War No More - VIII

"The world isn't working for everybody. Why isn't it?"
"Because we try to solve all the World's problems with politics."
[?] by interviewer [!] by R. Buckminster Fuller

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WAR NO MORE - VIII: Employing the Tools of Livingry

"Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete. (...) Nature's long-term design intervenes to circumvent the shortsightedness of human individuals, corporations, and nations competing for a share of the economic pie. Fundamentally, political economists misassume an inadequacy of life support to exist on our planet. Humanity therefore competes militarily to see which political system... is fittest to survive. In slavish observance of this misassumption, humans devote their most costly efforts and resources to killingry^[1] - a vast arsenal of weapons skillfully designed to kill ever more people at ever-greater distances in ever-shorter periods of time while employing ever-fewer pounds of material, ergs of energy, and seconds of time per killing."

R. Buckminster Fuller, Cosmography^[2]
A Posthumous Scenario for the Future of Humanity

Richard Buckminster Fuller aka Bucky
architect author designer engineer
inventor philantroposopher synergist

Equipped with an uncommon sense of common sense, Bucky's intelligence only came second after his unbridled love for humanity and all (other) Life on Earth. Often, he seemed far ahead of his time, although he himself thought any avant-garde never precedes the rest of the herd any further than twenty-five years^[3]. Of course, twenty-five years ahead of time does seem like quite the long yardstick along the length of an individual's life. On another shtick, when considering the long run of Life on Earth, as Bucky tended to do, a quarter century may feel like a mere blink of Life's third eye. Whatsoever seems the semantic case, Bucky understood the precious nature of time and its current availability to humanity. Growing increasingly aware of the idea that we may need to share as much of it as possible, he decided to shift his focus from personal gain and individual profit to collective wealth and reciprocal well-being. He summed this up in a sentence - a motto, if you will:

"You have to decide whether you want to make money or to make sense, because the two are mutually exclusive."

Paraphrasing the previous: making money does not make sense. Unless one owns a bank. Adding a personal variation to the theme: money does not aid trade^[4] the way it ever seemed intended to do. On the contrary, our current issues with the issuing of currency^[5] - its ever-declining value turning into ever-increasing debt^[6], the recurring^[7] monetary^[8] crises^[9], the accompanying normalization of greed and such - only seem to pull the rug from under our own economy by limiting trade to the purpose of hoarding money.

Adding a monetary value to money itself, feels like bringing water to the sea. Quite a similar superfluity seems involved in both processes, yet oceans do not tend to charge interest on the amount of water they loan to the land. Vicious circles turn downward spirals. The illusion of social inequivalence, a collective hallucination of societal stratification, driven by mounting financial inequity, seems to fuel the fire of warfare by feeding its flame with greed.

We allow to evaporate multiple trillions of monetary and other resources on warfare (or defense, if one prefers to bury one's head under a dune of politically correct sand) and still a majority amongst us complains about investing multiple millions in extending, for instance, our (public and outer) space exploration programs, unless we fearfully militarize such ventures, ergo: we display a tendency to divide and fight one another and destroy ourselves^[10], rather than to cooperate with each other and thrive together.

Quite naturally but less logically, we repeat such familiar behavior, common to us since before the dawn of historical time. However, options less self-desctructive should not seem too hard to imagine, no less hard to realize, unless we really enjoy becoming the gorilla on our own back. Working together on constructive solutions may take more patience than devoting our time to the regurgitation of violence, but didn't we once define insanity as "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results"? Again: if our use of sharp sticks, knives, guns, bombs, drones and independently targeting particle beam phalanxes^[11] would solve our problems, we would live in a world without problems.

Instead of simply touching gloves, the friendly gesture before a fiendish fight, we should extend helping hands, to embrace our world together. Some time ago, Bucky and others saw through the redundancy of trying to solve a problem either with politics or with warfare, either by throwing money at it or by employing killingry as a sole alternative. Here and now, the time has come for the rest of us to pick up the lead and take it ...
together, as one, in peace.


· visit the Buckminster Fuller Institute, online at bfi.org
· listen to a recent BBC radio program about Bucky, online here

[1] to expand on killingry and other neologisms, click here
[2] to expand on Cosmography, click here
[3] from Fuller's Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth, ch.1, ¶3
[4] wink to Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson
[5] - [11] click highlit text to expand on corresponding content


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More War No More to follow
for as long as we choose to become
divided, opposed and prodded like cattle.

link down to War No More - VII
link down to War No More - VI
link down to War No More - V
link down to War No More - IV
link down to War No More - III
link down to War No More - II
link down to War No More - I


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.: peace or perish :.

all text, apart from Bucky's,
ⓦ Satyr Barbarossa (cc) 2016