6 Dymaxion Messiah
2From his silence, he emerged talking of everything at once, and was barely intelligible. Amid the hubbub, a publicist hired by Marshall Field’s to give focus to a Fuller exhibit coined the word Dymaxion, a useful word resonant with suggestion. It became Fuller’s property, and for decades his trademark. It combined parts of words the publicist heard him use frequently: dynamism and maximum, and (for some reason) ions. If we should want a working definition, Bucky, who long ago decided what the word ought to mean, will tell us that Dymaxion means getting the maximum performance from the technical knowledge we have: the most from the most, which also (come to think of it) means the most from the least. (Since your knowledge is never enough, it is always a minimum.) If we never hear the definition, still the word has a fine modern sound. It has probably scared as often as it has lured.
3 Everyone, like the publicist, heard parts of words. From a nonstop presentation in St. Louis, the American Institute of Architects heard the words mass production, and blanched. Bucky had come there to make them a gift of his patents, and instead heard them pass a resolution stonily opposed to ‘‘peas-in-a-pod-like reproducible designs.’’ (A few months later, he remarked, St. Louis tornadoes made headlines by toppling the kind of brick walls architects designed.) Other people heard fragments about fourdimensional prosaic and harmonic integrity, and went away muttering. The editor of Nation’s Business sent back an article as incomprehensible to ‘‘most of our 300,000 simpleminded business readers.’’ (Nation’s Business was the organ of the United States Chamber of Commerce. Was ‘‘simpleminded,’’ Bucky wondered aloud, the Chamber’s considered opinion of its members?) An architect who had blinked at one magazine article wondered if there existed a single person (other than the typesetter) who had gotten through it, or would, or could. Was Mr. Fuller’s welter of words ‘‘due to his hexagonal researches having fractured his intellectual processes?’’ Another questioned his knowledge of engineering principles, and thought his view of human nature ‘‘far from rational.’’
4 The Total Thinking was simply too much. We have been decades getting used to his separate themes, and now that we have them---mobility, pollution, industrialization, recycling, waste, finite resources, planetary brotherhood--- we are apt to wonder if they can be reconciled. Men stake out, each one, a single theme, and decry one another, and are apt to decry Fuller too: as a spokesman for smokestacks, if they are conservationists, and as a Bolshevik if their cause is industrial.
5 We need not be surprised that his first writings are unknown. Their expression had a midway’s randomness of emphasis. A sentence would gain momentum like a cast-off wheel, bounding down ideological hillsides, entangling random clotheslines, frightening the chickens. The next sentence seemed to start t’other side of the creek, and zoom away out of sight while straw hats spun. In 1928, his first manifesto, 30,000 words long, sought to orient its readers with a brief introduction: . . in it Lord East and Lady West are married, with much necessary solemn music and jazz symphony---the various ceremonies, civil and otherwise, are progressively blended. Look sharply.’’ Since it turned out to be, more or less, a tract on housing, this introduction did not really introduce. Moreover, having had to pay the printer himself, he had economized by combining minuscule type with lines so long the eye gets lost in mid-scan. With half a novel’s wordage crammed onto twenty-eight pages, the pamphlet was as unreadable physically as it was psychically. It went off to 200 recipients, ‘‘deemed to be a fully representative group of altruistic thinkers.’’
6 This work, first called 4-D and later Timelock, contains all Fuller in potential, but obscurely, like a cloud of gas just condensing into a galaxy. No cliche was eschewed, no swatch of jargon. ‘‘One of the most impressive of recent ‘about faces’ of the medical profession, that is amply justifying itself in its results, is the new school of baby doctoring, very broadly based on the ‘stitch in time’ or progress by creation theory.’’ Stumbling through sentences no more graceful than that, we are apt to feel that worse prose is barely conceivable. Yet, paradoxically, inescapably, it is energized, end to end. Encumbered by deadweight, still the sentences move.
7 What moved them was the governing intuition he was later to identify as belief in synergy, a word he did not have available in those years. Start with parts, and when they come together they will interact unexpectedly. Professor Newcomb, starting with parts---existing metals, existing forces---had predicted the immediate future of aeronautics, and gotten it wrong. He was fooled by an unforeseen union of gas engine, bicycle and box kite. Someone attending to man’s evolving mobility---foot, horseback, railway train, then the lightweight bicycle---might have felt confident that man would next be flying, though unable to guess how. Only by starting with wholes can you hope not to be fooled by synergy. This means identifying very large trends, and ultimately starting with the Universe, which is not at all remote but all about you. Starting there, though, you may easily sound windy, and Timelock’s effort at Whole-System rhetoric contained large pockets of imprecision and bluff, as though to locate what would need to be ordered later.
8 Another paradox was the pervading altruism, propelled as it was---and no one could fail to sense this---by a highly mobilized ego. Bucky’s is a curiously innocent egocen- tricity. To watch him sign, date and pocket the scrap of paper on which he has sketched nothing more arcane than a triangle is to see in the septuagenarian the undying boy. In childhood, while his brother was collecting stones, he had collected pieces of paper with his name on them: letters, postcards, pictures, bills, programs, school reports. They carried their collections back and forth between Milton and Bear Island, and Bucky characteristically remarks that his, consisting of paper, was the less bulky.
9 In 1917, he made what he now calls a Grand Strategy Decision, which was simply to throw away nothing of this kind. He would even file it chronologically, as (mark the conversion into altruism) a unique document of the life of one twentieth-century man. (If anyone, anyone at all, anyone in the seventeenth-century, say, had kept Everything, what a window for historians! We should be still more grateful than we are to Pepys.) By 1960 his Dymaxion Chronofile had amounted to 250 volumes, 80,000 letters, 3,500 clippings, innumerable hearsay reports of uncollected items. He has graphed the frequency of news items about himself, ‘‘a wave pattern of ever increasing magnitudes, with the valleys never going quite as low as previously and the peaks going ever higher.’’ He has smoothed the graph and obtained a ski-shaped curve, almost horizontal for many lean years, but rising at last in the accelerating-acceleration profile. This means that Buckminster Fuller is becoming ever more explicitly a part of everyone’s experience of living in the twentieth-century, and we need not feel superior to the satisfaction this gives him.
10 In a similar way, the Timelock pamphlet both flaunted and concealed its author. Its first words, in large type, were ‘‘STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL---property of 4D.’’ No other name was visible. Yet four pages in we find the unobtrusive line, ‘‘B. Fuller, 739 Belmont Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.’’ Respondents, after all, had to know where to address their replies.
11 ‘‘4D’’ was a piece of mystification. It stood for the rumored Einsteinian Fourth Dimension, and seemed to conceal a ‘‘4-D Control Syndicate,’’ which possessed many solutions to the world’s problems and proposed to release them at times it judged appropriate. This pamphlet was the first installment, the treatise on the House. ‘‘The authorship and directing control of 4-D is and will be kept anonymous,’’ lest criticism be deflected from the ideas to the author.
12 In cold fact, the ‘‘4-D Control Syndicate’’ was Bucky Fuller, working furiously in a Chicago slum and sustained by the trust of various people his enthusiasm or his talk persuaded.
13 The need to seem numerous and organized is understandable. He had dreamed up nothing less than an industry, and needed the kind of capital that wouldn’t come to ‘‘B. Fuller.’’ The word Syndicate, though, suggests a curious whim, conveying as it does from that city and from those times a whiff rather more of gangland than of the boardroom. A gunman of Capone’s also lived at 840 Belmont, and often helped Anne carry out the garbage. Did Bucky mean his smoke signals to hint at the Outlaw Area?
14 They must have seemed smoky indeed, to men with T-squares and briefcases. ‘‘The spirit is not temporal,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Mind is of the spiritual; the brain is temporal.’’ This was no casual distinction. A decade later mind had become the phantom captain, and brain an electrochemical resource. Forty years after Timelock, in the 1967 Harvey Cushing Oration, Fuller was expounding with all his resources of analogy the distinction between Mind and Brain to 2,000 members of the American Association of Neurosurgeons. That piece of ‘‘thinking-out-loud’’ underlies the longest poem in his 1972 Intuition.
15 ‘‘No time may be lost in meditation,’’ he continued, ‘‘so long as it involves earnest search for the betterment of mankind, beyond which no conscious thought may go. This is a strange but absolute truth.’’ Scattered through the treatise are many such riddling sentences, clear now that we’ve heard his talk of the 1960’s and 1970’s but surely Sibylline then.
16 He mentioned Margaret Fuller, and Emerson, and his own ‘‘protracted isolation for mental research,’’ and described the ‘‘4-D House’’ (we’ll look at that later), and suggested, here and there, three governing principles:
17 ---Truth is one.
18 ---The unborn are uncorrupted.
19 ---Nature governs design.
20 We can look at these separately.
- 1.
- Truth is one. Since truth is one, all sincerity tends in the same direction. Hence there is no need to fear ‘‘pure individualism.’’ This recurrent American premise has sei- dom been stated. The usual statements about Individualism affirm that it glories in ferocious competition, which weeds out themes having low survival value. This version, called ‘‘Social Darwinism,’’ figures in intellectual histories as one of the less lovely by-products of the evolutionary vision.
21 But Bucky Fuller’s idea of the Individual is not Gould- ian or Vanderbiltian, but Emersonian. He believes that Character is by definition disinterested, and that conflict does not arise unless through selfishness, a corruption of character. Emerson toward the end of his essay on ‘‘Civilization’’ directs our gaze to ‘‘the constellation of cities which animate and illustrate the land,’’ and invites us to notice ‘‘how little the government has to do with their daily life, how self-helped and self-directed all families are.’’ He perceived---this was about 1861---‘‘knots of men in purely natural societies, societies of trade, of kindred blood, of habitual hospitality, house and house, man acting on man by weight of opinion, of longer or better- directed industry.’’ Moreover, ‘‘each virtuous and gifted person . . . lives affectionately with scores of excellent people who are not known far from home.’’ But no one feels it necessary to institutionalize this affection, virtue, and cooperation; that is what Emerson means by the minimal role of the government.
22 A brave dream gone? We may wonder if it was ever real. Yet Emerson does not claim to be predicting it, he claims to see it before him. Let us bear in mind, for later examination, the fact that Bucky Fuller believed in it, and continues to. That may have been what the man meant who found his view of human nature not rational.
23 Communities, so structured, are metaphysical, not geographical. If I can get to Munich in the time it once took a man on foot to reach the horizon, there is no reason why the people with whom I feel community should not be distributed world-wide (and in fact I have friends in Munich, and friends across town). The nuclear neighborhood was natural when place defined community of interest: on the frontier, on the waterfront, in the village where men use one another’s produce. But, ‘‘The world,’’ Bucky says today, ‘‘is my backyard.’’ As long ago as 1927 he had perceived that the very houses might as well be picked up and moved. Decades later the vogue for mobile homes has endorsed him, though they are still cramped to the width of a highway lane. He envisaged air delivery.
- 2.
- The unborn are uncorrupted. Nevertheless if they are born into our environment they will turn out like us. That is how the sins of the fathers are transmitted: surroundings which model a deficient imagination impress its deficiencies upon the impressionable. The jailer’s son believes in jails. The slum child grows up coping with slums. Squares live in cubes, cubes shape the next generation of squares. The house is the most immediate environment, and hovering in Bucky’s mind midway between metaphor and reality, the house became his prime theme when he talked of regenerating man. ‘‘Children are born naturally to truth or reason. Protect them in it mechanically and they need never lose it. The new industrially produced home will accomplish this.’’
24 Mechanically and industrially: those words can alarm, in that context. Something possessed him now and then, sweeping him past caution, even rhetorical caution. He waxed Messianic about the House. It was folly, for example, to hire an architect and bid him express your individuality: that way lay ‘‘aesthetics,’’ ‘‘the snobbish gymnastics of the formula champions.’’ That way lay cast-iron deer, fake Tudor, fake Cape Cod, fake affirmations about the unique self. (All that was in fact affirmed was affluence.) Think of the man, Bucky said, who must wear a special shoe: we do not call him individual, we call him deformed.
25 Being in the business of tailoring ‘‘individualism,’’ the A.I.A. had naturally recoiled from ‘‘peas-in-a-pod-like reproducible designs’’: as though the pea were not a design triumph, as though any two phantom captains did not manipulate nearly identical bodies.
26 Were houses mass-produced, where would architects’ commissions go? But we hardly think to impute to them self-interest, so strongly are we conditioned against the phrase ‘‘mass-produced.’’
27 Yet books are mass-produced.* Milton was not offended by the sameness of any two copies of Paradise Lost. Sheet music is mass-produced. Prints are mass-produced. The writer, the composer, the designer, each brings his prototype to the best perfection he can manage, and then entrusts it to a factory. Indeed by the 1960’s a constructivist in steel could instruct the factory by telephone. Such things shape our intellectual environment, and our bodies too are produced by automation.
28 The refined prototype, mass-produced: that is nature’s way with trees and cats and human frames, and the poet’s way and the shipbuilder’s. The prototype works as well as can be managed, and gradually, as parameters are refined, designs from different industrial drawing boards will converge on a norm. Airplanes have evolved like that. If you can tell a Boeing 707 from a Douglas DC-8 or a Convair 990, you are a connoisseur indeed. ‘‘Material affairs can be handled in but one best mechanical way.’’ So the house should work, and given working houses, ‘‘even localism and nationalism will soon disappear.’’ (What hubris!) The working house frees the life it shelters;
29 • Thirty years after Bucky had noticed this (Timelock, p. 13), it still seemed shocking when Marshall McLuhan reiterated it. neutral itself, it should foster individuality. The house meant to ‘‘express’’ individuality conceals its absence.
30 This trust in the benign environment was a nineteenthcentury theme, its orchestrations thoroughly Romantic. The romantic who believes in forests and in nature is trusting to a fit environment to free the soul.
31 Romanticism recoiled from ‘‘the busy hum of cities.’’ So did Bucky Fuller, but not---save for Bear Island---into the arms of untouched Nature. He thought the busy hum of cities not natural, indeed declared that cities were obsolete. They had been herding places for animal man, or ‘‘ignorant mob protection against unknown foes.’’ They were also agglomerations peculiar to a primitive stage of world transport, when raw materials were unloaded at docks, warehoused near the point of unloading, and processed near the warehouses. Hence the jam-packing of New York, and the building of tenements, to house workers close to where their work was. (They are human storage-bins now, for the economic overflow.)
32 ‘‘It is surely no love for work that fills a New York subway so full that it is necessary to employ muscular guards to literally shove men and women into the cars by placing their feet against the backsides of these so-called ‘patrons.’ ’’ It was no love for work; it was stark mechanical necessity, now obsolescent. ‘‘The great city, necessary before transportation and distribution, is losing its advantage. It will have lost it all with the advent of the industrially built home.’’
33 For such a home would be ‘‘natural,’’ one phase of nature being man’s valving of cosmic laws. Valving laws, not fighting them; especially not committing one’s time to ‘‘a rotting thing of wood, built after a billion different patterns, two-thirds of the cost of which is labor, for which there is practically no resale value in the material.’’ It
34 DYMAXION MESSIAH | 173 meant building according to the design principles of nature.
- 3.
- Nature governs design. This was the third theme, and in 1928 the most chaotic. Behind a rhetoric of spacetime, expanding spheres, fourth dimensionality, we may detect a governing intuition and a good deal of bluff. It would be twenty years before the principles of Energetic Geometry were statable with any precision. When they were clear at last, they yielded Tensegrity and the Geodesic Dome. So Bucky was finally vindicated.
35 But in 1928, having at his disposal neither the tetrahedron nor synergy, he zeroed in on the fashionable new theme, Time. We were to conceive of Time in the manner of a sphere expanding, like the sphere of sound around a man who has just shouted. The automobile engine ordered a time ballet, its expanding spheres of pressure in a timed sequence impinging on metals whose time-line was far slow'er. The interaction meant ‘‘a transition into motion, as we can perceive of it, within the material or conscious sphere.’’ Is the word sphere deliberate there? The sentence sounds cranky. Others sounded still crankier: ‘‘As long as we have time, we may have as many powers of time, times the whole or angular segmentations of the sphere, as we may wish. So-called gravity is but the expansion of this earth sphere keeping up with the units of nonamplified time-control. As we control time, so may we fly off the earth.’’
36 Here we catch one indigenous American accent, that of the crank mouthing his words of power. Every mathematician receives now and then long unintelligible treatises written like that, offering to solve the universe. The authors are commonly quasiliterate, solitary, Messianic. They have not hitherto been understood, they claim, and this is a willful refusal of the power structure, guarding
37 its expensive monopolies. In a raw land whose artists make homemade worlds, the solitary is very apt to suppose that all truth is accessible through some single aperture, now located by him. His rituals are not traditional, like those o£ witchcraft; their arcana are novel. Nor is his style, like that of the European eccentric, a patterned deviation from a norm it acknowledges; it is devised from the inside out, the projection of some Idea.
38 In Poe’s time a man named Symmes 1 announced that the earth was made up of five concentric spheres, with huge openings at the two poles. This was hard to refute before men had been to the poles. Late in the century a certain Teed demonstrated with much mathematics and even experiment the proposition that we live, cosmos and all, inside a hollow earth, the concavity of which we mistake for convexity. That gets rid of infinite spaces very nicely. Other cranks get rid of complex mathematics, sustained by the premise that nature always works simply. Some dispense almost wholly with mathematics.
4041„ gMlM2 . £ ,
42 F = ■■ --- gives many of us less
43 insight into gravity than the vivid statement of a crank named Gilette, that it is ‘‘the kicked back nut of the screwing bolt of radiation.’’ The unwary might take that detail for something of Bucky’s. Or this: ‘‘Any formation moves in a multiple direction according to the movements of many increasingly greater formations, each depending upon the greater formation for direction and upon various changes caused by counteracting influences of Suction and Pressure in different proportions.’’ This last is from the explanation by Alfred W. Lawson, founder of Lawsonomy, of how movement can be described after we have discarded the unnecessary concept of energy. Yet Lawson, who also set out to reform the economic system and the educational system, was not impeded by his crankery from designing, building and flying the world’s first passenger airliner. In 1908, he also coined the word aircraft.
44 Such rainmakers have abounded in America, cheek by jowl with the sellers of wooden nutmegs and the decipherers of Shakespeare’s epitaph. Their systems empower them to pronounce on many topics, they frequently have stocks of invented words, and they burn with the need to evangelize. They resemble American geniuses so closely that the inattentive cannot distinguish the species. Genius may overlap crankery, even charlatanry---think of Poe. Or the genius will pass through a crank phase en route to self-command, or will lapse into crankery after he has matured. It is like the way the vector equilibrium finds and loses stable states.
45 Why American Crank and American Genius should be so closely akin no doubt partly derives from a peculiar quality of American civilization. It is a notably verbal civilization, bound together not by local stabilities but by shared understandings which discussion may modify. Talk, which won’t modify an Englishman’s Englishry, may turn an American 180 degrees, and he’ll often protect this remarkable vulnerability by making antiintellectual noises. So the reformer’s tactic is to modify what somebody else believes. Citizenship is virtually defined by allegiance to a Constitution, which incorporates a Preamble, seven Articles with subsections, and a growing list of Amendments. The candidate for naturalization is supposed to demonstrate that he understands this document, which means that the very process of Americanization entails catechistic learning. The meaning of various sentences in the Constitution is subject to continual debate. The ritual American conversation commences with the question, what do you think of something. The town meeting was an indigenous unit of polity, people saying what they thought and sometimes hearing what visitors thought.
46 On sheets of paper, weighing every phrase, the Founding Fathers specified a New World, and nothing less than a world has been ever since a natural unit of American thought. What other people would have reached for the moon? No other people worries so much about schools, where the world itself, not merely the three R’s, is daily shaped anew in many million new minds. No other people spends so many years in classrooms, or listens to so many lectures. So the crank comes by his evangelical habits naturally, and as for the genius, he is expected to teach. The standard way of finding him an income is to find him a teaching job. Gertrude Stein, irritated by a fellow American in Paris, dismissed him as ‘‘a village explainer, all right if you were a village, but if not, not.’’ She too was apt to treat callers like villages. It is a national failing.
47 Had Timelock's author died in 1930, Timelock would exist, if at all, as a prime piece of crankery, tied up with the legend of a man who was never really educated, failed in business, and emerged from seclusion with a barely intelligible scheme for saving the world with prefabricated houses. Since he is still with us forty-five years later, loaded with fame and honors and deferred to, we can read Timelock (if we can find a copy) as a blurry first sketch, and also wonder what saved him from the crank’s destiny.
48 We may note that Bucky had not the generic crank’s capacity for being satisfied with the sound of his own first thoughts, nor the crank’s disinclination to learn more than he knows. So in the next few years he filled in many of the scribbled areas with sequences better thought out. Within a decade the man who had babbled of ‘‘elemental spheres of the human body,’’ their ‘‘relatively grouped samples’’ giving off ‘‘a constant friction heat of 98.6 degrees,’’ was explaining scientific concepts with authority to the readers of Fortune. That is not the crank’s vector, which points into deeper obscurity.
49 Bucky also understood that to simplify, clarify, you may have to complicate things a good deal first. The indivisible point of Euclid, much controverted in Greece, proved to be a fructive complication. Taken by itself, it could sustain weeks of discussion, but a whole system of thought could be drawn out of it. Newton, to write the gravitational equation, had to invent the calculus, and also had to introduce a grave complication, one he shrank from, force acting at a distance. He could not say how such a force might operate, and postulating it was a very bold step. The crank does not take such courageous steps: he follows the declivities of his mania downward. His energy is rhetorical, not conceptual. And Bucky Fuller, not content to burble of spheres, worked out the details of his Energetic Geometry, which led to his map and his domes.
50 Still, the rhetorical energy survives, and the sense of mission and the operational sweep. So does the faith that, like the parts of his whole-world map, all his concerns abut on one another, being after all each of them segments of the whole world. Many of his later discourses are like articulate and detailed expansions of one blurred hasty phrase or another in Timelock, which took all human problems as its province. His way of thinking has not really changed since then.
51 For synergy, a word he didn’t know in 1928, puts sharply a principle he already sensed, that it is always unsafe to start from anything less than the best Whole-Systems grasp we can manage. (‘‘Dig Wholes,’’ reads a sign in the Menlo Park, California, Whole Earth Truck Store, and on the back cover of The Last Whole Earth Catalog we find a NASA photograph of the whole earth, captioned, ‘‘We can’t put it together. It is together.’’) To put parts together is almost certainly to add up a sum that is not the answer ---Professor Newcomb’s mistake.
52 So Bucky starts with the biggest picture he can manage, the Universe itself. That is why he seldom answers questions briefly; questions pertain to details and subassemblies. ‘‘After dinner,’’ an intelligent journalist recalls, ‘‘I began asking Fuller some questions. Did he think there was still time to rescue the earth from pollution? Did he put any store in the ecology movement? What could be done to end racism?’’ And, ‘‘Fuller did not avoid these questions, but he did not quite answer them, either.’’
53 What he has to say is not the sum of such answers, for the same reason that reality is not the sum of such questions. Even human problems are not the sum of such questions. That is the political fallacy. Draw up a list of problems; devise a list of solutions; implement them; and see where it gets you (besides elected). Decide that racial imbalance in schools is a problem; determine that bussing children to unbalanced schools is a solution; then worry about the next problem, massive resistance to bussing.
54 Let’s see how Bucky Fuller approaches racism.
55 He notes that if you take his whole-earth map (be patient just a minute) and ask what determines human distribution, you come down chiefly to temperature gradients. This doesn’t mean gradations of heat, because most places get as hot as most other places. It means gradations of cold. ‘‘The difference is, how cold does it get? And the colder it gets the more annual variation in temperature you have.’’ That’s what race is, adaptation to temperature swings.
56 Mark the map with bands of color which signify how cold it gets where---this is how the standard Dymaxion Map is marked; apply to it (Bucky once did this) little dots of Helena Rubenstein pigments that match local skin tones, and behold: ‘‘A simple thing. The colder it gets, the lighter, and the hotter, the darker.’’ He can also say why.
57 He sweeps off into one of his time-lapse overviews of history. ‘‘You find the population of the United States going right along the freezing line until the Civil War, when it started going mildly northward as man became master of the cold and could exist north of the freezing line for the first time.’’ This freezing line was where men could get ice to preserve food and yet be warm in the summer to harvest, and almost 95 percent of humanity has arranged itself to live within 1,000 miles of the freezing line.
58 What about races, then? ‘‘People came up on land from the water, and small tribes got isolated following their sheep. They could use the sheepskins to make themselves clothing, and that permitted them to go into cold places, under their tents, off into scattered little tribes, isolated from other tribes for thousands of years. What we call a nation is a group of human beings who have become isolated over thousands of years.’’ And the most adaptable, who are also the most powerful, ‘‘tend to want to make babies with others of the same type. Grandfathers wind up marrying their granddaughters.’’ So survival characteristics get inbred. Russia had 148 different nations, with their languages, their physiques: virtual subraces. ‘‘We find the same thing in Africa. And great inbreeding is still going on there in very tiny little groups.’’
59 Q.E.D. ‘‘I’m absolutely convinced that there’s no such thing as race. We simply have groups isolated over long
60 180 | BUCKY periods, highly inbred and making their differences from others into a virtue. Sad, but highly informative.’’
61 All right, skin types, this is news to no ethnologist. What about differences in racial temperament?
62 ‘‘The colder it gets, the more annual variation in temperature you have. And the more variation, the more differences of conditions you have to adjust to. Therefore, the more man invents to be able to persist in that area.’’ To cross Lake Victoria in Africa (mean low, 68 degrees) men invented boats. To cross Lake Baikal in Siberia (mean low, far subzero) they invented boats for summer, sleds and skates for winter.
63 ‘‘Not that the Siberians were the more inventive, they simply had more occasion to do inventing. The northerly areas were the natural, necessary areas for industrialization to occur first. It masters the temperature so you can go into the cold, then develops air conditioning so you can endure the heat. Now that you can control the heat, industrialization is spreading southward.’’
64 Back to the nub: ‘‘Groups isolated over long periods, highly inbred and making their differences from others into a virtue.’’ So racial imbalance in schools is not the problem. Making superficial difference into a virtue, that is the problem. As to how America came to contain those blacks compared to whom lighter folk feel virtuous, Bucky recalls the splendid buildings he saw, still standing, at Delos in the Aegean. It had been a rich place; Delos was that world’s slave-trading headquarters. ‘‘And the slaves were always produced by warring, with the prisoners simply put into the slave market.’’ (War ended Delos itself. One day Mithridates’ admiral massacred all the inhabitants.)
65 ‘‘But gradually it became obvious that the ones who wore the least clothing were the least impeded, became the
66 strongest, and made the most valuable slaves.’’ Clothing, therefore temperature again, and the pigment that goes with temperature. ‘‘Gradually the black became the most valuable slave, better than the white. The black became the slave because he was superior.’’
67 Then the European exploitation of this, selling the slaves in North America. ‘‘And the slave gets to be an inferior man, chosen for his physical superiority.’’
68 He reiterates: there is no such thing as race. ‘‘We simply have humanity aboard this space ship,’’ with more important things to give time to than how many children of this color to ship across town to the enclaves of that color. He is confident that the synergetic view has identified a false problem.
69 Anyone involved in human misery here and now is apt to retort that a good deal of big-picture talk has accomplished nothing except the reassurance of (a) white supremacists, (b) people who for other reasons either prefer things to stay as they are, or else doubt that interventions can improve anything, really. A prescription for doing nothing?
70 Not at all. There is no one to whom Bucky Fuller offers less comfort than the man who wants things to stay as they are. Things have never stayed as they were, and nowadays especially nothing stays so for long. But the area of meaningful change needs specifying. ‘‘Making their difference from others into a virtue,’’ that is what has to change. How? Through the recognition that ‘‘we simply have humanity aboard this space ship.’’ How is that recognition to penetrate? In a thousand ways. (Don’t leave yet.)
71 The Dymaxion Map, on which all this discourse was based, crystallized out of geometrical research. Bucky was expounding geometry before some sharp kids from the streets when one of them wanted to know what all this had to do with the rats in his bedroom. ‘‘Shut up,’’ cut in a sharper voice, ‘‘he knows what he’s talking about.’’ So the Rat and the Synergetic View were never squared off. How would he have answered, Bucky was asked later. ‘‘I wouldn’t have,’’ he replied. ‘‘I never argue.’’
72 To argue is to get bogged down in special cases, where minds cannot move but can only Indian-wrestle. Rats, nevertheless, are confrontable, and may teach us that the problem is not the rat but the bedroom, a housing problem which means a design problem.
73 Tenements are a housing problem. The political way to get rid of tenements is to bulldoze them, and then find out that you cannot afford to build anything on the cleared sites that the former inhabitants can afford to live in, or want to. This is called urban renewal, a formula for bulldozing the poor out of sight. It profits contractors and land speculators, land minus slum being a brighter investment than land plus. Its apparent demonstration that we can’t afford to do anything clashes with the fact that if the slum has a telephone it is quite as good a telephone as Nelson Rockefeller’s, and probably cheaper per month (it has fewer pushbuttons).
74 So it seems conceivable that the slum might have housing as satisfactory as Nelson Rockefeller’s too (and possibly better, the Governor of California may want to interpolate; the wealthiest state’s Governor’s Mansion is a firetrap). This entails, according to Bucky, putting housing on the same service basis as telephony. (Think of the cost, if your telephone had to be crafted to order, like your house!)
75 This means design, which means (1) the inventory of the world’s resources; (2) rational design principles.
76 The role of a resources inventory is easy to illustrate. Take Western Electric’s list of the twenty-seven raw materials in a desk telephone set; plot their sources on the
77 DYMAXION MESSIAH | 18g world map; and ponder the fact that your telephone draws literally on the whole world. (Beryllium from the southern hemisphere; chromium from Turkey and South Africa; cobalt from Canada and the Congo . . . the list goes on. A quarter of the things on the phone company’s shopping list must be obtained outside the United States.) So why think of houses as if they were log cabins, restricted to local trees?
78 As to design principles, the telephone helps us realize that these are physical principles. It conforms to them, it can’t do otherwise. It also conforms to the anatomy of hand and ear, which likewise express physical principles. (Imagine the man who lives in the Biggest House demanding likewise the Biggest Telephone. Or imagine a local code to require that any telephone installed in this county shall contain as much brick as ingenuity can manage.) Design principles take us even further than to the Whole Earth; to the Universe, where Tension, Compression, Precession are majestically discoverable.
79 The telephone is a frequent example of Bucky’s, exemplary not because IT&T’s designers were men of peculiar altruism, but because they could find no other way to make it work. They had not even an incentive to cut the corners that lessen unit costs but shorten service life, because repair expense is borne by the company, and the most trouble-free instrument is the most profitable. Bucky has spent forty-five years trying to persuade people that there is no other way to make housing work either.
80 We get by with houses analogous to tin-can telephones because people are wonderfully adaptable. Chinese women even adapted to bound feet. And we’ve had no incentive to look at housing except in familiar ways. We can define very narrowly what a telephone ought to do, so the phone has had the specialist’s advantage of being able to insist
81 on its own perfection. The less specialized house has such intricacy of potential function that so long as it more or less fulfills just a few of them---notably keeping most of the rains off---we’re persuaded to settle.
82 Here we are again, somewhere out in the Universe, a long way from that Brooklyn rat. The Universe works: that is Bucky Fuller’s first principle. We are part of it: that is his second; we are not intruders. And---this is perhaps his third principle---we concentrate its themes most exquisitely around us when we valve its energies for our immediate service: controlling the flow of electrons, fluids, heat; warding off the winds, the fires and the rats. We call this, building a house. The Whole-Systems view---the synergetic view---brings our thoughts back repeatedly to shelters, which are energy controls. It will also explain how we may hope to pay for them.
83 In the Universe nothing is spent.
84 The quickest way to relate this to one’s budget is to reflect on the consternation felt by millions when they learned what precious equipment the astronauts had abandoned on the moon. A five-million-dollar car! A million- dollar color TV camera! Wasted!
85 But stay a moment with the TV camera, for which $1,300,000 appears on NASA’s account books. Where is that money now? On the moon? Not at all. It is somewhere on earth, subdivided and circulating from pocket to pocket. Then what is on the moon? Four lunar pounds---twenty- five earth pounds---of glass and metal and plastic. (But some of the metal was gold!} Ah, but the total loss to the inventory of Spaceship Earth was exactly a few pounds of minerals, now transferred to the account of Spaceship Moon. If no one ever retrieves it, still that is a small loss. The entire space program has extracted from Earth’s in-
86 DYMAXION MESSIAH | 185 ventory perhaps enough metal to make a day’s output of Volkswagens.
87 Yet over a million dollars was ‘‘spent’’? Not really. What was really spent, that will never be recovered? Time, simply human time, hours of brainstorming, of pumping slide rules and then making sketches and working drawings, of assembling, testing and modifying mock-ups, finally of diligent dust-free handicraft. A few dollars’ worth of paper went into wastebaskets (and one trusts will be recycled; anyhow the trees will regrow at no expense), and for prototypes a few hundred dollars worth of metal, chiefly copper, remeltable. Of all the resources that lunar camera drew on, only the time is not reusable. Would we get any of that time back, if we could somehow, at no cost, recover the camera from the lunar plain? Not one second of it.
88 Time.
89 Time wasted? Here we need a measure of waste. At minimum-wage rates, several million dollars’ time a day gets expended in New York City alone by people doing crossword puzzles. Think out the implications of forbidding that, and come back in twenty minutes with your estimate of how the suicide rate might rise, balanced against the additional widgets all those man-hours might be made to yield in a planned economy. If you are fanatical about waste you will soon have modeled a day in the life of Ivan Denisovich.
90 Nor need we simply equate the lunar camera with the daily crossword, for the million-plus dollars’ worth of time that went into the camera was time spent on purposeful learning. (Doing crosswords is random learning.) Assuming all had been learned that later experience proved needful, we could now duplicate a twenty-five-pound color TV camera for the cost of hand assembly. Hand assembly comes high (time, again). NASA says $115,000. If we
91 needed a hundred we could automate somewhat: make up jigs to help us duplicate many small parts. If we needed a thousand we could automate more. Automating means spending time over a process, in order to save it on products. More products will make more process design worth while, and any demand for ten million color TV cameras would justify such elaborate production processes that the cost would drop close to the cost per pound of materials, which is always a limit. (Detroit’s current rule of thumb for cars is a dollar a pound.)
92 We have here a familiar principle, that first prototypes are always fantastically expensive. Spread over many items, the first cost trends toward negligibility, and if the prototype gets destroyed, or left on the moon, all we’ve lost is a museum piece. That high first cost is simply the cost of learning. Once we have learned, we start modeling what we know. A book is one kind of model, a speech is another, a machine still another. What you paid for this book is a tiny fraction of what learning to write it cost me, or of my cost to the communities that maintained the schools I went to. More spectacularly, the $20,000,000 an airline pays for a Jumbo Jet is a negligible fraction of the investment the jet represents, an investment the Boeing Company’s accountants cannot begin to trace. The Jumbo Jet, by the time it was fully explained, would prove to model a large fraction of all human knowledge. Against a background like that, models are cheap.
93 This means: ‘‘things’’ are not expensive. Learning is. And what learning costs is time. Mere things, if there is reason to produce them in sufficient plenty, can sometimes come to so little it is feasible to give them away. I cannot remember when I last bought a ball-point pen. The one I am using to correct these pages bears the imprint of a restaurant in Maryland, whose owners gave it to me as
94 a bit of goodwill. It uses a half-ounce or so of materials, and to have it duplicated by hand would cost perhaps $200. But learning how to render its principle feasible cost so much that the first specimens, twenty-five years ago, retailed for nearly $30. They skipped and smudged, not enough having been learned yet, and to get purchasers interested at all the ad agencies asserted that they would write under water.
95 If ball-point pens had been left on the moon no one would have fretted, yet hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of learning went into them. How much we cannot ultimately tell. If we were to trace some of the relevant metallurgical and chemical techniques as far back as we possibly could, we should find that the pen business had been drawing on almost the whole heritage of Western technology. The first Iron-Age man whose fire alloyed copper and tin took an early step toward the brass ink-cartridge. Many things, such as learning how to make a sturdy plastic cylinder, never entered the pen-maker’s costs because when he got started they were already part of his heritage. And it is as true of the lunar TV camera as of the ball-point pen and Bucky Fuller’s glasses that the costs on the account books (enormous, in the case of the camera) were but a small fraction of the human investment the makers were drawing on.
96 Most of the costs of most of the things we buy were long ago amortized. They are simply available, as ‘‘general knowledge.’’ Everyone, most of the time, is riding free on all that mankind has learned. We are all on welfare.
97 For no one ‘‘earns’’ even $5,000 a year. Even a ditchdigger’s income is an incredible bonanza, quite unrelated to the muscle-power he sells. If we want to know what muscle-power is worth we may ask a company in the power business. They will quote us a figure, a few cents a kilowatt- hour. We may remember from the calculation about energy slaves chat a man working eight hours a day, 250 days a year, generates thirty-seven-and-a-half million foot-pounds of energy. Each day, at that rate, he produces 0.13 kilowatt- hours. As an energy source, he is worth far less than coolie’s wages. Back in 1940, Bucky calculated that in energy prices then current, a $50,000-a-year executive was being paid as though he developed 16,500,000 kilowatt-hours per annum. Neither he nor the worker is ‘‘earning’’ his pay. They are both drawing dividends at a fantastic rate.
98 Hardly anyone believes this. A counterculture delegation from the commune called ‘‘Drop City’’ staged a confrontation in the welfare office. ‘‘We sat down with the supervisor and laid our heaviest rap on him about what welfare really means. That we’re all on welfare, absolutely dependent on every other human being, plant, animal, earth, air, fire, water for our welfare. . . .
99 ‘‘As we put it to him the supervisor’s face got redder and redder. He started chomping and puffing his fat cigar faster and faster, and when we got up to leave, he was in a blind fit of rage. He began pounding on his desk with both fists, bouncing and clattering pencils, pens, paperclips and ashtrays with every blow, and screamed like a little girl having a tantrum, ‘YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO BE POOR!!!’ ’’
100 As they hadn’t. The bind is complex. The accounting system the supervisor was paid to administer prescribes that whatever is paid to Joe, nonworker, shall be carried on the books as a levy, via taxation, on Jim, worker. Jim’s view is that he has ‘‘earned’’ his $10,000, of which various governments take $4,000, used in part to keep afloat the likes of Joe. Jim resents this, and the welfare supervisor is paid to represent Jim, and scream on Jim’s behalf. As for Joe, he is very likely unwilling to distinguish the communal dividend from the rip-off. Life being short, he intends to take it now, even though as things now stand it comes off Jim’s hide.
101 As things now stand. At present the books are kept on the assumption that certain people---most people?---‘‘earn’’ their pay. This assumption, irradiating the psyche like gamma radiation, can generate unlovely tensions. ‘‘I scratched for what I have,’’ the lady said, ‘‘and they can scratch for what they get.’’ One would think she was demanding that the sewer pipes her generation laid should be dug up and laid over, but no, the young people in question were simply being educated without incurring sufficient debt to please her.
102 ‘‘But indeed I earn my pay,’’ cries an honest machinist, ‘‘for I put in forty hours weekly at this machine.’’ The machinist’s claim may be dissociated into two parts. One is that he would be useless without the machine. It places at his fingertips two centuries of design science, a precision he could never hope to attain and solar energy more efficiently valved than his metabolism can manage. The other is that the convention whereby he receives his slice of abundance in return for 2,000 hours per annum at his machine is just that, a convention. Another man draws his share in exchange for 2,000 hours riding in a train pretending to be a brakeman. (The brakes were long ago automated, but there are unions.) Another draws his share in exchange for time setting type which as soon as he sets it will be melted down, since the advertisements in question will be printed from stereotype mats. Another meets classes and teaches them nothing at all (a film is shown). Another watches a machine make condoms. All are paid. All obey the convention that they are earning a living. Elsewhere a man whose psychic processes may be comparable with Thoreau’s (though it would be foolish to
103 190 | BUCKY assert so) is buying his groceries with food stamps. He is ‘‘on welfare,’’ and a bad example.
104 Which is only to state the obvious, that ‘‘earning a living’’ need have no connection with doing work, useful work, even useless work. It has to do only with contracting to surrender a certain amount of time, say 2,000 hours annually. The reason for this is not that much of the populace consists of scamps and loafers. The reason is that no other mechanism so far devised for distributing purchasing power has ever gained the approbation of a public obsessed with what Bucky Fuller calls ‘‘the fallacy of ‘earning.’ ’’ Any means of distributing purchasing power which does not entail the indenturing of a man’s time is called ‘‘welfare,’’ and carries a stigma.
105 Such norms are carried over from an era of agriculture and handicrafts, when real need menaced any community whose able-bodied men were idle. (‘‘Able-bodied’’! Capable of metabolizing solar energy at a rate barely sufficient to keep a flashlight glowing!) Under those conditions, it was just that whoever wouldn’t work shouldn’t eat. Dawn to dark, a nail-maker made nails, hammered out red hot one by one. Nails were needed. If he didn’t make them there were none. The bargain was obvious: he worked, he was fed. Since that meant that in return for being fed he spent twelve hours a day with his mind on nothing but nails, he might well have rejoiced when a nail-making machine was invented. Society would gain cheap and abundant nails. He would gain freedom from his forge. Since his work was being done, it would have been equitable to go on paying him. But no, his meal ticket was lifted. He was ‘‘automated out,’’ and if he was properly roused by the injustice of this development, he tried to smash the machine. (Weavers, also automated out, tried to jam the mechanical looms
106 with their wooden shoes, called sabots, giving us the word sabotage.}
107 It seems sensible to think of automation as a freeing of people from toil. We might even think that one reasonable objective of automation is to create unemployment, the more the better, and that a society optimally industrialized should be blessed by nearly total unemployment. In 1919, when the Industrial Revolution was about a century old, C. H. Douglas calculated that three hours’ work a day for adults between eighteen and forty should supply all Englishmen’s necessities. That was one measure of how far England had come since Watt, and a half-century later one might expect the figure to have been halved. Instead we are doing everything we can think of to keep as many people employed as possible, and call unemployment a problem, not a benefit. If 7 percent of the potential work force, defined as able-bodied men under sixty-five, count as ‘‘unemployed,’’ the industrial system is failing, to an extent that verges on the catastrophic. That is how poorly we understand the industrial system.
108 Whole industrial sequences are now performed without the intervention of human muscle. One can imagine the logic of present-day procedures leading to an ultimate automated factory in which no one need do anything at all; and every morning a work force marching in, each man to be manacled for eight hours straight to a station beside the Ultimate Machine, in return for which penal servitude, once a week, he will be issued a pay envelope. He will have ‘‘earned his living.’’ Many jobs are already like that: contracts to surrender a portion of one’s time.
109 For over fifty years a continuous underground tradition has advocated some such view of things. Since its advocates have seldom been trained economists, they have been
110 brushed aside with relative ease. C. H. Douglas was an engineer; Frederick Soddy was a Nobel Prize chemist, discoverer of isotopes; Ezra Pound and Gorham Munson were men of letters. Each of them in mid-life became convinced that economic reality was about as we have outlined it. Encyclopedias do not give a line to their economic insights, beyond noting how Pound’s got him into trouble.
111112Douglas (‘‘I read him,’’ Bucky says, ‘‘in the 1930’s’’) said that wealth has two main sources in addition to brute labor. One is the accumulated sum of what men have learned, a knowledge concentrated in machines and processes. He called this ‘‘the cultural heritage.’’ Some of it is perfectly weightless. The inventor of zero contributed to the cultural heritage, and the inventor of logarithms, and the discoverer of the periodic table of the elements. Our wealth and comfort today derive from such things.
113The other prime source of wealth, on Douglas’ showing, was men’s ability to do in concert what they could not do singly. He called this ‘‘the increment of association,’’ and Bucky can teach us to identify it as a form of synergy. Thus many men together can make and operate a sailing ship, which at no expense for power can proudly tack round the world, bringing back what we have not at home.
114It seemed clear to Douglas that men deceived themselves when they ascribed their communal wealth to many million laborers, each paid for his work as though he alone had generated his fraction of the product. He proposed an early form of guaranteed annual income, a stated dividend drawn on what he called the community’s social credit. Discussion of this, what there was of it, bogged down amid power struggles and hoots about ‘‘funny money,’’ and his Social Credit Party went the way of all splinter movements.
115 Fifty years later such talk seems much less abstract. Though no one yet knows how the common wealth might be monetized, Puerto Rico is considering a scheme to distribute industrial dividends to the workers. The planners may some day get around to the nonworkers. For some years Robert Theobald has been writing books on what he calls the Economics of Abundance, abundance being easier to recognize than it was in Douglas’ time, and increasing unemployment---no one calls it increasing freedom ---easier to identify as a characteristic built into industrialization. The necessary work force gets smaller and smaller. We keep children from working at all. We discourage adolescents from working by prolonging their school years (half American youth go to college, and even graduate schools now get crowded). We are ambivalent about married women working. We retire men as early as possible, and during their working years we are careful to specify that any work beyond, say, forty hours a week is ‘‘overtime’’ and abnormal. All these devices diminish the labor pool, and even so it is difficult to keep more than 90 percent of the labor pool occupied. Someone has calculated that in the United States less than 25 percent of even those who work are engaged in ‘‘primary production.’’ The rest work for governments, or nonprofit employers, or in ‘‘people-service’’ occupations. And still we talk of people ‘‘earning a living.’’
116117As to the folk who say they earn theirs, ‘‘The trouble with them is,’’ Bucky said one day, ‘‘that they don’t think about how they got what they’ve got. Put them on a desert island and see how far they’d get.’’ (They call themselves the enterprising ones.)
118He has a simple model. Put a man down in a deserted tropical place, and in a couple of days he can spin a geodesic shelter over his head, using the local bamboo. He can only do this, however, if he has (1) the requisite mathematics and (2) a knife, which means bringing with him, in his head and in his pocket, a substantial portion of ‘‘the cultural heritage.’’
119 No one man’s head or pocket contains more than a fraction of it. The cultural heritage---which is more than crude ‘‘know-how,’’ embracing as it does every kind of intuition, including all the things artists have glimpsed before anyone else---belongs to the ‘‘world-around intercommunicating continuity of consciousness’’ which he calls ‘‘Continuous Man.’’
120 Continuous Man is ultimately weightless: he is our unfaltering knowledge of all that we know. The things you tell me, the things I tell you, all that the dead have told us, all we vicariously share---Columbus’ voyages, Homer’s measured pulsebeat---these and the idiosyncratic way each one of us metabolizes experience, these and the regenerative networks of consciousness in which all thought, all experience is new-formed, accelerated, shared---these are ‘‘humanity’’---Continuous Man.
121 In ‘‘the rotation of night as a shadow around the earth,’’ Bucky perceives an invisibility more important than anything astronomers imagine or astronauts see: the ‘‘rotating wave of shadow sleepers,’’ consciousness disconnected for a third of anyone’s time, and its converse, ‘‘two-thirds of all mankind at all times continuously awake.’’ That rotating wave of consciousness is the most important phenomenon in our part of the Universe, more transformative than the interaction of chromosomes, more massive than the tides. It sweeps on, absorbing principle as the Earth absorbs sunlight. It lives by integral cycles as Earth-life lives by the water-vapor cycle and the carbon-dioxide cycle. Its cycles are in part as invisible as photosynthesis, in part as public as the growth of leaves. Ships and planes emerge,
122 DYMAXION MESSIAH | 195 satellites rise and circle, atoms are coaxed through synchrotron tunnels, notebooks blossom with symbols, the very void is patterned with new information. This book is a tiny increment; there is nothing ‘‘new’’ in it and yet it regenerates old knowledge a little, in a way new to me as I write and I hope to you as you read. (At least you have never read this sentence before.) My trust in you, yours in me, on just this unique occasion, is yet one more novelty in a cosmos where everything is new under the sun.
123 And yet we talk of ‘‘Work,’’ as if it much mattered.
124 We should pay people not to work, Bucky has speculated, and pay them handsomely; then some work might get done. In the depths of the 1930 Depression there were still too many people working; their drag pulled millions down into starvation. Continuous Man was working nevertheless, isolating the first trans-Uranium elements, devising aluminum airplanes, writing Finnegans Wake. Man the automaton was already obsolete. We still pay millions an hourly dole to pretend to be working. We should pay them to go to school, or go fishing. Minds can marvelously repattern themselves while fishing. Fuller’s quick answer to anyone appalled by costs is to suggest that of every 100,000 set free, one would make some discovery sufficient to maintain the other 99,999.
125 A column by James J. Kilpatrick (Los Angeles Times, March 15, 1972) cites instance after instance in Catonic tones. Two men lay 100 blocks of masonry a day; in 1926 one man laid 600. A little gasoline-powered generator must be watched (union rules) by an operating engineer, an electrician and a pipefitter. The engineer draws nearly $400 a week ‘‘for starting once or twice a day a gas engine smaller than those on many home lawn mowers.’’ The electrician, similarly paid, puts a plug in a socket when-
126 ever the machine is moved. No one knows what the pipefitter does. ‘‘On a motel construction job in Philadelphia, electricians and carpenters quarreled over the installation of a chain-hung ceiling lamp. In the end each union got a piece of the action. The carpenter screwed two hooks in the ceiling and draped the chain; the electrician put the plug in a wall socket. Cost: $40 per installation.’’
127 Surveying such instances, Bucky Fuller does not deplore ‘‘the loss of the work ethic,’’ not at all. A great truster of popular wisdom, he would remark that these men know very well that their ‘‘work’’ is obsolete. But if the game requires simulated work as the price of eating, why, they will simulate, shielded by union rules. A system that can support such a host of freeloaders clearly draws on wealth unrelated to their ‘‘work.’’ It would cost nothing whatever to put them on affluent welfare.
128 Wealth is real, whether monetized or not. It has grown enormously since my parents’ time, and my share in the increase is real, though heaven knows my bank balance doesn’t show it. It exists as enhancement of access: five hours to cross the continent, not three days; tires that run 40,000 miles, not 8,000, and are almost never flat; a diet as diversified in winter as in fall. In my world it is normal for adolescents to summer in Europe. Paying adult fares, I have gone there eight or nine times myself. My parents visited Europe just once, and were more fortunate than most of their generation. I could lengthen this list indefinitely: not an inventory of possessions, nor a stock of money, but nonetheless a balance sheet of wealth.
129 What then is this wealth?
130 Bucky says it has two complementary parts: (1) the energy of the Universe, much of it radiant and gravitational, the rest locked up in ninety-two elementary patterns; (2) all that we know. The first transforms. It cannot be created or destroyed. The second grows, because ‘‘We cannot learn less.’’ So wealth can only grow.
131 Ah, but what of destruction of resources?
132 Not at all, he replies, they are not destroyed, though it is true that we lock away appalling quantities where we cannot easily get at them again. (Chess players do the same, and learn better chess.) Entropy---energy randomized, hence inaccessible---need not worry us while the sun pours on more. Chemical transformations need more careful watching. At present all the sulphur escaping from all the world’s smokestacks is exactly replaced by the sulphur we mine each year. We can imagine a day when every bit of it has been mined, and has been dissipated as sulphur dioxide ‘‘pollution.’’ That would be ‘‘destruction of a resource,’’ and wanton deadening of the breathable air, but not destruction of sulphur, every atom of which Spaceship Earth would still carry on inventory. But such dissipation is insanity. Those smokestacks ought to be our sulphur mines. Reclaim it before it dissipates! And sell the cost as sulphur stock, if you want. And do not suppose there is some natural law that says whenever we handle an element we must ruin it, and ourselves.
133 Locking gold away in vaults is in just this way a destruction of a resource. Complicated rules of bookkeeping (not of physics) make it nearly impossible to get at it again. So gold grows scarce, and yet there are sensible uses for gold, the seventy-ninth element. Those bookkeeping customs intimidate us like natural laws. Yet we have only to change them (‘‘Forget the gold standard’’). In the same way no natural law compels us to dissipate the resources we use. We have only to apply Wealth Component #2, Knowl-
134 edge. Industrialists who say reclamation ‘‘costs too much’’ are not taking the synergetic view. They think that wealth is sulphur, or oil, or gold.
135 Totaling at today’s costs the energy increments---ultimately solar---that slowly transformed fossil cells into oil, we can say that Nature invested one million dollars in every gallon of petroleum we harvest. That is not regenerated like trees and corn. It is short-term capital; Bucky compares it to the food deposited inside the egg, to nourish the chick till it breaks out of the shell and makes contact with the great Universe.
136 The chick was not designed to consume that deposit and then starve. Nor were we designed to consume our deposit of coal and oil and then starve. We were designed to start using our minds, eventually.
137 His glasses, as he talks, slip down his nose. He tugs them upward with an elbows-out gesture, like a diver adjusting his mask. That is a transient nuisance, like pollution. Most of his movements are a choreographic counterpoint, unconscious, functional. Watch him speak his 7,000 words per hour on the integrating function of the human intellect; keep an eye on the kinetics. At key occurrences of the theme-word intellect he is pointing to his head. A clutching and kneading movement of the left hand substantiates the shadowy word integrate, and nature in its countless manifestations, the impinging sunlight, the self-interfering knots, the lapse of pattern into the seemingly random, is elucidated by arm- and finger-work of Nijinski-like intricacy. In full communion with his theme he is weaving, tensing, leaning, straightening, to twist invisible valves and arrest split-second deterrences as though piloting a lunar lander amid strange new boulders.
138 DYMAXION MESSIAH 1Q9
139 (The pilot’s license in his wallet rubs against the machinists’ union card.)
140 No transcribed words correspond to any of this. It is a turning loose from New England decorums which Bucky ascribes to a remark of his daughter Allegra, who was twelve and already on her way to a dancer’s career when she told him what he was repressing by standing immobile like a union electrician. ‘‘If you just dare to let yourself move . . He takes dares. ‘‘I decided she was right and I would try to do it. It was a reversal of all the training I’d had, the Naval Academy and everything else. But today I’m absolutely unaware of my motions. Sometimes when I see a film of my lectures I’m amazed to see that I’m all over the stage like a ballerina. Absolutely unaware of it.’’
141 ‘‘If you just dare to let yourself move.’’ Watching him, we can believe in a transformational Universe, Bucky Fuller enacting man’s role in it. When Allegra said that ---if she said it: she doesn’t remember---she spoke for Continuous Man, supplying a theme her father would multiply by as many thousand as the thousands who have watched him. That is, in essence, what he has to tell them: ‘‘If you just dare to let yourself move.’’
142 One man can be paradigmatic (none is an island). There were times when Bucky lived on a bowl of soup, bought every other day. There were times of great affluence, put out as fast as gathered. (His normal ‘‘bank balance’’ continues to hover near zero.) During the times of thin soup he harvested principle. During the times of affluence he made a car, a house, numerous domes, transforming principle into availability. That has been, more or less, the story of mankind.