Buckminster Fuller, Excerpt from "Integral Functions"
Chapter 6 from "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth"
From: 1969 C.E. To: Unknown
“…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. Counselled 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 Wax 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 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 toe, 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 accelerating!y 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 to 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 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.”
-From “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,” Buckminster Fuller, 1969
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