Chapter 19
The Designers and the Politicians
2There is a new idea aloft in our era, one in which we do not think of our great world dilemmas in terms of politics. For years we have been telling the politicians to solve our problems, and yet the crises continually multiply and accelerate in both magnitude and speed of recurrence.
3 As automation eliminates physical drudgery, we will spend more time in the future in intellectual activity. The great industry of tomorrow will be the university, and everyone will be going to school. World society is going to concentrate on regenerating its capabilities and its wisdom of their employment.
4 When we talk about wealth today, we are not talking about money or gold. We went off the gold standard between world wars. There are still some gold exchange laws and international trade in which gold is involved, but they are ways of balancing books and not fundamental. After World War I, Germany discovered it would not, if it paid all its reparations, have the wealth necessary to rise again, so the agreement was simply abrogated by the establishment of a new government. The Germans had the blast furnaces, the iron, the coal and the know-how to make steel, so they began to make steel. They began to demonstrate what we really mean by wealth, which is to organize physical capability and to organize energy. Energy flows around the universe and is then shunted and canalled into valvability upon the ends of the levers which we make out of the physical energies interactive in patterns which we call ‘‘matter.’’
5 Industrial wealth consists of three main constituents: energy, as matter which is energy as gravitation and the radiant energies. The radiant energies are focusable, and therefore canalizable, and we can get them valved out onto the ends of the levers. We then take the radiation energy we call power and apply it to the convergent energy we call matter, organized as machinery.
6 Physicists like Einstein and Max Planck saw that energy left one’s system only by joining another system. They discovered, by experimentation, that no energy could be created and no energy could be lost. The physicists thus developed the concept, called the law of conservation of energy, that energy could neither be created nor lost. That’s a finite package of energy, the finite physical universe, which is the Einsteinian world.
7 If no energy can be created and no energy lost, and we put together energy as matter and energy as radiation to make machinery run by power other than our backs and muscles, then the constituent of what we call wealth is actually indestructible. When I was brought up, we used to have the idea that wealth was something that was continually running downhill and wearing out. But the revival of the German economy without money taught us something new.
8 There is a third constituent of wealth, which is intellectual. Every time I make an experiment, taking some radiant energy and applying it to reforming metals and making a better piece of machinery, I have learned more. This constituent of wealth is therefore inherently and regeneratively self-augmenting. Even if a physical part wears out, the intellectual constituent improves. This concept of wealth is changing our whole system of life.
9 Conservation will no longer mean withholding from use, but insistence upon widest, practical, active usefulness. The physicist’s law of Conservation of Energy means that the physical universe cannot wear out or run down or become exhausted by use. The law of Conservation of Intellect tells us that human use of intellect always improves human capability. The new scientific era conservative is inherently committed to multiplying reinvestment of capability which is complex and provides the only experimental test of synergy. The conservative realizes that the more that wealth is usefully reemployed, for more people, the more wealth is amplified. Socialism was one of yesterday’s ways of dealing with inadequate wealth. Socialism is now as obsolete as the stone hammer. So also is undeveloped static property, or gold capitalism. Gold coins wear out; land erodes. That is why capitalism is obsolete. Industry and biology are metabolic; they grow.
10 Up to and including World War I, there had been great masters of the earth, masters of commerce (you could call them pirates) who had built powerful ships and gone out and taken the other fellow; and they were running the world. They looked at the world as a great, comprehensive undertaking, where enormous wealth could be earned, and they planned a hundred years ahead.
11 With World War I the old masters went out of business because they were physically coordinated men who judged things in terms of their own eyes, ears, taste and touch. They didn’t trust others. But with the new technology, ninety-nine per cent of what was going on was utterly invisible, which is why we have scientists to deal with the invisible world. When the old masters went out, they were not coordinated in the invisible world, but in a sensorial world. Also, their gold was utterly inadequate for the magnitude of the new industrial productivity.
12 The world did not know of the departure of the old masters until the crash of 1929. The depth of the depression was 1932, when we completed the isolation of the ninety-second chemical element. Chemistry’s pantry shelves were now full.
13 We were ready for a great new venture. If we only had known what we were doing—we were dealing in invisibles—we would have realized that our society was not in a mess at all. The economic disaster was simply a disaster in terms of the economics and accounting of the old masters, who had become obsolete.
14 When the old masters went, some of the citizens found that their economies were in great trouble. This led to the assumption of power by dictators because people didn’t know what to do about their problems. It was the beginning of a society where people thought the politicians could solve the problems of the world, but the politicians have truly no idea of what to do about them.
15 In the hierarchy of events that reshape the face of the world as far as man’s participation goes, man, ecologically, has been sweeping out larger and larger areas. Ecology, as I have explained, is the science of the various patterns of life, the different species of life, the flora and the fauna. There is a unique ecological pattern for each kind of life. Man is the only living species which has altered its ecological patterning in the history of life on earth. He has progressed from a local sweep-out of perhaps a twenty-four-mile radius in the early ages of man, or perhaps a walk to the visible horizon and back to his home.
16 Until World War I an American man walked an average of thirteen hundred miles per year, and rode three hundred and fifty miles by some other vehicular means. As we came out of World War I, Americans were sweeping out an average of sixteen hundred miles a year by mechanical means and still walking thirteen hundred; but for the first time man had become primarily a riding device instead of a walking device. Instead of sitting in a static chair, he sat in an automobile chair.
17 In 1941 we were averaging six thousand, five hundred miles a year, despite the fact that the housewife was covering ten thousand miles, the salesman thirty thousand and the airline hostess one hundred thousand (invalids and so forth brought down the average). At the present time our sweep-out averages twelve thousand miles a year.
18 So man has, from the beginning, been participating in larger and larger patterns on the earth. This is the hierarchy of events. With the right kind of training the individual thinker as a scientist leads science and gives it new steps forward. Science paces technology, but it is hard for science to convince technology. Technology paces industry, but there is a long lag in the process. Industry paces economics. It changes the tools, a great ecological change. And in that manner we come finally to everyday life.
19 The politician is someone who deals in man’s problems of adjustment. To ask a politician to lead us is to ask the tail of a dog to lead the dog.
20 While I was speaking at Harvard recently, a number of Harvard students went to Washington in company with students from many other universities. They saw their congressmen and pleaded with them to abandon war and nuclear bombs. They said their congressmen were wonderful and let the students talk a lot. But the representatives said, ‘‘Don’t make us more miserable, we’re already dealing in trouble, and you want us to be a little more negative about trouble.’’
21 Just being negative doesn’t do any good. I tell students to stop using their feet and start using their heads. Our tails and our feet can’t lead us. This realization is beginning to move students, and we will hear a great deal more about it. We will soon have to design the over-all industrial network for making the world work for all humanity.
22 In 1835 Thomas Malthus, a well-to-do man with some influence and access to government data, was able to see certain figures being collected by English economic representatives all over the world. It was the first time any one man was faced with the facts about population and production. And what Malthus saw was startling. It was apparent that people around the world were multiplying more rapidly than they could produce and support themselves.
23 A generation later Charles Darwin developed his concept of the interpatterning of all biological species and his theory of the evolution of the species, and its corollary, the survival of the fittest.
24 Up to this time in history, men had believed that their fate rested on the whim of God or gods. Armed with the information that there would not be enough production to go around, and that mankind was being subjected to a survival of the fittest, certain statesmen conceived the idea of national defense a century ago. When the old masters were gone, the politicians, finding potential in their economies, decided it was their mandate not to let their economies run down. So they tossed the problem to their military colleagues, ordering them to invest total scientific and technical capability in defense. This was the beginning of the great arms race.
25 It is important to realize that there are people in this world other than politicians trying to do something. I would guess that one hundred years from now, historians will note that in the period of 1927 to 1967, man was so preoccupied and so relatively illiterate that he thought it all right to leave the problems of the world to the politicians. This idea will look preposterous in the perspective of history.
26 We are shooting to get to the moon. What soldiers want is to get the first commanding platform in space. That’s what the militarists are after. To be able to send a man to the moon, you first have to be able to give him his own private little earth, and he’s been living on an enormous earth with great energy-exchanging patterns he knows very little about. He knows a little about the air he breathes or the gas plants give off. He doesn’t know why men’s temperatures are ninety-eight and six tenths degrees, Fahrenheit when in good health. He doesn’t really know about his extraordinary energy balance.
27 Our processes are so secret that nobody really knows anything about plumbing. Everything fundamental about our sewage system was invented in India by 2500 b.c. No one has made significant improvements since that time. No architect ever looks back of the purple tiles, no scientist ever studies plumbing. We never hire scientists to look at our homes. Scientists, however, work with weaponry, and its by-products go back into our homes, but it is completely inadvertent. What would happen if the scientists helped us to use everything he and we’ve learned to make the world a success for man?
28 This is what is going to happen with our explorations into space, because we can no longer be wasteful. We will have extraordinary energy cycles developed in our behalf by the scientists. We’re going to have to give our spaceman enough food—he needs a ton a year, and he’ll have to process that. We are going to have to find out how to use that valuable chemistry we have been turning over to Nature’s landscape to process for us. While we look the other way the spaceman won’t be able to get rid of it. If he spits there is no gravity to take it away. It stays right there in front of him in space. We are not going to send the spaceman out into space to find out what to do with his chemistry to make him survive. If our scientists on earth haven’t figured it all out very satisfactorily in every respect, psychologically and esthetically, as well as chemically, before we send that spaceboy ‘‘out,’’ he’ll never come back ‘‘in’’ again—alive.
29 For the first time in history we are employing scientists to work on a little house. It hasn’t been thought of, architecturally, as a house, but it’s the most important house that’s ever been worked on. In America we are spending three billion dollars a year and in Russia they are spending six billion dollars a year on this autonomous dwelling device—for man.
30 The little black box that will take care of our sanitation will be more effective than anything that’s been used before. Men will control their environment and be very healthy. I believe that the telephone company will start expanding those little country telephone booths into replicas of space houses. Out of the prototype for the space age will come the scientific knowledge for the actual production of this autonomous dwelling device.
31 In a few years you may be able to walk into a telephone company booth one morning and ask them to put up a dwelling device on a certain mountain that afternoon. When you’re through with it, you will call the company and ask them to remove it. The company will have your environment control waiting for you wherever you want it at low cost for dream high standards.
32 There is a new dedication on the part of the young in this world. Students are corresponding with each other all over the globe. This young world is about to take over, to help us design ourselves to make man a success on earth. If this is successfully done, the Malthusian and Darwinian frustrations will be completely irrelevant. There will be enough to go around, and the politicians will have no mandate to build weapons. To get rid of weapons we must design our way to positive effectiveness, and not just be negative about politicians and what they are doing.