Buckminster Fuller, excerpt from "Regenerative Landscape"
Chapter 8 of "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth"
From: 1969 C.E. To: Unknown
“…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; low prices on vastly improved products and services, which have altogether established entirely new and higher standards of humanity’s living. 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 100,000 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 an consequent educational experience find, 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 ones 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 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 therefore knowledge of the a priori existence of a complex of generalized, abstract principles which apparently altogether govern all physically evolving phenomena of the 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 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…
… 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 to bum 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 , a responsibility of making humanity comprehensively and sustainably successful. We have earned 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.”
-From “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,” Buckminster Fuller, 1969
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