The End Of The (Bullshit Mass-Murder) World

This is not a game – but if it was we would be losing, hard (and totally unnecessarily - 'cause Bucky tried to show us better)

A means for mean ends

Hey Folks!

I was just a kid when I first came to one of my simplest most useful and important idea-tools. I have challenged and doubted it many times since (especially when emotionally captivated by dogma and partisan chums) but it has held up under heavy use for at least a half a century now, while the dogma and the partisans have all ultimately proven themselves to be false and/or stupid (lies/ego).

There is no such thing as an easy rulebook or a checklist for the lazy and mindless, which allows us to access genuine morality and helpful behaviour in life without ever thinking carefully, or doubting our own inclinations and emotions. Even stranger – almost everything which people now use in this way, as a “moral code” to accuse others of being essentially subhuman in some way (our most popular modern emotional sport) was clearly meant in an entirely different way – and that becomes obvious if we study it, in terms of the context in which it arose, and the reasons why it was ultimately widely adopted.

I always found when I did study, it was clear each set of enduring aspirational ideas began as a counter-balance to a troublesome excess in the previous dominant ideas. Over time the new ideas might become a new inflexible imbalanced dogma, which itself calls for fresh challenging ideas, to balance THAT over-correction, or add a new aspect of consideration to our commons, and so on. (meme-tabolism?)

Perhaps the most famous example of an old idea that we moderns almost always get wrong is the code of Hammurabi – “An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth.” – which has long been considered the birth of all (western) law. To us it now sounds harsh and transactional – almost an allowance for violence – but in the time in which it was introduced it was considered radically restrained and compassionate. It was really saying – if someone takes your eye, you can ONLY take their eye back, not outright kill them (even though that remains a very popular and emotionally appealing method of conflict resolution down to this day – all depending on the culture and the particular sanction involved).

Our extra recent difficulty is that one way or another (popular culture Big(War)News and advertising) we are all constantly being encouraged to be and remain eternal emotional brats, instead of steadily becoming more and more responsible capable and sober-thinking adults. This means we most often study the ideas of other groups, just to insult them, for our own (entirely negative and unwholesome) emotional reasons, and never even aspire to develop compassionate understanding or rational debate.

Some of the most jarring bizarre and offensive examples of this are seen in the vast torrent of modern propaganda we’ve all been subjected to, during this deeply twisted century especially, coming from supposedly ‘well meaning’ social engineering control freaks, who think they are being clever because they use the language of their opponents, in their cheap-shot attempts to shame them, but fail to deliver any useful message at all, because what their pitch reveals most clearly to their target audience is the profound and shameless hatred disdain and ignorance held by the those exact social-engineering assholes who are doing the “Moral” advertising!

I’m not a sports fan, which just means more seats and merch for those who are – no problemo. But I know many people who don’t like sports, who also insist on making grandiose self-serving theories about the clear violent roots and high passions involved in sports, as if to say something they don’t like or use should be banned for others, because of their own ignorant outsider contempt for it. Thing is, we human beings all have violent roots. There is considerable physical evidence to suggest neanderthals were stronger smarter taller and even nicer than us homo sapiens. We won because we kill, in packs. Yes, there are herbivores in our family tree (a very long while ago) but the nature of our early success was as cooperating predators, and finding that ‘icky’ or uncomfortable does not alter it. Plus, sports really do, do a heck of a lot to help sublimate and channel our otherwise dangerous animal tensions.

Angry at a particular group, creed, race, sect or even gender? Fine – freedom actually is that big (and must be, or we wouldn’t ever be allowed to object to truly evil things, being done by truly evil groups).

But when we make an entire philosophy out of our anger at any group (rather than confronting the bad intentions and harmful effects of specific evidenced actions of that group) we are using our brains to create, reinforce and live inside a bigotry, because we are too emotionally stuck, to get over our upset selves and think a little harder (that is, to become much happier and infinitely more useful to others).

An especially clear and hilarious (though also tragically destructive) example of this phenomena was on display for us all, when Obama and Hillary were fighting to lead the Democrats into the 2016 election. Hillary’s (mostly CIA regime-change spooks and money-laundering banker-creep powered) campaign, absolutely started it, but Obama’s returned the favour in the exact same coin – so suddenly we had “Everyone who doesn’t like Hillary is a sexist!” (because we aren’t allowed to object to supremacist warmongering by people with vaginas?) and on the other hand, everyone who doesn’t like Obama (surely the slickest, most accomplished and destructively effective race-traitor since Eldridge Cleaver) is a foul and disgusting racist!

These imbecile tribalists got so deep into this game that no one outside their cartoon fight ever knew what policies either of them stood for, all we knew was they were willing to use shameless emotional manipulation and purest obfuscation, instead of having any key principles and ideas (as Obama proved).

It may even be that the ‘shame game’ propaganda we see, offends the majority of us for an even simpler reason than the insult to our intelligence, and the strident ignorant bigotries revealed – the sad fact is, the way BigMoney-BigMedia sorts talent, that stuff is almost always produced by spoiled brats who have never had any real world material problems in their lives at all, and so make up ten thousand imaginary problems a day that they then insist on concentrating on (and insist we pay attention to also), because they simply must be at the centre of things, and refuse to get over themselves, even if that refusal guarantees they live far less happy lives and stay far stupider, than they would by growing up.

Now here is something which sounds exactly wrong, but is true by hard measure and direct witness.

People who have real physical survival challenges to overcome, are almost always happier by nature than people who were raised without any big challenges, and instead indulge every upset as a trauma.

It isn’t that poorer people are dulled-out emotionless or numb (as some coddled brats assert) and thus ‘cannot appreciate the finer and more subtle things that are worth being upset about in life’. We have all of those upsets also – we just understand that head-storms almost always pale in comparison to real world problems – and know in the most basic way – life will do plenty of things to make us angry and upset, so there is no sense letting our own emotionality join that negative team to give us extra trouble.

We fight for happy – relentlessly and instinctively, as a reward for not ever being able to make it all the way to safe. Meanwhile the ones who are so comparatively safe and opportunity-rich they take every bit of it for granted, self medicate in the millions, in their epic scale narcissism, petulance and misery.

I am a Canadian and Canada is a rich country – but that doesn’t mean all Canadians are rich (especially my younger friends). Thanks to screwy 60s commune psychosis, I come from a mix of madness and constant struggle and have lived in or adjacent to precarity, my whole life – having a great deal of fun with life on scant resources, the whole damn time! (not by grand means, only to say my wife and I were always consciously aware that we only get the days we get – and we either put fun into them as they happen – or we get no fun in life at all. A real blessing to know when young – doubly so, to share).

My dear wife also worked many hours and crazy jobs in her early teen years (this was still common in the 1970s and 1980s) but my life just kept chasing me from job to job without a break for ‘higher education’ except ten months at trade school paid for by Health and Welfare (Wealth and Hellfire) Canada – which I made the most of, with twenty years in the trade (skilled audiophile tech, and very happy doing it, until the trade itself evaporated with the advent of robotic manufacture – and our hyper-wasteful modern age of ‘too cheap to fix’ consumer goods – incomparably MORE wasteful, than in our supposedly barbaric pre-recycling days).

So, as I have admitted before, one part of my early leftist passion was a heatsink – a way to do something rational(izing) with my basic jealousy. Why should spoiled rich assholes get more loot and influence?

But as with so many other divides, I no longer feel resentful about those who really do have enough ‘privilege’ to think their own navel lint (and personal tantrums) are of universal importance. It isn’t just about how distancing such narcissism is, from other human beings, and from real, vital (and invigorating) achievement in the world, it’s also about what we learn from our hard or soft roads.

One of the strangest things about the way humans think, is that no matter how spoiled and cozy we may be, no matter how few serious physical problems we have in our life, all of ‘our problems’ always start out feeling to us, like all of the really important problems in the whole wide world.

If we stay juvenile and concentrate on our own internal feelings (as we are now universally encouraged) we keep thinking our pet-peeves are ‘the real crises.’

“Stigma” is probably the most common tip-off, here. You know who thinks eliminating stigma wholesale is the great cause for justice of the modern age? Bourgeois motherfuckers and no one else on earth (apologies, if I just insulted you – still true, though).

There is another important argument just next to this one – about how much value shame actually does have, for the health and endurance of any society (people who mistreat others SHOULD feel terrible). But I’ll get into that one another time – today I want to stick with how our hope ideas get turned into doom ideas (and how we fail to notice the reverse trick, even though it happens too – all the time).

Speaking as an anti-tribalist, the biggest problem with all of these popular confusions and wilful misunderstandings (almost always for our own cheap negative-emotion reinforcing sport) is that when we buy into them, so we can give ourselves the (comparatively comforting, because at least defined) feeling that our general anger at the objectively and deeply screwed-up state of things, was deliberately caused by one gang of bad people, who we can be good, by hating, we lose all of the big fights at once.

From this stance, my friends on the right can’t see any sign at all, that anyone on the left has given the slightest shit about civil liberties in twenty years or more – and yet, the exact same thing applies in reverse. Tribalism trains us to do a dishonest bit of emotional accounting, so suddenly we see our own team’s grotesque trespasses and violations of principle as the fault of ‘the other guy’ for pushing us too far, even while we count their very similar sins as doubly-bad, for the way they insult us by flat-out refusing to conform to our special (whatever) hot-air doctrines of perfected-checklist truth and virtue.

Groups don’t have virtue – or sin. Individual people have great and terrible characteristics, which we understand not from the empty words they spout, but from the actions they take over time in the world.

Are we looking for a reason to take an eye? Or can we go as far as the Christians did, with the radically compassionate and re-balancing idea of super-powerful self-sacrificial principle? How about we work on taking no one’s eyes at all? And while we’re at it, let’s throw the cursed moneylenders OUT!

The biggest problem that people of every political stripe now see in common (but still largely fail to recognize that the others see, also) is that the modern world has been ensnared by globe striding corporations, which have spent decades (and trillions) undermining the power of national governments (and we the people, they were always meant to represent) to restrain their most psychotic actions.

One of the most shocking and hard to accept things for modern westerners, is that we are all now faced with an example of a very successful civilization that does allow for, and yet also restrains capitalism, in order to prevent its most anti-social excesses – and where it misses, to punish them severely.

By every conceivable measure (poverty especially, but definitely not only) China has been moving from strength to strength this entire century, while we’ve spent this same century squabbling endlessly like idiot-tribalists, desperate to pose as righteous somehow, even while we end up paying for racist war after racist war, always based on a lie, and always a complete humanitarian disaster in the end. And absolutely always for corporate and banker’s profit – no possible upside ever, for we the people.

I grew up in a library (my father was one of the greatest natural bibliophiles I ever met) and I’ve been crazy for reading my entire life. For some reason (dumb-shit luck and/or divine providence – but I’m grateful either way), I have always gravitated toward very helpful contradictions in my manias.

I was crazy for the writings of both Plato and Frances Bacon, at an early age – and thus took much of use from the source-stuff of western inspiration and the grand edifice of western rationality both.

And I kept doing that – Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell sat on the same stack as GK Chesterton, CS Lewis and Charles Williams. The state, deified, vs. the defiant transcendent soul.

As a teenager I thought a lot about how teenagers in many other places were still drafted into the army (the scars of the Vietnam war were very fresh in the culture to the south) and I got into reading war history in a big way – dozens of books on the first, and hundreds on the second world war and Vietnam.

We don’t recognize this so much anymore, but WWII remains our key (and deeply twisted) myth.

Again – it is so tempting to go off for a dozen pages about many things which are fundamentally wrong with our understanding of the first and second world wars (and everything else about the already largely rewritten and falsified 20^th century, the later parts especially) but that’s an essay for another day.

The key thing for today is that I was reading voraciously, in a subject area which was plastered over completely with state-serving propaganda. But because I have always been more interested in the key clues and witness shared, rather than the author’s own final summation or conclusions, I couldn’t help noticing (rather like a good detective does, in an interrogation) that the inconsistencies in the re-telling of the lies, revealed an awful lot about their nature, and their only ever partially-disguised purposes.

And what, you may ask, was my balancing obsession during my war history phase? Would you believe hardcore Chinese Communist propaganda? (which I should note was charming as heck back then, even the translucent paper was so distinctly and tangibly ‘for the masses’).

I was working from the time I was a kid – and book-crazy, so naturally, one of my all time favourite childhood jobs was when twelve year old me worked up the nerve to ask the founder of a still excellent (and still friendly) local bookstore chain, if I could do some work for him, in his very first shop.

This was, I must note – the 70s – so different a time it is hard to convey. But more to the point, I was already out and living on my own (and told him so) and I came in to browse the sales-tables in his shop so frequently, he knew already I would take most of my pay home in discounted books (as I did).

So he hired scrawny piccolo-voiced wide-eyed nervous me, to ‘do security’ for his distant back annex. Mostly I just walked around near other customers and scowled at them, if they looked like they might try to snatch something (no doubt a hundred times more amusing, than intimidating, but ‘eyes’ at least).

The wonderful thing about that store (and any great bookstore anywhere, to this day) was that unlike the always-filtered internet, it was filled with truly excellent and thoughtfully chosen things (not majority slop-junk) that I did not know enough, to ask for! (random, but high-quality brain-stimulus!)

No really – this may sound insignificant, but long before AI began to threaten our ability to think in long sentences and construct complex arguments (let alone do research, one of life’s great pleasures!) the simple fact of the internet filtering for our stated preferences, was already badly warping our minds!

Why? Because life is big and we are not. How could we learn, but by looking further than we’ve seen?

This is hard to convey to modern people, because nowadays we are inundated with mostly low-quality information (advertising even follows us into the freakin’ bathroom now – yikes!). This means that we have all been forced to develop skills to keep information away, so we don’t drown in force-fed slop!

But like anything metabolic, we have to do both parts of the cycle, close ourselves to storms and toxins, but just as surely remember to open wide again to the nourishing (and humbling) sunshine, or else we will surely wither (out of sheer boredom and pointlessness, if naught else) starved of nutritious novelty.

So, being a curious kid, I bought and devoured a whole pile of amazing inexpensive 1960s and 1970s era photo books produced by the Chinese Communist party, to explain themselves and their cause (and remind us of the horrors, just before).

It is important to say I recognized at once, even as a kid, that these books were propaganda – but I couldn’t help noticing also, how many similarities there were, to the western war histories I was reading!

Beyond that – just because something is propaganda, that doesn’t mean there is nothing to learn there. (The key mental filter is the one I described above – seeking clues, while remaining wary about the conclusions – and seeking clues also, to the over-arching motivations behind those conclusions).

Another point which is more and more painfully obvious to me, as I age, is that most of the horror stories we then heard about the early period of Modern China (Mao) came from England – even though England literally fought a vicious war to push drugs on Chinese citizens, and thus brought that great nation into a state of pathetic debasement and warlordism, which cost a hundred million civilian lives.

In retrospect (especially in light of the anti-Slavic rabid madness on loud display, recently) Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech was purest racist warmongering insanity, coming from a sick Empire that still has not surrendered the tools of duplicity, corrupting-finance and racist hyper-violence, even to this day – nor have they ever once truly recognized they have no right to murder “inferior” foreigners.

Even ruined and bankrupt, England had to stoke hatred of the other. (Easier than facing their own evil?) Can’t help recalling the spirit of “from hell’s heart, I spit at thee!” – got to love a reference to the bard and for trekkies both, right?

So perhaps Morality is a word and tone the English government should be forbidden from using at all, for say, a century or so? (Or at least until they have made reparations for their centuries of cynical slaughter).

Now to be clear – there was a ton that wasn’t right about early China (and Stalinist Russia, to be sure) the question we never want to think about and incorporate into our understanding is – what were the real historical (sustained western violence) conditions, which we forced them to respond to?

For a version of this strange problem much closer in time to us (within memory for many) the Taliban is often criticized for many real and serious errors (though it is noteworthy that now that we also tear-down historical statues which offend us, we can no longer disparage them in shrill tones for cultural blasphemy the way we once did, without being forced to wear that same oaken tag ourselves).

But where did they come from? America provoked the war in Afghanistan deliberately (Zbigniew Brezhinsky, Carter’s national security advisor, boasted about this in a famous interview) in order to try to destabilize the Soviet Union, the same way the Vietnam war had destabilized (bankrupted) America.

Many in the west still like to believe ‘we killed it’ (the combination of Reagan’s outrageous weapons spending, Afghanistan, and the horrible Chernobyl accident, all destroying confidence in the state), but I have seen far more convincing (less vain, self-serving and childish) arguments, that the Soviet Union was doomed by its own internal contradictions and policies. We pushed, but mostly, they just failed.

And then what about Afghanistan, when the Soviets were no longer a problem? America just walked away and left the country smashed to bits and destitute, a failed state with no real national government.

It is painfully tempting to do several pages about the education, organization, funding and tasking of the early Taliban, and their political evolution since (extremely un-Afghan, in character – not to mention many fingerprints of intel agencies and dirty money from many nation-wrecking creeps).

But the key question is not ever “are they our (spoiled western) idea of nice” the question is – are they a measurable improvement on what the local people were living under, before they came? Mao was a million times more interesting and culturally influential than any Taliban thinkers I’ve learned about – but both highly flawed movements were huge improvements on the desperation, poverty and absolute lack of a functioning state, of the brutal exploitative zero-law warlordism which preceded them.

A more advanced state can steadily evolve from a basic one, but not ever where no state exists at all.

I know it’s a bit too ‘nail on the head’ but I must remind my friends. No state at all is the result of almost all of our modern wars over the last half a century. (The war of the golden billion against the poor of the world?) very much including the Obama-powered destruction of Libya (which was up to then, the most advanced and prosperous black-run nation on earth) and Syria (a rich and beautiful part of the culture of the western and eastern soul, continuously, for thousands of years – until we advanced western guardians of all that is right good and moral, ‘helped’).

We do that, like the Brits before us – we carefully (with trickery and hyper violence in combination) smash entire advanced cultures to bits, then say – look how shitty those poor desperate lowlifes are!

And as long as we got to write the history books (with blood-dipped bayonets) we all felt fine and good, and got to share not only in the looting of the world (our purloined prosperity) but also feel like the most obviously and resplendently superior beings the earth had ever known (and modest, too!) ;o)

But people who get kicked in the teeth repeatedly get very determined, while people who bully others get stupid, which means we’re all feeling the panic of the ground moving under our feet as we are suddenly confronted with a dark but inescapable reality – oh shit – we’re the f#cking bad guys now!

Please note – it isn’t the Republicans who smash countries and steal rights – nor is it the Republicans and the Democrats together – there’s no American exclusive, here – countries all around the Western world (that ever-so-smug, golden billion) are run by parties just as corrupt, incompetent and clueless.

Which means it is our non-transferable duty, as citizens, to figure out how to restrain them, even though corporations have long been reducing their power to do good, while increasing their control.

Ah – but fear not, I have yet to introduce the hero of the piece – or his foul and hateful nemesis!

You see, the contradictory mania which I come back to most often in this moment, is that tension between the approach of R Buckminster Fuller, and several whole shelves full of others, who tried to reason their way around and past his very purposeful and entirely rational (not rationalizing) optimism.

The way The Future was - (and the coolest cinema in the world, for decades)

Hatred of immoral corrupting and monopolistic corporations really is the place where people who still self-define mostly as left and or right, could most easily recognize their clear common purpose (which is of course why corporations invest so very much in the project of dividing us, over the long term).

If we go a step further than just hating corporations and study them awhile, we get all kinds of clues to how they mess us up so badly, but just as surely, the kind of thinking we need, to do much better (again, not a simple immaculate checklist for scolds – but a set of practical techniques and approaches).

If there is any evil thing that a corporation ever did, that was not done first by the East India Company (1600 - 1874), it must have been a specific technology they just didn’t have. Scheming for money, hiding from taxation, starting wars, causing foreign impoverishment and false-scarcity, stealing entire countries-full of wealth – they were the ones who pioneered all of it (one of the main reasons that the legal definition of a corporation is so essentially responsibility-denying – is that the main reasons for capital (rich psychos) to hide behind a false corporate face, have always been psychotic). At times, they even had a private army, twice the size of that commanded by the British crown!

They also hired a very smart and evil man named Thomas Malthus to study the resources and populations of the entire world, and extrapolate over time, to help them strategize for maximum profit.

His conclusion, backed up with all kinds of “Science” (which is to say “Models” based on a whole bunch of questionable and often simply wrong assertions, taken as proven axioms) was that population increased faster than food supply, so poverty was inevitable, and the rich and superior therefore had a natural right to kill the poor and inferior to get enough (since there was never going to be enough for all, and there would be less and less for anyone, over time), and that was simply the true hard scientific nature of the world, however cruel it seemed to our (then, still largely Christian) sensibilities.

He was also highly influential (in suspect ways) on Charles Darwin, Adam Smith and even Karl Marx!

The thing is, as smart as he was, and as much data as he gathered to prove his doomful and violent supremacy enabling ideas, he completely missed the industrial revolution, which was just about to transform the entire world completely – making material plenty for all, a practical possibility at last – and rendering every last one of his models and calculations entirely wrong! (Leaving nothing but evil).

I know this may seem like a witticism, but I swear one part of my own unusual scholarship which seems especially different from others, is that I outright like to be proven wrong. Many feel a slight to their pride, but I feel grateful, because it means I’m learning something (correcting an ignorance).

This can (and should) be done in a happy way – but I arrived there more with an ambivalence to personal suffering (a foolish chosen-toughness), than an enlightened lack of pride (working on it).

What this means for me is that I have read a great deal of modern doomful stuff, never shied away just because it was depressing, nor did I use that study as a way to accuse others (even as a poor person in a rich country, you can’t help understanding you are buoyed by exploitation of poorer others elsewhere).

And here’s a key book-person’s insight about that. READ ORIGINAL SOURCES! If you are deeply interested and drawn to study more, by all means delve into the interpretations and critiques of every last thing which inspires you – BUT GET INSPIRED, FIRST!

Rachel Carson (Silent Spring) actually had something important to say, and communicated it in a way which resonated well enough to change state policy, and thus very probably helped to save several entire species from extinction (and us humans from a whole lot of entirely avoidable disease).

James Lovelock (The Gaia Hypothesis) was a planetary chemistry specialist, who was asked to figure out why the earth was so weird and life-favouring (stable in terms of chemistry and temperature) compared to all the other planets in our solar system. He didn’t popularize the concept of our biosphere (with much additional work by microbiologist Lynn Margulis) with intentions to create new tax regimes. Though he retroactively regretted the use of the romantic-sounding name ‘Gaia’ for his hypothesis (rather than something clearer, about atmospheric homeostasis) he actually is kind of poetic, and was hoping we would understand and appreciate our extraordinary fortune, and with that understanding, begin to act with gratitude and respect for our precious, ancient, life-giving bequest.

Yeah, not so much, right? We’d have to want reality, before we could work on that. So far, no sign!

Now, having noted a couple of very sincere and helpful individuals, who added understanding (and meant to contribute to insight, not tribalist sanctimony) let me note what happens, all too often, when we leave the original sources (and their humane offerings of understanding) and go to mass digested institutional interpretations – whether boring textbooks or statements of corporate or state policy.

It isn’t just that you lose the spark, the why did they even come up with that in the first place? part. You also lose the original goal, because along the way someone (rich) will have an agenda to push, not just alongside of the original spirit and goal of the inspiring originator – but instead of it.

One of the most brutally depressing books I ever read was the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” which was in every way a modern Malthusian tract – it predicted mass starvations for the 1970s and global unrest as a result (and suggested surrender of sovereignty of rights to new, banker-funded institutions, as a necessary emergency responsible move, that all right-thinking people must endorse).

Now I know I seem a million years old to some of my younger readers (tube radio repairman? WTF?), but I’m still not quite old enough to have read “Limits to Growth” when it was still scary. What happened instead of famine was “the agricultural revolution” which multiplied crop yields almost overnight, and produced a surplus, where some of the world’s greatest minds had predicted famine.

Cui Bono? (who profits). The guy (Lovelock) who says, “Hey folks, I just realized that we rely on something we never noticed, and we’re messing it up, so we should consider how not to mess it up.” Or the institutionally-digested suit who says “We need to establish trans-national laws which can be imposed by experts from above, and never changed by any weight of citizen will” (anti-democracy)

Now, in the hour of our greatest murk gloomth and pressing despair, the hero at last appears! (cue fanfare)

He is a funny-looking old coot for the hero role, to be sure – but he also happened to be one of the most brilliant Americans who ever lived – the unique and relentlessly creative designer, architect, inventor, mathematician, game designer, cartographer, philosopher and above all engineer, R Buckminster Fuller.

Buckminster Fuller did a lot of interesting things in his early life – he was dissatisfied with the way geometry was taught to him as a child (and then went on to make very useful contributions to it) he liked to build and experiment with new inventions and approaches, so he got a machinist’s certification. He was kicked out of Harvard twice, served in the US Navy as a radio operator and rescue boat captain and first as a worker, then in later years in management, in the meat-packing industry.

After all that (though still in his twenties) he worked with his father in law on a company to produce excellent flexible modular construction materials – but the company went bust (rackets don’t respond to innovation immediately, especially if it threatens their rackets!), and since he was already deeply depressed about the death of his first daughter, for which he blamed himself (and their drafty house) he considered killing himself, so at least his family would get some life insurance money.

He had an epiphany then, which I truly adore (having felt quite hopeless myself, more than once).

He said he felt as if he was floating, and suffused with white light, and a voice said to him:

“From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.”

From that moment forward he decided to try a radical life-experiment, making himself the experimental subject – what he called “Guinea Pig B.” Here is how he put it, very near the end of his life.

“I am now close to 88 and I am confident that the only thing important about me is that I am an average healthy human. I am also a living case history of a thoroughly documented, half-century, search-and-research project designed to discover what, if anything, an unknown, moneyless individual, with a dependent wife and newborn child, might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that could not be accomplished by great nations, great religions or private enterprise, no matter how rich or powerfully armed.”

The funny thing was, though he cooperated with people from many spheres of knowledge that would seem wildly contradictory to us today, he was in every case working his experiment – trying to add advantage to humanity itself, by spreading better design ideas, to foster ephemeralization (doing more with less material – one of his great lifelong causes) and systems thinking – or to quote the surprisingly useful wikki-P article on him, specifically “the empirical study of systems in transformation; his focus was on total system behaviour unpredicted by the behaviour of any isolated components.”

In his brilliant “Critical Path” Bucky wrote about doing a large scale study for what was then one of the world’s largest mining concerns – very much like the study the East India Company asked of Malthus, so long ago, to understand how much raw stuff is there on all of earth, how many people need that stuff for what industrial processes and purposes, and how long will it all last?

But Fuller did not come to the same conclusions as Malthus, firstly because he was not at any time trying to reinforce class, supremacy or any kind of profitable false-scarcity (one of the most evil and frequent tactics of all growth-and-flourishing strangling monopolies) he was into omni-advantaging everyone. In fact, he ultimately came to the conclusion that competition for resources was completely obsolete – as a human survival strategy – and instead broad strategies of mutual advantage could easily accomplish material plenty, dignity and thriving for all citizens of what he called “Spaceship Earth”.

It was really just a matter of what we were trying for. As he pointed out, the greatest share of our intellectual effort and investment of resources was going (then, as now) into ‘killingry’ (war).

Were we instead working mostly on ‘livingry’ – sharing and innovating design solutions for constant progressive ephemeralization (more work done with less material inputs) then utopia, defined by him in terms of material conditions for broad-based thriving, rather than with any top-down single-model insistence (which he always considered a huge error) was not only possible, but obligatory. The only sensible positive aspirational and widely inspiring goal for any modern society – not least, to steer us all away from our Damoclean devil-deal – the always present threat of total nuclear annihilation.

Of course, to do a thing as sensible as that, we (the people) would have to throw the moneylenders out of the secular temples of Democracy and finally steer the great ship ourselves for real – instead of letting ‘our betters’ rule us all straight into the ground at a thousand miles an hour (the present general plan, for the future of tragically degraded western civilizational ‘excellence’).

The point is that we have the ‘stuff’ we need to make it work. We lack the vision will and clarity – only.

Can we fix it at the point of our bayonets? Nope, not anymore (and that never was sane or ethical, anyhow). On the other hand, can we participate in the material advantaging of millions of people who are struggling and ready to be unleashed on a modern global economy? Oh my, yes. If we’re China!

For those who are skeptical about the ‘how’ part, Bucky worked on that too. He established the “World Game” in the mid sixties, to get students from universities to game-out scenarios for global benefit – the exact opposite of our expensive thinktank driven military wargame complex, which, for all its malign purpose, still frequently warns us of predictable disasters (which warnings we mostly ignore).

The simplest great idea Bucky promoted, was the wonderfully counter-intuitive and essential trim-tab. He spent many childhood summers on Bear Island, Maine, and was an avid sailor his whole life, so he thought a lot about naval architecture and design evolution (again, a very helpful boost to his later far more comprehensive ‘whole-system thinking’).

For a small sailboat, a rudder makes basic mechanical and muscular sense – you can see how one person can hold that steering paddle against the resistance of the water in one direction, and turn the boat. But what do you do if you’re steering a gigantic ocean liner, and the rudder itself weighs many tons? Do you just brute-force it, with a mechanical muscle scaled-up in proportion to the ship?

No you do not! (and OMG would that ever need a STAGGERING amount of mechanical force).

What you do is use a trim-tab – which is like a very small rudder, out on the end of the big rudder. As soon as you turn the small trim-tab in the opposite direction you want the rudder to go, you create a natural pushing force at the very end of the ‘lever’ (outer edge of the rudder) which counteracts a significant proportion of the resistance the rudder must exert, to turn the mighty ship.

The little absolutely can move the gigantic and thus change the course of the whole mighty ship, we just have to be very clear about reality – and very specific about the application of force.

And yes we can all – everyone on earth – ‘make it’ and truly thrive and grow into a long and hopeful future. We just have to decide that we want a right to thrive, more than a right to kill ‘inferiors’!

(A re-balancing idea and a sanity we must all acknowledge – ain’t never once been rocket-science).

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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One final Bucky-ism today. As a lover of nature and natural systems he had a special contempt for greedy large corporations which made things like plastic flowers - completely missing the point of life, for money. He called them all OBNOXICO.

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No specific-story links today - but here are a few sites worth watching for great interviews with smart experienced people with well-evidenced perspectives and enough ethical stamina to remember cause and principle (instead of doing that oligarch serving purpose-substitution trick at the last minute, like Big(war)News)

Professor Glenn Diesen - a sane peace-seeking European (when we most need one!)

Dialogue Works - With Nima Alkhorshid - An Iranian expat Engineer in Brazil!

The Duran - outstanding stuff, from a wide range of insightful people (and check out both Alexander and Alex’s own shows also - some of the sanest news-people around)

The New Atlas with Brian Berletic remains depressing and outstanding on geopolitics

And nobody is doing a better daily business show right now than Sean Foo. Outstanding coverage of the meaning and repercussions of trade and currency wars

Finally, I do have one self-crafted public service announcement to share, which surely applies to snow machines just as well as it does to lawn equipment.