truth.
When we speak of the integrity of the individual, we speak of that which life has taught the individual by direct experience. We are not talking about loyalty to your mother, your friends, your college fraternity, or your boss, who told you how to behave or think. In speaking of truth we are not talking about the position to take that seems to put you in the most favorable light.
It was the realization of the foregoing that brought the author to reorganize his life to discover what, if anything, the little, penniless, unknown individual, with dependent wife and child, might be able to do effectively on behalf of humanity that would be inherently impossible for great nations or great corporate enterprises to do. This occasioned what is described in my “Self-Disciplines.”
With world-around contact with youth, generated by invitations to speak to the students of over 500 universities and colleges during the last half-century, I can conclude at the outset of 1980 that the world public has become disenchanted with both the political and financial leadership, which it no longer trusts to solve the problems of historical crisis. Furthermore, all the individuals of humanity are looking for the answer to what the little individual can do that can't be done by great nations and great enterprises.
The author thought that it would be highly relevant to the purpose of this book to enumerate those self-disciplines that he had adopted and used during those fifty years. Only those self-disciplines can cogently explain why he adopted the design science revolution and not the political revolutions (the strategy of all history). Only by understanding those disciplines can we understand the strategy governing the development of the artifacts, which strategy is called “critical path.”
Each year I receive and answer many hundreds of unsolicited letters from youth anxious to know what the little individual can do. One such letter from a young man named Michael—who is ten years old—asks whether I am a “doer or a thinker.” Although I never “tell” anyone what to do, I feel it is quite relevant at this point to quote my letter to him explaining what I have been trying to do in the years since my adoption of my 1927-inaugurated self-disciplinary resolves. The letter, dated February 16, 1970, reads:
Dear Michael,
Thank you very much for your recent letter concerning “thinkers and doers.”
The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done—that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.
Try making experiments of anything you conceive and are intensely interested in. Don't be disappointed if something doesn't work. That is what you want to know—the truth about everything—and then the truth about combinations of things. Some combinations have such logic and integrity that they can work coherently despite non-working elements embraced by their system.
Whenever you come to a word with which you are not familiar, find it in the dictionary and write a sentence which uses that new word. Words are tools—and once you have learned how to use a tool you will never forget it. Just looking for the meaning of the word is not enough. If you vocabulary is comprehensive, you can comprehend both fine and large patterns of experience.
You have what is most important in life—initiative. Because of it, you wrote to me. I am answering to the best of my capability. You will find the world responding to your earnest initiative.
Sincerely yours,
Buckminster Fuller
1. My father died when I was fifteen.
“Darling, never mind what you think. Listen. We are trying to teach you!”
My mother said it. My schoolteachers said it. All grown-up authorities of any kind—the policeman, the druggist said it. “Thinking” was considered to be a process that is only teachable by the elders of the system. “That is why we have schools, dear.” “Thinking” was considered to be an utterly unreliable process when spontaneously attempted by youth.
2. Grandmother taught us the Golden Rule: “Love thy neighbor as thy self—do unto others as you would they should do unto you.”
3. As we became older and more experienced, our uncles began to caution us to get over our sensitivity. “Life is hard,” they explained. “There is nowhere nearly enough life support for everybody on our planet, let alone enough for a comfortable life support. If you want to raise a family and have a comfortable life for them, you are going to have to deprive many others of the opportunity to survive and the sooner, the better. Your grandmother's Golden Rule is beautiful, but it doesn't work.
4. Knowing that my mother and relatives loved me, I did my best not to pay any attention to my own thinking and trained myself to learn what seemed to me “the game of life” as you would train yourself to play football. The rules are all written by others.
5. Along came World War I. I did well in the Navy, I didn't have to “make money” with my ships. But when I entered the business world and had to make money over and above producing a good product, or when it had to be myself or somebody else who was to survive in the system, I was a spontaneous failure. I was always sure that I could cope with hardship better than the other guy, so I would yield.
6. In 1907, at the age of twelve, challenged by Robert Burns's “O wad some power the giftie gie us to see oursels as others see us,” I sought to “see” myself as others might and to integrate that other self with my self-seen self and thereafter to deal as objectively as possible with the comprehensively integrated self. One of the techniques I adopted for doing this was to keep a come-as-it-may chronological—rather than an alphabetical or a categorical—record of my activities. In 1917, at age twenty-two, as commissioned line officer in the U.S. Navy, I named the record the “Chronofile.” It consisted, and as yet consists, of all my “to and from” letters, programs, sketches, memoranda, doodles, etc., plus a few typical bills.
In 1917 Anne Hewlett and I were married. In 1918 our daughter Alexandra was born; she contracted infantile paralysis and spinal meningitis and died on her fourth birthday in 1922. Between 1922 and 1927 I developed a manufacturing and building business, designed and equipped four small factories for manufacturing new building components, and therewith successfully erected 240 residential buildings, but I failed to do so profitably and lost my friends' investments and became discredited and penniless. Coincidentally with my failure in business in 1927, our second daughter, Allegra, was born in pristine health.
7. In 1927, at age thirty-two, finding myself a “throwaway” in the business world, I sought to use myself as my scientific “guinea pig” (my most objectively considered research “subject”) in a lifelong experiment designed to discover what—if anything—a healthy young male of average size, experience, and capability with an economically dependent wife and newborn child, starting without any capital or any kind of wealth, cash savings, account monies, credit, or university degree, could effectively do that could not be done by great nations or great private enterprise to lastingly improve the physical protection and support of all human lives, at the same time removing undesirable restraints and improving individual initiatives of any and all humans aboard our planet Earth.
8. In 1927 I also committed all my productivity potentials toward dealing only with our whole planet Earth and all its resources and cumulative know-how, while undertaking to comprehensively protect, support, and advantage all humanity instead of committing my efforts to the exclusive advantages of my dependents, myself, my country, my team.
This decision was not taken on a recklessly altruistic do-gooder basis, but in response to the fact that my Chronofile clearly demonstrated that in my first thirty-two years of life I had been positively effective in producing life-advantage wealth—which realistically protected, nurtured, and accommodated X numbers of human lives for Y numbers of forward days—only when I was doing so entirely for others and not for myself.
Further Chronofile observation showed that the larger the number for whom I worked, the more positively effective I became. Thus it became obvious that if I worked always and only for all humanity, I would be optimally effective.
9. I sought to do my own thinking, confining it to only experientially gained information, and with the products of my own thinking and intuition to articulate my own innate motivational integrity instead of trying to accommodate everyone else's opinions, credos, educational theories, romances, and mores, as I had in my earlier life.
10. I sought to accomplish whatever was to be accomplished for anyone in such a manner that the advantage attained for anyone would never be secured at the cost of another or others.
11. I sought to cope with all humanly unfavorable conditions, customs, and afflictions by searching for the family of relevant physical principles involved, and therewith through invention and technological development to solve all problems by physical data and devices that were so much more effective as to be spontaneously adopted by humans and thereby to result in producing more desirable life-styles and thus emancipate humans from the previously unfavorable circumstances.
I must always “reduce” my inventions to physically working models and must never talk about the inventions until physically proven—or disproven.
The new favorable-to-humans environment constituted by the technological inventions and information must demonstrate that new inanimate technology could now accomplish what heretofore could not be accomplished by social reforms. I sought to reform the environment, not the humans. I determined never to try to persuade humanity to alter its customs and viewpoints.
12. I sought never to “promote” or “sell” either my ideas or artifacts or to pay others to do so. I must never hire any agents to produce publicity for me, nor engage any lecture, literary, or “idea-selling” agents, nor hire personnel who would solicit support of any kind on my behalf. All support must be spontaneously engendered by evolution's integrating of my inventions with the total evolution of human affairs.
13. I assumed that nature had its own unique gestation rates, not only for the birth of each new biological component of ecological intersupport, but also for each inanimate technological artifact invention of human interadvantaging.
14. I sought to develop my artifacts with ample anticipatory time margins so that they would be ready for use by society when society discovered through evolutionary emergencies that they needed just what I had developed. I realized that if the new tools I had developed could provide valid human-advantage increases, then they would inevitably be adopted by society during the successive inexorable emergencies that occur in society, which evolution of emergence only through emergencies would dictate the proper rate of regenerative gestation of spontaneously adopted social advances.
15. I sought to learn the most from my mistakes.
16. I sought to decrease time wasted in worried procrastination and to increase time invested in discovery of technological effectiveness.
17. I sought to document my development in the official records of humanity by applying for and being granted government patents.
18. Above all I sought to comprehend the principles of eternally regenerative Universe and to discover human functioning therein, thereby to discover nature's governing complexes of generalized principles and to employ these principles in the development of the specific artifacts that would benefit humanity's fulfillment of its essential functioning in the cosmic scheme.
19. I sought to educate myself comprehensively regarding nature's inventory of chemical elements, their weights, performance, characteristics, relative abundances, geographical whereabouts, metallurgical interalloyabilities, chemical associabilities and disassociabilities.
I sought to comprehend the full gamut of production tool capabilities, energy resources, and all relevant geological, meteorological, demographic, and economic data, as well as to comprehend the logistics and vital statistics thus far methodically amassed by humanity as derived from its all-history experiences.
20. I sought to operate only on a do-it-yourself basis and only on the basis of intuition.
21. I oriented what I called my “comprehensive, anticipatory design science strategies” toward primarily advantaging the new life to be born within the environment-controlling devices I was designing and developing, because the new lives would be unencumbered by conditioned reflexes that might otherwise blind them to the potential advantages newly existent within the new environment-control system in which they found themselves beginning life.
Despite the fearful “you-or-me” survival preoccupations, it seemed clear to me that if an individual who had practical experience in engineering, marketing, aeronautics, vessels on the sea, building on the land, mass manufacturing arts, and naval ballistics, who also could discern the evolutionary potentials emerging in scientific discoveries and see what the priority of tasks might be in bringing about general economic success for all humanity, then if that individual were to address those problems, completely committing the balance of his life to the realization of such technical advantaging of humanity, then, if that individual was doing what nature was trying to do, he might find self—and those dependent on self—surviving and gaining in knowledge, capability, and experience relevant to the tasks to be accomplished.
Effective exploration requires effective record-keeping. I am confident of the accuracy of the record presented herewith. I am also confident that my personal record is pretty much the same as the record that would have been manifest by any healthy, well-informed individual who undertook the course I chose to seer upon the birth of Allegra in 1927. The fact that the individual who did pursue this course as a deliberate experiment (myself) found that it proved to be an economically tenable way of life and a technically effective way of approaching world problems may encourage others to address problems in the same manner.
As already related, in 1907 I started a chronological record of my life and in 1917 named it the “Chronofile.” In 1917, at the age of twenty-two—fortified with the already-thick Chronofile—I determined to make myself “the special case guinea pig study” in a lifelong research project—i.e., documenting the life of an individual born in the “Gay Nineties”—1895, the year automobiles were introduced, the wireless telegraph and the automatic screw machine were invented, and X rays were discovered—having his boyhood around the turn of the century, and maturing during humanity's epochal graduation from the nineteenth century, which closed Sir Isaac Newton's “normally at rest” and myriadly isolated hybrid world cultures to which change was anathema, into the twentieth century and Einstein's normally “dynamic,” omni-integrating world culture to which change has come to seem both essential and popularly acceptable.
Though I lived within seven miles of Boston's center, so new and rare an object was the automobile that I was seven years old when I first saw one. I first drove one when I was twelve. Operators' licenses and owners' registration certificates did not come into official use in any states until a decade later.
When I was nine years old, the airplane was invented, but I did not see one flying until I was fourteen, and I did not fly one until I was twenty-two, within which same year (1917) I heard the historically first human-voice conversation over the radio. Earlier in that extraordinary year the U.S.A. had entered World War I; I had entered the U.S. Navy; and Anne Hewlett had entered into marriage with me.
The cumulative effect of this swift succession of epochally surprising “first-ever” (for me) human and personal experiences precipitated my previously mentioned inauguration of the history of the evolution of “Guinea Pig B” (“B” for Bucky)—the Chronofile.
Along with millions of other pre-Kitty Hawk juveniles I, too, had tried to invent the airplane, first with paper dart models and then with box-kite-like multiplaned gliders. Despite our elders' doubts and engineering's down-to-earth negatives, immanent invention of the “airplane” was everywhere present in the thought world of my pre-Write Brothers, knee-breeches years. It is interesting that our latest supersonic and 2000-mile-per-hour planes are beginning to take on the overall shape perfection of those early paper darts. Children's intuitions are keen.
My extraordinary experiences with the U.S. Navy's World War I galaxy of new tools—oil-burning turboelectric ships, aircraft, diesel-engined submarines, radios, automatic range-keepers, etc.—convinced me that the experience pattern of my generation was not to be just one more duplicate generation in a succession of millions of generations of humanity, with an approximately imperceptible degree of environmental change, as compared to the immediately previous generation. I was convinced that, unannounced by any authority, a much greater environmental and ecological change was just beginning to take place in my generation's unfolding experience than had occurred cumulatively between my father's, grandfather's, great-, and great-great-grandfather's four previous generations. I had read their diaries, expense accounts, or letters containing descriptions of their lives in their successive undergraduate days in the Harvard classes of 1883, 1843, 1801, and 1760, respectively. They all told of days-long walking or driving trips between Cambridge and Boston. I realized intuitively that the subway, which opened in my 1913 freshman year to connect Harvard Square in Cambridge to Tremont and Park streets in Boston in seven minutes, was a harbinger of an entirely new space-time relationship of the individual and the environment.
It was clearly the environment and not the humans that was changing, and though the environmental changes might not alter human genes, changes in their external conditions might permit humans to realize many more of their innate capabilities than heretofore.
Humans are tool-complexes—hands for certain tasks, feet, ears, teeth, etc., for others. Using their human tool complexes, human minds, comprehending variable interrelationship principles, invent detached-from-self tools—the bucket can lift out more water from the well than can a pair of cupped human hands—that are more special-case-effective but not used as frequently as their organically integral tools. Humans invent craft tools and industrial tools. The latter are all the tools that cannot be invented or operated by one human. The first industrial tool was the spoken word. With words humans first compounded their experience-won knowledge. (Most industrial tools are driven by inanimate energy rather than by human muscle.)
Dwellings are environment-controlling machines. So are automobiles. Automobiles are little part-time dwellings on wheels. Both autos and dwellings are complex tools. Both autos and dwellings are component tools within the far vaster tool complex of world-embracing industrialization. I use the world industrialization to include all intercoordinate humanity, all its artifacts, its evolving omni-interfunctioning and omni-integrating, omni-life-support-producing capability.
I do not demean the phenomenon of industrialization by identifying it as being the money-making business that exploits productivity for unilateral profit. I do not identify the biological complexity “cow” and its ecological support system as being a component of some dairy business. Industrialization is not business's mass production of weaponry and munitions for political proliferation and personal profit. Industrialization's productivity is exploited by business. But industrialization's coordinate productivity can be employed directly by spontaneous cooperation of humanity without business-profit-motivation.
Life continually alters the environment, and the altered environment in turn alters the potentials, realities, and challenges of life. Environment embraces a complex of nonsimultaneously occurring but omni-integrating mutations of humans' external, only-by-invention-realized, metabolic-regeneration organisms which we think and speak of as industrialization.
Our Harvard 1917 class of 700 had only three automobile-owning members at its 1913 freshman start, one of whom was Ray Stanley, whose father had invented and produced the Stanley Steamer. But it was even then at least wishfully clear that humans in general might sometime acquire automobiles. Since that time I have owned successively forty-three automobiles, three of which I invented and built, and have personally driven the forty-three cars a total of one and one-quarter million miles. I have lived long enough in various places to have had my cars registered in different years in ten different U.S.A states. I have flown one and one-half million miles, part of that distance in three of my own planes. I have owned many boats, traveled in many others, and have commanded several craft in the United States Navy.
My total travel, by land, sea, and air, aggregates more than three and one-half million miles to date, and in the last twenty-two years my work has taken me completely around the world forty-seven times, making it more economical and efficient to rent automobiles locally than to own them and leave them sitting in airport parking lots. Consequently I have rented over 100 cars in addition to the forty-three I owned. This is in no wise a unique record. It is fairly average for millions of humans who have responsibilities in the general frontiers of evoluting world society. Three and one-half million is paltry mileage for any senior Pan American Airways pilot. Every astronaut with only two weeks away from Earth has traveled over three and one-half million miles.
Pre-1900 average world man covered only 30,000 miles in his entire lifetime, which is only one percent of my lifetime mileage to date.
In 1900 no human thought assumed that acceleration existed in human affairs, i.e., sociologically. In 1980 there is no longer valid dissent from the concept of an accelerating change in the affairs of humans on Earth. The average U.S.A. family now moves out of town every three years. My present official address for passports and taxation is in Maine. I have had successive voting privileges in eight states. Whether I am “in residence” or not, my land, my house, you too, and I whirl constantly around the Earth's axis together (at about 800 miles per hour in the latitude of New York City), as all the while our little Spaceship Earth zooms around the Sun at 60,000 miles per hour, while at the same time our solar system rotates in its nebular merry-go-round at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour—none of which celestial-arena traveling did I include in my previously stated lifetime mileages or in those of other Earthians.
In all reality I never “leave home.” My backyard has just grown progressively bigger and more globular until now the whole world is my spherical backyard. “Where do you live?” and “What are you?” are progressively less sensible questions. “At present I am a passenger on Spaceship Earth,” and “I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category, a highbred specialization. I am not a thing—a noun. I am not flesh. At eighty-five, I have taken in over a thousand tons of air, food, and water, which temporarily became my flesh and which progressively disassociated from me. You and I seem to be verbs—evolutionary processes. Are we not integral functions of the Universe?”
The first important regenerative effect upon me of keeping this active chronological record was that I learned to “see myself” as others might—and usually did—see me.
Second, it persuaded me ten years later (1927—a decade after inception of “Project Guinea Pig B,” in 1917) to start my life as nearly “anew” as it is humanly possible to do.
One basic tenet of my new 1927 volition, as already mentioned, was that whatever was to be accomplished for anyone must never be at the cost of another. Robin Hood, whose story my father read aloud to me when I was very young and not long before my father died, became my most influential early-years' mythical hero. This meant that in my “first life” I had improvised methods in general to effect swift moral and romantic justice for those I found in trouble or danger. Foolishly self-confident in my “first life,” I had often rushed thoughtlessly to assume responsibilities beyond my physical, monetary, or legal means to fulfill. This rashness led me into complex dilemmas, for in attempting to keep my assumption of responsibilities legal, I inadvertently involved my unwitting family, dragging them into preposterous financial sacrifices.
In inaugurating my new life I took away Robin Hood's longbow, staff, and checkbook and gave him only scientific textbooks, microscopes, calculating machines, transits, and industrialization's network of tooling in general. I made him substitute new inanimate forms for animate reforms. I did not allow Robin any public relations professionals or managers or agents to “promote” or “sell” him. It seemed obvious that if the new tools that the “new” Robin Hood developed could provide valid human-advantaging increases, they would inevitably be adopted by society during the successive, inexorable economic emergencies—which dictate the proper rate of regenerative gestations of evolution.
There is a dawning awareness that I am saying something realistic when I say we have been asking the politicians to do what only we can do ourselves, technologically, by cooperative use of our intellects and active initiatives plus our innate, politically transcendental integrity and artifact-inventing and mass-producing capabilities.
I have been consistently faithful to my 1917 determination to treat myself objectively as an historical guinea pig, and I assure any who may be interested that my files include as many unflattering items, such as notices from the sheriff, letters from those who thought me to be a crank, crook, charlatan, etc. I am glad that these negative charges are infrequent and to the best of my knowledge untrue, though the record discloses the ease with which items taken out of context can be negatively interrelated and interpreted.
Because my Chronofile and archive's data constitute a faithfully comprehensive record, I am now able to comment objectively regarding my subjectively disclosed guinea-pig self (and I am usually more critically incisive with myself than I am with studies of other humans).
When my subject is being effective, I am glad, and when it is worriedly procrastinating, I am sad. When it makes mistakes, I learn the most and am elated. That is the extent of my prejudice.
It has been an expensive and often cumbersome task to keep the records and to hold together the archives that document the half-century history of this experimental undertaking, which had often to passage penniless times. However, that record-keeping has been accomplished. As a consequence it may serve to encourage others to commit themselves to nature's precessional principles.
Few who know me or of me—over and above friends familiar with my 1917 resolution to faithfully document the life of an individual and my 1927 resolution to conduct a lifelong experiment with that individual—are cognizant of the reasons governing adoption of several important stratagems within my personally conceived and adopted grand strategy of self-disciplines, though these have altogether governed the last half-century of my eighty-five years, and as yet continue to do so.
In 1927 I designed the experiment's strategies in a manner that seemed to me most probable to prove clearly that all the irreversible gains for all human individuals that I set about to produce could not be accomplished as conceived and initiated by business corporations, political states, academic, professional, labor, or any other social groups, no matter how powerfully rich, well-informed, well-intentioned, or well-armed they might be. I was concerned with the unique cerebral faculties, conceptual metaphysics, and physical articulatabilities integral to, and operative only within, the inventory of one single individual human's functioning.
As I initiated such a lifelong operation in 1927, it was evident to me that within the extant world-around, socioeconomic milieu, the physical resources essential to the reduction to physical realization and production of the individual's invented artifacts could only be legally acquired in three ways.
1. Within the U.S.S.R. only by first persuading the Communist party leaders that my concepts were either superior to or compatible with theirs, and thereafter waiting on their relative priority list for half a century until the first ten of their five-year plans had been completed.
2. Within one of the great dictatorships I might gain the physical means of realization my technological artifacts by first persuading the dictator that his only militarily sustainable plans should be abandoned because they were diametrically opposed to my concepts (not pursued).
3. Within the remainder of the world I would acquire the means only in exchange for cash money or services. This brought me once more to the number-one strategic question: how could the initially moneyless, creditless, physical-facilities-lacking individual succeed in realistically demonstrating that the invented artifacts not only could be practically realized but that their use would substantially increase the economic, technological, and social advantaging of all world-around humanity and not be inherently limited to advantaging only minorities.
I saw that twentieth-century money was an economic invention that could be manipulated, for instance, through the Federal Reserve Bank and its control of its member banks' rediscount rate—or again by the banks' loaning to already powerful organizations large blocks of the money of many small depositors to enhance the advantage only of the few through profitable exploitations of the many's needs. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, since Malthus (1810) it had been assumed by all the world's political ideologies—as it is even today—that there is a fundamental and lethal inadequacy of life support on our planet, wherefore, poverty and misery for vast millions of humans have been accepted as unavoidable. Wherefore, the also universally assumed law of “survival only of the fittest” had given historical rise to various political ideologies, as ways of coping with this fundamental inadequacy—each convinced that the ultimate proof of which ideological group is fittest to survive can be resolved only by periodic trial of arms.
Politicians' effectiveness is dependent on the degree of growth of their ongoing authority. Since there is no sustainable equilibrium in a 100-percent efficient, ever-regenerating physical Universe, the politician of the moment who has gained greatest effectiveness is the one whose gained authority is as yet increasing—i.e., the brightness of whose “star” is waxing. Once their authority becomes visibly less, they are “on the way out.” The same is true of the money-making private-corporation executives. They must play company politics to ever progressively augment personal authority.
No matter how altruistic a public image they may attain and maintain, both the budding or full-bloom politicians and corporate executives must secretly have always on highest priority the increasing enhancement of their own public image as well as of their own financial credit. Whether public or private, professional or amateur, their own kudos-building or -maintenance requires that both the politicians and corporate executives forever be attempting to favorably reform the viewpoints of others regarding their particular organizations. To do so they are forever proposition to reform the organization commanded by those others whose prerogatives they hope to acquire.
Far different from the politicians', corporate executives', and religious leaders' strategies was the new noncompetitive course I took in 1927—i.e., that of reforming only the physical environment through artifacts, such as increasing safety and decreasing accidents by engineering improvements of motor vehicles while also providing overpasses and banked turns for the vehicles to drive on, instead of trying to reform the vehicle drivers' behaviors.
I planned to employ the ever-increasing and -improving scientific knowledge and technology to produce ever more effective human life-improving results with ever less investment of weight of materials, ergs of energy, seconds of time per each measurable level of improved artifact performance. I was hopeful of finally doing so much with so little as to implement comprehensive and economically sustainable physical success for all humanity, thereby to eliminate the need for lethally biased politics and their ultimate recourse to hot or cold warring.
The big question remained: How do you obtain the money to live with and to acquire the materials and tools with which to work?
The university and college students who became the first to make the world news as dissidents in 1965 and 1966 were born in the years TV came into the American home. The Class of '66ers were the first human beings to be reared by the “third parent,” whose TV voice and TV presence were often heard and felt by the children much more than those of the two blood parents. TV daily briefed them visually—ergo, vividly—on the world-around news, regarding the world's continual aches, pains, disasters, Olympic triumphs, etc.
The young were saying, “I know that Dad and Mom love me to pieces, and I love them to pieces, but they don't know what it's all about. They come home from the office or golf links or hairdressers and sit down to beer and small talk or 'sitcoms.' They have nothing to do with our going into Vietnam. They have nothing to do with our going to the Moon. They have nothing to do with anything except earning a living—and spending it on TV-advertised goods. The whole world is in great trouble. Since the older people don't seem to know what is going on and are too preoccupied with irrelevancies, I and my contemporaries must do our own thinking and find out what needs to be done to make the world work.”
As we wrote in the opening lines of our “Self-Disciplines,” up to the time of the radio the older people were always saying to the young, “Never mind what you think. Listen. We are trying to teach you.” With the TV making it clear to the young that the parents did not know much about anything and were not “the authority,” the young, responding to intuition, said to themselves, “I am going to have to do my own thinking and take my own actions.” Nonetheless, they were utterly unskilled in world affairs, highly idealistic, and easily exploitable.
The abrupt, spontaneous historical events on the Berkeley campus of the University of California and elsewhere occasioned youth's discarding forever the authority of their elders. The Class of 1966 shocked the world by saying that it felt no special loyalty to its families, its university, its state, or its nation. The youth of the Class of 1966 were thought by the oldsters to be shockingly immoral and lacking in idealism. Not so! They were as idealistic and full of compassion as any child has ever been, but their loyalty was to all humanity. They were no longer the victims of local class or race bias. Their idealism was at first skilfully exploited by the psycho-guerrilla warfaring of the communist-capitalist secret operations. Soon the young realized that they were using their heads for punching bags and cudgel targets instead of for thinking. Many of their numbers began to listen to my lectures about solving problems by appropriate technology instead of by physical struggling or political revolution. Informed by me, they began to say mankind can do anything it wants. “Why don't our officials and families stop talking about their local biases and wasting wealth on warring—all because they assume that 'war is necessary' simply because there does not seem to be enough to take care of even one-half of humanity's needs.”
The young ones asked, “Why not up the performances per units of invested resources and thus make enough to go around?” Their elders repeated, “Never mind what you think,” so the young ones stopped asking.
All technical evolution has a fundamental behavior pattern. First there is scientific discovery of a generalized principle, which occurs as a subjective realization by an experimentally probing individual. Next comes objective employment of that principle in a special case invention. Next the invention is reduced to practice. This gives humanity an increased technical advantage over the physical environment. If successful as a tool of society, the invention is used in bigger, swifter, and everyday ways. For instance, it goes progressively from a little steel steamship to every-bigger fleets of constantly swifter, higher-powered ocean giants.
There comes a time, however, when we discover other ways of doing the same task more economically—as, for instance, when we discover that a 200-ton transoceanic jet airplane—considered on an annual round-trip frequency basis—can outperform the passenger-carrying capability of the 85,000-ton Queen Mary.
All the technical curves rise in tonnage and volumetric size to reach a “giant” peak, after which progressive miniaturization sets in. After that, a new and more economical art takes over and then goes through the same cycle of doing progressively more with less, first by getting bigger and taking advantage, for instance, of the fact that doubling the length of a ship increases its wetted surface fourfold but increases its payload volume eightfold. Inasmuch as the cost of driving progressively bigger ships through the water at a given speed increases in direct proportion to the increase in friction of the wetted surface, the eightfolding of payload volume gained with each fourfolding of wetted surface means twice as much profit for the same effort each time the ship's length is doubled.
This principle of advantage gain through geometric size increase holds true for ships of both air and water. Eventually doubling the length of sea-going ships finally runs into trouble. For instance, an ocean liner made more than 1000 feet long would have to span between two giant waves and would have to be doubled in size to do so. If doubled in size once more, however, she could no longer be accommodated by the sizes of the great world canals, dry docks, or harbor depths.
At this point the miniaturization of doing more with less first ensues through substitution of an entirely new art—David's slingshot of Goliath's club operated from beyond reach of the giant.
This overall and inexorable trending to do more with less is known sum-totally as “progressive ephemeralization.” Ephemeralization trends toward and ultimate doing of everything with nothing at all, which is a trend of the omniweighable physical to be mastered by the omniweightless metaphysics of intellect.
All the missile-hurling arts of man and men's warring or fighting to the death have followed this same fundamental evolutionary pattern of bigger, then smaller.
Assuming that there were not and never will be enough vital support resources to go around, we conclude that there must be repeating eventualities in wars to see which side could pursue its most favored theory of survival under fundamental inadequacies. Humanity has continually done more killing with less human effort and greater and greater distances and at ever-higher speeds and with ever-increasing accuracy.
The killing went from a thrown stone to a spear to a sling to a bow-and-arrow to a pistol, a musket, a cannon, and so on until man used the great weapons-carrying battleships. Suddenly a little two-ton, torpedo-carrying airplane sank a 45,000-ton battleship, and then the 2,000-miles-per-hour airplane was outperformed by the 16,000-miles-per hour, atom-bomb-carrying rocket of minuscule weight in comparison to the bomb-carrying plane. If world warring persists as a consequence of the concept of “survival only of the fittest minority,” there will come the approximately weightless death rays operating at 700 million miles per hour.
In the new invisible miniaturization phase of major world-warring both sides carry on an attention-focusing guerilla warfare (as was conducted in Vietnam) while making their most powerful attacks through subversion, vandalism, and skillful agitation of any and all possible areas of discontent within the formally assumed enemy's home economics.
In carrying on this new and unfamiliar world-warring they do not have to send ideological proselytizers to persuade the people of the other side to abandon their home country's political system and adopt that of their former enemies. Instead they can readily involve, induce, and persuade individuals of the other side to look for discontent wherever it manifests itself and thereafter to “amplify” that condition by whatever psychological means until the situation erupts in public confusion, demonstrations, terrorism, etc. The idea is to make a mess of the other's economy and customs and thus to discredit the other's political system in the eyes of the rest of the world and to destroy the enemy people's confidence in their own system.
Because the active operators are sometimes engaged on a basis of just gratifying their own personal discontent, they are often unaware that they are acting as agents. Because almost everyone has at least one discontent, a well-trained conscious agent can invoke the multiplying effective unwitting agency of hundreds of other discontent promoters and joiners—in ever-larger, more amplified, masses.
As a consequence of this new invisible phase of world-war trending, a most paradoxical condition exists. The highly idealistic youth of college age who are convinced that they are demonstrating against war are, despite the most humane and compassionate motives, often in fact the front-line soldiers operating as unwitting “shock troops.” Meanwhile the conventionally recognized soldiers engaged in visible “war-zone” warfare (either of ambush or open battle) are carrying on only a secondary—albeit often mortally fatal—decoy operation.
This invisible world-around warring to destroy the enemy's economy wherever it is operative, above all by demonstrating its homeland weaknesses and vulnerabilities to the rest of the world, and thus hoping to destroy the confidence of the enemy people in themselves, is far more devastating than could be a physical death ray, for it does everything with nothing. Furthermore it operates as “news,” which moves around the Earth by electromagnetic waves operating at 700 million miles per hour.
As those many who have become involved in the new invisible warfaring discover that their aims can be attained only through technological revolution, all the young world-around idealists will have to face up to the question of whether they prefer to keep on agitating simply because they have come to enjoy a sense of power and importance by so doing. All who are really dedicated to the earliest possible attainment of economic and physical success for all humanity—and thereby realistically to eliminate war—will have to shift their efforts from the political arena to participation in the design revolution. The latter course involves the development of ever-self-regenerating and improve scientific and technical competence. In turn this means that the individual must plunge earnestly and dedicatedly into initiating self-development, using the resources of the educational system.
Because automobiles were becoming ever-more popular in the 1920s and because they were using inherently exhaustible fossil fuels, such an approaching critical moment in human history as we are now experiencing was clearly visible to me and many others a half-century ago. I did not, however, know of any other humans who thought there was anything that they personally could do about this problem and any other such “too big” problems. Nonetheless, I committed my life to dealing only with total Spaceship Earth and all its passengers' regeneration. I have therefore included the chapter on the self-disciplines I adopted at thirty-two years of age at the 1927 outset (or soon thereafter) of my lifetime commitment. Many of the disciplines are importantly relevant today in respect to the way in which unknown, economically insecure, individual humans may function effectively in this world crisis.