Freesteel Blog » On Reading Buckminster Fuller
On Reading Buckminster Fuller
Sunday, December 10th, 2017 at 1:27 pm
I’ve had a bit of a layoff for the autumn due to various issues, but strength seems to be returning. I have just finished reading Buckminster Fuller’s 1981 book Critical Path, which was written well before the internet or the invention of free software.
I wanted to type up an excerpt. But since the writing was so terrible I decided to edit it down extensively so you can read and get the gist more easily.
Chapter 8, Critical Path: Part Two
It was important to adopt a target date so far in the future to avoid making any of the power structures of 1927 feel their interests were threatened by what I was proposing. It was necessary to reach beyond their most forward developed visions so that my concepts would appear to be either a pleasant “pipe dream” or innocuous nonsense.
I was able to do exactly that. The most powerful people I knew found me utterly unaccreditable but “interesting” — and to some “fascinating”. This induced them to invite me to their parties to entertain their guests with my “dreaming out loud”. For this reason their press frequently gave my projects prominent publicity– because they found my concepts popularly entertaining. They published them ever more frequently and prominently, hoping for advertisements-inducing, increased readership.
I will now discuss the probable order of livingry-reoriented realization of the socioeconomic results of our already-accomplished, half-century, critical-path-artifacts development.
Approximately 60% of employed US America are working at tasks that are not producing any life support. Jobs of inspectors-of-inspectors; jobs with insurance companies that induce people to bet that their house is going to be destroyed by fire while the insurance company bets that it isn’t, and so on.
The majority of Americans reach their jobs by automobile, probably averaging four gallons a day– thereby, spending four million real cosmic-physical-Universe dollars of nature’s stored accumulated millions of years mineral wealth without producing any physical Universe life-support– which alone constitutes wealth.
We can ask a computer the question: “Should we carry on as at present, trying to politically create more of these no-wealth producing jobs, or pay everybody a handsome fellowship to stay at home.”
The answer is obvious.
But then wouldn’t all the people staying at home just continually buy all kinds of expensive things? The answer is No. Because these people will want to travel around the world, and they will quickly discover that while you can’t take it with you when you die, you also can’t take it with you around the world. They will each discover for themselves that the greatest luxury is to be able to live unencumbered while able to get any information you want in split seconds and any desirable environmental condition they want in a day.
Assuming that, as a result of technological advances with machines, we can produce adequate life-support for humanity in half the present time, present custom would say we should adopt a four-day, five-hour-per-day work week. But this would result in living in the same spot and clogging up the highways with local weekend to-and-froing. Instead I propose a few years of continuous six-day-per-week, eight-hour-per-day service as in the military or medical internship so that by the age of 38 workers will have completed their service in direct production support of humanity. With their wisdom evolved, they will have more than half their lives left to live. They will be extremely well-informed and free to initiate their own commitments to the improvement of human functioning within the eternally regenerative integrity of Universe.
Along with making it economically feasible to permit a large majority of people to remain at home in country or city, to think fearlessly and unselfishly, we will permit all children to study at home, eliminating the schoolhouse, schoolteachers. school janitors, and school-bus systems, which cost unnecessary trillions of dollars each school year. At home we shall provide each child with a private room, television set, and video-education cassettes as well as world-satellite-inter-relayed computer and controlled video-encyclopedia access. These will make it possible for any child anywhere to obtain lucidly, faithfully, and attractively presented authoritative information on any subject.
Children and grown people will be able to get their continuing intellectual education at their home terminals. They will get their social experience and tool-handling education in locally organized neighborhood activities when humans wish to converge.
Those who have attained high scholarly capability assure us that the only real education is self-education. They also say that this self-discipline is often inspired by great teachers who make it apparent that it will be worthwhile to take the trouble. The records of all great self-educated individuals show that they discern intuitively when and what it is they want to learn. Thereafter they arrange to do so by four main strategies. The first is by self-conducted experiments, if they are scientists. The second is by going to living people who have educated themselves from direct experiences. The third is to contact through books those who have discovered and learned but are now dead. Fourth, they sometimes recourse to word-of-mouth information passed from generation to generation by craftsmen-artists.
Fearful of losing their jobs, the tenured professional educators of today and all those earning a living by teaching are relentlessly fighting video. Since they can’t tell the truth about their motives, these tenured pedants rationalize, “What the children need is the personal equation.” What I’ve long observed in the movie world is that millions of human beings fall in love with heroes and heroines knowing only their photographic images cast upon a blank wall. All the “personal equation” can be transmitted with more poignancy by electronics than would ever be feasible in ordinary, personal-contact life.
After beginning to receive their home-research lifetime fellowships and trying the video educational system themselves, professors and researchers won’t protest anymore about loss of the “personal equation” in education.
With complete freedom of choice, much of humanity will begin to discover that it loves to work at tasks of its own choosing — that it loves to discipline itself to demonstrate its competence to others — that it will compete with the many to demonstrate its competence to serve on one of the multitude of production teams. There will be no pay for work. It would be like qualifying for the Olympic team to be allowed to do what you want to do. You would have to prove that you could do the job you wanted to do better than anyone else available to get onto the production teams. Permission to serve on the world’s production teams will be the greatest privilege that humanity can bestow on an individual. There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you’re doing well.
There will be no attempt to block automation to keep human muscle and repetitive-selection jobs operative. There would be continual inspiration to invent more automation. Those who are real craftsmen are good at developing the tools-that-make-tools and love their work will be at the heart of the production teams. There will be no need to earn more because your fellowship will always get you more than you want. You won’t be able to buy any non-consumables– you will only be able to rent. If you are renting more than you can use, the system will call the excess back.
Those who love to teach and have something valuable to teach can discipline themselves to qualify for membership on the subject-scenario-writing teams or on video-cassette or disc production teams. Great scholars will thrive, whatever their fields may be. They will be free to devote their entire time to their labours of love. Vast numbers will discover that they are earnest, capable independent-research scholars. What they have to say, if unique, can become the subject of a video-cassette world-satellite-relayed encyclopedia entry.
1 Comment
1. aaron replies at 14th January 2018, 9:56 pm :
Glad to read of your recovering from your Autumn layoff.
Your two R. Buckminster Fuller blogs are of particular interest; I grew up with his Nine Chains to the Moon and other booklets related to his work.
Some of what RBF is/was about might well be experienced better through films of presentations by or about him.
This recent Vimeo excerpt, a kind of ode to RBF, turns up in brief search: https://vimeo.com/63376370
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