Fred Truman
Design & Code Creative
Notes on Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
September 8, 2011
I’ve just reread Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, by Buckminster Fuller, and this time I took some notes. I really love his optimism and boldness of vision, something I believe we . I don’t claim any grammar accuracy here (especially since I typed much of this on my phone) and I didn’t take any notes on the eighth and final chapter “The Regenerative Landscape” – which is arguably the most inspiring portion of the book and where he lays out interesting ideas on the future of “race”, “possessions” and “mind fellowships.” My favorite term from the entire work is definitely “universal rascality” (page 90), and I also love that he refers to politicians as “stooges of the Great Pirates.” Anyways, here some to chew on:
I am enthusiastic over humanities extraordinary and soomerimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all of the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserved. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. - page 21
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 seperateness. 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 will either have become evidently to humanity that these questions are absurd and anti-evolutionary or men will no longer be living on earth. - page 31
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 top-most 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 those 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 the G.P.’s grand deception victorious. - page 38
…specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the “expert” is fooled into accepting g his slavery by making him feel that in return he is in a socially and culturally preferred, ergo, highly secure, lifelong position. - page 42
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 polotical, scientific, and religious leaders face-savingly acquiesce. - page 45
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 the respective exclusivities, all the class warfare ideaologies have become extinct. Capitalism and socialism are mutually extinct. Why? Because science now finds there can be ample for all, but 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. - page 48
When… 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 world but they inadvertently abandonded their own comprehensivity and they, too, became severe specialists as industrial production moneymakers, and thus they compounded their own acceleration to extinction in the world-paralyzing economic crash of 1929. But society… 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 labor, 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 in inherently world-co-ordinate these world economic depression events of the 1920s and 1930s meant that each of the local head politicians of a number of countries were asked seperately 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. - page 52
… the evolutionary antibody to the extinction of humanity through specialization appeared in the form of the computer in its comprehensively commanded automation which made man obsolete as a physical production and control specialist – and just in time.
The computer as a superspecialist 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 “comprehensivity.” 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. - page 53
To begin our position-fixing aboard our Spaceship Earth we must first acknowledge that the abundance of immediately consumable, obviously desirable or utterly essential resouces 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 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 locomote 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. - page 66
…powerful thought tools: topology, geodesics, synergetics, general systems theory, and the computer’s “bitting “ - page 83
We may… 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 directlg-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 “. - page 85
Universal rascality - page 90
…wealth…[is]… 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. - page 93
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 losing energy. Hence the universe itself was thought to be losing energy. This indicated that the universe was ” running down”, at which time revolution 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 yesterdays conservatism. All who expended energy in bringing about further evolutionary changes were to be abhorred. They were to be known as reckless spenders. - page 97
But we can scientifically assume that by the twenty-first century either humanity will not be living aboard Spaceship Earth or, if approaximately 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 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 non will be profitting at the expense of the other. Humans will be free in the sense that 99.9% 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. - page 111