Design-Science – The Importance of Buckminster Fuller
In order to frame what follows, I will begin with some of the ideas of Buckminster Fuller. Buckminster Fuller was a ‘design-scientist’, a dedicated futurist, who following an epiphany in his early thirties devoted himself to coming up with ideas to benefit humanity, working for the common good. His work spanned political and economic questions such as: the fair, sustainable, and efficient use of the world’s resources; the creation of a one-world energy grid, cost-effective housing and transport; as well as thinking through practical questions of how such a society could function.
I know that if we stop wasting our money on armaments and use our high technology on livingry instead of weaponry, within 10 years we could have all humanity, all 4 1/2 billion, living at a higher standard than anybody has ever known. In other words, we could have a billion billionaires. It is now physically and technologically possible. All the warring is on the misassumption of all politics that there is a fundamental inadequacy of life support. This is incorrect. It was correct until yesterday, but not today.
Seeing the future differently – Escaping our conditioned inertia
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
“In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.”
What is so necessary about Fuller’s approach is the demonstration that with the scientific knowledge which humanity has accrued, and the current resources on the planet it is perfectly possible each one of us, all over the world, perfectly comfortably. This ‘visioning’ work is urgently needed to help us escape from our collective brainwashing to believe that there is no alternative to the neo-liberal economic model, the ‘Dark Satanic Mill’ which has attained such centripetal force that it continues to accelerate on its own, whirring and whirring towards a great big crash which will take humanity along with it. Somehow we have become mentally imprisoned, through an education system which encourages us to pass tests and get jobs, the TV whose rays provoke docile, hypnotic states, and show us pictures that look like reality, as well as the mass media engine of LCD screens on the walls of the walled-garden.
In order to get more of our friends and neighbours, i.e. a critical mass of humanity to escape from this conditioning, we need to demonstrate, repetitively that something better is possible.
Fundamental Point – One World and We are all billionaires or none of us are
Another reason why Buckminster Fuller was so important is that his work is fundamentally based on the search for solutions for all humanity, not for a given class or nation. This is justified as a practical approach. One of the most important political points that he makes is that humanity needs to start thinking of itself as a planetary family, rather than members of different nation-states. His approach is therefore communitarian, as the accumulation of resources by an individual to the detriment of his neighbours when everyone could be living perfectly luxuriously together, is not only illogical but dangerous. A system where a very few individuals have massive access to resources leads in itself to planetry destruction according to Fuller. This is a profoundly political point, and I seek to work through how some sort of egalitarian world system in the Buckminster Fuller mould could be achieved.
“Technologically we now have [six billion billionaires] on Spaceship Earth who are entirely unaware of their good fortune. Unbeknownst to [us our] legacy is being held in probate by general ignorance, fear, selfishness, and a myriad of paralyzing professional, licensing, zoning, building laws and the like, as bureaucratically maintained by the incumbent power structures.”[1]
The current global economic situation has been compared to an organism living with a large tape-worm. Catherine Austin Fitts compares the actions of a small group of insiders, who accrue massive profits at the social and economic costs of the rest of humanity, and the planetary ecosystem, as that of a tapeworm, driven to destroying its own conditions for survival through its drive for self aggrandisement.
In a Tapeworm Economy, a small group of insiders consolidate political and economic power at the expense of people, living things, and our environment in a manner that destroys real wealth.[2]
Currently we are a long way from being a planet of billionaires; rather we are on a track to becoming a planet of serfs, with a handful of absurdly rich individuals. An OXFAM report released January 2014 warns:
- Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population.
- The wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion. 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.
- The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world.[3]
Buckminster Fuller’s vision is for a very different world, one that needs to be imagined into being:
“I know that if we stop wasting our money on armaments and use our high technology on Livingry instead of Weaponry, within 10 years we could have all humanity, all 4 1/2 billion, living at a higher standard than anybody has ever known. In other words, we could have a billion billionaires. It is now physically and technologically possible.”[4]
Spaceship Planet Earth
On the political level, Fuller makes the excellent point that universal management of resources is an efficient and necessary step towards human evolution. For example, if we mapped all the word’s resources, we would be able to allocate them fairly and sustainably for everyone. What gets in the way of this is the politics of competitive individual nation states. Our world as like a great big ship we are all on it together and we now must organise the steering of the rudder. Fuller says that the current problem is that there is 180 plus Admirals each pushing in different directions, one considering the front the back, another the other way around, all contradicting eachother, a chaotic situation with no-one at the helm.
- It is now possible to give every man, woman and child on Earth a standard of living comparable to that of a modern-day billionaire. This is not an opinion or a hope — it is an engineeringly demonstrable fact. This can be done using only the already proven technology and with the already mined, refined, and in-recirculating physical resources.[5]
- You say that the 160 nations of the world act as 166 blood clots blocking the free and unobstructed exchange of ideas, scrap metals, tools, and real wealth. But isn’t it hard to imagine the world’s people giving up their strong nationalistic instincts?
FULLER: No, it isn’t. I have been around the world 48 times. The United States isn’t a nation. It is a crossbreeding world of humans. In one section of Los Angeles there are 81 nations’ people interbreeding.[6]
- We have today, in fact, 150 supreme admirals and only one ship – Spaceship Earth. We have the 150 admirals in their 150 staterooms each trying to run their respective stateroom as if it were a separate ship. We have the starboard side admirals’ league trying to sink the port side admirals’ league. If either is successful in careening the ship to drown the “enemy” side, the whole ship will be lost.[7]
| MACRO-LEVEL EXAMPLE
1. One-world grids and roads An example of how this could be different is the one-world electricity grid, if we see the world more or less as one big land mass could connect a grid from South America to North America, to Russia, then on to both Europe and Africa, and through the middle east to India, China, South East Asia and Australia. If the grid were connected in this way, there would be massive energy savings and better energy provision for all. This is not even that difficult to do, a simple connection between North America and Russia’s existing grids and a few more connections in other places would be sufficient. This sort of land mass connection could connect with highways and train lines, a one-world train line from Patagonia to Auckland via Montreal, St Petersburg, Tehran, and Singapore! What we need to do is bring into the public consciousness the understanding that such solutions are possible. Going back to Fuller’s metaphor, these solutions are hindered by the lack of vision and cooperation between states, which all share an out of date Machiavellian understanding of states craft that would not allow such ideas because they would involve the ceding of power to foreigners, and cause problems with the owners of capital.
“I have presented my plan for using our increasing technical ability to construct high-voltage, superconductive transmission lines and implement an around-the-world electrical energy grid integrating the daytime and nighttime hemispheres, thus swiftly increasing the operating capacity of the world’s electrical energy system and, concomitantly, living standard in an unprecedented feat of international cooperation”.[8] |
Towards a new epistemology of international relations and global governance
North and South are constructs, there only exists in and out, close to the equator or far from it. We need a new way of talking abut global governance, new categories, new ways of imagining a global humanity as a political entity, and new forms of governance to regulate and distribute resources on our behalf.
World Governance
Of course, we need to be careful of promoting one world governance in the currently billionaire dominated planet. We do not want a totalitarian state, we do not want richer states to be privileged. OF course, the fundamental principle of some sort of global regulatory and enabling managerial system would be to benefit the common good, not accrue more useless wealth and ‘power over’ of the existing elites, or the creation of a new elite. Therefore the technicalities of ensuring that Global Governance does not become a nightmare need to be considered carefully.
The idea of this text is to get us to think about possible solutions or virtuous ways of doing things in keeping with the Buckminster Fuller maxim to “Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”[9]
Global Level
At the global level, we need to look into the different ways of regulation of trade, the question of the monopoly of violence, multi-polarism, different ways in which the world could be democratically organised.
[1] R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
[2] http://solari.com/articles/tapeworm_economics/
[3] OXFAM Briefing Paper, released January 2014,available at: http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/bp-working-for-few-political-capture-economic-inequality-200114-en.pdf
[4] Buckminster Fuller’s last interview, conducted in 1983 available at http://www.communitelligence.com/clps/clitem.cfm?AdsID=172
[5] http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/leisure/bucky.html
[6] This interview — believed to be R. Buckminster Fuller’s last– was conducted by John Gerstner at Fuller’s home in Pacific Palisades, California, in November, 1982. Available at http://www.communitelligence.com/clps/clitem.cfm?AdsID=172
[7] Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
[8] Buckminster Fuller, in Cosmosgraphy, 1993, Fuller and Kuromiya
[9] Quote from Fuller regarding the intentions of the World Game, available at www.bfi.org
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