1 Breaking the Shell of Permitted Ignorance
2In addition, several people in Fuller's office were crucial in their support of our work and in the countless small tasks they performed for us. In particular, we would like to thank Shirley Sharkey, Tim Wessels, Anne Mintz, and Medard Gabel.
3 Finally, we would like to thank Pam Campbell and Ken Walker for comments and suggestions that have made the book substantially better than it would have been without them.
4 I often make use of two tools of thought that I find important in casting loose from the biases and patterns of yesterday. The first is simply to recognize how powerfully our reflexes are conditioned. For example, the words up and down, which we all use without much thinking, were invented to accommodate our multimillion-year-old misconception that we lived on a flat world extending laterally to infinity. Since all the perpendiculars to the same plane have to be parallel to one another, they could only go in two directions, up and down. These two words have nothing to do with our spherical planet moving around the sun at 60,000 miles an hour in a Universe where there is no up or down whatsoever. That we still find such expressions appropriate means that we are still thinking in terms of planes that go to infinity: ‘‘The four corners of the earth’’ or ‘‘worldwide.’’ This is eminently human. The average person in a lifetime sees less than a millionth of the surface of the earth.1
5 If it really were a plane, stretching omnilaterally to infinity, then there would be infinite room to pollute and infinite resources to replace those already exhausted. Indeed that is the way it seemed in the past, and we are still very much in this frame of mind. Similarly, we still see the sun going down at night and rising in the morning, although we have known for 500 years that it is not doing so. Our reflexes can be that much out of gear with what we ‘‘know’’ theoretically. The fact that we ‘‘know’’ a great many ‘‘things’’ does not mean that we are going to behave better.
6 A second way of thinking, which helps to free one from outdated patterns of thought, has to do with ‘‘synergy.’’ This word is not familiar to most people. It means ‘‘the behavior of whole systems that cannot be predicted by the behavior of any parts taken separately.’’ That this is not a popular conception can be deduced from the fact that synergy is not a popular word—as I have found by inquiring of 300 university audiences.
7 A series of important scientific measurements starting in ancient times and later refined observationally by Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler disclosed a hitherto unknown mathematical coordination between the planets and the sun. The forces causing this coordination were puzzling since there were no mechanical linkages between the planets, which were all of different sizes and distances from the sun, around which they orbited at different rates. At about the same time, Galileo was measuring rates of free-falling bodies and those sliding on various slopes, and evolving some laws of motion, particularly laws describing the accelerating acceleration of his falling bodies. Newton, excited by all this, sought to discover the mathematical explanations. He reasoned, as had Kepler, that there must be some attractive force operating between the bodies of the solar system. He made the working assumption that a body would persist in a straight line of motion except as affected by other bodies. Newton then calculated what the straight line of the moon's motion would be if Earth were suddenly annihilated. He then measured the rate at which the moon was falling away from the line toward Earth in a given time. He found that the rate of falling corresponded exactly with Galileo's law of falling bodies.
8 Galileo's accelerating acceleration gave Newton the clue from which he finally evolved his law of mass attraction, to wit: that when the two intercoordinating bodies' masses are multiplied by one another and the distance between them is halved, the attraction is increased fourfold, that is 22 = 4. With certain as yet debatable modifications, Newton's mass-attraction law has since explained all thus far observed macro- and micro-behavior of Universe. Yet there is nothing in one of the bodies by itself that tells you it is going to attract or be attracted by another, and that is exactly what is meant by synergy.
9 The very integrity of our Universe is implicit in synergy, and the fact that the word is popularly unknown shows how relatively ignorant humanity as yet is.
10 There is a hierarchy of synergies. There is nothing in atoms that predicts the behavior of molecules. There is nothing in molecules per se that predicts the behavior of biological protoplasm. There is nothing in protoplasm per se that predicts the ecological energy-exchanging regenerative coordination of all the living species of our planet.
11 Going from micro to macro, each more inclusive aspect of Universe is unpredicted by any of its respective subparts taken separately. Universe is a synergy of synergies. It is a corollary of synergy that the known behavior of wholes plus the known behavior of a few of their parts enables discovery of other parts and their behavioral characteristics. In order to really understand what is going on, we have to abandon starting with parts, and we must work instead from the whole to the particulars.
12 We are all becoming aware of the superb ecological balance whereby the vegetation impounds all the sun's radiation necessary to regenerate all life aboard our planet. In the photosynthetic impoundment of the sun's radiation, the vegetation produces hydrocarbon molecules while giving off gases that would eventually permeate the whole planetary atmosphere if it were not for the mammals who live by these vegetation-produced gases and in turn convert them into the gases necessary to keep the vegetation going. This recirculatory complementation is typical of our whole Universe. There is nothing that one does that does not affect all others in varying degrees. This, of course, includes all life.
13 From this point on, we must learn to consider the seriousness of human decisions and actions. But society is still hamstrung by its now obsolete conditioning and inadequate accounting systems.
14 It is absolutely a priori to everything that I can think about that human beings are born naked and ignorant on board this planet but are given beautiful mental equipment with which, by trial and error, they can gradually learn better how to cope with life. We have not as yet pulled ourselves very far out of that abyss of ignorance. It is important that we realize that we have not. Because of the availability of new communications technology and because we now have a great deal more information, we are supposed to be pulling out very fast, but our reflexes, conditioned by the days of ignorance, are not paying realistic attention to our new information.
15 We are coming out of a common eggshell of initially permitted ignorance. As with the embryo chick, we were endowed with all the nutriments to nourish us through the period of exclusively subconscious growth. The nutriment for trial and error is exhausted. We are grown. We now know that only our metaphysical mind can and does discover and employ the eternal, weightless, generalized principles governing all Universe transactions. Suddenly our eggshell is broken, and like the chick, we must make good on our own. It must be all or none, and all true to principle.