Chapter 5
I Figure
2On November 1, 1942, eleven months after Pearl Harbor, the editor and staff of Pencil Points Magazine which later was renamed Progressive Architecture proposed that I write an article on post war housing. Chapter 5—‘‘I Figure’’ which now follows was the result. When I turned it in to them in December, 1942, they decided against publishing it. By then I was busy in the U.S. Government’s Board of Economic Warfare and I put ‘‘I Figure’’ away in my File and Forget file—and did actually forget it—for twenty years—until, in preparation of this biography of my thought development, I recalled it and felt that its inclusion might permit a sense of realistic participation by others in the typical circumstances and intuitions that seemed to have uncorked my intermittent prognostic outpourings.
3 I certify that no changes other than those of spelling or typographical corrections have been made in it and that I had not looked at it for twenty years.
4 Many of the predictions have proven premature, yet these seem more plausible in 1963 than in 1942 which suggests that they may be realized within another decade or so. Some of the predictions have proven surprisingly accurate not only in spirit but in factual magnitudes, for instance, of housing activity or other social developments.
5 I apologize to my many friends in the American Institute of Architects for my rugged treatment but they too will recall war engendered emotions and will, as they have so frequently in the past, once more forgive me.
6 It is only fair to this soliloquy that those who read it in the inevitably changed mood of the world years from this date—Sunday afternoon November 7th, 1942—take note that as I now 85 sit down to my typewriter the radio program has just been interrupted with the announcement that ‘‘strong and modernly equipped American forces have landed on the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of North Africa.’’
7 Some day, probably not remote, we may have scientific measurement of the power regenerated in the individual by the telepathetic stream of emotions popularly propagated by such announcement as this. But certainly it is with a sense of unwilling personal remoteness from the excitement of the swiftly unfolding events that cerebral ‘‘I’’ withdraws to concentrate upon answering the earnest question put to me by a trade magazine publisher—half in apprehension, half in business necessity: ‘‘What do you figure to be the characteristics of postwar housing, speaking both generally and specifically?’’
8 The suppositional setting of this day-after-sometime activity was not furnished. Many months, many years hence, never? Housing. That is an entirely irrelevant subject anyway. Or is it?
9 Could housing, for instance, have anything to do with whether it will be months or years to war’s end? What nonsense! Haven’t they shut down on priorities for that housing stuff until the show is over? Has housing, in fact, anything whatever to do with war? If we pass over newly created munitions production that was delayed for months while awaiting provision of housing to bring personnel within operating range as being a matter of poor management, could we say that ‘‘housing’’ in itself has at least something to do with how it happened that we are now at war? If only in housing’s function as incubator of the social components, —the individual and the family group?
10 That is to ask: Is it possible that housing could have been originally responsible for war in its ignorantly rendered task as the environmental factory for mass-maturing the end product, man, which latter perplexing invention psychology is roughly estimated to be five per cent a product of heredity and ninety-five per cent a product of environment?
11 In view of the fact that the above assumption has been vindicated by scientific measurement, are we brought to recognize that houses are thus scientifically discovered to be incubators of relative degrees of race insanity—incubators of human ‘‘fowl,’’ self-hybreeding for their self-invented lethal pit fighting, on the one hand as the sport of cartel-imperialism (which game they also self-invented), or on the other hand for the self-caged, mass egg-laying industry, or quite simply for self-stuffing, roasting, frying, or adulterizing?
12 If found materially contributory to the whyfor of war, would it not follow that the housing issue might have something important to do with how, when, and even where the peace might happen? Haven’t we been taking an awful lot for granted about housing anyway, and an awful beating to boot?
13 Haven’t we let opinions of every formal or informal pressure generating group lead us in diametric directions, each for its own special easiest-way ends, getting us nowhere and ever dictating to us what we ‘‘want’’ or ‘‘need’’ as environment?
14 And must I not start my aroused conjectures about housing with consideration of the measure of sagacity implicit in the expression of the problem as ‘‘postwar housing’’? Doesn’t this sophisticated expression seem a bit patronizing, a little too sure, faintly insinuating a tomorrow unrelated to the vital issues of today,—an aloof pragmatism that has stood deferentially aside while men fought and which is now discounting the human family expenditure of twenty million of its lives, the most costly investment in its future mankind has ever been called upon to make?
15 Or even if postwar housing is expeditiously considered as just a temporary rebuilding program or an emergency resumption of inefficiency, does it not at least suggest further compromising investment in that outworn, though never trodden, backwards road to normal?
16 ‘‘If what man really wants,’’ says science, ‘‘is to go backwards to all the troubles of yesterday, packaged tightly in cellophane and neatly labeled ‘normal,’ he had better turn around that crate that he has labeled ‘civilization’ and go back where he came from —because this particular highway that he has been traveling all these centuries doesn’t happen to lead to a dead end of selfish limitations.
17 ‘‘The highway leads,’’ says the referee, ‘‘with many a promising sign along the way for those who can read science’s language, to broad green lands so vast that they may only be cooperatively husbanded by the brave and enlightened. In these broadlands directly ahead the selfish isolationists must starve, for the fruits are so large and are hung so high that they are beyond the grasp of the single-handed anarchist poacher.’’
18 May we not throw overboard that slavish ‘‘down-to-business-like’’ thought of a ‘‘return’’ to postwar housing, a phrase to which attaches the stigma, be it ever so delicate, of precious self-profit? May we not immediately undertake a solution of housing realistically underwritten with unlimited worldwide commonwealth credit, and with enthusiastic and complete self-commitment to the omniscient custody of the Almighty, so reliably bespoken by the orderly vastness of energy demonstrations, not only recorded by science, but so magnificently displayed in the heavenly pageantry, or the beauty of a spring day, or the force of thundering, mountainous surf, or of a lovely young human being, for any who will to read!
19 May we not dedicate that housing project to the scientific insulation of humanity and his so hard-earned civilization against further necessity of industrialized mass destruction of his commonwealth potentials and mass murder of his choicest young lives (albeit the revolting mayhem is statutorily legalized by declaration of war as prescribed by the protocols of the frequently bilious normal monopoly obsessions)?
20 May our housing not insulate us against this filthy periodic necessity, complicatedly endured, to effect the simple evolutionary adjustments which humanity’s ignorantly self-imposed environment conditioning has hitherto failed so repeatedly and miserably to prepare man to peacefully effect for himself?
21 If man’s amazing original spontaneity and speculative previewing imaginative faculties were growthfully nurtured (instead of ruthlessly strafed) by a comprehensive environment arrangement adequate to its necessities and to his creative impulses, practically maintained by scientific dwelling mechanisms, might he not prepare with glad and humble heart the appropriate and scientifically timed adoption of progressively efficient designs for future guarantee of his cooperative industrial welfaring?
22 Because such a progression constantly does more with less, must it not harvest an increasing raw material inventory, self-emanating from ‘‘scrap’’ for successfully and successively retooling-up man’s commonwealth, amplifying a regenerative circuit from out the apparatus thus vacated by obsolescence—a regenerative circuit valved to sun-emanating energy in its many radiant materializations? Would there not thus emerge an automatic increment sufficient to account for the most lavish scientific piloting of the course? Could housing be that important? Can we afford to pass up the chance that it may be?
23 Naked man had only one advantage over environment which was sufficient to prolong his association with it. This was his cerebral advantage. Man running and bounding on his legs can manage to jump to a height about equal to his own six-foot stature. With cerebral articulation of observed mechanical principles in Nature he can, though seeming superficially to encumber himself with the additional weight of a pole, run forward and, with the same quota of energy employed in the six-foot jump, now vault over a barrier better than twice his own height. Thus he demonstrates the cerebrally combined mechanical advantages of angular acceleration with the fulcrum principle, a cerebrally detected compounding principle resulting in the principle of dynamic self-leverage.
24 The cerebral advantages are progressively pyramided upon the compounded and irrevocably cumulative basic-data-grid of technology and science. The web-interstices of the basic-data-grid, in which there are still many blank spaces, are, however, being ever more closely woven together with the memorial strands fashioned by mind, will and courage out of utter intellectual integrity.
25 Though the treasured basic data web is closely guarded by the increasing host of academic science and technology, both its original detections and ultimate domestications were and are solely articulated by that most precious of all characteristics of living man, the power of the selectively precomposing creative imagination, which, as Morley phrases it, is ‘‘The Holiest Ghost we shall ever know.’’
26 Deriving compound advantages out of the basic-data-grid, we have learned in astronomy, navigation and ballistics that the degree of accuracy of forecast is directly proportional to the degree of completeness both of inclusion and evaluation of the convergent force factors, the total resultant flow diagram of which unfailingly prescribes the tracking, time and station schedule of events for those who are faithful and industrious enough to survey scientifically the appropriate dynamic system.
27 Therefore, confident that the same reliable trend prognostication principles must adhere also to man’s social affairs, I can now only apply myself with vigorous humility to the task of prognostication, a process which sincerely attempted might appropriately be designated as Total Thinking, a necessitous rather than a pretentious invention.
28 I figure: that any planned postwar housing now in preparation by the components of the professional housing world as now and hitherto constituted will get about as far as a ten-ton truck can be jerked by its self-starter before the battery goes dead.
29 …that this calculation includes every phase of housing from A.A.A. (for academic architectural aesthetics) through A.F.L., A.I.A., A.M.A., and so on down through the seventeen thousand possible combinations of nuances of human association describable by three initials, organized for intentionally better or unintentionally worse public or private purposes, and all fulcrumed upon the simple, exploitable fact that man requires shelter, sanitation, and privacy in varying degrees dictated by the larger factors of environment.
30 …that the stationary engines of the old world housing business are permanently stalled. This statement in no way refers to special engineering projects whose activities, having now sincerely adopted scientific method, are each hour turning in more amazing records.
31 …that old housing is stalled and its postwar planning invalid because its philosophy is obsolete. It is obsolete because its premise is essentially unscientific. Science has been interrogated falteringly about patchwork palliatives, but has never been asked whether the invention of housing as a whole was soundly conceived.
32 …that the invention of housing, as we have known it, provides no simple and practical means, economically or mechanically, for swiftly interpreting each scientific research gain in principle and precision into the everyday environment mechanics of man.
33 …that far from coinciding with contemporary scientific concept, the over-all housing thinking lapses backward at least three thousand five hundred years to pre-Greek conjecture for its major premise.
34 …that its truly ignorant premise derives from the superficially stationary aspect of housing structures. This illusory stationary aspect happened to coincide with the gravitational effect demonstrated by stones accidentally recumbent in a pile.
35 …that all postwar-wise housing plans as yet coming to light still start with sewer, water, and light arteries laboriously buried in the ground, a three-thousand-year-old invention, immediately immobilizing all subsequent design. However, willfully more ignorant than the designers of three thousand years ago, this start overlooks the fact that the original drains were led to a few of the better run stone temples and palaces as accessories after the fact, as corrective expediencies. The fact to which the buried arteries were accessory was that the house was usually built of the stones immediately at hand and therefore that the edifice was located on the spot as a measure of energy efficiency and not, as architecture would have it, because housing should esthetically ‘‘arise from the bosom of mother earth,’’ or ‘‘spring from the native soil.’’
36 …that site planning for postwar will take no consideration of the interim degrees of multiplied mobility developed for man by the war, which would make possible setting down a city of one hundred thousand well-equipped persons in twenty-four hours in the mountain reaches of Tibet, because postwar planning goes right ahead by-passing all scientific gains of the whole three thousand years’ climb from the first emergency sewer systems, and limits the planning to the mechanical advantage rating of man three thousand years ago, when he had one-twenty-five-thousandth the physical augmentation modern mechanized man has —as he now considers most activities other than housing in the terms of around-the-world in flying-hour tons.
37 …that architecture starts the plan not only with every limitation known to the Egyptians, but also complicated a million-fold by three thousand years of clinging growths consisting of every possible scheme of parasitic exploitation of that original Stone Age immobility of the anchored victims of housing. So old are the vines now that most of them are heavy with the cultivated fruits of ethical and legal precedence, and are perfumed with the venerated aesthetic. And then, too, say the ‘‘good old housing’’ exploiters, ‘‘a rolling stone gathers no moss.’’
38 …that this stationary premise assumed in the formulating of housing concepts continues in utter denial of the scientific and now fortunately quite popular concept of an atomic universe totally in motion, in which one rolling stone can knock over ten pins again and again. Who wants to gather moss anyway, asks the around-the-world-flying man! Plenty of time to raise moss when you are dead.
39 …that just as communication and transportation have progressed from wire to wireless and track to trackless respectively, with concomitant, manifold increase of their time-space mastery per unit of expended energy, always developing in synchronization with the contemporary philosophical concept of essential motion, that just so will housing of scientific necessity finally progress from its vainly weighted-down footing, from a rooted to a frankly rootless art, with vast gains for man in the terms of environment control per unit of expended energy.
40 …that the change will come about as a potential motion-for-security’s-sake, and not as a motion-for-motion’s-sake innovation; that this mobility for security will be articulated whenever evolutionary necessity requires repositioning of dwelling locale for consolidation of the progressive interim gains in living, learning, working, and enjoyment standards, or when anticipation of obsolescence or public convenience indicates mutual advantage in change.
41 …that by thus synchronizing with the reality of motion, the major premise of a new housing industry will become scientifically tenable.
42 …that inasmuch as the word ‘‘economics’’ means the body of knowledge pertaining to household management, that the latter’s mobilization will cause the whole economic prospect of man to come of scientific age.
43 …that with mobilization of high standard living equipment, that the age will not only have its new-grown wings, but also have powerfully energized talons to secure each freely-selected, graceful landing. The American eagle is an excellent symbol of industrial man’s future. We are wont to depict the eagle alertly poised with intense potential mobility and therefore with well- demonstrated security, even upon the most precipitous advantage.
44 …that this derooting will thus actually control the new economics of man by freeing his dwelling from its parasitic subsistence on the back of an industrial jungle host of sewer, water, gas, and garbage systems, and by insinuation of man into individually powered and processing dwellings, unlimited in range of location of secure poise, on mountain top, in remote valley, or island, without time severance disadvantage and with ever-improving standards of living.
45 …that in the new economics resultant to flying and securely-poised dwelling, man will discard his treacherous misconceptions of wealth, which hold that it is comprised only of the items about him which stand still, and between which little things shuttle with strings tied to them, trolleys to wires, wires to centrals and centrals to mortgages, all reduced to ‘‘securities’’ that can be placed statically under lock and key. The sunlight has never been called ‘‘wealth’’ except by the poets or by laughing youths, who are wild poets. The lawyers have never been able to tie a monopoly string to the sunlight or to tie it back to some system of less refulgent sovereign deeds.
46 …that man will soon set up a new accounting system geared into the true wealth of power-potential truly accounting our dynamic mastery of environment by science-educated control of energy—that is of energy all external to man’s integral pittance of that all-pervasive phenomenon which uniquely characterizes life as action (motion) or reaction (heat). This is the new concept, An Energy-Borne Commonwealth of Humanity, instead of monopoly and patronage affluence, pyramided on a bedrock acre base.
47 …that the mass of materials which the old building world so inefficiently employed will be expeditiously scrapped and run through the mills again. This applies to materials (1) directly frozen into structures and (2) indirectly employed in the concomitant inventory of employed materials to fabricate the heavy plant equipment and rolling stock which in turn process, transport, store, and handle the ill-conceptioned buildings’ materials, all of which compound to astronomically inefficient or entirely superfluous tons.
48 …that these recaptured materials will eventually be reassigned with scientific discretion to efficiently conceived tasks in the industrial cycle.
49 …that if dancing one-and-a-half-ton automobiles and pounding ten-ton trucks, and thunderingly alighting twenty-five-ton airplanes can be initially supported on compressed air structures in pneumatically stressed tension skins with the additional advantage of locomotion, and that if sixty-ton airplanes can be supportingly hung from the sky by a pneumatic-lag vacuum, and if a hundred-thousand-ton ship with a relatively delicate steel skin can be supported on a liquid plastic foundation of water (because of the ship’s pneumatic content being maintained in expanding pressure by the weight of the blanket of atmosphere above, whose specific gravity is sufficiently less than the water to permit of its supporting the otherwise sinkable steel by marrying it to the air in efficient comprehensive design), that human families of less than one half a ton total working load, who present no stress requirements of the magnitude germane to airplanes, trucks, and ships, should be easily structured in their miniscule dwelling requirements by a few atmospheres of compressed air confined within less than a ton of stressed skins.
50 …that all essential pneumatic and hydraulic compression components of structures are comprised of the locally available substances occurring in nature at or near almost any spot on earth as compound liquids or gases, as, for instance, water and air, or even dry ‘‘dirts,’’ which have hitherto been used in buildings only as constituents of frozen plastic masonry, which cannot dynamically distribute its stresses to the enclosing tension components of the design, as can pneumatic and hydraulic systems of structural composition.
51 …that only the tension components of structure need be centrally fabricated for wide distribution to structural assembly locations, the compression components being always locally available if pneumatic and hydraulic conceptions of solution are employed by the designers.
52 …that because the stress-ability of modern, scientifically-designed tension components has advantages varying from two up to ten to one over compression component abilities, that the production and shipment of only tension components will reduce the over-all industrial loads by as much as seventy-five per cent.
53 …that in this war crisis it is technically treason to allow ourselves to be short sixty-five thousand freight cars weighing fifty tons of steel each, which shortage is equivalent to the number of cars required exclusively to transport the solid foundation and flooring materials unscientifically employed as frozen compression elements to structurally support the tiny weights of the one-tenth-of-a-ton load of men who comprise the negligible working loads of housing, or to support machinery from below that could better be suspended, etc.
54 …that we adhere to this unimaginative stupification of building concoction only because we are confined by a thousand codes to comply with essentially the same designing systems employed five thousand years ago when the compressive strength of masonry (fifty thousand pounds per square inch) of the post-Stone Age still had a great advantage over available tension components of grass or bark or wooden sections.
55 …that with eyes trained to appraisal standards of post-Stone Age lore, that industrial engineering, such as that of ‘‘gas tanks,’’ and ‘‘good architecture’’ were bound to be incongruous, because the gas tank was in tension; and that because ‘‘good architecture’’ remains ‘‘good’’ because of race hypnosis, the unadorned engineering design seems monstrous and threatening.
56 …that the differences in efficiency of these new dynamic and the old inert structures can be readily discerned by noting that the tops of many public service gas tanks in large cities are each several times larger in horizontal plan than is, for instance, the waiting room floor of the Grand Central Station in New York City, the station mausoleum designed essentially in the inert classical manner appropriate to stones balanced on stones, though of necessity held together by an enormous hidden steel tension structure insinuated within (instead of efficiently containing) the design. As a deck, these gas tank tops would easily carry a load several times greater than the live load of people who fill Grand Central in a holiday crush. Despite this many times superior spanning and carrying capacity, the gas tank decks are structured of 1/1000th the weight of fabricated materials of the station, which had to be transported far in appropriately heavy transport units over appropriately heavy railway systems instead of directly by air as would be quite economical with gas tank components.
57 …that the materials—raw, partially processed, or sub-assembled—of old housing (which term includes all the latest prefabrication compromises), have weighed on an average of one hundred to one and have bulked on an average of ten to one inexcess of the quantities necessary to accomplish the desired end result, and have fallen as proportionately short of satisfactory performance as they have of energy conversion efficiency.
58 …that the American people, who during the last century have produced their own weight in copper products and one hundred and twenty-six times that weight in steel products, were so production rich that they were product careless.
59 …that they have become technologically poor now (haven’t enough to meet wants), because of the super-wastefulness of many of their designs, particularly of past housing design. Their assets are frozen in inexcusably inefficient design because those who have managed their affairs have been downright ignorant (no matter what other expedient characteristics they have possessed). The U.S. citizen has one hundred and forty pounds of copper per capita frozen into his product designs (mostly building) with only fourteen pounds per capita known to exist per world citizen, including all surfaced metal and all known geological reserves. U.S. man has nine-and-one-half steel tons per capita as his own share of the social mechanism, where less than one ton should suffice, were moderately good design (technically speaking) demonstrated.
60 Marine Corps helilift of a 42-foot Geodesic Dome from the U.S.S. Leyte, Hampton Roads, Virginia, 1957.
61 Geodesic Dome on the U.S.S. Leyte
62 The 100-foot Travillon in Winrock, Arkansas
63 Kaiser dome (150 ft. diameter) in Honolulu, Hawaii. It was assembled in less than one day.
64 Interior of the Kaiser dome. Erected in 1957, its acoustics are considered to be superb.
65 Twelve men and a boy perch on a 10-foot Playdome at Harvard University.
66 The 40-foot Plydome Chapel with windows of colored plastic, constructed for the Columbian Fathers in Korea. Test erected in Hamford, Iowa.
67 11 III III I Hill..
68 Roy Gussow’s Geodesic symbol for US1S in Bangkok, Thailand
69 Steel Geodesic Dome of the Union Tank Car Company in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The dome—384 feet in diameter, 116 feet high—was designed as a car rebuilding plant.
70 The Cornell University Pinecone Plydome
71 Radome on the Arctic DEW line
72 Radome Octetruss in the garden of The Museum of Modern Art, New York City
73 Tensegrity Sphere at Southern Illinois University
74 Anheuser-Busch Aviary built by Union Tank Car Company at Tampa, Florida
75 The author and Tom Moore inspect the latter’s prestressed, lightweight, concrete ‘‘Dog-Bone.’’
76 Interior of the Miami Seaquarium
77 Palomar College gymnasium in San Marcos, California
78 Pease 39-foot hot weather pavilion
79 Exterior of Buckminster Fuller’s 39-foot dome-residence in Carbondale, Illinois
80 Buckminster and Anne Fuller’s living room in Carbondale, Illinois i
81 Dining room-kitchen of author's home
8283Kaiser dome over a Lutheran church in Florida
8485Tensegrity Octa (Ted Pope)
8687A four-foot Aspension Model in Tokyo
88 …that the inefficient design is due to lack of over-all philosophical discernment of the managers, particularly regarding the vast step forward in civilization, which it was their historical opportunity to make, and lacking which they have instead invested their productivity in a metals imitation of the Old World, starting with cast iron or bronze replicas of Greek columns, friezes, and didos appropriate to extreme specialization of the Stone Age art, carrying this absurdity through to metal imitations of wood windows, steel coaches, bronze mass-production doughboys, all representative of an inferiority complex and mistaken identity in history.
89 …that the Old World (Europe and Asia), having waited long and seemingly in vain for our New World (American) contribution of a cerebrated design for creative living, is now showing us the new design pace, but perversely articulated in destructive instruments, as of a world species committing suicide, having nothing better to do, or rather being denied the right by its ignorant managers, to turn its potentials to creative extension.
90 …that the Old World is leading us the creative perversion pace in design by employing our own unique springboard and only special contribution to social history, mass production, which might, under comprehensive management less preoccupied in fighting for guarantees of high risk odds for no risk arrangements, have been applied to insure happiness and enlightened growth of man himself.
91 …that upon inspection of the metals’ industries inventory record, the essentially unused copper and iron content of the obsolete and overweight buildings, whose contingent materials inventory accounts for more than one half of all of the metals produced in the last century, is alone sufficient to supply our complete production needs of these two major metals for five more years of war, though we were unthinkably to shut up every iron and copper mine.
92 …that practically all the metals produced in the last century remain on inventory in the equipment, rolling or stationary, of plant and structure, of which business management in general (including the banks and law firms) has been sole management custodian.
93 …that the minority, classified as ‘‘business executive, et al.,’’ rather than the American public at large, must bear the blame for the lack of comprehension of the potential historical contribution of America and—worse—for debasing American man’s otherwise great idealistic frontier objective into money-grubbing.
94 …that this grubbing is an economic result of the inert characteristic of architecture’s environmental imposition on the viewpoint of the individual.
95 …that this perverted objective has made a static virtue out of grubbing the last kernel out of only the first productive setup of what might otherwise be recognized, if allowed to grow, as a regenerative and geometrically amplifying system of wealth circulation and living standard advance, a veritable golden-egg-laying goose, destined (eventually, why not now?) to spread its energy conversion service to all people on this tiny planet.
96 …that despite the seemingly large bulk of metals which might superficially be judged to have been distributed by end product sale into the personal custody of the individual citizens, that the proportion of all processed metal actually reaching them was very small and only seemed large because it was sliced so thin.
97 …that the small proportion of all the metals in private custody was revealed when the populace was recently called upon to support their fighting boys at the front with scrap badly needed by the steel industry; for then the American home folks, though fanatically combing attics, cellars, yards, pot cupboards, ornament dressers, and tool boxes, scraped together only twelve million tons of iron and iron alloy, which is only four-fifths of one per cent of the surfaced, processed, and placed-in-use iron metal now on inventory in the U.S. economy. Extremists think that the citizen wasn’t thorough enough in the first scrap drive and could go back and dig up another, final twelve million tons. If we add to this the twenty-four million tons total of excess metal in personal custody or about the premises of the public, the additional weight in metals contained in its national inventory of automobiles (basing computation upon the record 1941 registration of motor vehicles), the total figure of metals in popular custody as of Pearl Harbor date, prior to the first scrap drive, reached only fifty-four million tons as compared with the billion-and-a-quarter tons in corporate, industrial, or government custody at that eye-opening date. Of this latter huge tonnage, the government portion is negligible, as is typified by the small percentage involved in the unprecedented twelve-million ton Navy and twenty-six-million ton merchant marine goal now set for war’s peak. The combined popular custody tonnage subject to the individual’s or his government’s mandate might be brought up, by inclusion of state, county, city, and regional authority bridges, dams, and equipment, to a sum-total of two hundred million tons, in comparison to the one billion, one hundred million tons remaining solely in corporate or trust custody.
98 …that this proportion of relative mandate over the surfaced inventory of metals leads to some cogent political conjecture.
99 …that just as the tongue, as a mechanical invention, precedes the phenomenon ‘‘word’’ as a fact, and ipso facto the political consequences of the word’s invention, that in exactly the same way all mechanics are to be appraised as causal rather than as resultant to political evolution.
100 …that in view of the fact that mechanics pace political evolution, the development of advancing industrialism in America provoked its political adventure in forthright democracy.
101 …that the advancing industrialism invisibly threw the complete determination of man’s political fate, as dictated by mechanical evolution, to the prerogative in design advance of, first, the industrial financiers, and, subsequently, the self-perpetuating industrial management few—not at all to popular political mandate.
102 …that political fate rested entirely upon the limited technical wisdom and far more limited world development vision of the industrial management few.
103 …that it may be said in strict technical veracity that democratic management has not yet existed in America and that such weaknesses as have up to now been revealed in the social organization of American man are not limitations of democracy at all.
104 …that the democratic test in the U.S. has been in any realistic sense a trial of Charlie McCarthy for the whims of Bergen.
105 …that it is no wonder the industrial businessmen sprang to democracy’s defense in its hour of need.
106 …that under the surface cloak of an entirely theoretical application of democracy, a money-minded few have pulled all the mechanical strings and that the manipulators, to play fair with them, are to be criticized for their utter inability to comprehend the broad meaning of such contributory facts as those we have just cited (and which have often been cited to them by their hired technologists), which ignorance explains, though it cannot condone, their consequent failure to act intelligently upon them.
107 …that, though one hundred per cent ‘‘responsible,’’ they are guiltless of any malevolent attitude towards society.
108 …that these leaders have been found wanting, and that the failure is at the center of the world storm, and that their cries for another chance for democracy are provoked only by the pattern of their ignorant association-of-ideas, and that their pleas for democracy and its rainbow-haloed free enterprise (the right of the best corporation lawyers they can hire to write new rules that give them new license), may be appraised only as their scheme for prolongation of their quite undemocratic custodianship of the works for the sake of relatively diminutive dollar dividends—preposterously diminutive by comparison to the net earnings in standard of living that will accrue if and when the democratic body politic is given the controlling voice over its industrially organized and mechanically implemented commonwealth.
109 …that the fifty-four million tons of obsolete end-product metal in direct personal or popular custody of American man is equivalent to only one-half a year’s production of his steel mills.
110 …that you may think the individual has a lot more tonnage than that alone inventoried in his plumbing, heating, and hardware, but realistically exploring, we find that only two per cent of the U.S. population own their own homes outright, which therefore places the essential custody of this ‘‘home’’ inventoried accessory and arterial system tonnage within the control of corporation trusts or government. Though holding ultimate title foreclosure powers, the government to date has laboriously supported rather than challenged the corporate and trust prerogative over this tonnage, in order to avoid the political disturbances threatened by realistic inspection of the deflated functional value to which this junk tonnage is collateral throughout the vast ‘‘securities’’ structure of the country.
111 …that of the billion-and-a-quarter tons of strategic metals in fabricated status now in custody of others than the individual, and therefore beyond his control to do anything about until he knows the facts and can support the initial moves of his representatives to remedy legislatively over seven hundred million tons were fashioned into their present inventory shape and function before World War I, and much of that tonnage even before the turn of the century.
112 …that, from the over-all service efficiency viewpoint, this inventory tonnage of seven hundred million, equivalent to eight years’ complete production of our present steel mills’ war capacity, is, with no important exception, obsolete as now formed.
113 …that the fact that the horsepower output per pound of engine metal has advanced two thousand five hundred per cent in the interim, is ample substantiation of the typical cause of obsolescence obtaining in the older portion of the inventory, which, however, so long as it promises any dollar production, no matter how small, is ‘‘good,’’ so far as the short range viewpoint of its custodians is concerned.
114 …that the custodians of the plant structure and equipment deem them to be potential of earning a pure, even if small, dollar profit, just so long as they are standing, no matter how empty or idle, because the amortization was long ago completed; and therefore as custodians they don’t have to take any responsibility for the success of a better service use of the materials involved by a new imprint of energy and technology.
115 …that they are unwilling to part with the properties on the ‘‘headachey’’ basis (from their viewpoint) that its revamping might possibly amplify the effective striking power of America twenty-five-fold, as indicated by the technical gains in scientific service industries such as communications. Multiply any of our industrial or military figures by twenty-five and see what that would mean to the war winning.
116 …that this inefficient inventory, just by virtue of its existence in such preponderant size, puts a premium on suppression of efficiency increase from a prescheduled dollar income viewpoint of management.
117 …that the easy monopoly of average laissez fairs protects inefficiency by allowing only slow and controlled improvement by trial balloon introduction of innovations by the least successful divisions of the industry.
118 …that the no-risk premium on retarded growth is a real behind-the-scenes stumbling block if not an anti-war success motivating force, for, because of it, improvement in design is countenanced only for fighting equipment when our items are directly out-designed by the enemy—lest the war, with its wastes otherwise advantageous to monopoly maintenance, upset the seemingly good-enough system of preferred stagnation.
119 …that it was probably hoped by the huge, unwieldy, obsolete inventory custodians (if they were aware of it at all, which is doubtful), but at least by the legal tacticians for them, that the public scrap drive as such would satisfy the public demand for solution of the vaguely publicized scrap problem, hopeful that the war might be won without too serious design advance concession, though glad to have the public liquidate its own small tool, accessory, and improvising materials position by tossing in its scrap pittance (which is, incidentally, so inefficiently thin, being mostly light-gauge sheet product and plating, that as scrap it is used only by the metal producers as a last resort).
120 …that the custodians will, however, finally get the picture straight regarding the advantage in wealth gains accruing through accelerated velocity of scrap recycling, in which each cycle represents an impress of sun-free energy into the cumulative commonwealth standard of efficiency advance.
121 …that when the problem of its preferred introduction, because comprehended, happens to coincide with survival necessity, then the whole essential economic volition of the world will be converted from an inert to a dynamic asset system.
122 …that once the scrap is really recycling on an efficient basis, new design will be constantly in demand to warrant a new cycle and that the world-wide industrial wheels will turn as never before.
123 …that out of the starting phase of tonnage recirculation, industry should net better than a quarter of a billion new dwelling service units.
124 …that industry will thereafter not only continually provide more and better housing with its materials inventory, but will also trade tonnages of its inventory as scrap for other materials of greater advantage with the government’s strategic materials stockpiling and priority control board, trading on a basis of weight-strength-efficiency formulas resolved to net foot-pound efficiencies.
125 …that this vital scrap problem had something vital to do, then, with both housing and war, and that scrap trend is one of the major force factors shaping our prognostication trajectory.
126 …that the traditional attitude of new ore producers and ore body reserve owners toward the scrap problem, i.e., that it is just a necessary evil to be classified as a ‘‘monger’’ activity and ‘‘the less said and the more exported, the better,’’ even if it is to our enemies, is not to be considered seriously beyond noting that they have held it as a matter of policy that the less scrap getting back into re-circulation, the better market they theoretically could command. Because design advance would accelerate scrap recirculation potential, they were fundamentally against design advance and brought that attitude to bear throughout every intertwining directorate influence on the whole economy.
127 … that the basic metals producers have their faults but they are not particularly dumb and are certainly not afraid of major physical operations, as any who have reviewed far flung mining operations must admit.
128 …that their potential of efficient public service is now great because of a number of combinable circumstances which will eventually gear together; that these circumstances are, for instance, to be discovered in the fact that today their investment in processing and fabricating equipment is distinctly greater than their amortized investment in ore bodies, and that scrap processing is less costly than new mining processes.
129 …that a new world industry of housing, for instance, if well developed in its organization and on daring enough lines, will bring the metals refiners and initial-use-form fabricators into active forward motivation.
130 …that the successful maneuvering of this attitude change toward emphasis on design advance instead of on blind support of mass production of ‘‘or equal’’ products will spell the difference between democratic victory and defeat, which is all the difference there is.
131 …that realistically appraised in productive cost comparison to raw production, it is not unlikely that this unexpected scrap increment of the U.S. commonwealth could and would be accountingly arranged by legislative enactment to wipe out the national deficit.
132 …that before this World War fate is really over, we will witness an American Unbuilding Program which will exceed the highest rate of building activity ever attained in the past boom years by many-fold, and which will exceed even the rate of concurrent war bombing demolition, which latter accidentally releases materials for new uses, and is an unmartialled articulation of the inevitable trend. In the American case, forced by the materials and manpower emergency, the demolition will be premeditated because of the distinctly greater metallic content of the American structures as compared to European.
133 …that in either case of planned or bomb-wrought demolition, evolution will be demonstrating the large-scale incorporation into popularly comprehended industrial phenomena of the recycling of material elements into progressively more efficient use forms, a phenomenon which was becoming popularly evident in automobiles and ocean liners, but was not hitherto importantly evident in the housing world, whose end product the economic-supporting propaganda schematically inferred to be desirably permanent in arrangement.
134 …that so strong was this economic sentiment of ‘‘permanency’’ regarding housing in an otherwise dynamically developing world, people at first considered their purchase of an automobile in the light of a permanent family acquisition, wherefore a five-thousand-dollar investment in a well built, permanent Winton Limousine seemed cogent in 1910. Mankind went so far with its permanence whimsies as to consider its breeding complements not as free will partners but as permanent material possessions.
135 …that one of the major changes to be wrought in world thinking by this war is the acceptance of the concept of change itself, relative to which equilibrium is the word which describes controlled design arrangements of dynamically desirable complementary associations. This constant change and progressive equilibrium is the propagative key to the infinite vitality of the democratic principle, which, if never schematically allowed hitherto to take realized command of man’s affairs, was always pumping along, dynamically active in his behalf, when his best interests seemed to be hopelessly frozen. Certainly, adaptability to constant change will be a characteristic of postwar housing, and dynamic equilibrium the key-note.
136 …that the erroneously titled ‘‘credit’’ system, that crude-fueled the now stalled old housing world, was constantly rediluted at a one-for-two mortgage equity rate, and that the credit-less credit system will be summarily abandoned by even the most powerfully conspiring secret forces of tide fighters.
137 …that inasmuch as the two hundred per cent collateral forfeiture ‘‘credit’’ system is devoid of real substance in the scientific sense, nothing of its vacuum will be available for recirculation, and that with its vanishing will also disappear the whole legal fiction of real property and its extenuated nonsense of chattel mortgaging.
138 …that thus will exit deathage as a fulcrum of exploitation of an acceleratingly live world which of necessity is learning to eliminate the vain fear of death from its cosmos.
139 …that if fixation on death preoccupies the manager, we had best get him out of the control seat. Practically the whole of the change in contemporary history is written in the natural substitution of the designation ‘‘pilot’’ for that of ‘‘driver’’ of our most special era transportation.
140 …that the economic issues of the now-stalled housing world were so snarled and entwined about that housing world’s throat that its hungrily-gulped first prewar breakfast choked it to death instead of reviving it as many an interest had hoped.
141 …that housing’s deathbed watching almost scared the official war effort to death, and that, after having inspected the deflated and pitifully inadequate legacy of that old housing world, the war effort has finally had to go ahead the hard way without the seemingly desirable advantage of a well-ordered housing organization to gear its manpower to general mobilization and essential decentralization of production and to a world flow system.
142 …that the possibility of a newly incepted scientific industry of housing to expedite and vastly facilitate the initial American war effort was sentenced to solitary internment by priority rulings comprehendingly issued six months before Pearl Harbor.
143 …that the infant scientific housing industry was mercilessly kicked around for a year previous to its ‘‘duration’’ sentence by a host of forces now useless to recall by name, but all of which were dominated in the last analysis by fear, by cerebral paralysis or selfish preoccupation that failed utterly to witness the accelerating evolution, preoccupations, be it well marked, that must be completely abandoned by those who will witness war’s end. These are not ear-marked criticisms. The inseparable ramifications of the old housing world are as broad as the whole economic system built thereon.
144 …that you may say, ‘‘Why don’t you cut out all this political-economic stuff and get along with the stark facts of description of precisely what you think the postwar housing is going to look like?’’ And I say to you it isn’t going to look like anything until the war is over and that I can’t envision its coming at all except in the terms of the meaning of the war. I say, and I have given realistic testimony to prove, that is why we have had to have a war: because we couldn’t free ourselves for thinking without the detaching effects of war. Short of war, we just let well enough alone. We were swivel-moored to the rooted-down tonnage of our lugubrious past.
145 …that within the broad ramifications of the old housing world lie embalmed all the essential causes of the now-unleashed total war, and that therefore we cannot toss aside the question of housing until the war has been won, as we are urged to do by the unthinking and superficially patriotic in the phrases characterizing the shortening temper of busy-bodies who have long been frustrated in their attempt to revive yesterday in the midst of the upheavals and splintering of the scaffolding in the building dock as the ship of dynamic world commonwealth, its release interminably postponed, starts inexorably down the science-greased ways toward self-launching as the blockings of wooden structures give way to rot and termites. Soon she’ll be majestically water-borne and riding the tide, capable of being maneuvered over every ocean and of weathering all storms.
146 …that this total war is a World Civil War amplifying into full cry the prototype local civil war of the United States of eighty years ago, which marked the first popular phase of transition of man’s wealth-making from the anarchical, ignorance-limited and seasonally hazardous agricultural method of energy husbandry to the richly amplifying commonwealth method of industrial production piloted by science; employing vast, inanimate energy augmentations applied to ever more precise mechanical and chemical arrangement advantages.
147 …that the extent of this wealth is so unlimited, having reliably harnessed forces as lasting as the solar system as to allow of fabulous piracy so long as the new wealth source remained properly unaccounted for by any adequate, new, scientific bookkeeping system.
148 …that true audit would clearly reveal to popular comprehension that the solar system, rather than the ‘‘First National,’’ or ‘‘The Federal Reserve,’’ or ‘‘The Treasury,’’ is the source of all physical wealth when released by science through technology.
149 …that, with sun energy wealth (in one of its many conversion phases) leaking in from a myriad of new sources from which, by any recognized feudal agricultural economic precedent, wealth was not supposed to gush, the astonished discoverer of each latest leak could stand in front of it and fill his back pockets without question of his legal proprietorship to that wealth, by any precedent of the obsolete accounting system’s stewards.
150 …that this world-shocking impact of a meager realization of a potentially unlimited commonwealth upon the awareness of a civilization which had with superstitious ignorance struggled for an existence within the arbitrary and cruel limits of the system of ‘‘one against the many’’ and ‘‘survival of the fittest—only,’’ detonated the one hundred years’ civil war of man.
151 …that because the cause of his revolutionizing was too brilliant for him to face and believe, he listened with misgiving and resilient distrust to the sanctimonious inventions of the equally bewildered pocket-fillers who were afraid to be wise, lest they lose their newly-gained smart advantage.
152 …that this World Civil War is being waged, wittingly or unwittingly (and mostly the latter), for the total emancipation of man, not only from the swift ravages of ruthless war, but from the slow and far more painful ravages of a ruthless peace, with its unsung heroisms and its betrayed self-communion over its mutual survival problems.
153 …that social telepathetic self-communion over vital and mutual survival problems is betrayed because it is misbespoken by popularly published perversions of its mutual intent—the perversion being accomplished by omission by any special interest, Baptist, Communist, Episcopalian, or Democratic, of the required balancing components of any dynamic system of mutual volition.
154 …that this perversion of socially-generated volition is hard to detect, not alone because it is a vacuum instrument, but also because it is practiced by all ‘‘sides.’’
155 …that the ruthlessness of an unworthily arranged peace must ever be promulgated by the principle of might makes right, whether the kinetic monopoly be imposed by the few or the many, through vacuum stress or pincer pressure; and that man’s insulation against the selfishness of monopoly of his commonwealth or common sense, and therefore his emancipation from that selfish fixation, will be provided only by scientific organization of his physical environment and wealth-making into a starkly mechanical reality, a reality the benefits of which politics can at best but promise the individual a chance to seek—a promise easily forgotten.
156 …that right here, in the cited difference between scientifically comprehensive engineering anticipations and political promises, is where our total Civil War thinking encounters the theory of the origin of the postwar housing. What physical guarantee does man need of certain realization of his promised emancipation? Obviously, scientific extension of his environmental control—not a political gesture.
157 …that from the curves of those trends which are apparently converging toward integration of the multiple of plus factors, i.e., those promising man’s increased welfaring—that the particular phenomena, which will eventually be identified (probably years after the fact) as constituting origin and prototype of the true postwar housing, will occur only by critical emergence for causes as yet certainly unknown.
158 …that the virginally emergent, that is to say, unheralded postwar housing will appear in important volume during 1945 and will have attained enormous proportions by 1948, proportions that will dwarf into insignificance any previous historical performance of new housing on any per-capita-per-unit-of-environment cubage as yet put under a measure of successful control by man.
159 …that this enormous volume of postwar housing will range rapidly upward within a decade to an equilibrium level of production in the magnitude of two hundred million new units annually, grossing an annual rental income of approximately one hundred billion dollars, though computed at the fantastically low figure of five of today’s American workman’s hourly-wage-geared dollars per month per capita—including heat, light, and maintenance in private, individual quarters.
160 …that these individual quarters will be substantially proofed against fire, flood, pestilence, violent atmospheric disturbance, physical or psychological injuries or discomforts caused by inadequate design, scientific knowledge or technical performance.
161 …that this emergent postwar housing will be a mechanized human container service, purveying to you a controlled atmosphere of seventeen cubic feet of air per minute per person, free of toxic or disagreeable odors and dust, at a dry bulb temperature of 74°F., relative humidity forty-five per cent, wet bulb temperature of 60.5°F., dew point 51.3°FF., vapor pressure .01869 pounds per square inch, with reasonable plus or minus controls, with a noise level below the audible threshold, and with every essential refreshing and resting and sensing (illumination, etc.) device necessary to your happy well being ready to hand.
162 …that the mechanized containers will be but incidental apparatus of a World-Wide Dwelling Service—that is to say, the mechanized containers will be incidental in the same way that the telephone table hand set is an incidental (though obviously integral) mechanical item in the vast interconnected system of scientific apparatus which together makes up the world-wide communication system, a system which you voluntarily join up with by expressed subscription and in which you have no technical function except that of ‘‘user’’ and a system in which no mortgages, replevins, etc., occur.
163 …that if you don’t play ball, the service is ‘‘shut off’’—engineering simplicity replacing legal complexity.
164 …that by this latter, larger mechanical continuity, it is now physically possible for anyone near the earth’s surface to speak to anyone else anywhere about the global premises, provided both have contact with at least a portable radio transceiver set.
165 …that it must be realized that this universal permeation of ‘‘self’’ completely obsoletes the old economic concept of things, immovably ‘‘in place,’’ or absolutely ‘‘at rest,’’ and of a few slowly shuttling, mobile gadgets that were ever a legal control headache to a system strictly predicated upon the proposition that wealth is ‘‘fixed property’’—estate that is ‘‘real’’ only when ‘‘static.’’
166 …that the now-developing, scientific, world-girdling air transport and communication services, together with the new, scientific dwelling service, will all be part and parcel of an encompassing larger unit system, eventually complemented and insured of direction by world-girdling energy distribution services, sometimes beamed by radio, sometimes by wire, and sometimes transported in batches as fuel—a sort of ‘‘American plan’’ Living Service, a De Luxe Travel-or-Stop-Over-As-You-Please Service, ticket good for a life time, anywhere on earth, and available to all.
167 …that this total living service will reliably provide a complete set of ever-advancing standard-of-living conditions, whether you be speeding, poised, lingering or dwelling, upon the surface of the dry land, the high seas, in steaming tropic, on the fly-teeming Arctic tundra, on floating ice, high in the sky, on a mountain top, under the sea, or within the depths of the earth.
168 …that the duration of location occupancy will be proportional to proximity to strategical conditions and to population density, and that government land lease will be predicated in time limits upon reasonable pleas—socially beneficial custodianship, etc.
169 …that in the role of occupant you will have nothing to do personally with the mechanical process of moving, nor with the design and semi-automatic operation of the mechanized containers’ energy processes as thermal, light, or work phases, any more than you have to do with the moving of your telephone or with the original design and upkeep of a suite on a liner.
170 …that you will notify the Service that you wish to move at such and such a time to this or that spot, and will be advised promptly whether the spot is already busy and, if not, for how long you may engage it and what the rate differential above local zone service will be, if any, as predicated on zoning distances from service centrals.
171 …that, dimensionally, the containers with all apparatus will average per occupant about fifteen hundred cubic feet and not over five hundred pounds when fully in use, including all machinery; or approximately three cubic feet of controlled environment per pound of scientifically arranged materials.
172 …that the mechanized dwelling containers will compact in service transit to less than fifty cubic feet per occupant, or one thirtieth of its in-use bulk.
173 …that these ‘‘living service’’ weights and volumes will include everything that the individual does not carry in his personal luggage, tool kit, files, and display miscellany.
174 …that the balance of the individual’s possessions, outside of his customary reference requirements, will be expediently deposited in, or loaned or donated to, vaults or public collections without loss of access on the one hand and with increased public enjoyment on the other, while at the same time freeing the individual to enjoy his world-girdling freedom of motion and poise.
175 …that the dwelling containers will be fashioned out of the whole family of new alloys and chemical synthetics in increasing variety, as demonstrated by the scope of materials that enter into air transport fabrication.
176 …that the metals, broadly speaking, will be more generally found in the production and service phases of the industry than in the end product, with the notable exception of the latter’s primary energy propagator and its mechanical equipment.
177 …that the synthetics (plastics) will predominate in the end product’s visible surfaces, though probably skeletonized delicately within by metallic reinforcements.
178 …that the mechanized dwelling containers, considered as end product, will be constantly improved in design and that new models will be progressively fed into the broad service operation as the service organization progressively scraps and recycles the materials in improved efficiency of disposition, essentially unheeded as a process of change by the service user, exactly as does the telephone service evolute by scientific expediency, the user being a ‘‘party’’ to its evolution only as a potential or kinetic statistic.
179 …that the individual or single family mechanized dwelling service containers will constantly reflect the latest advantages of scientific knowledge gained through pure and applied research, thus affording man direct, cooperatively effected benefit of the environmental complements to his welfare, without conscious designing initiative or effort on the part of individual man as practiced in the past only through inspection of his own selfish immediate requirement, spotlighted exclusively for his consideration because, ‘‘No one is going to look after my best interests if I don’t myself.’’
180 …that man has been working against his own welfare, because his unscientifically appraised, individual requirements were always so wasteful and inefficient as to keep the commonwealth bankrupt and innocent of increment which, if allowed to accumulate, might be scientifically diverted toward instrumenting the organization of his scientifically cooperative ‘‘living service.’’
181 …that the educational system enjoyed by the new life incubated in the evolving ‘‘living service’’ facilities will be a combination of radio, movie, television instruction, industrially devised and recorded by vast mutual programs of service and the arts, and that this instruction, freely tapped by the occupants of the containers, wherever they may be, will be amplified by actual experience at the source as a practical proposition made possible by the energy work efficiency gains of the world-girdling living service.
182 …that, in reality, the whole globe will become every man’s backyard.
183 …that any detailed discussion now of the mechanical ‘‘features’’ is petty and superfluous, other than to note that it is probable a world-wide scientific service of the magnitude now looming up will engage in such terrestrial development as that of utilization of the cold of the Arctic and Antarctic and of the upper reaches of the air, together with the constant winds and reciprocating tides which will all be gathered into the heat exchange system and energy-storing operations by production of liquid oxygen in vast quantities in those cold polar and stratospheric regions and development of its controlled expansion uses in the energy cycle.
184 …that long before employment of these cosmic sources of energy, today’s wastes of the sanitation cycle will be converted to energy work, providing as they do by natural process 110-octane methane gas; and that synthetic fuel for human bodily processes, together with other new food forms already developing, will sum-totally affect the mechanical apparatus requirements of the dwelling containers in a revolutionary manner.
185 …that it is possible that competition of these over-all services for annual contracts with the individual will become the new major political diversion of the world, as Imperial Dwellingways proselytes for voluntary contract constituents in competition with Pan-American Plan or Intercontinental Cooperatives.
186 …that these mechanical containers will serve as constant referendum voting booths, recording the temper of their vast intercommunicated population.
187 …that the new life incubated within these containers will be energy-conscious to an amazing degree, will think dynamically in foot-pounds of energy involvement (not by consciously mumbled calculation). The new life will know how to psychoanalyze itself and its social proclivities, learning how to do away with destructive war as a means of evolutionary growth.
188 …that unselfishness will be as practical a concept as the ability of a steel ship to float by the cooperatively arranged disposition of its atomic body politic, and that the individual will be guaranteed his inviolability, by the nature of mathematics, and that life will be essentially a lesson to be enjoyed.
189 …that in order merely to survive, when environment is comprised of unscientific structure, equipment, philosophy of concept, or environment represents an outright hodgepodge of ignorance, the human occupants must ‘‘rise above it’’ by exercising a strict schedule of self-limitation, together with an immaculate discipline of person and premises.
190 …that when the occupants of unscientifically conceived environment fail in sanitary self and environmental discipline, that then the standards of their lives rapidly degenerate.
191 …that when the environment is scientifically conceived and rendered, the human occupants can then divest themselves of the necessity of onerous and Puritanic hardship of conduct and yet accomplish successful and happy living in naturally engendered sanity.
192 …that because cleanliness is popularly accepted as next to Godliness, daily routines tallying by categories one and a half hours of dishwashing, one and a half hours of clothes, towel and bed linen washing, one hour of house cleaning, two hours of cleaning and preparation of food, one hour of self-cleaning, externally and internally, interspersed with an hour for back-resting, all add up to an eight-hour day devoted to yesterday’s dirt, lest that dirt become today’s filth and tomorrow’s disease. And in all those eight hours devoted to the clean-up of yesterday, not one constructive act nor forward gain in the standard of living is accomplished.
193 …that it takes a seventh day, hallowed for resting, and considerable preaching, praying and psalm-singing, to keep a mother housekeeper in good humor as she progressively relinquishes her own potentials to the next generation.
194 …that in the sense that a child is pure, that all people of any age are also innately pure, and that they are not made better by practice of severe routines of religion or self-discipline, but that those routines, which have been pivoted for millenniums upon development of habits of effective sanitation of the body and physique, have been instituted out of survival necessity as a sort of fervent sing-song sanitation, akin to Negro slave spirituals, or Volga boatmen’s chants, or even to sailor’s chanties, invented out of many psychological causes, not one of which today has any obvious relationship to the actual rhythm of exertion.
195 …that if people were synchronized and instrumented in mutual inter-services, designed creatively throughout, that is, anticipating tomorrow as one with yesterday; and these services were focused upon the most simply effective scientific control of our environment processes, that people could then continue to maintain the purity of spontaneous action and reaction with which they were born, and do so quite unconsciously, that is, without having to cite or recite a moral under which they were acting.
196 …that, granted a scientifically-designed interservice, people would be able to continue in the original purity and dignity of nativity without having to go through the innocent corruption, realized degradation and reform or perish cycles, heretofore inherent in the ignorant chaos of unscientifically encountered environment. And out of these cycles of initial purity, subsequent corruption, degradation, and reform, few, if any, whole beings are ever recreated in the flesh or even in spirit.
197 …that, sum-totally, the whole gamut of religious and moral codes of the past have been necessary to man as palliatives of environment rather than as improvements of his innate qualities; that the words sane and sanitary, which both derive from the Latin sanus, meaning healthy, sound or wholesome, originally intended to communicate that the integrity of original process or phenomena remained unblemished.
198 …that so old have the fundamental sanitary requirements become most of them have acquired a patina of esthetic or religious tradition, which celebration of them in itself obscures the original cerebration, or why for, of the simple, sanitary requirements; until finally meaning has been obscured entirely by the dilettante vacuum accruing to all art for art’s sake—or specialization pursued for special rather than comprehensive issue.
199 …that, in its broadest philosophic sense, this reasoning indicates the enduring superiority of benefit to man inherent in loving as compared to the temporary and miniscule advantages accruing to selfishness.
200 …that the degree of probability of preservation of inherent sanity in the individual is proportional to the degree of maintenance of inherent sanitation in environment; that beyond the inherently functioning sanitation there is no super-sanity to be attained by passion or formula—by mysticism or morality.
201 …that here man may actually help himself to a higher degree of living enrichment by scientific design, not to improve, but to protect the original radiant beauty of curious energetic life, of truthful process, of paradise never lost.
202 …that the modern disaffection from religious dependence decried by the sect proprietors springs from the release from sanitary precaution in its broader, necessitous sense, provided by modern mechanics and science, through which shower baths, sulfa compounds, steri-lamps, and radio-summoned air ambulances, and scientifically pooled cooperative blood banks, have retained people nearer to God than they have ever been returned by the moral sanitation of the sect proprietors, whose original founders gained their popular strength through effective admonition in these fundamental problems of sanitation and survival, and not by initiation of collection-plate routines, abracadabra, sage political moves or real estate investments.
203 …that I conclude our world-wide contemporaries are not less fervent, loving, trustworthy, and individually aware of the profound mysteries and universal omnipotence than were their forebears. In fact, I figure that quite the contrary is true.
204 …that the people are now more deeply conscious than ever before in history of the existence and functioning principles of universal, inexorable physical laws; of the pervading, quietly counseling truth within each and every one of us; of the power of love; and—each man by himself—of his own developing, dynamic relationship with his own conception of the Almightiness of the All-Knowing.
205 …that our contemporaries just don’t wear their faith on their sleeves anymore.
206 …that people have removed faith from their sleeves because they found out for themselves that faith is much too important for careless display. Now they are willing to wait out the days and years for the truthful events, encouraged individually from within; and the more frequently the dramatic phrases advertising love, patriotism, fervent belief, morals, and good fellowship are plagiarized, appropriated and exhibited in the show windows of the world by the propaganda whips for indirect and ulterior motives, no matter how meager the compromise—the more do people withdraw within themselves and shun taking issue with the nauseating perversions, though externally exhibiting quiet indifference, nonchalance or even cultivating seemingly ignorant acceptance.
207 …that this wholesale and published exploitation of integrity and squandering of the meaning in words has come to such a pass that people the world over no longer trust any impersonal corporate statement and promise, although seemingly accepting the mandate of the moment in quiet resignation that might superficially appear as subscription to interpretive pronouncements of the limited liability oracles.
208 …that all these profound developments in the exterior and interior relationships of man and his privately intercommunicated intelligence are precisely bound up with the mechanics of his environment.
209 …that men know and have known for long of the relative security to be found, on the one hand, in values of the static system, as developed by proclamation and necessary acceptance, and, on the other hand, within the dynamic system, as discovered by reality of awareness. For I note that throughout history when men sought to punish one man, they first demoted him, that is, deprived him of degrees of his net motion privileges; on second offense they forthrightly arrested him; next they imprisoned, and if he still struggled, shackled him. As complete and final punishment, they killed him. Here indeed was complete demobilization of the individual.
210 …that that is why men spoke long ago of the ‘‘quick’’ and the ‘‘dead’’—true freedom of articulating individualism must permeate the whole of environment. The only limitations must be those discovered sanely by the individual in the relationship of operation of universal physical principles.
211 …that ‘‘quickness’’ in sanitation—that is, in degree of spontaneity equivalent to unconscious and therefore natural act, making possible free action in every direction, accomplished through the complete integration of intelligent universal principles into cooperatively performed services, which we call industrialization-must find its broadest historical application in production and development of the scientific dwelling service.
212 …that mankind’s prewar plight is similar to that of the fellow who painted himself into the middle of the floor because he was so preoccupied with the technique. Man has applied the benefits of industrialization—at least a priming coat—to everything except his most important spot, the worn-out place in the center where he most frequently treads, his habitat. Man is at last willing to apply industrialization to his home itself, now that its air conditioned brightness and efficiency have come so provokingly to his attention with the new war effort manifestations, but he doesn’t know how to get out of his own way to effect that final application. Suddenly the air raid warning sounds and he streaks for the door, paint or no paint, only to find himself when the ‘‘all clear’’ sounds unexpectedly outside the situation and free at last to attack the problem objectively. There, outside of each of their houses, contemplating them with critical eye, stand each and all of his neighbors. That is where man and his housing are today.