Chapter 9
Appendix IV
2Buckminster Fuller’s ‘‘Integrity’’ (1982).
3 (From The Review, November/December 1982, pp. 3--5.)
4 A very large number of Earthians, possibly the majority, sense the increasing imminence of total extinction of humanity by the more than 50,000 poised-for-delivery atomic bombs. Apparently no one of the 4 V2 billion humans on our planet knows what to do about it, including the world’s most powerful political leaders.
5 Humans did not invent atoms. Humans discovered atoms, together with some of the mathematically incisive laws governing their behavior.
6 In 1928 humans discovered the existence of a galaxy other than our own Milky Way. Since then we have discovered 2 billion more galaxies, each averaging over 100 billion stars. Each star is an all-out chain-reacting atomic energy plant.
7 Humans did not invent the gravity cohering the macrocosm and microcosm of eternally regenerative Universe. Humans did not invent humans, nor the boiling and freezing points of water. Humans are 60 percent water. Humans did not invent the 92 regenerative chemical elements or the planet Earth with its unique biological lifesupporting and protecting conditions.
8 Humans did not invent the radiation received from our atomic energy generator, the Sun, around which we designedly orbit at a distance of 92 million miles.
9 The farther away from its source, the less intense the radiation. With all the space of Universe to work with, nature found 92 million miles to be the minimum safe remoteness of biological protoplasm from atomic radiation generators.
10 Humans did not invent the vast distance-spanning photosynthetic process by which the vegetation on our planet can transceive the radiation from the 92-million-miles- away Sun and transform it into the hydrocarbon molecules structuring and nurturing all life on planet Earth. Design is: both subjective and objective, exclusively intellectual, mathematical conceptioning of orderliness of interrelationships.
11 Since all the cosmic-scale inventing and designing is accomplishable only by intellect and it is not by the intellect of humans, it is obviously that of the eternal intellectual integrity we call God.
12 All living creatures including humans have always been designed to be born unclothed, utterly inexperienced, ergo absolutely ignorant. Driven by hunger, thirst, respiration, curiosity and instincts such as the reproductive urge, all creatures are forced to take speculative initiatives or to ‘‘follow the herd,’’ else they perish.
13 Ecological life is designed to learn only by trial and error. Common to all creature experience is a cumulative inventory of only-by-trial-and-error-developed problem-solving reflexes.
14 Unique only to human experience is the fact that problem-solving leads not only to fresh ‘‘pastures,’’ but sometimes to ever more intellectually challenging problems. These challenges sometimes prove to be new, more comprehensively advantaging to humanity, mathematically generalizable, cosmic design concepts.
1516Humans have had to make trillions of mistakes to acquire the little we have as yet learned.
17The greatest mistake we have ever made is to assume that the supreme authority governing life and Universe is not God but is either luck or the dictum of the humanly constituted and armed most-powerful socioeconomic systems and religions. The combined human power structures—economic, religious, and political—have compounded this primary error by ruling that no one should make mistakes and punishing those who do. This deprives humans of their only-by-trial-and-error learning. The power structure’s forbiddance of error-making has fostered cover-upping, self deceiving, egotism, false fronts, hypocrisy, legally enacted or decreed subterfuge, ethical codes and the economic rewarding of selfishness.
18 Selfishness has in turn fostered both individual and national bluffing and vastness of armaments. Thus we have come to the greatest of problems ever to confront humanity—What can the little individual human do about the supranational corporate power structures and their seemingly ungovernable capability to corrupt?
19 A successful U.S. presidency campaign requires a minimum of 50 million dollars, senatorships 20 million, representatives 2 million. Through big business’s advertisingplacement control of the most powerful media, money can buy and now has bought control of the U.S.A, political system once designed for democracy.
20 Without God, the little individual human can do nothing. Brains of all creatures, including humans, are always and only preoccupied in coordinating the information fed into the brain’s imagination—image-ination—scenarioing center by the physical senses and the brain-remembered previous similar experience patterns and the previous reflexive responses.
21 Human mind alone has been given access to some of the eternal laws governing physical and metaphysical Universe, such as the laws of leverage, mechanical advantage, mathematics, chemistry, electricity, and the laws governing gravitational or magnetic interattractiveness as is manifested by the progressive terminal acceleration of Earthward traveling bodies or by the final ‘‘snap’’ together of two interapproached magnets.
22 Employing those principles first in weapons and subsequently in livingry, humans have been able to illumine the nights of all humanity with electricity and to intercommunicate with telephones and to integrate the daily lives of the remotest-from-one-another humans with the airplane.
23 As a consequence of human mind’s solving problems with technology, within only the last three-fourths of a century of our multimillion of years’ presence on planet Earth the technical design initiatives have succeeded in advancing the standard of living of the majority of humanity to a level unknown or undreamed of by any pre-20th century potentates.
24 Within only the last century, humanity has grown from 95 percent illiterate to 65 percent literate. Preponderantly illiterate humanity needed literate leaders. Now, preponderantly literate humanity is capable of self-instruction and self-determination in major degree.
25 Clearly humanity is being evolutionarily ejected ever more swiftly from all the yesteryears’ group-womb of designedly permitted ignorance.
26 Regarding the power-structure-supported scriptures’ legend of woman emanating from a man’s rib, there is no sustaining experiential evidence.
27 Humanity now knows that only women can conceive, gestate, and bear both male and female humans. Women are the continuum of human life. Like the tension of gravity-cohering space-islanded galaxies, stars, planets, and atoms, women are continuous. Men are discontinuous space islands. Men, born forth only from the wombs of women, have the function of activating women’s reproductivity.
28 The present evolutionary crisis of humans on planet Earth is that of a final examination for their continuance in Universe. It is not an examination of political, economic, or religious systems, but of the integrity of each and all individual humans’ responsible thinking and unselfish response to the acceleration in evolution’s evermore unprecedented events.
29 These evolutionary events are the disconnective events attendant upon the historic termination of all nations. We now have 163 national economic ‘‘blood clots’’ in our planetary production and distribution system. What is going on is the swift integration in a myriad of ways of all humanity not into a ‘‘united nations’’ but into a united space-planet people.
30 Always and only employing all the planet’s physical and metaphysical resources only for all the people, this evolutionary trend of events will result in an almost immediately higher standard of living for all than has ever been experienced by anyone. The higher the standard of living, the lower the birth rate.
31 The population-stabilizing higher living standards will be accomplished through conversion of all the high technology now employed in weaponry production redirected into livingry production, blocked only by political party traditions and individually uncoped-with, obsoletely conditioned reflexes.
32 A few instances of persistent, misinformedly conditioned reflexes are: the failure popularly to recognize the now scientifically proven fact that there are no different races or classes of humans; or failure to recognize technological obsolescence of the world-around politically assumed Malthus-Darwin assumption of an inherent inadequacy of life support, ergo ‘‘survival only of the fittest’’; or failure to ratify ERA, the Equal Rights (for women) Amendment, by the thus far in history most crossbredworld-peoples’ democracy in the U.S.A.; or, with ample food production for all Earthians, the tolerating of marketing systems which result in 41,000 humans dying of starvation each and every one of the 365 days of each and every year.
33 Carelessly unchallenged persistence of a myriad of such misinformed brain reflexings of the masses will signal such lack of people’s integrity as to call for the disqualification of humanity and its elimination by atomic holocaust.
34 You may feel helpless about stopping the bomb.
35 To you, the connection between the Equal Rights Amendment and the atomic holocaust may at first seem remote. I am confident that what I am saying is true. The holocaust can be prevented only by individual humans demonstrating uncompromising integrity in all matters, thus qualifying us for continuance in the semi-divine designing initiative bestowed upon us in the gift of our mind.