7 R. Buckminster Fuller: Cosmic Surfer
2Dr. Glenn A. Olds
3 My first and last meeting with Bucky was fittingly on a university campus. He was then, first and last, inviting us to enroll in the University of the Universe, from which there is no graduation.
4 ‘‘Dare to be naive,’’ he was telling us. ‘‘In cosmic calculus, you are its highest number.’’ Had he lived more fully in the lingo of our computer age, he would have said we are its indispensable Web site, the ‘‘personal regenerative energy’’ through which and by which the universe works. To know this is to be wise; to do this is to be successful in the cosmic venture; to share it with others is the highest form of freedom and fulfillment.
5 Such wisdom comes not merely by opening your eyes, though seeing is essential, but by knitting your brows, which is to exercise your true nature, your spiritual birthright, your authentic and unique place in the scheme o£ things. Such wisdom is open to every person on the same condition. It cannot be commanded or coerced. It is never secondhand. It is first person singular, experimental, universal, the way the world works.
6 ‘‘Look,’’ he would say, ‘‘at who you are, and where you are.’’ The law of entropy may be a foundational building block of physics, but not for the human mind. Indeed, he would remind us, as had Thomas Huxley, father of Julian and Aldous, nearly a century before, that the human mind can reverse that law. It is regenerative, not only bringing order out of chaos, inventive creativity, or in Bucky’s trenchant phrase, ‘‘Doing more with less.’’ This anchored Bucky’s optimism, rallied a confused and diffused student generation across the campuses and world to an inspired empowerment, a new sense of self-education, a new ‘‘World Game’’ designed for win-win strategies, resisting the counsel of scarcity, fear-ridden violence and possessiveness, and in Bucky’s cosmic classroom, full participating partners in discovering the ‘‘operational manual’’ for Spaceship Earth.
7 Surfing
8 One whose life and early listening were set in the surf surroundings of his beloved Bear Island in the rugged contour of the Maine coast would recognize surfing as a fit symbol for the regenerative integrity of the pulsating phases of Bucky’s extraordinary life. Bucky was schooled in that surfside sea. Anyone who ever visited him there, as I have done, sensed the strength and wisdom he drew from that place. Whether under the silent stars, his navigation chart, with his ‘‘summer of children visitors,’’ or standing almost awestruck on the shore with him marveling at the unusual energy of the tidal lift of the moon or undulating tidal comings and goings; or listening to the wind whisper through the tall trees, arm stretched, skyward, en route from boat to house, one knew this was Bucky’s ‘‘home.’’ Like Thoreau’s Walden Pond, Muir’s Wilderness, or Kant’s belfry beacon, it was where all the intricate webbing of a marvelous mind knit together. It was the netscape of his horizons. It anchored his soul.
9 Bucky knew, at the crest of the wave, nature marshaled its propelling power. An article I did on his remarkable life, ‘‘At the Crest of the Wave,’’ in the resurrected Saturday 'Evening Post of March-April 1973, made this telling point. The agility, flexibility, and strength required to negotiate the balance, movement, and forward thrust at the crest of the wave was Bpcky’s mind dancing with innocent delight at the naked edge of nature’s design and power. This was why even children, as well as the world’s seminal thinkers, found such fun in the frolicking of Bucky’s mind.
10 It was Bucky’s-genius to see the extravagance of Nature’s unused and abundant energy, the raw material for human inventiveness. His early proposals for connecting the energy grids of The World (see the remarkable strategy of GENI—Global Energy Network International—for its deployment) to use the idle power at night on one side of the earth to light and lift the load of the other was but one of the multitude of his insights on this issue. Another was his early plan to create a new sea-city in Tokyo Bay energized by harnessing the unused power of the tidal pull of the moon and thermal differentiations of that remarkable sea.
11 It was this pondering of our human capacity to harness what nature lavishly provided, and navigate its most troubled waters by the delicate orchestration of its powerful and provident resources, that was at the root of Bucky’s confidence in harnessing technology and resources to make the all-around human venture truly successful for all its players. He thought every person, if properly ‘‘schooled,’’ could sail through life at the crest of the wave.
12 Significance of the Sea
13 It is not difficult to understand why for Bucky it was easy to see the sea as the metaphorical substitute for space in our cosmic setting. In his enduring and endearing description of ‘‘Spaceship earth,’’ ‘‘ship’’ is as important as ‘‘space’’ in localizing our habitat.
14 His speculation that our origins may more reasonably be located in the Polynesian culture of the Pacific than in Africa is not the work of an empirical anthropologist. His reasons are not dug from the earth but from the human mind, and its inferences form what we know about how the earth turns, winds blow, prevailing tides propel, and stars guide. Though Bucky never had a James Michener to tell this story, he was intrigued by its potential scenario, only partially portrayed in Michener’s Hawaii.
15 Bucky’s Dymaxion map, which hangs on my study wall, reminds one of how he saw the world as connected islands in a sea of water. Even as he believed the lunar cycle, its tidal counterpart, and woman’s menstrual periods had some cosmic connection not yet found, so he believed it was not sheer chance that so much of our earthly embodiment was water. He did not go so far as Aldous Huxley in proposing that we are amphibious, but the metaphor was not lost on him. That the basic elements of earlier cultures seemed reducible to earth, air, fire, and water left Bucky puzzling over man’s Piscean nature in the Age of Aquarius. His sense of the role of astronomy, astrology, and numerology in the evaluation of mathematical and geometric models in his almost daily doodling on napkins and scraps of paper over dinner reflected his preoccupation with sailing the seas, navigating in unknown and uncertain waters, and how we can use wind, tides, and stars in all of nature’s abundance to awaken us to ways of invention and partnership to take us places we had never been before. Somewhere, in all this, he felt sure was a remarkable cosmic design.
16 Design
17 Few people grasped so immediately, intrinsically, and profoundly the factor of design in all that is and is yet to be. That is why even his beloved Harvard, which threw him out twice, then welcomed him finally as deserving of its honor, classifying him as poet and architect, saw this incredible talent for discerning pattern in all possibilities.
18 It was this sense of pattern-making, whether in the poetry of words, the ‘‘geometry of thinking,’’ (as he characterized his Synergistics), or the artistry of construction which characterized his inventive architecture, that made Design so central to his ideas and the integrities of his life. (See his book Ideas and Integrities.} And it was this factor, I believe, which moved Bucky, a real ‘‘loner’’ who was suspicious of all forms of power, political or organizational, to reluc- tandy concede to the formation in 1972, at the Carnegie Center for Peace, across from the United Nations, the International Design Science Institute.
19 The Institute, launched in midsummer, to which the New York Times devoted a full page in surprise and speculation, met with interest and puzzlement. Its credentials were impressive enough. The World Advisory Council was composed of Arthur C. Clarke, Constantinos A. Doxiadis, Walter J. Hickel, Margaret Mead, Jonas E. Salk, U Thant, and Jerome B. Wiesner. The organizing and management body included some of Bucky’s oldest and most devoted friends: Fritz Close, former chairman of Alcoa; Gerald Dickler, Bucky’s lawyer and distinguished New York publishing legal expert; Edgar Applewhite, family member and Bucky’s coauthor and editor; Norman Cousins, founding editor of the Saturday Review; Charles M. Harr, professor of law at Harvard and onetime assistant secretary of housing and urban development; Neva Kaiser, one of Bucky’s brilliant young campus enthusiasts, later to head one of Tuft’s distinguished institutes; Martin Meyerson, president of the University of Pennsylvania and former dean of the College of Environmental Design at Berkeley; John S. Rendleman, president of Southern Illinois University; M. W. Whitlow, Bucky’s longtime banker and personal friend; and William M. Wolf, president of Wolf Computer Corporation, early involved in the U.S. space program. I myself, just leaving my post as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council and assuming the presidency of Kent State University after the tragic shooting there, was the institute’s president.
20 It was our conviction that the impressive range of Bucky’s inventions, patents, and designs should be more widely known and, where possible and practicable, converted into useful artifacts and made humanly available for what Bucky called ‘‘the World around success of every human being.’’ And by converting weaponry to livingry, to quote another of his powerful images, help a then deeply troubled world, paralyzed by the Cold War and Vietnam and on the eve of Watergate, to find its way ‘‘home.’’
21 The institute’s modest influence was a commentary on the resistances of the times and what Whitehead called the inertia of empty categories and dead ideas. With minor instances of support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and isolated friends, the Institute was never able to rally the financial resources to implement its mission. In some ways, alas, it confirmed Bucky’s deepest conviction that the evolutionary design of the universe rested on solitary, particular, individual inventiveness and sustaining power, and the universe could not be forced or bargained with and was indifferent to the games we play to control or subordinate others. This conviction was sufficient to bear Bucky up and carry him forward. But, of course, it could not sustain the Institute.
22 The final deathblow to its effort came after a last valiant effort to enlist Ambassador Phil Klutznick of Chicago, my predecessor at the UN, confidant of presidents, brilliant civic leader of Chicago, and most successful businessman, who had known Bucky in the brief period in Wichita after World War H when he had been asked to mass-produce his geodesic-dome house to provide low-cost, environmentally sound, and replicable housing for returning servicemen. Ambassador Klutznick was persuaded of the institute’s purpose, the relevance of Bucky’s powerful ideas, and the need for sustainable financing for the institute’s functions and Bucky’s future.
23 One never knows why the final negotiations of so delicate a deal—negotiations between a man whose second nature was privacy but whose ideas were genuinely universal and invited implementation and an exceedingly successful public servant, business entrepreneur, and social engineer—should fail at the last moment, but they did.
24 It seemed enough to Bucky to say ‘‘I told you so’’ and to convert the institute into an advisory council primarily concerned with preserving and perpetuating Bucky’s considerable archival repository over a lifetime. Happily, Norman Cousins was willing to succeed me in that new venture, and Bucky’s dedicated grandson and daughter together with other close friends have kept that vision of the Design Science Institute’s appropriate role vital and growing.
25 Key Concepts
26 If one were to characterize Bucky’s range and depth of ideas over his productive lifetime as a system, it would have to be a different kind of system from those we are generally used to describing. Though for him the universe was finite, that did not mean it was finished, bounded, or final. Indeed it was Bucky’s intent to show that Einstein’s genius in characterizing nature’s behavior in his famous equation E = me2, did more than show the transformational relation o£ energy and mass, gravity and radiation, space, time, and motion. It provided Bucky a structure to show that form itself is a verb, and that at work in the universe is this incredible design that can remain orderly but changing, substantative but transformational, binding but never finally bonding, that its pattern is evident but never repeatable. This deep discernment runs through each of his generic concepts.
27 Comprehensivity
28 Here is a characteristic Bucky term. He wants to say more than ‘‘comprehensive’’; he means whole, inclusive, all-comprehending. He wants to include more than the formal, rational, mathematical, or abstract. He wants to suggest a combination of sensitivity and compassion, a dynamic grasp of the aesthetic and technical, the appreciative and descriptive, the pattern of the whole and its process.
29 For Bucky, the tragedy of the specialization that dominates our educational and knowledge model is not its analytic clarity or simplicity, or even indeed its insular isolation, limiting as they are. The tragedy is to miss the whole. It is to mistake simplicity this side of complexity for simplicity on the other side (to use Oliver Wendell Holmes’s trenchant description). It is to miss the marvel of the total design, in which orchestration of the parts must be ultimately understood. Miss this, and you miss its essential meaning, its mirroring of cosmic design, the transformational character of pattern, the telic character of all true knowing. To invert Marshall McLuhan’s maxim ‘‘The medium is the message,’’ the message is always more than the medium. The more, to use Bucky’s characteristic language, is weighdess. It does not add to physical properties. It is the formless form of the half hitch, which can inform any material (hemp, cotton, steel, twine, etc.). It is the way we were meant to think, to exercise our transformational propensities, to be, which is always a verb.
30 Synergy
31 This follows comprehensivity. This is, to use Bergson’s term, the elan vital of all our forms of structure, life, and understanding. It is the manifestation of non-entropic energy where the whole is always more than the sum of its parts. It gives the lie to all reductionists forms of logic, driving through the rearview mirror, perpetuating the past as a vital and viable part of the unformed tomorrow.
32 At work in this concept is a new meaning for causality. It faindy echoes Aristode’s formal and final causes, but is not reducible to either. It is not simply push or pull, measures of linear progression, but can more readily be characterized as the artist’s idea that permeates the product, the living oak that celebrates its form in the tree, the manner in which a dream informs the deed. It is why secondhand concepts of experience are already shadowy in substance. It is why so much of our learning is boring, tedious, or dumb, and why our images of ourselves are so frequently blinding, binding, or deadening of potential. Synergy is the style through which energy dances through space and time. It is the way we become what we are though perpetually differing. It is what sustains and propels our spaceship and informs the design of all our courses. It is the right relationship for sustaining community through every civil or political design.
33 Integrity
34 Integrity is more than making the outer and inner man fast friends, as Plato affirmed. The category is more than moral or mathematical, though it is both. It is metaphysical. It is an appropriate characterization of the trustworthiness of God. It makes the concept of covenant, the constant in all equality, the patterned integrity of all diversity, the one in many, understandable, dependable, authentic, and demonstrable.
35 Without integrity, neither mathematics nor morality could stand. Diversity would dissolve into anarchy, and difference would beget enmity and violence. It was this understanding, so central to Bucky’s thought and life, that endeared him to thousands of students, worldwide. They were sick of duplicity, deception, and contradiction, and their attendant manipulations and exploitive power. They welcomed Bucky’s conviction as beliefs buried within them. His credibility was rooted in integrity, his own and that of his ideas.
36 Generosity
37 Though Bucky speaks litde of this virtue in his writings, it was eloquent in his life. One of the pages of the book Bucky kept at Bear Island for his young visitors every summer, in which they were invited to write what they had learned from their visit, leaps out at me:
38 ‘‘Dear Bucky, Thanks. I learned a little about sailing and a lot about loving.’’
39 His name I have forgotten, but the age was ten, and the sentiment ageless. Bucky felt if the universe was so provident and generous, could we be less as the local manifestation of its regenerative design? For him this was no burdensome obligation or societal imperative. It was the natural expression of who we are and were intended to be. We were lent to be spent. We pay the rent for our space and place, not for possessing, grasping, or holding, but by giving, channeling, releasing in regenerative form our unique inventiveness. His favorite illustration was how the half hitch can inform and pass through any rope like string, so long as it remains loose; but tighten the loop, knot it, and that’s the end of the form. Though I never knew him to say as much, I believe his view of immortality lay in the imperishability of the way in which we let life work through us, giving out and away the energy, and synergy, and integrity, of who we are and what the cosmos intended.
40 Anticipatory
41 Bucky had a marvelous sense of ‘‘fast forward.’’ He seemed always ‘‘ahead of his time.’’ Any biography of Bucky will disclose the remarkable way in which he ‘‘anticipated’’ future events. They were so clear to him he did not think of them as imagination or speculation. They were real, awaiting only actualization. Nor was anticipation purely visionary. His views were grounded in fact, pattern, and cumulative history. His archives, kept personally over the years, augmented here and there by volunteers and staff, were a montage of meaning mirroring nearly a century. His ‘‘World Game,’’ so successfully developed in Philadelphia when Bucky served as a distinguished world scholar/states- man under President Meyerson’s creative support, was soundly rooted in this aggregation of fact-event-resources from which patterned trends and consequences could be seen and anticipated.
42 He saw wealth as created by the regenerative power of the human mind in partnership with resources ever inventive of that technology capable of doing more with less. His Dymaxion revolution and revelation root in this anticipatory turning of problems into opportunity, limited resources into wealth.
43 The future was not a place in space or time, but the actualization of anticipatory events through human invention, and application of design sciences. This is why he remained to the end, with the innocence and wonder of a child, open to the discovery of ever new linkage that held the promise of regenerative principles and their applicability.
44 Doability
45 ‘‘Only the impossible is possible,’’ Bucky never tired of saying, driving home his conviction that ideas were meant to inform action. He was not a pragmatist. He did not believe that the test of the truth of an idea was its doability. On the contrary, in an inverted way, he believed that if you could not think it, you would not do it. Its doability was its thinkability. This sprang from his conviction that it was the grasp of principles, and their intrinsically integrative interrelatedness, that made both knowledge and dependable, transformational action possible. Creative action was not merely the result of its grasp or thinkability, it was part of the dynamic of both grasping and doing.
46 As with discovery of the principle of the lever, after human stumbling over, walking on, encountering the principle at work in fallen trees, load-lifting propensities of nature, to finally grasp its significance carried intrinsically its adaptability and fruitfulness in a wide range of applications for human good. Its adaptation with the wheel to the waterwheel effected a giant revolution in agriculture, in construction, in levered tools of every kind and description.
47 This made Bucky so magical on campuses so devoted to the simonizing of secondhand symbols. As Whitehead had said, ‘‘In the garden of Eden we saw the animals before we named them.’’ The tragedy of modern education is that it learns the names and rarely sees them.
48 The impossible had its fascination for Bucky because of its open-ended invitation to discovery. If an idea was only possible, it was already disposed to become actual, and it remained but to trace out that disposition of probability. But if it was impossible, there were no barriers of probability to deter the free play of anticipatory rehearsal, naive wonder, or unpredictable consequences, or the surprise and delight of finding what is not, or even cannot be, suddenly and surprisingly appear. It made one wonder at Tagore’s wisdom from the East, ‘‘To exist is a perpetual surprise, which is the joy of life.’’ What cannot be through its own self explanation, or any form of necessity, should, indeed, be, is the ultimate surprise. It is not surprising it anchored one of the classical and endurable arguments for God, the cosmological. It further inferred, such an impossible surprise, since not necessitated or anticipated, must be a free act, to be must be an act, not a fact, a verb not a noun!
49 In the end, I suppose, one could say Bucky was the best illustration of both his talk and walk. ‘‘What he was,’’ as Emerson once eloquently remarked, ‘‘shouted so loudly I could not hear a word he said.’’ His very being anchored this thinking, and was the final vindication of his ideas and his life.
50 Bucky’s life was full of ‘‘jitterbug transformation,’’ a kind of dance with pattern but spontaneous, anchored in individuality, never secondhand, yet embracing a whole ever more than the sum of any step or succession of steps. It kept a beat both uniquely its own and yet in some strange way synergistic with the integrity of the others, and generous in affording all others the space, incentive, and opportunity for their own thing. This perpetual movement of pattern and form, extravagant of energy yet inclusive of synergy, to be anticipated but never slavishly copied, generous yet mindful of the integrity of personal responsibility and choice, was how he lived out his days.
51 His call to me was never loud or raucous, never commanding or coercive. It was ever invitational, a call to being, ever becoming. It was, as I said at the beginning, Bucky’s invitation to the University of the Universe. He expected no graduation, nor do I.
52 Comprehensive Designing from Ideas and Integrities
5354The Comprehensive Designer emerges as the answer to the greatest problem ever addressed by mankind: The Human Family now numbering three billion is increasing at an annual rate of three per cent and is trending toward seven billion expected by the end of the second half of this century. Of this number, sixty-five per cent are chronically undernourished, and one third are doomed to early demise due to conditions which could be altered or eliminated within the present scope of technology; specifically, that area of technology comprising the full ramifications of the building arts, which now contains the negatives or blanks which match the lethal factors. Relative to this premise, Jawaharlal Nehru once said in Chicago: ‘‘It is folly to attribute the disquietude of the Orient to ideological pressures.’’ Nehru went on to point out that the deenergized and doomed are prey to any political shift of the wind that might promise arrest of their fate.
55At present all the world’s industrial, or surfaced, processed and reprocessed functional tonnage (the Industrial Logistics) is preoccupied in the service of four tenths of the world’s population, though one hundred per cent are directly or indirectly involved in its procurement, processing and transportation.
56All the politician can do regarding the problem is to take a fraction of that inadequate ratio of supply from one group and apply it to another without changing the over-all ratio. The politician can, of course, recognize and accept the trend rather than oppose it, but this does not accelerate it in adequate degree to arrive at a solution in our day and generation, and, more importantly, before the deadline of the doomed.
57All that money can do is shower paper bills of digits on the conflagration. Relative denominations neither decrease nor increase the velocity of combustion.
58 How and by whom, if at all, may the problem be solved? Scientists are often charged with the task, but scientists as a class (irrespective of their proclivities as individuals) do not function in the comprehensive capacity, they function as specialists in taking the universe apart to isolate and inventory its simplest behavior relationships. Engineers function as invoked specialists in reproducing satisfactory interactions of factors ascertained as ‘‘satisfactory’’ by past experience and a wealth of behavior measurement. Both engineers and politicians would lose their credit from society if they incorporated the unprecedented in wholesale manner.
59 We hear and read frequently in scientific and philosophical journals of the desirability of ways in which problems of the universe may once more be approached by comprehensive and scientific principles.
60 A New Social Initiative
61 There emerges the need for a new social initiative which is not another function of specialization but is an integral of the sum of the produce of all specializations, that is, the Comprehensive Designer.
62 The Comprehensive Designer is preoccupied with anticipation of all men’s needs by translation of the latest inventory of their potentials. Thus he may quickly effect the upping of the performance-per-pound of the world’s industrial logistics in fourfold magnitude through the institution of comprehensive redesign, incorporating all of the present scientific potentials that would otherwise be tapped only for purposes of warfaring, defensively or offensively.
63 In view of our myriad of performance-per-pound-advances of multifold degree (in contrast to percentage degrees) typified by pounds of rubber tire upped in performance from one thousand miles to thirty thousand miles expectancy without poundage increase (yet with complete chemical, though invisible, transformation), or of communication advance from one message to two-hundred-fifty concurrent messages per unit of cross section of copper wire (and both of these multifold advances have been accomplished within a quarter of a century), it is seen as a meager technical problem to consider advancing the over-all efficiency of worldwide industrial and service logistics fourfold (to serve one hundred per cent of the population).
64 Some may tend to underestimate the comprehensive nature of the problem, saying the people are thus starving and we have the land capacity to raise the food. This conception voiced by the theoretical specialist or casual observer is without benefit of logistic experience. It is not just a matter of raising food but getting food to people, anywhere from zero to twenty-five thousand miles distant. And then it is not just a matter of getting food to people zero to twenty-five thousand miles away—it is a matter of getting it there at certain velocities; and it is not just a matter of getting it there at certain velocities, but it is a matter of getting it there on schedules in certain conditions, conditions of nourishing content, palatability and vital preservation.
65 And even then it is not a matter of success concerning all the preceding conditions, for the dumping of a year’s food supply in front of a helpless family huddled on the street-curb is but an unthinkable tragedy. The maggots appear in hours. And once again the continuing energy controls providing progressive freezes, heatings, etc. cannot be effected by refrigerators and stoves dumped in the street along "with a year’s tonnage of food. Obviously, a world continuity of scientific-industrial controls resultant from comprehensive and technical redesign is spelled out as the irreducible minimum of solution.
66 For those who think that this minimum can be obtained through legislative enactment by the politician or by the establishment of new dollar credits, and who are forgetful that the total world tonnage is already preoccupied with service of only forty-four per cent of the world-people, it is to be noted that the economic-statistical approach has been voiced by the press in conjunction with water shortages in the great American cities, such as New York and Los Angeles.
67 These are not problems unique to those cities, but symptomatic of the trend of the great industrial interactions. The economic-statistical solution, voiced by the politicians and the news, proposes further encroachments of the watershed origins through the rerouting of waters otherwise destined to lesser centers.
68 A typical question asked by the Comprehensive Designer is: What do people want the water for? They are using two hundred gallons per day per capita, consuming only one gallon for their vital processes while employing one hundred ninety-nine gallons to dunk themselves, and gadgets, and to act as a liquid conveyor system of specks of dirt to the sea. We note that scientists do not need water to dunk their instruments in, nor industrialists water to soak their machinery in. Are there not superior ways to effect many of the end purposes involving no water at all, and where water is found to be essential, can it not be separated out after its combining functions and systematically recirculated as chemically pure, sterilized, ‘‘sweet’’ and clear, and with low energy expense or even an improved energy balance sheet as a result of comprehensive redesign?
69 The specialist in comprehensive design is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist. He bears the same relationship to society in the new interactive continuities of worldwide industrialization that the architect bore to the respective remote independencies of feudal society.
70 The architect of four hundred years ago was the comprehensive harvester of the potentials of the realm. The last four hundred years have witnessed the gradual fade-out of feudalism and the gradual looming of what will eventually be full of world-industrialization—when all people will produce for all people in an infinity of interacting specialized continuities. The more people served by industrialization, the more efficient it becomes.
71 Positive Constituents of Industry
72 In contrast to the many negative factors inherent in feudalism (such as debt, fear, ignorance and an infinite variety of breakdowns and failures inevitable to dependence on the vagaries of Nature), industrialization trends to ‘‘accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative,’’ first by measuring Nature and converting the principles discovered in the measurements to mastery and anticipation of the vagaries. Day and night, winter and summer, fair weather or bad, time and distance are mastered. Productive continuities may be maintained and forwardly scheduled. There are three fundamental constituents of industry; all are positive.
73 The first consists of the aspect of energy as mass, inventoried as the ninety- two regenerative chemical elements which constitute earth and its enclosing film of alternating liquid-gaseous sequence.
74 The second fundamental component of industry consists of energy but in a second and two-fold aspect—that is: (a) energy as radiation and (b) energy as gravitation, both of which we are in constant receipt of from the infinite cosmic fund. The third and most important component of the industrial equation is the intellect factor, which secrets a continually amplifying advantage in experience-won knowledge.
75 Complex-component No. 1 cannot wear out. The original chaotic disposition of its ninety-two regenerative chemical elements is gradually being converted by the industrial principle to orderly separation and systematic distribution over the face of earth in structural or mechanical arrangements of active or potential leverage-augmentation. Component No. 2, cosmic energy, cannot be exhausted.
76 Constituent No. 3 not only improves with use but is interactively selfaugmenting.
77 Summarizing, components No. 1 and No. 2 cannot be lost or diminished and No. 3 increases, with the net result inherent gain. Inherent gain is realized in physical advantage of forward potential (it cannot be articulated backwards; it is mathematically irreversible). Thus, industrial potential is schematically directional and not randomly omni-directional. Thus, the ‘‘life’’ activity, as especially demonstrated by man, represents an anti-entropic phase of the transformations of non-losable universal energy.
78 The all-positive principle of industry paradoxically is being assimilated by
79 man only through emergent expedients, and only in emergency because of his preponderant fixation in the direction of tradition. Backing up into his future, man romantically appraises the emergent dorsal sensations in the negatively parroted terms of his ancestors’ misadventures.
80 The essence of the principle of industry is the principle of synergy, which I have explained in an earlier chapter. This principle is manifested both in the inorganic and organic. The alloying of chrome and nickel and steel provides greater tensile strength than that possessed by any of its constituents or by the constituents in proportional addition. Three or more persons by specialized teamwork can do work far in excess of that of three independendy operating men. Surprisingly, and most contradictory to the concept of feudal ignorance, the industrial chain’s strength is not predicated on its weakest link. So strong is the principle that it grows despite a myriad of superficially failing links! In fact, there are no continuous ‘‘links’’ in industry or elsewhere in the universe because the atomic components are, interiorly, spatially discontinuous.
81 The strength of ‘‘industry’’ as with the strength of the ‘‘alloy’’ occurs through the concentric enmeshment of the respective atoms. It is as if two non-identical constellations of approximately the same number of stars each were inserted into the same space, making approximately twice as many stars, but none touching due to the difference in patterns. The distances between stars would be approximately halved. It is the same with alloyed atoms whose combined energetic cohesion increases as the second power of the relative linear proximities of the component parts. Though the parts do not ‘‘touch,’’ their mass cohesive dynamic attraction follows the gravitational law of pro- portionment to second power of the distance apart of centers. Therefore, alloying strength is not additive arithmetically but is advantaged by gravity, which, as Newton discovered, is inversely proportional to the ‘‘square’’ of the distance apart.
82 Man has now completed the plumbing and has installed all the valves to turn on infinite cosmic wealth. Looking to the past he wails, ‘‘How can I afford to turn on the valve? If I turn it on, somebody’s going to have to pay for it!’’ He forgets that the bill has been prepaid by men through all time, especially by their faithfully productive investments of initiative. The plumbing could not have been realized except through absolute prepayment of intellectually organized physical work, invested in the inherent potentials of Nature.
83 Epochal Transformations
84 Not only is man continually doing more with less—which is a principle of trend which we will call ephemeralization, a corollary of the principle of synergy—but he is also demonstrating certain other visible trends of an epochal nature. Not only does he continue to increase in literacy but he affords more years of more advanced study to more people. As man becomes master of the machine—and machines are introduced to carry on every kind of physical work with increased precision, effectiveness and velocity—his skilled crafts, formerly intermittently patronized, graduate from labor status to continuity of employment as research and development technicians. As man is progressively disemployed as a quantity-production muscle-and-reflex machine, he becomes progressively re-employed in the rapidly increasing army of research and development—or of production-inaugurating engineering—or of educational and recreational extension, as a plowed-back increment of industrialization.
85 Product and service production of any one item of industry trends to manipulation by one man for the many through push-button and dial systems. While man trends to increasing specialized function in anticipatory and positive occupations of production, he also trends to comprehensive function as consumer. Because the principle of industry improves as the number of people it serves is increased, it also improves in terms of the increase of the number of functions of the individual to which it is applied. It also improves in terms of its accelerated use.
86 Throughout the whole history of industrialization to date, man has taken with alacrity to the preoccupation of the specialist on the production side of the ledger; but the amplifications of the functions of the individual as a comprehensive consumer have been wrenched and jerked and suffered into tentative and awkward adoption in the mumbo-jumbo and failure complex of obsolete feudal economics. Up to yesterday man was unaware of his legacy of infinite cosmic wealth. Somewhere along the line society was convinced that wealth was emanating from especially ordained mortals, to whom it should be returned periodically for mystical amplification. Also with feudal fixation man has looked to the leaders of the commercial or political states for their socioeconomic readjustments—to the increasingly frequent ‘‘emergencies.’’
87 Throughout these centuries of predominant ignorance and vanity, the inherently comprehensive-thinking artist has been so competent as to realize that his comprehensive thoughts would only alienate him from the economic patronage of those who successfully exploited each backing up into the future. The exploiters, successively successful, have attempted in vain to anchor or freeze the dynamic expansion at the particular phase of wealth generation which they had come to monopolize.
88 The foolhardy inventors and the forthright prospectors in humble tappings of greater potentials have been accounted the notable failures. Every industrial success of man has been built on a foundation of vindictive denouncement of the founders.
89 Thus the comprehending artist has learned to sublimate his comprehensive proclivities and his heretic forward-looking, toward engagement of the obviously ripening potentials on behalf of the commonwealth. The most successful among the artists are those who have effected the comprehensive ends by indirection and progressive disassociations. So skillful have the artists of the last centuries been that even their aspiring apprentices have been constrained to celebrate only the non-utilitarian aspects of the obvious vehicles adroitly employed by the effective artists to convey their not-so-obvious but all- important burden.
90 Thus the legend and tradition of a pure art or a pure science as accredited preoccupations have grown to generally accepted proportion. The seemingly irrelevant doings of the pure scientist of recent decades exploded in the face of the tradition of pure mathematical abstraction at Alamogordo. No one could have been more surprised than the rank and file of professional pure scientists. The results were implicit in the undertakings of artist-scientists whose names are in the dim forefront or are anonymous in the limbo of real beginnings. How great and exultant their secret conceptioning must have been!
91 The Time Has Come
92 The time has arrived for the artist to come out from behind his protective coloring of adopted abstractions and indirections. World society, frustrated in its reliance upon the leaders of might, is ready to be about-faced to step wide- eyed into the obvious advantages of its trending. We will soon see the emergence of comprehensive training for specialists in the husbandry of specialists and the harvesting of the infinite commonwealth.
93 Will the Comprehensive Designer, forthrightly emergent, be as forthrighdy accepted by the authorities of industrialization and state? If they are accepted, what are the first-things-first to which they must attend?
94 The answer to the first question is yes. They will be accepted by the industrial authority because the latter has recendy shifted from major preoccupation with exploiting original resource to preoccupation with keeping the ‘‘wheels,’’ which they manage turning, now that the original inventory of wheels, or tools in general, has been realized from original resource. Though original resource-exploiters still have great power, that power will diminish as the mines now existing above grade, in highly concentrated use forms (yet in rapidly obsoleting original design), become the preponderant source of the annual need. Severe acceleration in the trend to increase of performance per pound of invested material now characterizes all world-industry. With no important increase in the rate of annual receipt from original mines, the full array of mechanics and structure requisite to amplifying the industrial complex, from its present service to approximately one-fourth the world’s population to serve all the world’s population, may be accomplished by the scrap ‘‘mined’’ from the progressively obsoleting structures and mechanics.
95 World-industrial management will be progressively dependent upon the Comprehensive Designer to accelerate the turning of his wheels by design acceleration. Each time the wheels go round, the infinite energy wealth of cosmos is impounded within the greater receptive capacities of the ninety-two regenerative-element inventory of earth, and those who manage the wheels can make original entry on their books of the new and expanding wealth increments even as the farmer gains cosmic energy wealth in his seasoned cycles.
96 An answer as to whether the designer will be accredited by political leadership has been made. Political leadership in both world camps has announced to the world of potential consumers their respective intents to up the standard of living of all world peoples by ‘‘converting the high technical potential to account through design.’’
97 Only the designer can accomplish this objective. Legislative mandate and dollar diplomacy cannot buy the realization.
98 As first of the first things, the designer must provide new and advanced standards of living for all peoples of the world. He must progressively house and re-house three billion people in establishments of advanced physical control. The mechanically serviced sheltering must be a continuity of roofs, stationary and mobile, sufficient to allow for man’s increasing convergent- divergent interactions of transciency or residence, of work, play or development, interconnecting every center of the world and penetrating to autonomous dwelling facility of the most advanced standard, even in the remotest of geography. The logistics of this greatest phase of industrialization must impound cosmic-energy wealth, within the inventory of ninety-two chemical elements, to magnitudes, not only undreamed of, but far more importantly, adequate to the advancing needs of all men. Implicit is man’s emancipation from indebtedness to all else but intellect.
99 The Very Reverend James Parks Morton was until his recent retirement the Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, the largest (though unfinished) Gothic church in the world. It is significant that he hosted the celestial as well as the cerebral. He took the whole world into his arms, welcoming ideas from many, and literally opened up the church to all the city's ethnic and social groups, creating a vital church where God is more than a hyperbole.
100 Morton has hosted such "livingry" as the famous Poet's Corner, major art exhibitions, and performances of portions of the musicals Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. And he hosted Philippe Petit, the man who walks on air, as an artist in residence at St. John's. Petit is the man who tightroped-walked the Eiffel Tower and performed on a cable stretched between the Twin Towers.of the World Trade Center in New York City, to the delight of jaded New Yorkers.
101 The unfinished towers of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine challenged Bucky Fuller to design an icosahedron tower for the crossing of the neo-Gothic structure in 1978. Morton presented a special program, held at the cathedral, for the Centennial Celebration of the life of R. Buckminster Fuller in 1995. God is omnipresent and omnidirectional; somewhere there is a halo. Morton presents his memories of Bucky as a series of epiphanies.