1 Education for Comprehensivity

1  Education for Comprehensivity

2R. Buckminster Fuller

3 I’m very grateful for so cordial an introduction, but I also feel it is necessary when such nice things are said to remind myself that I am not impressed, because I know myself too well. I’m quite confident that I have become known at all only because in an age of almost complete specialization I have deliberately set out to be the opposite, to be a comprehensivist; and I have had no competition. If I’d had any, I doubt that I would have come in first. This brings me right away to one of the fine focuses of the Franklin Lectures; that is, to considering the function of higher education and some of the many great changes that may be desirable, and indeed necessary, in our world society within a very short period of time.

4 I find it surprising that society thinks of specialization as logical, necessary, desirable, if not inevitable. I observe that when nature wants to make a specialist she’s very good at it, whereas she seems to have designed man to be a very generally adaptable creature---by far the most adaptable creature we know of. If nature had wanted man to be a specialist, I am sure she would have grown him with one eye and a microscope on it. She has designed no such creatures. I observe that every child demonstrates a comprehensive curiosity. Children are interested in everything and are forever embarrassing their specialized parents by the wholeness of their interests. Children demonstrate right from the beginning that their genes are organized to help them to apprehend, comprehend, coordinate, and employ---in all directions.

5 Man is not unique in having altered his environment. All living creatures alter the environment in one way or another, and then the altered environment alters them back. There is a chain reaction that goes on, giving rise to what we call evolution. And not only living creatures but every physical system gives off energies entropically, and thereby alters the environment. The universe is a very complex environment altering local processes, but there are creatures that alter their environment in discrete ways, and we find that when they do so, inasmuch as all creatures are processes, the altered environment, in its discrete way, carries out some function of the success of that creature’s process. For instance, a bird alters environment by making a nest, and this is related to its ability to fly. If a bird had to gestate little birds in its womb, it would become so heavy that it would be unable to fly. So we find the bird developing the process of the nest and then issuing forth new life in the form of an egg encasing both the embryo and all the nutriment that is going to be necessary to develop the embryo until it hatches as a chick. There is only one thing to be added: a very discrete amount of heat has to be given to that egg to keep it going along so that the embryo will develop.

6 In designing that nest, birds demonstrate an interesting adjustment to the delicacy of the process. With a great many migrating birds, the males migrate north earlier than the females and, from their flight advantage, pick areas of the trees where there is going to be the kind of food that that type of bird needs to live---insects or worms or whatever it may be. The males come into the trees and pick positions where nests are going to go. We are familiar with soldiers standing in a tight line and then taking room on the line, spreading out until each man has adequate elbow room. The birds do this in an omni-directional way. Sometimes you see two birds of the same species out on the lawn, and you wonder why they seem to be fighting. What they are doing is taking positions in the trees and then making trial flights to find the nearest insect: they come together, they hit each other, they get interference, and then they spread out in their positions before the time comes to build nests. The males pick domains for their nests and sing their song, and soon the females come along. The female doesn’t just stop at the first male she comes to; she waits until she finds the right song and then she comes in. And now they both get busy and build the nest. By the time eggs are laid in the nest, it is a beautiful insulating device; the mother bird sits on top of it, making a total enclosure with high insulation; mother giving off just exactly the right amount of heat to make the egg work. They have situated the nest so that the mother bird is in good position to fly to an insect or a worm, without interference from any other bird, and to get back in time, before the egg goes below the critical heat. All in all, it is an extraordinarily well-balanced design, essential to the successful flight of birds. We have here, then, an externalized function, in that the nest is really part of the womb function.

7 I mention all this in order to make clear that a process, such as the bird, being in several parts which are not integral to one another, can be disassociated from part of its function.

8 In a sense, my glasses---I’m very farsighted and have been wearing glasses since I was four years old---have become a part of me. I recall being invited in 1930 to speak at Dartmouth College, in what they called Dartmouth Hall. Seventeen years later, in 1947, I was asked to speak at Dartmouth again--- and again spoke in Dartmouth Hall. After being introduced as having been there seventeen years before, I stood up and said that while I didn’t like to be contradictory, actually I hadn’t been there before. My host looked a little surprised, and I pointed out that in the interim Dartmouth Hall had burned down and they had rebuilt it. Moreover, in that seventeen years, all my flesh had completely changed---there was none of the 1930 flesh left. In fact, the only important physical evidence that ‘‘I’’ had been there seventeen years before were my eyeglasses: they were the same ones as before. But nothing else about me was the same. Quite interesting to discover that part of the function ‘‘me’’ was really more permanent than, yet not of, my integral flesh.

9 Man is not unique, then, as a toolmaker. There are many creatures that make tools, in the way of nests and other apparatus. Man is unique only in the extent to which he has employed tools. All his tools result from the discovery of repeated functions and conditions that are unfriendly or unfavorable to the continuation of the life process. In each case of man’s developing or inventing a tool, it is because he has had some experience of need. Man---early man---doesn’t have to invent being hungry or thirsty. So he tries out some things, and when he sees that some people die when they eat those red berries, he passes those berries by and keeps looking for something that will keep him going. While looking for his food, he suddenly realizes he is very thirsty and there is no water at hand. In desperation for a while, he finally happens upon some water. Now if you come to water and you are very thirsty and you are just an ancient man, you would have to ask, ‘‘How do I take in water?’’ You might plunge your head under and you get water up your nostrils---that isn’t very good. I recall as a child seeing the cat and the dog lapping up their water and wondering if maybe that wasn’t a better way. I saw lots of things that animals did which seemed to be very logical. I remember trying to lap water with my tongue, and I found that I couldn’t take water in nearly so fast as I could get it if I put in my hand and cupped it, and then I found two hands were even better than one, and I could pour it down like---kloope!

10 Supposing then that our ancient man has repeated this same process time and again and now has his water---he’s still very hungry and must go after berries. And he says, ‘‘Everytime I go after berries, I keep losing my water. I wish I Could bring this water along with me; yet, if I keep my hands full, this water will probably spill and I can’t pick berries.’’ So among the very earliest of all artifacts of man on earth we find vessels or containers of various kinds. From the very beginning, there were men who were able to control environment by taking some of the environment here and moving it to another place so as to have it with them. They were altering the environment in a preferred way to their own advantage.

11 Once man invents that vessel, several very interesting observations can be made. When he was not using it himself, somebody else could use it. He could make the vessel by scraping out stones, or by scraping out wood, and finally by forming things together---baking clay, weaving baskets, and so forth. Once you develop the vessel, you can also begin to make it of materials that can stand up under heat that your hands couldn’t stand. You can make your tool hands much bigger than they had been. You can make them stand acids that your real hands couldn’t. In other words, there is a definite basic function for this tool, but you can greatly extend the limits of that functioning--- sometimes to such a degree that you don’t readily recognize it as an extension of the integral function, as when we get to great tanks and reservoirs. This is something that it is very important to remember about tools.

12 Thus, man has not been unique in his having developed tools, but he is unique in the extent to which he employs them. And all this comes out of his recognizing repeated experiences and realizing that he can anticipate certain conditions and alter them favorably by making such a thing as a vessel.

13 As I compare man with other creatures in relation to specialization, I observe that man discovers principles that are operative in his environment and he makes use of those principles. For example, we have the flying bird as a specialist, and the bird does fly beautifully; but when the bird wants to walk, it folds up its wings and therefore has to walk quite awkwardly. The fish swims superbly but can’t walk on land. Man can walk on the land, but he also learns the principle of flight, and he puts on his wings and then flies. Then he takes them off so as not to be encumbered by them when he wants to walk again. He can put on his scales and go into the sea, but he is not encumbered by them when he doesn’t want to use them. So man has the ability to put on and take off much more than other creatures---which seems to be unique. This is what I mean when I speak about man’s general adaptability: the fact that his functions seem to be as little encumbered as possible.

14 What is really unique is that man is about halfway in the range of size among all creatures---halfway, in the middle of them---and he has extensibility in a great many directions. This, then, says that the specialization should be in the tools and not integral to man himself. The dinosaur had a one-ton tail to knock down bananas when he came to them, but he didn’t come to enough bananas to make pulling that one-ton tail around pay off for him. Man invents a ladder that can be left near the trees and out of the way when not in use. And we invent extensible hands and clippers with which to cut things down. We can do all those remote things beautifully.

15 About eight years ago, two papers were presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Philadelphia, one in anthropology and one in biology, that had been written by authors who were unknown to each other. The one in anthropology inquired into the case histories of all the human tribes that have become extinct. The one in biology inquired into the case histories of all the biological species known to become extinct. Both were trying to find a common cause of extinction, and both came up with the same one. Extinction was a consequence of overspecialization.

16 This is something for us to think about as we begin to go deeper and deeper into our own specialization. How did it happen?

17 Recalling Darwin’s concept of the evolution of species, he speaks about survival only of the fittest. Evolution does not presuppose the elephant stretching his nose and getting bigger and bigger all the while he is alive, altering himself within a generation. Desirable changes occur very gradually from generation to generation. A typical case would be that of a bird that flies over water and lives on certain species of microscopic sea life. Such birds, being able to fly, see that the kinds of sea life they want most tend to get into the marshes along sides of the sea. So we find these birds spending their time in the marshes, enjoying very good hunting for that type of sea life. But then the waters of the earth begin to recede as a consequence of the size of the polar icecaps, and the waters in those marshes become so deep that only birds with long beaks can reach far enough into the water to get at the food they need. The birds with shorter beaks can’t get at the food, and they die. This leaves only the long beakers, and long beakers with the procreative drive built into them procreate only with other long beakers.

18 We’ve learned in breeding, as with two fast running horses, that when we get two of an eccentric type, we tend to concentrate their genes with the probability of producing faster and faster running horses by breeding them together. But as you develop a special concentration of genes, you do so at the cost of breeding out general adaptability, and then your hybrid has to be protected. There are other things that you have to do for it that it used to do for itself.

19 It is also to be observed in the general pattern of our energy universe that, because the local systems are always giving off energies in diffused ways---eveiy local system changing, transforming, moving, giving off its energies in diffused ways---we have an expanding universe. Because the universe is more or less increasingly disorderly (with a consequent distribution of energies into smaller and smaller packages), the number of times that you encounter small amounts of energy that can do small things is very much greater than the number of times you encounter large amounts of energy that do large things--- there are more mosquitoes than there are earthquakes. This is just the general nature of the universe. Consequently, encountering a very large amount of energy, such as a star, would be a very remote possibility for much of the universe. This means that the large events in the environment are relatively infrequent. This being so, in losing general adaptability there is a tendency to lose those capabilities which are in reserve for only the very occasional, but also very important, big things. The birds I spoke about developed longer and longer beaks. Suddenly there is a great marsh fire and these birds discover for the first time that their beaks are so heavy they can no longer fly. That’s where the extinction comes in---as a consequence of overspecialization and a resulting loss of general adaptability.

20 Our human society, by becoming more and more specialized, has been getting itself into a very precarious position. Although we’ve developed the ability to use the energy of the atom to perform extraordinarily large tasks, we have in effect no world authority on what we ought to do with this ability. We have no fundamental authority on how we’ll use our energies in important and constructive ways. And we find our energies are being developed in enormous ways for no better purpose than to destroy man. By now we are, by way of retaliatory button pushing, technologically capable of eliminating man from the earth.

21 Since we’ve been getting into serious trouble as a result of our specialization, I’d lik'e to know how it happened. We were designed, obviously, to be generally adaptive, and yet we have become specialists. As I contemplate this educational institution of higher learning, Auburn, and indeed all educational institutions, I’m trying to discover the trends, the possible modifications in our educational processes, that may be highly desirable. All universities are organized today on the working assumption that specialization is essential. Now how did that come about?

22 Universities are quite new in the history of man. The technical ones go back to military undertakings and the like. Looking back in history, I find that there were some very strong men and there were some very illiterate strong men. Now, in that situation, if you are the strongest man around and everybody is illiterate, and you find there is very little to sustain life, and that the drive to satisfy hunger and thirst and the desire to reproduce are very powerful, then you are simply going to say, ‘‘Well, it’s quite clearly you or me, and I guess it’s going to have to be you.’’ And that’s the way it was. The strong man was able to organize himself into a powerful position by making it perfectly clear that he was stronger than that other fellow. Then came the followers who said, ‘‘Well, I’d better go along with him because he seems to be able to organize things here. Everybody gets out of his way and lets him have those things that are necessary to survive.’’

23 For fife to be regenerated on earth, it must be supplied with energy. We are energy processes; entropy is always working. We have to take on more energy than we give off, because we don’t have 100 percent efficiency in our use of energy. Now the only source of the energy needed to keep life going on board our little planet is the sun, which has been superbly designed in the right proximity to give us radiation without burning us up. Our biosphere is designed to refract those energies and separate them out into very useful frequencies. But you and I can’t go out in the sun without our clothes and expect to get enough energy through our skin to keep us going. Vegetation has been designed to help do that. If we went farther out into the biosphere, beyond the Van Allen belts, we would get plenty of radiation, but we would die because such a radiation concentration would be fatal.

24 The vegetation just mentioned---the green vegetation on land and the algae in the oceans---is designed to impound energy. The land vegetation is beautifully water-cooled and has roots so it can get the water as moisture running through it to be able to take on all that radiation. It then impounds the energy by photosynthesis. You and I can’t eat all the grasses and trees and bark; in fact, we can eat very little of those kinds of vegetation. But there are insects and animals that can. And so, as illiterate primitive man observes his drive to eat and the elements that sustain him, he sees a lot of people getting killed by eating the wrong mushrooms and the wrong berries and the wrong leaves and the wrong grasses. But then he sees the animals eating those same things not getting killed, and he decides that the animal is probably safe because the animal could digest it. Then he finds that he can live longer on the flesh of those animals with much greater safety. So the illiterate man goes after those animals for thfe flesh to regenerate himself. Where there are relatively few animals and a strong man, he says, ‘‘Now, I have my gang of strong men around me, and there are other gangs over here; now all those animals belong to me, you understand.’’ Weaker people, those who weren’t the king’s men, had to make do with roots, berries, and herbs.

25 Now when you get that kind of a picture, we find that the strong man with his strong men around him operating with cunning and great strength had to have a little more cunning than the other strong men. If you get to be top man, then there’s something you have to do: you have to work at it continually, to keep on being top man. We see this operative in all animals, in all creatures, in the battle of the male goats, the battle of the bulls to see which one is going to be on top. It goes on all through nature. But even the top man has to sleep every once in a while. So he gathers these very dull but strong men around him and says, ‘‘Now, you understand that the greatest virtue in the world---do you know what it is?---well, it’s loyalty. Have you got that good and straight? Okay, so now I’m going to go and get a little sleep.’’

26 Even so, he was always aware that there were some bright ones around who were not quite so strong physically but seemed able to contrive things---they could see things ---they seemed to catch on. So he said, ‘‘I think you’re a bit too bright for your own good, young man, and you’re not very big either. Maybe I’m going to have to cut your head off.’’

27 And the bright young man replied, ‘‘Sir, I think you could use my head in other ways. I can tell you what your enemies over there are doing because I just happen to speak their language, and I’ve heard what they were saying, sir.’’

28 ‘‘Very good, young man, a very good idea. From now on your job is just exactly that. You concentrate on getting that information for me, and you keep right at it.’’

29 And then somebody else said, ‘‘Sir, I think you could use my head too. I know how to make a little better sword.’’ ‘‘Very good. From now on you’re going to be my sword maker.’’ And another smart young man was going to record the history, while still another was going to sing songs about how great the great man was. So the top man gradually developed this kind of bait capability just as, when he captured prisoners, he found out what they could do and what they knew as specialists. And he began then to develop little tutors. For example, the Romans and Greeks turned some of their war prisoners into tutors---into specialists for these special people.

30 Now, if you are the headman and you have this problem of feeding your own soldiers, your great capital capability, of course, is your strength, and beyond that is the food that you control. So you say, in order to have this man be a specialist with a tutor to make him even brighter---the better to outdo your enemy---you’re going to have to feed both the scholar and his tutor. You have to take some of the food at your command and invest it in the process.

31 The pattern, then, is one of the head man saying, ‘‘All right now, you mind your own business, you understand, and you mind your own business, and you mind your own business. I’m the only one who minds everybody’s business. Is that quite clear? Okay!’’

32 Now, this is where specialization begins. I’ve just given you the scheme and the strategy and the design of Oxford University. The head man had his boys, and he wanted them to be comprehensivists, but he also wanted them to get used to these specialists and so he sent them to the same school. And the nobleman needed his chief soldiers to grow up and understand, too, and so he sent them off to school, along with those specialists. This is the way it began.

33 What we call specialization is really just brain slavery--- just brain slaves. It is very important for us to realize this. We have had some extraordinarily powerful, brilliant head men in history.

34 In the big pattern of man on earth, we observe two very important environments---the land and the sea. Man typically considers himself a dry land creature---he finds that either he doesn’t know how to swim or, if he can stay under water, he can’t stay under water very long. So he thinks of himself as a dry land creature. But only a quarter of the total earth sphere is dry land, and not all is by any manner or means favorable for the sustaining of life. In fact, when we get down to what land would be able to sustain life, we find a very small percentage, only about two percent of the total surface scattered about the earth; and the people in some of these small increments do not know about the people in the others. A relatively few men discover favorable points for the sustaining or regenerating of their life. They don’t invent these things---they don’t invent any of the process at all. They just discover. And they find themselves beset periodically by wandering people who haven’t been so lucky, who haven’t found the good places, or who’ve exhausted their local resources and have now gone looking for a new place. Suddenly they come to some men who are successful; and they immediately say, ‘‘Well, it’s going to be those people or ourselves.’’ Then there is a battle, with the ones who found a way to survive having to defend their position.

35 The great historical strategy is very clear. First they tried the great walls, such as the one in China. But it was too much to mount, and it couldn’t cover all the length. So they built smaller walls as a fortress, picking an area where there was water---a well---to be sure of having a supply. You must have water inside your fortress. When we get something like Mycenae, we find long passages down from the mountain heights, down secret passages in the rocks where one could get down fairly well. Then you built great granaries, and your farmers stay outside fanning, so you don’t get too confined; then, when the enemy is reported as approaching, you take everything out of the fields---you harvest all crops and put them all inside. Anything that can be stored is stored, the rest you just bum. When the enemy comes, you are all inside with food and water to last for a long time. People outside haven’t been eating for quite awhile---they are already starved and weak. So you just watch them out there---just watch them get weaker and weaker. And you wait until they are weak enough and then you go out and kill them. That was the great scheme.

36 Now, under those circumstances, the heavier and higher, wider, more formidable the walls, the more secure; the bigger the granary, the more secure; security was in bigness, enormity. So they build a rock fortress, and they pick rocks to build the fortress.

37 While 99.9 percent of humanity is living that kind of life, there are people who have found a way of life on the river, the lakes, the waterfronts, the sea. But if you go out very far you begin to get into trouble. Gradually, better and better boats develop, and finally the round-bottom ship emerges that keeps stable on the sea. Earlier---as we know today---there were canoes and outriggers and dugouts that were able to travel great distances, but they couldn’t carry any important kind of cargo. Men finally put several of those together and got a raft, such as did the early Polynesians, but even rafts were not good for cargo. The seas would roll over them and the food would spoil. Not until the deep-bottom boats could large amounts of cargo be carried.

38 Gradually, the explorers were making discoveries great distances away, going off to sea where they discovered that resources are very unevenly distributed and that climates vary greatly. By going to places that nobody at home knew anything about, they were able to bring back some extraordinary things which would complement what they had at home. Things they had at home that had seemed absolutely useless could be complemented by what they found elsewhere to create great new wealth. They discovered that just one good voyage could make a fortune.

39 Now then, in going to sea, you soon discover that stone sinks and wood floats. So when building your boat, you had better start with wood. Then you learn that making a wood and skin boat is even lighter and better than trying to hollow out the logs, and it would have great buoyancy, and you could put great cargoes inside it. Then gradually you learn about floatability---how much cargo you can carry--- just by seeing your boat being laden down. Finally, you have Archimedes explaining the principle of displacement. Men then knew what the cubage of the ship must be for it to float---that is, equivalent to the cubage of water displaced times the weight of water per cube---and that is the weight of your ship and all the cargo that it can carry.

40 You have the men going to sea, encountering a very extraordinary kind of fundamental problem. In the first place, when you go to sea the conditions are fundamentally different. On the land, theoretically, you can close the blinds, you have your walls (in a deep-walled building), and you can put on your shutters and lock yourself up. It’s night, you don’t know what’s going on, so you just shut yourself up good and safe. At sea, you can’t shut the sea down. On land, it’s possible to live a 12-hour kind of experience; living on the sea is a 24-hour experience. On land floods come and go; on the sea you start with flood and have it with you all the time. Waves on the sea are what we call seaquakes; they have the same characteristic as earthquakes on the land. But seaquake waves are much bigger than earthquake waves, and you have seaquakes every few days. When the waves are big enough to crash down over the deck, you have the equivalent of an avalanche. Men at sea have to cope with nature under extreme conditions: the kind of conditions men might face on land only once in a lifetime occur repeatedly in just a week on the sea. There is a great acceleration of high energy events.

41 In going to sea, then, you develop a ship that can get you there and back safely while being large enough to carry great cargoes. You need a good deal of advance information about the probability of finding valuable things after you get where you’re going. And you have to know how to get from here to there because there is no land in sight: you have to learn how to employ the stars. You have to invent navigation, and to do that you have to invent mathematics. I am quite confident that all the really important mathematics, certainly the trigonometry between two stars and yourself, came out of this necessity.

42 The men who develop their capabilities in this way become brilliant. They have to be extremely tough and powerful men in order even to get their ship built. It is too big a ship for one man to build, and they have to have the power to say, ‘‘I command all the very good woodworkers in the kingdom to work on my ship, and all the people who know how to handle fabric are going to make my sails, and all the metal workers are also going to have to work for me. And they all have to be fed, so you farmers understand you’re shipping all this food over to my shipyard to take care of these people, you understand pretty clear!’’ This kind of man, a man who is used to commanding other human beings and to maintaining his position physically, has to have a brilliant head, has to organize and discipline himself, and has to develop mathematics.

43 Now this man’s purpose is to make a voyage and come back with great riches. His enemy over here knows this and says, ‘‘That’s a pretty good idea that man has. I don’t know just where he went, but I do know that when he comes back he’ll be bringing a lot of valuable stuff. So all I’ve got to do is build myself a small boat, get some of my tough boys together, and the night before he arrives home we’ll take his cargo away from him.’’ So that became a very popular sport, too.

44 When we get out on the high sea, there’s no way to enforce the laws that apply on land. Three-quarters of the earth was outside the jurisdiction of man-made laws. The men who went in for the seafaring life were inherently outlaws. The only law that had to be obeyed was natural law, and the question was, ‘‘Who is going to stay on top and who is going to go to the bottom?’’ Nobody on the land ever knew anything about it. And that’s the way it was.

45 You learned to build the very best ship you could at home, using local resources---the best tree you had, the best fibre for your rope, and so forth. But you knew from previous voyages that, when you came to the next land, there were going to be some very taller trees with very much longer, stronger fibre; so you put in the better mast. Then you came to another country, such as the Philippines where you found much stronger fibre, and you took those fibres to make your ropes. In still another place, you found better fabrics for your sails. And so, as you sailed round the world, your ship got stronger and better. This was the beginning, really, of what we call the production line. And as you came to those places, you took some additional amount of those woods, and spars, and metals and fibres and brought them home to build even greater ships. So a regenerative process begins in terms of the widely dispersed resources of the world.

46 Now if you have the same size ship as your pirate enemy but your mast is of stronger wood, your sail of better fabric, and your ropes of stronger fibre---then you can keep sail on when he has to take it off---when the wind begins to really blow. This enables you to outmaneuver him, and down he goes to the bottom. Thus the man who had a greater amount of floatability, who could do more with less, was the one who would stay on top. This was the very essence of shipbuilding technique.

47 You find these resources around the world, and what is unique about each one is that each could do a little more of some special task. So you design special tools that do specific things in more effective ways, but always it’s doing more with less, always the ratio of the investment of weight to the time or the energy in the muscles of the men who put the sails on and off. You have pounds, watts, and seconds to invest. Whoever could get the most out of those pounds, watts, and seconds was going to run the world. So this was where the great trail was, out beyond the laws of people on lands.

48 Out there men became extraordinarily powerful, and in time they learned the strategy that several ships can outmaneuver one ship. You can box in your enemy or the prize you want to protect; so navies were invented. And you learn to divide and conquer. Now divide-and-conquer or divide-and-rule was something I alluded to when explaining the origins of educational specialization, where the head man learns that divide-and-conquer is very powerful indeed, and that anticipatory divide-and-conquer is more effective than tardy divide-and-conquer. Divide and conquer the others before they even know they’re being divided. And that’s exactly what the top man was doing when he took in all the bright ones and made them specialists. He didn’t bother with the dull ones at all. The bright ones weren’t allowed to talk to one another very much, and in time they became so specialized, and their languages so different, that they couldn’t talk to one another anyway.

49 In developing comprehensive navies, the top men had to build new ships. They chose the great big patterns---they began to deal in the total world as they knew it. If you were an invisible world master of the water-ocean earth, you had to maintain the capability to create and run the best world navies. You had to have physical control of the biggest patterns. No matter what else we may think of these men today, they were magnificently imaginative big-scale operators. They had to use all that their science had learned about energy in order to give their navies the faster, farther, more accurate hitting power needed to stay in supreme command of the physical affairs of mankind. This involved not only designing the network of world-around voyaging and the ships for each task, but also designing the industrial establishments and world-around mining operations and naval-base building for production and maintenance of the ships. This top-man planning inaugurated the large scale thinking of the world-around industrialists of today.

50 You may wonder: ‘‘Aren’t you talking about the British Empire?’’ and 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 absolute world control by a few top men through their local stooge-sovereigns and their prime ministers, only modified innocuously and locally here and there by the separate sovereignty’s internal democratic processes.

51 As we soon shall see, the British Isles---a fleet of ‘‘unsinkable ships’’ and naval bases commanding the great harbors of Europe---were the possessions of a few top men who sailed the seas. Since these men were building, maintaining and supplying their ships on those islands, they quite logically gathered up their crews from among the islanders, who were simply seized or commanded aboard by royal edict. Seeing these British islanders on these ships, people around the world mistakenly assumed that the world conquest by these few top men was a conquest by the will, ambition, and organization of the British people. Thus the grand deception of a few top men emerged victorious. The bulk of the British islanders never had any special desire to go out and conquer the world, but as a people they were manipulated by the top men and taught to cheer when informed of ‘‘their’’ nation’s world prowess.

52 The British Isles were themselves unsinkable flagships, commanding all the harbors of all the customers. Who ran those islands was going to run the world. They were not only situated in a commanding position, but they had large supplies of the woods, the metals, and other things needed to build ships. The fighting over those Isles by the Vikings, by the men of Europe, made the shores of these islands one continuous battle ground for little pirates trying to become big pirates. The same can be said of Scotland. Gradually there emerged the most powerful people who kept things under control everywhere, with the British Isles as the terminal. These people are normally water people: their home was the sea---and in fact, then, their home was the world. Water people are inherently world people because three-quarters of the earth is water, and the waters go everywhere. Land people are inherently ‘‘local,’’ water people inherently ‘‘world.’’

53 As I’ve said, there are two completely different worlds operative, one on land, one on the sea. In the latter, experiences accelerate very rapidly, and so water people have had occasion to invent more powerful tools much more frequently than land people have had. Of course, the development of new strategic tools must be kept completely secret. It is a very interesting fact that none of the great naval organizations, such as the Navy department of our own United States or the British admiralty, kept records of the engineering work that went into their ships. Such records were quickly and methodically destroyed. You got your ship in operation before the enemy could find out just how you were able to do so much more with so much less, since it was your doing that more with less, which meant you were going to run the world. It is a hard, tough, ruthless game, and the point of it is that our land society, up to now, had been organized in terms of the bigger the security, the bigger and higher the walls and the bigger the grain bin. On land man had not learned to make do with a light structure on a really great venture.

54 The results of sea technology were completely to be expected. Its acceleration brought men of the sea into steam ships and into metal ships and then into ships of the air. This is where it really ends, with the ship of the air or the airplane, because in 1929 a single little airplane with a torpedo was able to sink a large armored cruiser. It was really the end of the supremacy of the ship.

55 The year 1929 happened to coincide with another very important set of events. We had what I call the ‘‘in-pirates’’ and the ‘‘out-pirates.’’ The in-pirates, with their navies, were something like the British admiralty, and while command of the seas seemed to belong to one country, it was, as I explained, really simply a matter of convenience to have that country as a terminal.

56 Actually, the in-pirates invented what we know today as countries. All of what we know as historical countries were invented by these top strong men. When they came to a country they said: ‘‘I am dealing with the head man here, you seem to be the toughest guy and now I have my ship and I can carry much bigger cargoes than you can carry on the backs of your men or on the backs of animals. I have the great line of supply.’’ In warfare, remember, you have that business of the seige, when the side that continues to eat is the one that will be able to come out and do some decimating.

57 So we find the great powers coming to various geographical areas such as the one we now call Italy. Now in Italy, there were hundreds of strong local barons with their castles, counting their little local farms. And the top man of a great power said: ‘‘I see they have a lot of these local strong men around here. I don’t want to be bothered with them. So I’m going to make you my strong man. I have my ship and I have the line of supply, and I’ll see that you get your food. You just go and besiege those castles. You used to be starved. You’re not going to be anymore, because I have my ships and I can see that you get all the food you need. Now this is a narrow piece of land; I’ll bring my ship around to this side and get right near that castle. You are going to eat. The people inside there think they are pretty secure, but you’re going to keep getting food all the time and they are going to use up all the food they have inside.’’ That’s exactly what happened. None of the walls of the great castles along the Rhine or in Italy had to be breached; the people inside were simply starved out by what I identified for you as another grand strategy---when the men began to master the world by mastering their ships. ‘‘From now on this is called Italy and you are the head man and I want you to wear a lot of purple and gold and make yourself very prominent because I am not at all worried about you people here on the land. But I am going to worry about those other pirates. And the pirate whom I must now go to fight is a pretty bad one.’’

58 The greatest strength the people of the sea had was in the fact that the sea was very big and you could get lost in a hurry. The other man didn’t know where you were going, or when you were going, or why you were going, all of which made it very hard for him to intercept you. And the Earth is spherical: fourteen miles away you were what they call ‘‘down under’’ the horizon, so you could stalk your enemy under that horizon---if you had the faster and better ships. So the very essence of the men who were masters of the world was their secrecy. And that didn’t mean fooling; a little joking to show off once in a while. They knew they wouldn’t stay on top for long if they ever let people know who they were. That’s why they wanted all those very prominent head stooges around who would seem to be powerful in their own right, why they created the heads of these great countries like Italy and gave them big names, distinctive colors, and so forth. But all of this was completely obscure to man on the land, of course, because it was intended that he not know about it.

59 We see this pattern developing up to the point when the pirates who listened to their scientists or specialists and put in steam suddenly found themselves way ahead of the other powers that were still waiting for wind to fill their sails. And then the scientists said: ‘‘Make your ship of steel because then you can drive it so much harder.’’ The inpirates did just that, and they did get way, way ahead of their competition. They carried much bigger cargoes. They got so far ahead of the out-pirates that they began to get a new kind of a pattern. The out-pirates just couldn’t catch up to them now at all. However, in order to build the steel steamships, they had to take the marine railway and run it backwards up to the land. That is the beginning of the tunnels and the railways with steam power going up on the land to pull the great cargoes. For the first time, the way of distributing that load to be carried on land had to be balanced just as in the launching of the ship; a marine railway track, depending on one keel, has to have a double rail so she won’t tip over. This is the time, also, when blast furnaces were developed, and it is a very strong history of world industrialization from here on. For example, steel was being made for ships of the sea for fifty years before anybody thought of putting a piece of steel into a building on land. Land people just weren’t thinking about that kind of thing. They put steel into their ships and into their marine railway, but not into building on the land: stone and wood served well enough to keep the rain off. Again, in order to have that steel hull with the steam freight power, you had to have forced draft---the beginning of air conditioning. But to develop air-conditioners, there had to be good oxygen to clear the air going down there and you had to have light going down into places where there was no light at all. That meant generators and all manner of auxiliary equipment. And they had to have fresh water for their boilers; salt water wouldn’t do.

60 So we had advanced invention realizations for over a century on the sea before we had them on the land. We had refrigeration for ships at sea for about half a century before it came up on the land. All the great generators were built for the ships of the sea at first; it was only after the people on land had been organized to produce all the generators they could use on the ships that the manufacturers of these goods looked around for some new customers. So the men on land who owned the new kinds of equipment needed to produce steel, and electric generators, and so forth finally discovered that these things were also salable for use on land, and that they could make a new kind of profit they’d never thought of before, quite apart from what they were winning from their commerce of the sea. They became very, very deeply involved with this new kind of profit.

61 This is a very wonderful thing that they found, this mechanical cow. You just kept milking it. When some inventor came along and said: ‘‘I can show you a better way of doing it,’’ they didn’t like that at all, because they thought that their ‘‘then’’ mechanical cow was doing just fine. They were monopolizing everything and they didn’t have any competition whatsoever, so there was no reason for changing once the mechanical cow was working and bringing in plenty of profits. A scientist came to the great powers and said: ‘‘Sir, I’ll show you a way to make steel so that it won’t rust.’’ But the great powers thought: ‘‘The more it rusts, the more I sell. How crazy can you get? Take the papers out of this man’s pocket, he’s obviously crazy. Put him in the insane asylum---and put those papers in my drawer here.’’

62 They were very worried about these people, the scientists, because when they asked them how they could do these things, they said: ‘‘Well, sir, it’s done with mathematics like this and so forth.’’

63 And the pirates said: ‘‘Well, we don’t understand mathematics, that must be very dangerous stuff.’’ They reserved for themselves the right to be master. They judged and tested everything with their own eyes, their own noses, their own touch, their own hearing.

64 The in-pirates got very, very far ahead of the out-pirates, until finally the out-pirates saw that man was putting all those papers in his drawer. Then they said: ‘‘Well, he got way ahead of us with that steam and steel business. It could be that these inventors and scientists are giving him lots of technology and he is paying no attention to it at all. Maybe if we could get those papers we just might be able to take him by surprise.’’ And that’s exactly what they did.

65 World War I, then, saw the out-pirates challenging the in-pirates’ mastering of the surface of the sea. The out- pirates said: ‘‘We are going to go under the sea and above the sea to learn a new geometry of attack.’’ And they found this new technology, the technology of the submarine, which enabled them to go under the sea and to break the in-pirates’ line of supply to such an extent that the in-pirates almost lost. To save themselves, the in-pirates had to get that great productivity of tools which had been developed in the United States and all those untapped resources really to work on their side. And they had to let the American navy come up to parity with what we call the British navy, or what I have explained to you to be the navy of the great Masters of the World.

66 Now to do this, the in-pirates had to listen to the scientists. The other side had listened to scientists and had taken and used what the scientists had given them in order to get in position to challenge the in’s. With the line of supply being broken badly by submarine attack, a scientist said to one of the high command in England: ‘‘Wouldn’t it be just as good as getting twice as many guns to the front if we could make the guns that do get to the front last twice as long?’’

67 And the high command told the great power: ‘‘You could really make those guns last twice as long and this would make up for these deficiencies.’’

68 And the great power said: ‘‘You’ve got to let those scientists get going there.’’

69 And so they did. They opened the Pandora’s box of new technologies by letting science get going.

70 In World War I, these new technologies took us from wire to wireless, from track to trackless, from visible muscle structures to invisible alloy structures. In other words we went from the world of what we call ‘‘sensorial’’ reality into the great ranges of reality that are nontuneable directly by man’s senses. Because of this, the great masters who did everything with their own senses could no longer know quite what was going on. The new technology did save the day: the in-pirates won their war. But when the war was over, the old masters undertook to do what they called getting things back to normal. They said: ‘‘Let’s get things back to where we can see them,’’ and they tried to do just that in the 1920’s. But they couldn’t turn things back to ‘‘normalcy.’’ They didn’t know what was going on. Suddenly they had lost by default.

71 ‘‘Twenty-nine’’ saw the folding-up of earth’s old masters. Having always kept themselves secret, they certainly didn’t announce their own demise. They even hoped it wasn’t true. There was no public announcement of their passing because the public had never known that these masters existed. 1929---all the mills have stopped around the world, all the wheels have stopped, everything has stopped. We have people in Germany saying: ‘‘There’s the iron, there’s the coal, there’s the blast furnace; we know how to make steel; why aren’t we?’’ They asked their local politician: ‘‘Why don’t we make steel?’’ They didn’t know the local politician was only a stooge. But he did, and so he got on the telephone and tried to reach the old master. No answer. So suddenly the politicians saw they were really up against the wall. They never had had anything really to do with how to make the world work, but the local people were now demanding that they do it. So they simply changed their government, put over a new one, and started opening those blast furnaces. And they started demonstrating that there was something very powerful: that wealth really could be generated without their having money, that wealth was something else which could produce the tools.

72 So, then, we have Hitler, and Hitler said: ‘‘Well, the way we propose to run the world is to decimate all the people we don’t like.’’ That is not a very good solution---a very unhappy one, in fact. But that is what they started to do.

73 In no time at all it was being said: ‘‘You have no wealth and no money in Germany.’’ Actually they had real wealth---that is, they had productive capability---and soon they were challenging the whole world and almost knocking it off its feet again.

74 We have, then, the beginning of the era of the little man everywhere not knowing that there ever were those great masters (now forsaken) and identifying the success of those who were successful with the fact that they had more knowledge.

75 They were ‘‘better informed.’’ So all the mothers and fathers said: ‘‘I would like my boy not to have to go through the pain I’ve gone through, being illiterate and having a very poor vocabulary. If my boy had that schooling, he might really be able to get there.’’

76 The voice of common man had something to say that could be listened to. This voice had produced a Magna Carta and a Bill of Rights. We had then the representatives of democracy realizing the one sure way to be elected would be to give their constituents schools. And so they simply set up a prototype school of one of the great powers and copied that prototype. For years we couldn’t have a school unless it was built in Georgian-style architecture, or something like it. Whatever Oxford had, we had to have. It was physically or superficially exactly the same picture. It was never thought out what education might be; we simply bought in wholesale lots the specialization of the old, dead great pirates.

77 That’s how we got our specialization. We got all specialized, with everybody minding his own business---and now nobody can mind everybody else’s business in order to put things together. That’s where we are right now. We’re all dressed up with enormous capability and absolutely no ability to coordinate the affairs of the earth.

78 These old great powers saw things in a very limited way, but they really were running the world. They ran it on a very clear pattern and things were very well coordinated. All our customs have been developed out of these patterns. But the great powers had some misinformation from their scientists. All the empires of man up to just yesterday were what I call infinite worlds. The Roman, Ghengis Khan’s, and all those other ancient empires came into being when man thought of the world as an infinitely extended lateral plane with perhaps regions of mountains here and there and some valleys, but still a world that went out flat in all directions. There was the known area, which comprised the great empires, outside of which you came first to some pretty uncivilized people; and beyond, the dragons; and beyond them---well, you’d better not go any farther because it gets pretty dangerous. When you have an infinitely extended plane, then there is a possibility of an infinite number of variables. If you don’t like what is going on here, there is always the chance that out beyond the known and towards infinity you can find a roast beef mountain or a mountain of gold or whatever it be. Man could choose his own god because an infinite number of gods could exist. Just shop around for the right one and you’ll come out all right.

79 This was the condition of things up to the time of what we call the British Empire. This empire---although we are not taught this in our history books---was the first spherical empire. Being spherical, it was a closed system---the first closed-system empire as compared to the open-system empires of before. Suddenly we have man discovering the utility of the closed system. With the closed system there are no longer an infinite number of variables. And this happened only a hundred and seventy years ago in 1800.

80 In 1810 we have Thomas Malthus, who was professor of political economics for the East India Company---those were the really top-grade in-pirates---and the first economist to receive the total statistics from around a closed- system world. He found it all quite astonishing and wrote in his first book that: ‘‘Apparently men are reproducing themselves much more rapidly then they are producing goods to support themselves.’’ Ten years later, after receiving more data, he was able to say in his second book: ‘‘Apparently men are reproducing themselves at a geometrical rate and are only producing goods to support themselves at an arithmetical rate. Therefore, except for a chosen few, humanity is destined to be a complete failure.’’

81 Now during this same period the great powers were taking their geologists, biologists, and other scientists hither and yon around the spherical closed system to learn what resources could be found and where: they wanted the specialists to tell them what there was to be exploited and how it could be exploited. Among the biologists being taken around the world, Charles Darwin went to catalogue all the living species. By this work, Darwin discovered certain design interrelationships out of which he developed a theory of evolution. Now it’s important to realize that Darwin could not have developed a theory of biological evolution for the Roman Empire, with its open system, because he would have had to include dragons to the nth power. You can’t develop general system series unless you have a closed system. It is only quite recently, for less than two centuries, that we have had the advantage of closed-system information to work with.

82 Right on the heels of Malthus, then, Darwin came along with his theory of evolution based on the idea of the ‘‘survival only of the fittest.’’ The in-pirates are getting this information from their intellectual slaves---and highly important information it is. What if you are the headman, at a point in history just a little over a hundred years ago, and Malthus and Darwin tell you that there isn’t ever going to be enough to go around and that only the fittest are going to survive. The scientists have said it and made it very clear; this is the scientific law. So you say: ‘‘Well, I’m obviously the toughest and the fittest in this system, and I’m going to stay on top and survive.’’

83 In the meantime, however, that same information is becoming available to another scholar, Karl Marx, and he says: ‘‘Well, I think that the workers know how to handle that seed to get something out of the ground. The fisherman knows how to do his work. The craftsman knows how to do his work. These pirates are parasites and they wouldn’t know what to do if the worker weren’t there. They couldn’t do this work. They’re just simply exploiting the worker. Therefore, the workers are the fittest.’’ There was nowhere nearly enough to go around so you have the two extremes: on the one hand, Marx with his workers; on the other, the great powers. All the other political ideologies are somewhere in between.

84 If you had been the headman and you had this information and you say, ‘‘What do we do? Notify all the world that there is nowhere nearly enough to go around?’’ Divide everything up evenly and let everybody die slowly together! An appalling idea. Or we might do what the Greeks did: we might decimate the excess. That’s no longer considered becoming. Well, there is something we could do. There are all these people out here and they don’t even know that there is not enough to go around. They’re still thinking of infinity. They’ve got their gods, and while practically none of them is going to survive beyond about twenty-seven years of age, at least they’re fairly content about it all, because their hopes spring eternal so long as there’s a roastbeef mountain over there. So why disillusion them? At least let them have their hope. We know they’re doomed to early death, but we’d be making things even worse if we told them the truth.

85 So that’s exactly what they did, and that’s what we call the ‘‘underdeveloped’’ countries, and that’s what we’re still doing about it today. The in-countries gradually found that they didn’t know just how much there was to go around. ‘‘We can’t guarantee that you are going to survive on our side.’’ But there seemed to be tough ones on each side in the survival-of-the-fittest game. They are the tough, strong people, and they survive all right. And we join up with the other side---there seem to be enough for two sides. Two countries, three countries, four---there are alignments to see which side is going to survive.

86 In his early pattern of survival a man just picked up a stick or bludgeon. He was hungry and went out to fight. Later there were swords and still more swords as technology made enough of them. If you had a sword, you went out to fight with it. You learned early that you had better go out and fight to survive while you were still young and had hard muscles, because pretty soon you won’t have those muscles and you’ve seen what has happened to those other boys who didn’t do it while they could. They’re just a miserable mess, rotting in the slums and dying very early.

87 Sometime later men got a little something better to fight with. They got their revolvers and were pretty busy with them---and that’s really the gist of our western story. Most of the time in our western story a man could do some constructive work only once in a while---he was so busy with that revolver most of the time. Then suddenly they came up with bigger guns and ships that could carry them--- bigger and bigger guns, the products of our science-directed technologies---just about the time that Malthus was making his discoveries.

88 Now we find both our sovereigns and our democracies saying: ‘‘Well, there are the different schemes of life. We think we’ve got a pretty good piece of land here, and we are going to defend it. We’ve also got a fairly good idea of how to get on with our enterprise. Man’s primarily liberal, remember, and quite evidently the best thing is for everybody to turn in his gun and spend a great deal of time looking out for himself. We will have a professional military who will look out for things; we’ll have some agreement about our rules of playing the game so that you and I can get very busy and take care of raising vegetables. We can grow things or we can manufacture this tool, whatever it is.’’

89 So society organizes itself this way, because the man growing things and the man manufacturing things are both completely preoccupied with their work. But there had to be somebody looking out for their joint interests in the meantime---hence political systems. The picture is one of some people tilling their fields and looking to this year’s crop, others managing their factories and concentrating on this year’s production and customers, the politician looking out for just his particular constituents, and so forth. All these people are planning ahead for just one year, two years, or for possibly a crop rotation perhaps five years ahead. The politicians looking ahead only as far as the next election. With every one keeping eyes on his own work, all the looking is quite shortsighted in both time and geography. It’s left to the military to keep watch on the world and to look far ahead to anticipate trouble. They’ll get their big guns on the promise of looking out for us all when the official fighting time comes.

90 This was the scheme of things that began to prevail in a big way starting just a hundred and fifty years ago, more or less, and with it the military said quite clearly: ‘‘From this point on, our statecraft is predicated on Malthusian and Darwinian concepts, on the basic assumption that there isn’t nearly enough to go around and there never will be.’’ And this was the thinking up to the beginning of the present century. My father died when I was very young and I had a rich relative and he said: ‘‘Young man, I would like to tell you some things because I think your father would want me to do it. In the first place, I am rich and there are not many of us who are rich.’’ (At that time there were not so many rich men as now.) He went on: ‘‘I am on the board of directors of a great many companies, and, between one thing and another, I have quite a lot of information.’’ And he said: ‘‘I know you have been impressed with your grandmother’s golden rule and you’re going to feel badly about what I am saying here, but the fact is that if you want to bring up a family of five, the figures are that less than one in one hundred is going to be able to live out his potential life span. And if you want to be economically successful, the chances are about one in a million; these are the figures just now.’’ He said: ‘‘Understand then, that it isn’t just you or the other fellow, it is you or a hundred others. If you want to bring up a family of five you are going to have to deprive five hundred people of their right to five. Well, I know you don’t like that. Don’t tell your grandmother, but I’ve already taken care of her hundred.’’

91 Now, that’s the way it was when I was already a grown man, so-called, and I didn’t like that picture at all. I thought this was a pretty messy situation but that was the very essence of why we had a navy and everything else in the system. So the scheme was that the military, and particularly the navy, which could carry loads too great for the backs of horses over land, would control not merely the local last-defense but the big story which was the world. It really amounted to this: Whoever could deliver the greatest hitting power the greatest distance in the fastest time with the greatest accuracy and the least effort is going to be the side that eats. The other side is going to die. Now death may be slow or may be fast; you may be killed outright in war or may just die slowly in a slum, which is really a much worse and humiliating kind of life.

92 This is the way things were organized. The military said this accurate hitting power is a matter of science and we need chemists and physicists and mathematicians. And this need brought about and was really the beginning of the great technical schools. Science formed military usage, and the military has been the prime underwriter of almost everything we call science. The spies said: ‘‘Well, well, the scientists on the other side are escalating,’’ and then new orders were issued: ‘‘All right, scientists, you’ve got to get up to here now’’---all giving rise to rapid escalation of scientific capabilities on both sides.

93 Now I’m going to point out to you something about technology. I’ll go back to 1810---to the time of the first economic census in the United States. At that time there were a million American families and our total wealth, including wilderness, all public lands, homesteaders, and the rest, was about $3,000 per family, or about three billion dollars. What would have happened in 1810 if we had chosen the blest, wisest, and most trustworthy of our citizens and said: ‘‘Gentlemen, we would like you to form a planning committee to take our three billion dollars and, as rapidly as possible, employ our total resources in the most intelligent way we know how, to take care of the most people in the shortest time.’’ As it happened, in 1810 we were not too far from inventing the telegraph. Suppose our forefathers had said: ‘‘We are going to undertake not only to develop a telegraph, but we also are going to send power through a solid wire. [Nobody had ever heard of such a thing!] We are then going to go even further and have wireless; we are going to have all the things that we have today: the periodic table, the discover)' of atoms, etc.’’ What would have happened if a man had said: ‘‘We are going to develop transistors and go around to the other side of the moon?’’ In 1810, they would have said: ‘‘Too bad we picked this fellow for the committee; we’ll obviously have to replace him.’’ There’s not one item of modem technology that we’ve acquired since 1810 that would have been possibly accredited or even dreamt of. And if they had known what it was going to cost…1 If they had asked the committee: ‘‘What is it going to cost to get those things?’’ and someone had said: ‘‘it will cost about a quadrillion dollars’’---obviously he would have been disqualified too.

94 But what really happened was that a moment came when the great pirates realized that the out-pirates were really pushing themselves forward. This is often found in a political situation when local politicians find conditions getting unbearable. Looking out for their own side, they set conditions guarded by fences to try to make their own side survive.

95 Finally it comes to an impasse and there is going to be a war. So the politicians say to the military: ‘‘All right, we’re going to have to have a war. What are you going to need?’’

96 The military says: ‘‘Well, our side has leveled off here, but our spies tell us the other side is going to start at this higher level of technology. They are going to be able to fire five or ten thousand yards, whatever it is, with great accuracy.’’

97 Naturally the politicians want to know: ‘‘What’s it going to cost to beat them?’’ and when they hear the answer: ‘‘We don’t have that kind of money. We can’t afford it.’’

98 The military says: ‘‘Buy or die.’’

99 ‘‘Can you produce?’’

100 ‘‘Yes, we can produce.’’

101 ‘‘Well, no telling how we’ll ever pay for it, but go ahead and produce it.’’

102 And that’s what we did. That’s how we’ve acquired all this technology. Acquiring it, then, we quickly come to a World War I and II. Up to this time wars had been in the era of agriculture which took farmers from their farms, used up food supplies, devastated the fields. Everybody suffered. World War I was an entirely new kind of war, however, because it related to this bigger pattern I’ve given you, with the navy and all those resources around the world which could do very special things with new-found techniques. It was what I call an energy war. To explain, I shall have to digress.

103 I spoke to you earlier about man’s developing tools. Just as my own personal strategy, I found that I could divide all tools into two main classes---craft tools and industrial tools. By craft tools I mean those that could be invented, produced, and operated by one man starting nakedly in the wilderness where he could pick up a stick, for example, and use it as a spear. This category includes all kinds of tools for working stone and so forth. All the great artifact heaps that we find around the world are tools that could be and probably were invented by some one man, starting from nothing in the wilderness with no information from anybody and using just his own experience, which taught him that this thing just might work. He tried it and it did work.

104 By industrial tools I mean the ones that couldn’t be produced by one man. That’s a simple enough cleavage. The first industrial tool was the spoken word. You can’t invent a word without two people. It’s very interesting. You have no occasion to invent a word without two people. So, as the Bible says: ‘‘In the beginning was the Word.’’ I’ll say: ‘‘In the beginning of industrialization was the word.’’ This is the beginning of relaying information and experiences from one man to another. Because men were able to relay information both in terms of overlapping lives and also travel, they began to consolidate all kinds of information. And we get then to the industrial tools that clearly fit my definition; for instance, the steamship Queen Mary, obviously a tool that could not possibly have been produced by one man or run by one man, or used by one man. The telephone system, a roadway system, great blast furnaces, and so forth---all these industrial tools are very extraordinary things that can accommodate you and me. They are the consequence of all the information from all the history of man about all resources everywhere, and their superiority over the craft tool is very, very great. They involve discovery in the scenery around us: whether in that rock there is something called beryllium and that beryllium can make you a coil spring that won’t fatigue or spout; or that there are such things as chrome and nickel, the addition of which to iron produces a steel with a tensile strength a thousand times that of the tensile strength of iron alone. These are the kinds of thing that man found. And because of discovering that you could do more and more with less and less, a given cross-section could have greater and greater tensile strength.

105 So, out of this industrialization came the ability to do very large things in very big ways. But I’d like to get down to something rather more fundamental. What man then has to discover is generalized principles. In literature, the word ‘‘generalization’’ means trying to cover too much territory too thinly. In science, the word refers to the discovery of a principle that holds true in every case; if you find even a single exception, then it is no longer a generalized principle in science.

106 Consider, in ancient times, a man like any of us going through the woods from time to time, woods where men have not gone very often. Trees, fallen in great storms, are strewn across one another, and he tries to reach his destination as directly as he can by climbing over them. As he climbs over one of the trees, it begins to sink with him slowly and he moves back for a moment and then comes up again to the same place. As he walks on the tree and it sinks lower and lower, he wonders what’s going on. He looks at the tree and sees that it’s lying across another one, the other end of which is under a very big tree---and as he moves out farther that enormous tree is being lifted, and he says: ‘‘I never lifted a tree like that.’’ He goes over and tries to lift it with his muscle and finds that he can’t budge it. But standing back on the fallen tree, sure enough he can lift it. Now I suspect this man must have gone to his family with talk of a magic tree, a very special tree that would be brought home and kept around for a number of generations. But then one day someone must have found that any tree would do. Now, as a generalization, that is the beginning of the lever.

107 With that lever, man was able to move things he couldn’t move with his own muscle. He began to move large rocks around and develop monumental defenses. Then the great pirates began to use levers in big ways. They set their slaves to rowing ships, which now could go windward with the rowing ship (something the wind alone would not let them do). They then began to have very much bigger ships, and they had to find a way to anchor them. The anchor, which of course had to be recovered when not in use, was made of metal and was very heavy. So they developed those same levers into a capstan around a shaft that the slaves pushed around horizontally---and up came the anchor. Later, man found that he could turn the shaft around vertically and from this came water wheels. Man had time and again felt the potential force of falling water (under waterfalls and so forth). Now men mounted a wheel on a shaft and bearings, and they put pulleys and then belts up into buildings to do all kinds of work. This was the beginning of man’s discovering generalized principles and using them to channel energies from the atmosphere. In this case, the sun is elevating water out of the sea into the sky until it returns down the hills to be channeled to the ends of levers to do man’s work. From this point on, the big task of man was to use his mind to find ways of doing work very much greater than his muscles could possibly do, by mastering and channeling energies of the universe onto the ends of levers.

108 The beginning is really World War I---the first big industrial war using big industrial tools. Here man shunted energies onto the ends of levers in an enormous way. The way you get the most energy from any one place to another in the greatest amount and in the greatest hurry is by wire, which is much faster than by pipeline or tanker. In World War I, copper was used because it was the most plentiful of the metals and was a good conductor. In just one year, 1917, man mined and put to work more copper than he had in the whole of man’s history before---an idea of the magnitude of the energy undertakings in World War I. He had two new technical capabilities, flotation and electrolytics, refinements that made it possible to get that copper to work very much faster. Since that time, man has been using copper in new magnitudes. But when the war was over and that wire was mounted on those poles it kept right on conducting electricity. What we had done was to rearrange the environment. We had taken the copper out of the earth and we put it to use where we wanted.

109 Because we had developed a production capability by landing energies on the ends of those levers, we were generating great wealth---and we kept right on doing so when the war was over. America and the rest of the world didn’t quite understand all that wealth. Many said that there must be a lot of corruption in America because here the war was over and suddenly there were a lot of millionaires. During World War II, too, America was lend-leasing etc., using and giving away all manner of things, but still we came out of the war vastly richer than we had been, despite all the things we had done, all the ships sunk, and the rest. But even from those sunken ships we have been recovering the metals used to make them. This is an entirely new aspect to our world---that all metals that get mined, even if they are used to make something that becomes obsolete, are scrapped and then put right back into circulation. Of all the copper mined in the history of man, in fact, only about fourteen percent has gone out of circulation. The rest gets melted up and used over and over again. And every time we use it, the wire carries more messages-per-cross- section than it did before. We continually up the perform- ance-per-pound as we re-use those metals.

110 An entirely new possibility for man is clearly emerging as a result of fallout from technology developed primarily for war purposes between 1900 and today. As compared to less than one percent in 1900, more than forty percent of the world’s people have a higher material standard of living than could have seemed possible before the turn of the century. Not as a result of any consciously organized work on man’s part---but rather as ‘‘fallout’’ of man’s acquiring greater productive capability, under the aegis of fear of the great Armageddon, and without any understanding of what wealth really is or what he could ‘‘afford.’’ Man thought that what he could afford was something held by the powerful man. The powerful man had something he called capital with which to finance his undertakings; if he said he didn’t have the necessary capital, then he couldn’t ‘‘afford’’ it. In these last statements, there is no realization of what wealth really is. Our understanding or lack of understanding of this point---what wealth really is---will have a whole lot to do with whether or not man is going to survive on the face of this earth.

111 Long ago, now, scientists had discovered from their studies of steam etc. what they called thermodynamics. There they found that every system always tends to lose energy. This is called entropy: systems run down. Thus when I went to Harvard as a student, that intellectual community was assuming that we all live in an ‘‘instant universe,’’ just as Newton had. The stars were simply there---they always had been---and Newton’s gravity operated instantly everywhere in the universe. If you have an instant universe, then this universe is a system and as such it must be losing energy and is, then, ‘‘running down.’’ This was the way men were explaining things as recently as my student days. There had been some sun disturbance eons ago and the sun had thrown off light all right but ultimately we---the earth---would stop spinning for, as Newton said in his first law of motion: ‘‘A body persists in a state of rest, or in a line of motion except as affected by other bodies.’’ His first statement, the ‘‘at rest,’’ is the norm, and things are going to come to rest in the universe--- eventually. If the universe is running down and energies are involved, then anybody who goes in for something new and uses up energies is anathema. This was when the great pirates were saying they didn’t want any new inventions, because they had invested quite a lot to get those factories and they didn’t want any change in their monopoly. As you can imagine, it was very easy to get scholarly support because they said: ‘‘Anybody who’s using up that energy is ‘spending’ and helping the universe to ‘run down’ and die.’’

112 But then there had already been some experiments concerning speed-of-light measurements, around the turn of the century, and soon we have Einstein and Planck going even further and saying that the speed of light is 186,000 miles a second. They said it would take about eight minutes for the light to come to us from the sun, the nearest star to earth, and four years from the next nearest. As we now know, as we look around the sky we’re seeing a live show taking place thirty thousand years ago, if we just shift the eye a little we see another live show taking place 150,000 years ago, and so forth. Therefore, Einstein and Planck said: ‘‘Well, the universe must be an aggregate of nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping events.’’

113 This is still the best description we have of the ‘‘universe.’’ We see a little child growing bigger but certainly not running down and it’s clear that a child is not entropic right from the time of birth. Thus, there are apparently areas where energies are accumulated. Einstein said that in this non-simultaneous aggregate of events, when energy is disassociated from one local system, it had to be associating into another. Exhaustive experiments, review of all experiments, and careful accounting of all further experiments made it perfectly clear that this was exactly what was going on---that when energy disassociated here it always associated there and was always a hundred percent accounted for. When there was any amount that wasn’t readily accounted for, scientists began to discover that nature has some kinds of behavior that they hadn’t experienced as yet, and that a lot of these kinds of energy behavior occur relatively seldom---hence man’s not having run into them before. The scientist learned, then, to respect that fraction of the total that he didn’t know about, and if he made further experiments and the same fraction was there, then he had to say: ‘‘Well, we don’t know exactly what the behavior is but this is about the energy it takes, and we’ll give it a name; we’ll call it a meson.’’ Still later, the scientists were actually able to isolate the meson and begin to find out what that behavior is. Even so, the experiment has disclosed neither the creation of new energy nor the loss of any of the existing. Energies, apparently, are finite and accountable. This law, the law of conservation of energy, states that energy cannot be lost, created, or destroyed. Which is simply to say that the working assumption of the best minds up to the time of the turn of the century, that the universe was running down, is no longer tenable.

114 This fact, that energy is not lost, has not yet found its way into our books on economics. In them we still find the word ‘‘spending’’---a word referring to that now outdated thinking before man knew that there was a speed of fight.

115 What, then, do we know about our wealth---about what we can ‘‘afford?’’ I think it is very important to ask this because you are quite a large audience. I’ve tried what I’m going to do with you now with several large audiences, the first time with fourteen hundred people at Stanford University, and later with fifteen hundred people at the Congress of American Planners, in Washington, D. C. According to a count I was given earlier, there are more than a thousand of you here tonight. Now I am going to propose several things to you and, if anyone disagrees with me, please put up your hand. I’m going to say to you, first, that no matter what you think wealth is, would you agree with me that no matter how much you have of it, you can’t alter one iota of yesterday? No hands. Did you all hear it all right? There are still no hands, and I assume everyone agrees that no matter how much wealth you have, no matter what you think wealth is, you can’t change yesterday in any way. So we don’t have to give any thought to yesterday as we try to think about what wealth is. Whatever wealth may be, it has to do with our now and our tomorrows but not our yesterdays. Consider now a man who has plenty of all the items we now say certify great wealth. This man has all his checkbooks, and all his stock certificates, and all his bonds, and all his deeds with him. He has a big stack of gold bars and a number of bags of diamonds with him. He’s a certified billionaire---a billionaire on board a ship in the middle of the ocean. Suddenly the ship catches fire and all the life boats are burned and there this man is. If he hangs on to his gold he’ll just sink a little faster than the others. They may be poorer in gold, but his kind of wealth can’t give him any tomorrow either. So that kind of wealth isn’t very powerful. If he could have gotten to the shore, he might have had some tomorrows, but he didn’t have any way of doing that.

116 I would say, then, that what we probably mean by ‘‘wealth,’’ really, has something to do with how many forward days we have arranged for our environment to take care of us and regenerate us in life and give us increased degrees of freedom.

117 Now, regeneration of life is produced first with energy, which we have in two fundamental conditions: energy associative as radiation that can be focused on the ends of levers etc.; and energy as radiation that can be converted into energy as mass or matter, and vice versa. Now we find that the energy part of the universe is conserved---that it cannot be created or destroyed---and we use the energy as matter for levers and energy as radiation to impinge on the ends of levers. This is really the fundamental great general scheme. Energy is conserved and there’s plenty of it. Every time we rearrange our environment, we can get more energy and more levers to do more work to take care of the regeneration of more and more of our forward days. These energies are there, and they cannot be spent.

118 The other element of wealth to be defined is by far the more important. It is our intellectual capacity to recognize generalized principles that seem to be operative in the universe and to employ these principles. This is man’s metaphysical capability, which we use to make an experiment to find out how the lever works and to discover generalized principles. There are a number of very important irrevers- ibles to be discovered in our universe. One of them is that every time you make an experiment you learn more; quite literally, you can not learn less. That’s a pretty interesting fact, isn’t it, because it means that the metaphysical factor in wealth is one that is always gaining.

119 So we find the physical, or energy, component of wealth is being conserved and never will be lost, we find the metaphysical component to be gaining always---and wealth consists of these two. The weightless metaphysical and the physical---that’s everything of the universe. I’ve left nothing out. That’s all there is.

120 That wealth combines two factors---the physical which is conserved, the metaphysical which can only increase--- isn’t to be found in our textbooks, but it is what we are learning. It explains the fact that suddenly, completely to our surprise, we find forty percent of humanity prospering as no king ever dreamt of less than a century ago---in that yesterday we agreed couldn’t be repeated or changed. And it means that we are going to have to get into a completely new accounting system. There’s not a single chapter in any book on economics about doing more with less. All the great secrets, how the world was run by the great powers ---all carefully omitted from the books even now. And there is still no integration of the economists with the physicists in regard to the inner significance of these matters. The economists and physicists are all too specialized. But these are the kinds of things we are going to have to learn.

121 We are living on a closed-system earth, and yet I find people asking, when they talk about space: ‘‘Would you really like to be an astronaut?’’ ‘‘We are all astronauts’’ I reply. ‘‘That’s all we’ve ever been.’’ You say: ‘‘What does it feel like to travel in space?’’ I say: ‘‘You tell me. That’s all you’ve ever been doing. Right now you are on board a spherical space vehicle, only eight thousand miles in diameter, flying formation with our sun at a thousand miles a minute.’’ That’s a pretty good speed, and yet people often say to me: ‘‘I don’t know how you travel so much,’’ and I have to reply: ‘‘You don’t know what you’ve been doing.’’ I hear people say: ‘‘Never mind this space business; let’s get down to our problems here on earth, never mind all that nonsense we’ve been spending our money for.’’ I simply say again: ‘‘You simply don’t know what you’re doing. You’re already on board a space ship.’’ So please don’t ever say to me: ‘‘Let’s get down to earth.’’ You’re on board a space ship right now. It’s beautifully designed and man has been on board it, according to present knowledge, for some two million years. Utterly astounding, isn’t it, for us to be on board a space ship so superbly designed and supplied as to allow man to be so utterly ignorant for so long. And yet man is full of vanity and false pride over his great success ---forever patting himself on the back about ‘‘his’’ success when he didn’t invent even one of those chemical elements. He merely discovered them, and fortunately each one of them shows him how to do something a great deal better. These are the things that have to do with our real education.

122 Now I ask you: ‘‘Is there anybody here who doesn’t use the words ‘up’ and ‘down’?’’ No hands. These words were invented to accommodate the concept that the world is a plane going out to infinity. In reference to such a plane all perpendiculars are parallel to each other, and therefore lines go in only two directions, up and down. But as man began to fly around his earth he felt that as an aviator he was not really upside down. He had to find better words, and so now he comes ‘‘in’’ for a landing and he goes ‘‘out’’ on takeoff or lift-off. From now on, then, please take the trouble to say to yourself: ‘‘I’m going outstairs and instairs.’’ You’ll soon begin to catch on that you’re living on board a space ship, one on which the words ‘‘up’’ and ‘‘down’’ have no absolute meaning.

123 If there is an infinite system, then there are an infinite number of resources to be exploited. You can be just as careless and stupid as you want, since there are an infinite number of resources out there and we’ll never run out. And there’s an infinite amount of space in which you can get rid of all your filth as you waste all those resources. But in a closed system you can’t do that---and that’s the kind of system we’re in. We have anything but an infinite number of resources! We have just enough to make the experiment. We’re born utterly helpless---you needn’t have an inferiority complex about being helpless or ignorant: every child is born that way. But the child is born with extraordinary, beautiful faculties that have not yet been laden with misinformation. What we are discovering, then, is that we are born utterly helpless, but with very good reason for our being born that way.

124 Part of the complementarity is that our spaceship is so well designed that we can be utterly helpless until we gradually learn that the important thing we have is here and now. We are all given this great chance to learn, and we’ve come to the point now, for example, where the pollution is getting so bad that very soon there will be enough dust floating in our sky to block out too much of the sun’s radiation. When that happens, we won’t be able to regenerate life on earth. And we’re very close to that point of no return, in so many different ways. We’ve gotten to the critical point of whether man is really going to survive here or not. And we’ve only just come to the point of learning that since wealth can only increase, we can afford whatever we can produce: whatever we need, we can produce and we can afford. We don’t have to ask anybody’s permission! We’ve got to realize that this is so. Man is just coming out of a fantastic complex of slave thinking.

125 Now I would like to talk a bit more about the way I know what we all ought to know in relation to our experience. To begin: What do I mean by universe? I find that I must answer all by own questions in terms of my own experience, not in terms of what somebody said might be so, and using no axioms, no beliefs. I want to know: What have we learned by experience? In just this way, I shall answer: ‘‘I mean by universe the aggregate of all of humanity’s consciously apprehended and communicated experience, whether communicated to one’s self or to others.’’ That’s all I can possibly mean by universe. It’s part of our experience, then, that all our experiences are as finite as our going to sleep and our waking up. Our smallest physical experiences get down to quanta. There is no continuum; there are no solids. We have separate energy packages, with everything in finite packages. Aggregates of finites are themselves finite. Our universe as defined is finite.

126 Another question: Does man have a function in the universe? Or is he just a theatergoer waiting to be pleased or displeased? I’ve made a discovery that seems to indicate that man does have a function, and that it is possibly one of the most important, even essential, functions in the system. But before I can go into this, I have to draw attention to a distinction that may seem a bit irrelevant at first---the distinction between mind and brain.

127 Now, I don’t pretend to know what ‘‘mind’’ really means ---or whether it has any meaning at all. But the physiologists and neurologists who have been probing the brain with electrodes over the last two decades have found out a great deal about this information processing, information storing/retrieving system of ours. Many fairly specific functions have been located in the brain. The men who have been doing the probing, the physiologists and neurologists, say that it is easy to explain all the data they have concerning this phenomenon if they assume two fine variables, one which they will call ‘‘brain,’’ the other which they will call ‘‘mind.’’ That is, it’s easier to explain all the data they have discovered if they assume both a brain and a mind, than it is if they assume brain only. Why is this? It’s because a telephone conversation going on over the system doesn’t explain the feedback of the system itself. I’ve been thinking and exploring a good deal in this particular subject, and this last spring I was asked to give the principal address to the American Association of Neurosurgeons, two thousand of them meeting in Chicago. I offered them my differentiation between brain and mind and I received an ovation indicating that they approved of what I said on the matter, so I don’t feel I’m misleading you in defining it for you now.

128 To make the differentiation between brain and mind, I’m going to go through the following: First, I’m going to start by saying, ‘‘I take a piece of rope and I start tensing this rope as vigorously as I know how and the more vigorously I tense it the tauter it becomes.’’ Meaning that, if it is getting tauter, its girth is contracting; which means that while I am purposely tensing in one axis, at the same time and at 90 degrees to that axis, the rope is going into compression. I can also take a number of steel rods, long, thin, steel rods, which when I push at the ends bend rather readily. However, if I put a great many of them together in what is called ‘‘closest packing’’---which is hexagonal packing: just as you put wires together to make wire rope in hex packing, and put a tension strap around those wires so they can’t pull apart---I will have a tight bundle of rods. Therefore, it will act as a single column and I can load that column. As I load it on top, each rod would like to bend but can’t because it is in closest packing: it can’t bend inward because it will run into the other rods, it can’t bend outward because of the tension straps. Therefore, as I load the rod bundle very heavily, it tends to become cigar-shaped. Its girth begins to increase and the wires around it begin to get stretched. So while I’m purposely loading my column in compression, at 90 degrees to my loading it is demonstrating tension. By such means it is very easy to demonstrate experimentally that tension and compression always and only co-exist.

129 A system is something that divides the universe into all that is inside the system as distinct from all that is outside of it. Your body is such a system. So is a tomato can. So is the earth. Viewed from inside, a system is concave; viewed from outside, it is convex. As the sums of the angles add up, the total is always less degrees than a plane. In order to take a flat piece of paper and make it into any kind of polyhedron, regular or irregular, you are going to have to keep taking out angles to bring it back to itself until, finally, it is a polyhedron. You always come into that concavity and convexity eventually. When energy radiation impinges on concavity, the radiation converges; energy impinging on convexity diverges the radiation. So concave and convex always-and-only co-exist. I give you three kinds of always- and-only co-existing functions: tension and compression, concave and convex, and proton and neutron. Now we can develop something we call the theory of functions where we have x and y as the two co-variables and have the x standing for tension, convex, and proton, and y standing for compression, concave, neutron.

130 Going further still, we come to something called relativity. And I can’t have relativity without two variables to be related. Then I go further than that. I have the word ‘‘universe.’’ Now when I said I take a piece of rope, I didn’t have a piece of rope at all, but nobody said: ‘‘You don’t have a piece of rope.’’ I didn’t say whether it was nylon or manila or cotton or whatever. I didn’t say what diameter it was. This is called a first-degree generalization. Everyone of you has had an enormous number of experiences with ropes. I take a piece of rope as a first-degree generalization. It is a second-degree generalization to discover that tension and compression always-and-only co-exist. It’s a third- degree generalization---or a generalization-generalization ---to develop the theory of functions that embraces a number of generalizations. It’s a fourth-degree generalization to say ‘‘relativity,’’ a fifth-degree generalization to say ‘‘universe.’’

131 Now a little dog will play with you a game of tension and compression. He’ll take hold of a belt in his teeth, and there’s compression in his teeth and convex and concave surfaces in his teeth. And he’ll pull very hard on that rope---his protons and neutrons all coordinating without his knowing it. But there’s certainly nothing in our experience with dogs that tells us they will develop a theory of functions. What the brain always deals with---and neurologists agree with me---is special cases. It remembers every special case or experience---that’s its wonderful recall ability. But mind is the ability to generalize. It is really quite wonderful to begin to see the difference between these two, brain and mind. And this generalization is utterly abstract, weightless, purely metaphysical.

132 As we look for a function of man in the universe, and remembering this realization, we recognize that the physical universe locally is giving off energies diffusely and in very random ways. So entropy is spoken of by the mathematician as an increase in the law of random elements. You find then that the physical is expanding and increasingly disorderly in the universe, and the therefore complex universe is expansive. Also as we have seen in physics, every fundamental behavior has its complementary. Therefore, there must be some phase of universe, where universe is contracting and increasingly orderly. We say, ‘‘Where is that?’’

133 Now all the stars I observe are expansive and increasingly disorderly, giving off their radiations. We find, however, that our own little space ship, Earth, is receiving energy. The geophysical year showed daily receipts of many thousands of tons of stardust---radiation we receive every day from the sun and other stars. What is interesting about this is that the radiation doesn’t just reflect off like a steel ball but is being impounded by radiation bending, just as you see the light bending if you put your pole down in the water. Radiation is bent the same way. The energy gets impounded as heat in the water. So we find our earth taking those energies and impounding them, for example, as stardust and radiation heat. Also, vegetation impounds energy by photosynthesis, which means the production of beautiful orderly little molecular structures. This is the beginning of the orderly. The biologicals are anti-entropical; all this chaos suddenly being turned into order. What is very impressive about all life is its inherently orderly growth.

134 But of all the biologicals, human beings are the only ones with mind function differentiated from brain. If we took all the different rope experiences this audience has had, I would would say each one of you must have experienced at least one hundred kinds of rope, so that the total rope experience is perhaps ten thousand kinds, and we’ve gotten that down to only one piece of rope. Then we took all the myriad kinds of experience with concaves and convexes and with protons and neutrons; we got that down into the theory of functions, and then we embraced that even further, getting just the word ‘‘relativity.’’ And finally we got this word ‘‘universe.’’ What we have here is a pyramid of all the special cases working up to generalizations, and generalizations to one word. That’s as orderly as you can get. We were looking for a phase of the universe where things are contracting and increasingly orderly. Nothing could be more orderly than those generalizations. We find, then, the metaphysical balancing the physical---the metaphysical apprehending, comprehending, and ordering the physical. We find Einstein’s mind taking the measure of the physical, writing those beautiful, economical equations such as E = MC², saying that the physical universe is energy and you have to have one differentiation of energy on one side and another on the other side of the equation in order to understand it. And one is energy as associative matter, and the other is energy as disassociative radiation. And the rate of the radiation is to the second power or the rate of growth of a wave of 186,000 miles a second, to the second power. This tells us how much energy there was in that mass.

135 Here we have, then, intellect taking the measure of energy. We have nothing in our experience to suggest that this is reversible. Nothing suggests that energy will ever write the equation of intellect. I simply say to you that we have the metaphysical apprehending, comprehending, and ordering the physical. The physical tending to be disorderly and the metaphysical apprehending, comprehending, and putting together. Man, therefore, represents the very clearly demonstrated function in the universe that is essential to the regeneration of universe. Also we discover that the universe is a perpetual motion machine because its energy is never lost. So the minimum number of transformations or accommodations is universe. It is the minimum and only perpetual motion machine, and perpetual conservation requires this metaphysical functioning of order and collection inherent to man.

136 We find, then, that man has this extraordinary kind of function, and what we have just discovered by all these experiments is that we really have this great function and were put aboard our space ship, Earth, to provide it. Where nature has an essential function, then she uses very great capability to be sure it persists---as, for instance, in the development of vegetation known to be able to regenerate life aboard this particular space vehicle. Vegetation has to regenerate its young, but it can’t have its young if there is a shadow. The young plants would not be able to get any of the necessary radiation. Therefore, most vegetation launches its new life in little seeds on the winds and on the waters. The possibility of these seeds landing in just the places where they will prosper is poor, and nature makes many starts---enough to make sure that the species survives.

137 With metaphysical function essential to the continuance of the universe, nature is going to make many, many starts. From this reasoning we can assume that we are probably not the only group---that our little team of human beings aboard this space vehicle is not alone in carrying on this needed metaphysical function in the universe. Professor Fred Hoyle, the great astronomer in England, said that he does not feel he is misinforming society when he says there are probably hundreds of millions of planets with intelligent beings aboard. But whether our particular team is going to make good I believe to be very touch and go at this time in history. Everything we can be learning here of the progression and evolution is to make us aware of the vital need of insuring man’s continuance and success aboard spaceship earth.

138 Luckily I went to the U. S. Naval Academy during World War I when the in-pirates, in order to maintain their supremacy, had to let the American navy come to parity with them. There were barely two thousand men at the naval academy learning how the old great powers ran the world. Their studies deliberately made them comprehensivists--- so they could be the right-hand men of the great powers. You were trained to be able to take all that had been found out about the physical universe and put it into all those tools of enormous tonnage. You had to be able to take all that hardware and go half-way around the world, and there was no way you could be communicated with about strategic matters faster than a courier could be taken by another ship. (Even though we had radio in World War I, we didn’t trust it because the enemy could read cipher and code.) So you had to send commands by ship. Therefore, when you went off in a ship with all that expensive hardware, there was no central authority to tell you what to do.

139 You had to be trained to be able to build new naval bases. You had to understand the whole pattern of the great ambitions, of how you run the world, and where the major commerce was, where all the resources were, how to handle people, and how to organize things in fundamental ways. So the training was designed to make a man a comprehensivist. And the very essence of being a comprehensivist is the following: you learn about those generalized principles, because it isn’t a generalized principle if there is any single exception. Therefore, although there may be all kinds of names used by the specialists for a particular thing, you learn it’s the same generalized principle.

140 I was science and technical editor of Fortune Magazine for two years, 1938--1940. I was brought in to institute a new phase of their reporting because the general managing editor felt that the readers of Fortune ought to have a better understanding of the scientific foundations of their great corporations. My job was to make them aware of those scientific foundations. We had a month to prepare each story. I went with the researchers, who were all Ph.D.’s, to visit those companies. They were the ones who were going to write about the business side of things. I went there to organize the writing about the scientific side and I was usually given approximately a double spread or more in Fortune to tell that side of the story. The chief scientist, the vice-president in charge of research or whatever he might be called, would always say to me: ‘‘Your task is hopeless. Really to understand what we are doing here in depth, the only way it can be expressed is mathematically, and unless readers of Fortune read mathematics you cannot really communicate.’’ For every issue, I was able within that one month to go in depth into that work with our scientists and to convert it back into conceptual language and to tell the Fortune reader in ways that even the chief scientists admitted were not just pleasant analogies but were efficient explanations. They always said that I had actually succeeded in telling faithfully and in depth what they were doing, and I was able then to demonstrate that my kind of training as a generalist made it possible for me to go in depth with any scientist into any subject in one month. I’ll just simply say that in our society, then, you don’t have to be that much a specialist. You can get that specialized kind of tutoring very rapidly today. You can become very sharp in any kind of subject if you have organized yourself well in terms of generalized principles. But there are still not many of us who can do it.

141 There are ninety-two regenerative chemical elements. There is multiplication and division of these elements, and you really must master the understanding of these fundamental transformations. I said that our society is on the way to extinction through man’s overspecialization. Inadvertently, our society has developed its own antibody: the computer. And it has developed the computer because it is getting ready for World War III. It realizes the complexities of dealing with all the different kinds of alloys and an entirely new way of looking at things that has been coming since 1932, when for the first time we had on the shelf the isolation of all the different chemical elements. We now can take the universe apart and put it together again in preferred ways. We used to have chance discovery of alloys; but suddenly, when we came to the space program, we got to where we had to have a metal which could take the re-entry heat and still hold together in the right shape in addition to its other functions. And so we had to invent those needed alloys. With the space program, we’ve gone through an entirely new era of our technology. We used to say: ‘‘You can design things out of the materials that are available,’’ and all schools of architecture had courses in materials. But now you can make the needed materials without any intermediary form of tubes and angle irons and sheets; you make the end form instantly out of that special alloy without any intermediary nonsense.

142 We are well into an era of entirely new dealings with our physical universe, into an advanced phase of technology. Well, I’ll only talk about what we’ve developed already. When you think about an automobile, there are 5,000 different types of parts. A residence has only about 500 types of parts. A great airplane has between 25,000 to 50,000 types of parts. In 1.946, when we came out of World War II, one big corporation, International Harvester, had in inventory, in order to service all its different kinds of equipment, 110,000 different kinds of parts. If you have enormous numbers of corporations with hundreds of thousands of types of parts, in all kinds of different alloys and all kinds of association, what are you going to do in getting ready for World War III? How are you going to stockpile your resources? Quite clearly what had been a great failure in America during World Wars I and II was the thought that a single man could be a director of all war production. They took the smartest businessmen they had, but they always fell short of what they needed to do. You realize you are asking a human being to do more than he could possibly handle.

143 I spoke to you about a tool being an extension of a fundamental integral human function, but in designing the tool you could extend the limits of its capability. In inventing and proliferating the computer, done because after World War II science had the technological capability to do it, the human brain function was extended. Although the computers do nothing that a brain cannot do, they can do it longer and much more powerfully, much more swiftly, and can handle fantastic amounts of information and be preoccupied and hold this for you and file that and retrieve all of it very rapidly. That is all the computer is doing. It does nothing a brain cannot do, but it can do more of it than a brain can do. A computer is able to stay up all night, separating the pink from the yellow at speeds you can’t possibly match under conditions of cold you can’t support---you’d freeze to death.

144 The computer is about to take over what we call automation. People worry about automation although we’ve all been automated ourselves. You haven’t the slightest idea what you are doing this minute with your dinner; you’re not purposely sending the peas and rice to this or that gland to make hair; that’s all automated. You haven’t the slightest idea how you went from 7 pounds to 170; it was all automated. Nobody is saying: ‘‘I’m pushing each of my hairs out in various colors and sizes’’---you don’t even know why you have hair. It’s all automated. We are about to have our computers take over the automation of the integrated tools that sustain you and me. Automation will take over those tools and it’s going to make man utterly obsolete as a specialist. Man’s going to be forced back to what he was bom to be---a comprehensivist---to learn those generalized principles and to become master of his situation. This is what is coming up, if man is to make good on Earth---if we make good in time, if we catch on in time.

145 I’ve taken a great deal of your time; even so, there is still something else I would like to talk about. And I will talk about it just as fast as I know how. It relates to the young world and what is going on. Everybody is talking about ‘‘Be a man’’ etc. About war. We see how we got into war, all right. We have this working assumption that it has to be you or me and the Great State crowd saying that is so. I began to see in 1927---I had gotten out of the Navy in 1922, and I had gone into the building world and I found the building world five thousand years behind the technology we had at sea and in the sky. I found that no scientist had ever looked at the plumbing, and even now they haven’t looked at it! I find that man is not doing anything about how to make himself a success. All technology is going into this great killing ring. I said: ‘‘I see that Malthus may be wrong. The whole rationale of war is the assumption that Malthus is right, that there is not enough for all of us.’’ But what I was so impressed with, having come out of sea technology, was that we were doing so much more with so much less. I said Malthus didn’t know that there was going to be any kind of refrigeration. He didn’t know that the food he thought was going to rot in the fields could be preserved and could reach mouths way across the ocean. It was perfectly clear to me that we could do so much more with so much less. We just might be able to take care of everybody. Then Malthus would be utterly wrong and we wouldn’t have to have a war.

146 We’ve all been working under the assumption that man is destined to be a failure. I say man is quite clearly like the hydrogen atom: designed to be a success. He is a fantastic piece of design; it is completely wrong to think he is meant to be a failure. I assume he is supposed to be a success and that he is supposed to use his mind to make himself a success; and to understand things like wealth, as I gave it you a few minutes ago---to understand those generalized principles and to realize that when you employ them you aren’t ‘‘spending’’ anything of the universe. You are simply employing what the universe is---turning the universe to your account. And that is what you are meant to do in order to demonstrate man’s success.

147 And so I said in 1927: I’m going to commit the rest of my life to exploring the whole matter of doing more with less and seeing what would happen if we took the kind of technology which had only been applied in the sea and sky and applied it to the land where people have been building all those heavy buildings. In the years since then, I have spoken to the architectural associations of almost every country of the world, and in the different states and cities. I always ask the audience if they will tell me what the building we’re in weighs. And I say: ‘‘Any hands?’’ No hands. I say ‘‘Will you tell me just roughly within a hundred thousand tons?’’ No hands. So I say: ‘‘Give it to me roughly within a million tons.’’ No hands. So quite clearly people, architects included, do not know what buildings weigh. If you don’t know what a building weighs, you certainly don’t know what its performance per pound is. If you don’t know what it weighs, you are certainly not trying to do more with less. We try to be efficient in the design of the machinery inside our buildings, but the buildings themselves are certainly not thought of in this way.

148 It became perfectly clear to me long ago that, in our land economics, we could make fantastic strides; and that realization brought me into trying geodesic domes. I now have five thousand of them in fifty countries. Thousands of these domes are light enough, strong enough, sufficient enough to be delivered by air. They weigh only about three percent of the weight of a traditional building of equal span. They are also proof against earthquake and relatively fireproof (for a given amount of time, code determined).

149 They bear up under arctic snowloads and hurricanes. They are doing these things at only three percent of the weight of the best known alternate conventional solutions for buildings. So I discovered there was fantastic room for improvement to be made for the living arts on dry land. My investigations made perfectly clear what upping performance per pound of employed resources can mean in economics. Incidentally, during the time between 1900 and today, in two-thirds of a century we have gone from less than 1 percent to more than 40 percent of humanity living at a high standard. In the same period the amount of resources per man has been continually decreasing, so we obviously did not accomplish that high standard of living as a result of our having more resources to exploit. It came only as fallout of the doing-more-with-less design philosophy.

150 Now it is quite clear that politics doesn’t know anything about that. Current design standards will only take care of 44 percent of humanity, with the majority of people doomed to very short life and to great pain along the way. But there is nothing in politics except knowing how to do without or taking it from one and giving to the other. That is what the sociologists and politicians attempt to do. They still say it has to be just you or me. There’s no real awareness among politicians anywhere around the world that there could be more-with-less to the point of making it possible for the world’s available resources to take care of everybody---and at higher standards than anybody has dreamt of. But science now says that is perfectly possible. It has to do with something called ‘‘engineering efficiency’’---the amount of work done by a machine out of the energy it consumes. A reciprocating engine, which you all have in your automobiles, is only 15 percent efficient. You have explosion at the top of the pistons and the energy is sent by connecting rod to crank shaft. So you send it down and the crank shaft sends it right back from where you sent it. It immediately contradicts you, and this is called a 180 degree restraint. And it is only 15 percent efficient; that’s all you can get out of it. Now we have the explosion on this side of the piston instead of at its top. There is still a connecting rod but just a thick shaft and this system is called turbine. It has only a go degree restraint, and that is 30 percent efficient. I’m just giving you the approximate figures for this. Then we have the jet engine, which gets up to 60 percent efficiency. I’ve doubled each time, just removing those restraints. The overall efficiency of all the machinery man is using around the world today is only 4 percent. In engineering it is highly feasible to go to an overall 12; and if we do, we can take care of all humanity.

151 In talking about pure engineering feasibility, it is eminently clear to scientists that the job can be done. But they all also say you can’t do it with any of the national boundary restrictions which ‘‘protect’’ the nations. Each one is thinking that it has to be his side which has the advantage. Everyone depends on protection. But to do the job man must have absolutely free intercourse and access to the distribution of resources found around the world. We have to deal with our space ship, Earth, as a machine, which is what it is. You can’t have a machine where the U.S.S.R. is the spark plugs, and the U.S.A, is the crank shaft, and the two parts don’t work together. Today’s situation. And we say: ‘‘How are you going to get of this mess?’’ Politics? No politician is allowed to yield to another politician, and any political leader you can get is going to be finally up against what his military will tell him. The military will tell him that the joint chiefs of staff of the United States and the joint chiefs of staff in Russia, the joint chiefs of staff of China, et al., all operate under John von Neumann’s game theory. And in game theory it’s one side or the other. And in this game theory of John von Neumann’s, if one side makes an altruistic move---it loses. If any political leader makes any kind of altruistic move or statement, it is purely camouflage. If he made one genuinely altruistic move, then he’d be saying: ‘‘I’m choosing my side to lose,’’ and no political leader will do that. He may campaign otherwise but he finally is going to be up against that military saying: ‘‘You have the right to make the decision that your side is to lose.’’ He couldn’t do that.

152 Logically, today’s youth becomes exasperated and asks: ‘‘Why can’t we make the world work?’’ All this negative nonsense is the consequence of outworn, ignorant biases of old timers. I say let’s join forces and set things to rights. Parading in multitudes, students demand that their political leaders take steps to bring about peace and plenty. The fallacy of this lies in their age-old and mistaken assumption that the problem is one of political reform. The fact is that the politicians are faced with a vacuum, and you can’t reform a vacuum. The vacuum is the apparent world condition of not enough to go around, not enough for even a majority of mankind to survive more than half of its potential life span. It is again a you-or-me-to-the-death situation that leads from impasse to impasse to ultimate showdown by arms. Thus, more and more students around the world are learning of the new and surprising alternative to politics---the design-science revolution that alone can solve the problem.

153 Along with the 1965 Berkeley episodes and the myriad of civil disturbances which occurred in the United States as a result of the national reactionary pullback at the by-election polls in 1966, every college campus has had its quota of incidents. But in relation to this there are now new realizations. The students who graduated in June, 1966 were born and grew up under historically unprecedented conditions that are known by behavioral science research to have affected very seriously the intellectual and social development of humans. The university and college classes of 1966 were born as the first atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, killing and maiming vast numbers of civilians. The students of 1966 were the first human beings to be reared by the third parent---by television, whose voice and presence are seen and heard by children far more than those of the two blood parents. The real parents come home from the store, or office, or golf course, or hairdresser and say: ‘‘Wow! What a day! Let’s have a beer,’’ and sit down to small talk about local events---and the children slip off to hear the third parent brief them visually, ergo vividly, on the world-around news regarding the world’s continual aches, pains, disasters, Olympic triumphs, and all.

154 As the class of 1966 grew and developed from birth, they learned from the third parent about man’s going across the North Pole under ice. In their fourteenth year, the Russian unmanned rocket photographed the far side of the moon and returned to earth. When they were fifteen, the U. S. bathyscaphe took man safely to photograph the bottom of the Pacific Ocean’s deepest hole. In their sixteenth year, a Russian orbited earth in a rocket. As they reached seventeen, the DNA genetic code for control of the design of all life was discovered. And then the class of 1966 at Berkeley 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 most oldsters to be shockingly ‘‘immoral’’ and lacking in idealism. Not so. They are as idealistic and full of compassion as any child has ever been, but their loyalty is to all humanity. They are no longer the creatures of local, class, or race biases. They 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.’’ Today’s youth say: ‘‘Why not up the performance per unit of invested resources and thus make enough to go around?’’ And they’re right.

155 Students can learn the following: that technical evolution has this fundamental behavior pattern. First, as I have explained to you, there is a scientific discovery of a generalized principle, which occurs as a subjective realization by experimentally probing man. Next comes objective employment of that principle in a special-case invention. Next, the invention is reduced to practice. This gives man an increased technical advantage over his physical environment. If successful as a tool of society, it is used in ever bigger, swifter, and everyday ways. For instance, it goes progressively from a little steel steamship to ever bigger fleets of constantly swifter, high-powered ocean giants.

156 There comes a time, however, when we discover other ways of doing the same task more economically. For instance, 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 Elizabeth or that a quarter-ton transoceanic communications relay satellite outperforms 150,000 tons of transoceanic cables. 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 which also 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 while increasing 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 eight-folding of payload volume gained with each four-folding of wetted surface means twice as much profit for less effort each time the ship’s length is doubled. This principle of advantage gain through geometrical-size increase holds true for ships of both air and water. Then doubling of length of sea-going ships finally runs into trouble; for instance, the ocean finer made more than a thousand feet long would have to span between two giant waves and would have to be doubled in size to do so. However, if doubled in size once more, she could no longer be accommodated by the great world canals, dry docks, and harbors.

157 At this point the miniaturization of doing more with less first ensues through substitution of an entirely new art. David’s slingstone over 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 an 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 ballistic arts of man and men’s warring to the death have followed this same fundamental evolutionary pattern of bigger, then smaller.

158 Assuming that there was not and never would be enough of the vital support resources to go around, and concluding 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 at greater and greater distances and at ever higher speeds with ever increasing accuracy. Humanity’s killing capability has gone 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 to the great weapons-carrying battleships. Then 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, a miniscule 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 virtually weightless death rays operating at 700-million miles per hour. At the present point of history, the uranium bomb has been recently displaced by the hydrogen bomb until it was discovered that if either side used that new greatest weapon, both sides and the rest of humanity would perish. Therefore, the biggest weapons could not be used, nor could the equally large and mutually destructive biological or chemical gas warfaring. Then both sides discovered that killing of the enemy’s people was not their objective. Killing the enemy’s ideology is the objective. Killing the enemy’s people brings sympathy and support for the enemy from the rest of the world, and gaining the good opinion and support of the rest of the world is one of the new world’s war aims.

159 And now? Both sides have started to explore the waging of more war with lesser, more limited killings, but more politically and economically devastating techniques. Just as ephemeralization (employing ever more miniscule instruments) took technology out of the limited ranges of the human senses into the vast and invisible ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, so too has major warfaring almost disappeared from the visible contacts of human soldiery and entered into the realm of invisible psychology. In the new invisible miniaturization phase of major world warring, both sides carry on an attention-focusing guerilla warfare, as now in Vietnam, while making their most powerful attacks through subversion, vandalism, or skillful agitation of any and all possible areas of discontent within the formally assumed enemy’s home economics.

160 In carrying on this new and unfamiliar world warring, they don’t have to send ideological proselytizers to persuade the people of the other side to abandon their home country’s political systems and adopt that of their former enemy. 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 demonstrations etc. The idea is to make a mess of the other’s economy and thereby discredit his socio-political system in the eyes of the rest of the world and to destroy the enemy people’s confidence in its own system. Because the active operators are most often engaged on the basis of just gratifying their own personal discontent, they are most often unaware that they are acting as agents. Because almost everyone has at least one discontent, a single well-trained, conscious agent can evoke the effective but unwitting agency of hundreds of other discontents, promoters, and joiners. As a consequence of this new invisible phase of world war trending, a most paradoxical condition exists wherein the highly idealistic youth of college age, convinced that they are demonstrating against war, are in fact the front line soldiers operating as unwitting shock troops while 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.

161 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 hopefully destroying the confidence of the enemy people in themselves, is far more devastating than a physical death ray could be; for it does everything with nothing. Furthermore, it operates as news that moves around the earth by electromagnetic waves operating at 700-million miles per hour. At the moment, the highly controlled political state has a great defensive advantage over the open, freedom-nurturing states by virtue of the former’s controlled news, for it is the omniexcitable news in the free countries which is primarily exploited to publish, spread, and thus create a chain reaction of dismay through the guaranteed publishing of any and all of their organized-discontent activities.

162 While all the foregoing curves of rising and falling in the technical evolution of weaponry have taken place, there has also occurred, all unnoticed to the parties of the warfaring, a vast fallout from the defense technology into the domestic technology of ephemeralization’s doing ever more with ever less. As I remarked, within two-thirds of a century this unnoticed and inadvertent fallout has converted forty-plus percent of total humanity from have-not-ness to a high standard of living-have-ness and made clear that the only way all humanity may be elevated to such an advantage is by further acceleration of this technological revolution.

163 It becomes evident, then, that youth’s world-around clamor for peace can only be realized through technological revolution, which will do so much more with so much less per each function as ultimately to produce enough to support all humanity. It is also clear that such a task can only be accomplished by this technological design revolution. As many who have become involved in the new invisible warfaring discover that their aim can only be attained through this design revolution, all the young world- around idealists will have to face the question of whether they prefer to keep on agitating simply because they have come to enjoy a sense of power and importance by doing so, or whether they really are dedicated to the earliest possible attainment of economic and physical success for all humanity and thereby realistically to eliminate war.

164 If the desire for the elimination of war is what they are most moved by, they will have to shift their effort from mere political agitation to participation in the design science revolution. The latter course involves the development of ever self-regenerating and improving scientific and technical competence, and that in turn means the individual must plunge earnestly and dedicatedly into selfdevelopment by the resources of an educational system designed to develop the inherent comprehensivity of humanity.

165 October, 1968