Philosophy

"Buckminster Fuller, the twentieth century philosopher, described the Earth as a spaceship, and he wrote that all humans are really astronauts sharing residence on a planet travelling 60,000 miles an hour. He believed, "We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody." This is exactly the underlying philosophy that propels the United Nations... Having a global education and being a world citizen is the key element for peace and for all elements of progress outlined in the UN Charter."

"So, planners, architects, and engineers take the initiative. Go to work, and above all co-operate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe. p. 133"

"While no politician or political system can ever afford to yield understandably and enthusiastically to their adversaries and opposers, all politicians can and will yield enthusiastically to the computers safe flight - controlling capabilities in bringing all of humanity in for a happy landing."

"Sum-totally, we find that the physical constituent of wealth-energy-cannot decrease and that the metaphysical constituent-know-how-can only increase. This is to say that everytime we use our wealth it increases."

"They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe."

"Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less. He may learn that what he thought was true was not true. By the elimination of a false premise, his basic capital wealth which in his given lifetime is disembarrassed of further preoccupation with considerations of how to employ a worthless time-consuming hypothesis."

"Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system's separate parts or any subassembly of the system's parts... Since the word is unknown to the average public, as I have already pointed out, it is not at all surprising that synergy has not been included in the economic accounting of our wealth transactions or in assessing our common wealth capabilities."

"Topology provides the synergetic means of ascertaining the values of any system of experiences. Topology is the science of fundamental pattern and structural relationships of event constellations. p. 73"

"Let us now exercise our intellectual faculties as best we can to apprehend the evolutionary patternings transcending our spontaneous cognitions and recognitions."

"I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem. Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences."

"I have learned about public reaction to the unfamiliar and also about the ease and speed with which the transformed reality becomes so "natural” as misseemingly to have been always obvious. So I knew that their last observations were made only because the evolutionary events I had foreseen have occurred on schedule."

"First, I'd like to explore a few thoughts about the vital data confronting us right now — such as the fact that more than half of humanity as yet exists in miserable poverty, prematurely doomed, unless we alter our comprehensive physical circumstances. It is certainly no solution to evict the poor, replacing their squalid housing with much more expensive buildings which the original tenants can't afford to reoccupy. Our society adopts many such superficial palliatives."

"Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking."

"We must stop burning up the house to keep the family warm. We have all the technology needed to tap vast cosmic energies of the sun but greedy big business and money drunk government won't allow it because they haven't found a way to place a meter on the sun."

"In our schools today we still start off the education of our children by giving them planes and lines that go on, incomprehensibly "forever” toward a meaningless infinity. Such oversimplified viewpoints are misleading, blinding, and debilitating, because they preclude possible discovery of the significance of our integrated experiences."

"This all brings us to a realization of the enormous educational task which must be successfully accomplished right now in a hurry in order to convert man’s spin-dive toward oblivion into an intellectually mastered power pullout into safe and level flight of physical and metaphysical success, where after he may turn his Spaceship Earth’s occupancy into a universe exploring advantage. If it comprehends and reacts effectively, humanity will open an entirely new chapter of the experiences and the thoughts and drives thereby stimulated."

"Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences. Only our minds are able to discover the generalized principles operating without exception in each and every special-experience case which if detected and mastered will give knowledgeable advantage in all instances."

"Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable, and desirable. Yet in observing a little child, we find it is interested in everything and spontaneously apprehends, comprehends, and co-ordinates an ever-expanding inventory of experiences. ... Nothing seems to be more prominent about human life than its wanting to understand all and put everything together. p. 13"

"The men who were able to establish themselves on the oceans had also to be extraordinarily effective with the sword upon both land and sea. They had also to have great anticipatory vision, great ship designing capability, and original scientific conceptioning, mathematical skill in navigation and exploration techniques for coping in fog, night, and storm with the invisible hazards of rocks, shoals, and currents. The great sea venturers had to be able to command all the people in their dry land realm order to commandeer the... skills necessary to produce their large, complex ships... There were very few of these top power men. But as they went on their sea ventures they gradually found that the waters interconnected all the world’s people and lands... these very few masters of the water world became incalculably rich and powerful."

"These hard, powerful, brilliantly resourceful sea masters had to sleep occasionally, and therefore found it necessary to surround themselves with super-loyal, muscular but dull-brained illiterates who could not see nor savvy their masters’ stratagems. There was great safety in the mental dullness of these henchmen. The Great Pirates realized that the only people who could possibly contrive to displace them were the truly bright people."

"Under these everyday, knowledge-thwarting or limiting circumstances of humanity, the comprehensively - informed master adventurers of history who went to sea soon realized that the only real competition they had was that of other powerful outlaws who might also know or hope to learn through experience “what it is all about.”"

"I call these sea mastering people the great outlaws or Great Pirates... simply because the arbitrary laws enacted... by men on the land could not be extended effectively to control humans beyond their shores and out upon the seas. So the... men who lived on the seas were inherently outlaws, and the only laws that could and did rule them were the natural laws — the physical laws of universe which when tempestuous were often cruelly devastating..."

"The British Isles lying off the coast of Europe constituted in effect a fleet of unsinkable ships and naval bases commanding all the great harbors of Europe. Those islands were the possession of the topmost Pirates. Since the Great Pirates were building, maintaining, supplying their ships on those islands, they also logically made up their crews out of the native islanders who were simply seized or commanded aboard by imperial edict. Seeing these British Islanders aboard the top pirate ships the people around the world mistakenly assumed that the world conquest by the Great Pirates was a conquest by the will, ambition, and organization of the British people, Thus was the G. P.’s (Great Pirate's) grand deception victorious. But the people of those islands never had the ambition to go out and conquer the world. As a people they were manipulated by the top pirates and learned to cheer as they were told of their nation’s world prowess. p. 25"

"Leonardo da Vinci is the outstanding example of the comprehensively anticipatory design scientist. Operating under the patronage of the Duke of Milan he designed the fortified defences and weaponry as well as the tools of peaceful production. Many other great military powers had their comprehensive design scientist-artist inventors; Michelangelo was one of them."

"The topmost Great Pirates’ Leonardos discovered both in their careful, long-distance planning and in their anticipatory inventing that the grand strategies of sea power made it experimentally clear that a plurality of ships could usually outmaneuver one ship. So the Great Pirates’ Leonardos invented navies. Then, of course, they had to control various resource-supplying mines, forests, and lands with which and upon which to build the ships and establish the industries essential to building, supplying, and maintaining their navy’s ships. p. 27"

"The required and scientifically designed secrecy of the sea operations thus pulled a curtain that hid the Leonardos from public view, popular ken, and recorded history."

"Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives."

"How may we use our intellectual capability to higher advantage?... In organizing our grand strategy we must first discover where we are now; that is, what our present navigational position in the universal scheme of evolution is. p. 58, Ch. 5, General Systems Theory"

"Evolution consists of many great revolutionary events taking place quite independently of man's consciously attempting to bring them about."

"My own picture of humanity today finds us just about to step out from amongst the pieces of our just one-second-ago broken eggshell. Our innocent, trial-and-error-sustaining nutriment is exhausted. We are faced with an entirely new relationship to the universe."

"The politicians, having an automatic bias, were committed to defend and advantage only their own side. Each assumed the validity of the Malthusian-Darwin-you-or-me-to-the-death struggle. Because of the working concept that there was not enough to go around, the most aggressive political leaders exercised their political leadership by heading their countries into war to overcome the rest of the world, thus to dispose of the unsupportable excess population through decimation and starvation-the age-old, lethal formula of ignorant men."

"When, as we have seen, the Great Pirates let their scientists have free rein in World War I the Pirates themselves became so preoccupied with enormous wealth harvesting that... they, too, became severe specialists as industrial production money makers, and thus they compounded their own acceleration to extinction... But society, as we have seen, never knew that the Great Pirates had been running the world. Nor did society realize... that the Great Pirates had become extinct."

"Capitalism and socialism are mutually extinct. Why? Because science now finds there can be ample for all, but only if the sovereign fences are completely removed. The basic you-or-me-not-enough-for-both— ergo someone-must-die tenets of the class warfaring are extinct. p. 39"

"World society was fully and painfully aware of the economic paralysis. Society consisted then, as now, almost entirely of specialized slaves in education, management, science, office routines, craft, farming, pick- and-shovel labour, and their families. Our world society now has none of the comprehensive and realistic world knowledge that the Great Pirates had. p. 42"

"All the great ideological groups assumed Armageddon. Getting ready for the assumed inexorable Armageddon, each applied science and all of the great scientific specialization capabilities only toward weaponry, thus developing the ability to destroy themselves totally with no comprehensively organized oppositional thinking capability and initiative powerful enough to co-ordinate and prevent it. Thus by 1946, we were on the swift way to extinction despite the inauguration of the United Nations, to which none of the exclusive sovereign prerogatives were surrendered."

"We are going to have to spread our wings of intellect and fly or perish; that is, we must dare immediately to fly by the generalized principles governing universe and not by the ground rules of yesterday's superstitious and erroneously conditioned reflexes."

"There's a major pattern of energy in universe wherein the very large events, earthquakes, and so forth, occur in any one area of universe very much less frequently than do the small energy events... In the patterning of total evolutionary events, there comes a time, once in a while, amongst the myriad of low energy events, when a large energy event transpires and is so disturbing that with their general adaptability lost, the ultra-specialized creatures perish. p. 40"

"Because world societies thought mistakenly of their local politicians, who were only the stooges of the Great Pirates, as being realistically the head men, society went to them to get the industrial and economic machinery going again. Because industry is inherently world - co¬ordinate these world economic depression events of the 1920’s and 1930’s meant that each of the local head politicians of a number of countries were asked separately to make the world work. On this basis the world-around inventory of resources was no longer integratable. Each of the political leaders’ mandates were given from different ideological groups, and their differing viewpoints and resource difficulties led inevitably to World War II."

"The evolutionary antibody to the extinction of humanity through specialization appeared in the form of the computer and its comprehensively commanded automation operating manual for spaceship earth which made man obsolete as a physical production and control specialist-and just in time."

"Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate "comprehensivity." Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us. p. 43"

"Man is very vain; he likes to feel that he is responsible for all the favorable things that happen, and he is innocent of all the unfavorable happenings. But all the larger evolutionary patternings seeming favorable or unfavorable to man's conditioned reflexing are transpiring transcendentally to any of man's conscious planning or contriving. p. 44"

"Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space. . . . Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship. p. 47"

"As we attempt competent thinking we immediately begin to reemploy our innate drive for comprehensive understanding. p. 59"

"Universe is synergetic. Life is synergetic."

"The procedure we are pursuing is that of true democracy. Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgement what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect's function in universe."

"Einstein, Planck, and other leading scientists said, "We're going to have to reassess and redefine the physical universe." — They defined the physical universe as "an aggregate of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping transformation events.""

"We may first note an evolutionary trend that countered all of the educational systems and the deliberately increased professional specialization of scientists. This contradiction occurred at the beginning of World War II, when extraordinary new scientific instruments had been developed and the biologists and chemists and physicists were meeting in Washington, D. C... They found there was no real dividing line between their professional interests. They hadn’t meant to do this, but their professional fields were being integrated inadvertently, on their part, but apparently purposefully-by inexorable evolution."

"So, as of World War II, the scientists began to invert new professional designations: the bio-chemist, the bio-physicist, and so forth. They were forced to. Despite their deliberate attempts only to specialize, they were being merged into ever more inclusive fields of consideration. Thus was deliberately specializing man led back unwittingly once more to reemploy his innately comprehensive capabilities."

"You may very appropriately want to ask me how we are going to resolve the ever-acceleratingly dangerous impasse of world-opposed politicians and ideological dogmas. I answer, it will be resolved by the computer. p. 133"

"This is the way schools began — as the royal tutorial schools. You realize, I hope, that I am not being facetious. That is it. This is the beginning of schools and colleges and the beginning of intellectual specialization."