
Operating
Manual for Spaceship Earth - Chapter VII
Purchase a print version of this book from our on-line
store
The first census of population in the United States was taken in 1790.
In I8IO the United States Treasury conducted the first economic census of
the young democracy. There were at that time one million families in this
country. There were also one million human slaves. This did not mean that
each family had a human slave; far from it. The slaves were owned by
relatively few. The Treasury adjudged the monetary value of the average
American homestead, lands, buildings, furnishings, and tools to be worth
sum-totaIly $350 per family. The Treasury appraised the average worth of
each slave as $400. It was estimated that the wilderness hinterlands of
America were worth $1,500 per family. The foregoing assets plus the canals
and toll roads brought the equity of each family to a total of $3,000.
This made the national wealth of the United States, as recognized by man,
worth three billion dollars.
Let us assume that, practicing
supreme wisdom, the united American citizens of I8IO had convened their
most reliably esteemed and farsighted leaders and had asked them to
undertake a 150-year, grand economic and technical plan for most
effectively and swiftly developing America’s and the world’s life-support
system-to be fully realized by 1960. At that time, it must be remembered,
the telegraph had not been invented. There were no electro-magnetics or
mass-produced steel. Railroads were as yet undreamed of, let alone
wireless, X-ray, electric light, power by wire and electric motors. There
was no conception of the periodic table of the atoms or of the existence
of an electron. Had any of our forefathers committed our wealth of I8IO
toward bouncing radar impulses off the Moon he would have been placed in a
lunatic asylum.
Under those I8IO circumstances of an assumed
capital wealth of the united American states, both public and private,
amounting to only three billion dollars, it is preposterous to think of
humanity’s most brilliant and powerful leaders electing to invest their
"all" of three billion dollars in a "thousand times more expensive"
ten-trillion-dollar adventure such, however, as has since transpired, but
only under the war-enforced threat of disintegration of the meager rights
won thus far by common man from history-long tyrannical powers of a
techno-illiterate and often cruel few.
In I8IO it was also
unthinkable by even the most brilliant leaders of humanity that I60 years
hence, in 1970, the gross national product of the United States would
reach one trillion dollars per year. (This is to be compared with the
meager forty billion of the world’s total monetary gold supply.) Assuming
a 10 per cent rate of earnings, this 1970 trillion-dollar product would
mean that a capital base of ten trillion dollars was operative within the
United States alone where the 18IO national leaders had accredited only
three billion dollars of national assets. The wisest humans recognized in
I8IO only one three-hundredth of I per cent of the immediately thereafter
"proven value" of the United States’ share of the world’s
wealth-generating potentials. Of course, those wisest men of the times
would have seen little they could afford to do.
Our most reliable,
visionary, and well-informed great-grandfathers of I8IO could not have
foreseen that in the meager century and one-half of all the billionsfold
greater reaches of known universal time that human life-span would be
trebled, that the yearly real income of the individual would be "enfolded,
that the majority of diseases would be banished, and human freedom of
realized travel one-hundred-folded; that humans would be able to whisper
effortlessly in one another’s ear from anywhere around the world apart and
at a speed of seven hundred million miles an hour, their audibility
clearly reaching to the planet Venus; and that human vision around Earth’s
spherical deck would be increased to see local pebbles and grains of sand
on the moon.
Now in 1969, 99.9 per cent of the accelerating
accelerations of the physical environment changes effecting all humanity’s
evolution are transpiring in the realms of the electromagnetic spectrum
realities which are undetectable directly by the human senses. Because
they are gestating invisibly it is approximately impossible for world
society to comprehend that the changes in the next thirty-five
years-ushering in the twenty-first century-will be far greater than in our
just completed century and one-half since the first United States economic
census. We are engulfed in an invisible tidal wave which, as it draws
away, will leave humanity, if it survives, cast up upon an island of
universal success uncomprehending how it has all happened.
But we
can scientifically assume that by the twenty-first century either humanity
will not be living aboard Spaceship Earth or, if approximately our present
numbers as yet remain aboard, that humanity then will have recognized and
organized itself to realize effectively the fact that humanity can afford
to do anything it needs and wishes to do and that it cannot afford
anything else. As a consequence Earth-planet-based humanity will be
physically and economically successful and individually free in the most
important sense. While all enjoy total Earth no human will be interfering
with the other, and none will be profiting at the expense of the other.
Humans will be free in the sense that 99.9 per cent of their waking hours
will be freely investable at their own discretion. They will be free in
the sense that they will not struggle for survival on a `’you" or "me"
basis, and will therefore be able to trust one another and be free to
co-operate in spontaneous and logical ways.
It is also probable
that during that one-third of a century of the curtain raising of the
twenty-first century that the number of boo-boo’s, biased blunders,
short-sighted misjudgments, opinionated self-deceits of humanity will
total, at minimum, six hundred trillion errors. Clearly, man will have
backed into his future while evolution, operating as inexorably as
fertilized ovaries gestate in the womb, will have brought about his
success in ways as synergetically unforeseeable to us today as were the
ten-trillion-dollar developments of the last I50 years unforeseen by our
wisest great-grandfathers of 1810.
All of this does not add up to
say that man is stupidly ignorant and does not deserve to prosper. It adds
up to the realization that in the design of universal evolution man was
given an enormous safety factor as an economic cushion, within which to
learn by trial and error to dare to use his most sensitively intuited
intellectual conceptioning and greatest vision in joining forces with all
of humanity to advance into the future in full accreditation of the
individual human intellect’s most powerfully loving conceptions of the
potential functioning of man in universe. All the foregoing is to say also
that the opinions of any negatively conditioned reflexes regarding what I
am saying and am about to say are unrealistically inconsequential.
I have so far introduced to you a whole new synergetic assessment
of wealth and have asked that you indicate your disagreement if you
detected fallacies in the progressively-stated concepts of our common
wealth. Thus we have discovered together that we are unanimous in saying
that we can afford to do anything we need or wish to do.
It is
utterly clear to me that the highest priority need of world society at the
present moment is a realistic economic accounting system which will
rectify, for instance, such nonsense as the fact that a top toolmaker in
India, the highest paid of all craftsmen, gets only as much per month for
his work in India as he could earn per day for the same work if he were
employed in Detroit, Michigan. How can India develop a favorable trade
balance under those circumstances? If it can’t have a workable, let alone
favorable balance, how can these half-billion people participate in world
intercourse? Millions of Hindus have never heard of America, let alone the
international monetary system. Said Kipling "East is east and west is west
and never the twain shall meet."
As a consequence of the Great
Pirates’ robbing Indo-China for centuries and cashing in their booty in
Europe, so abysmally impoverished, underfed and physically afflicted have
India’s and Ceylon’s billions of humans been throughout so many centuries
that it is their religious belief that life on Earth is meant to be
exclusively a hellish trial and that the worse the conditions encountered
by the individual the quicker his entry into heaven. For this reason
attempts to help India in any realistic way are looked upon by a vast
number of India’s population as an attempt to prevent their entry into
heaven. All this because they have had no other way to explain life’s
hopelessness. On the other hand, they are extremely capable thinkers, and
free intercourse with the world could change their views and fate. It is
paradoxical that India’s population should starve as one beef cattle for
every three people wander through India’s streets, blocking traffic as
sacred symbols of nonsense. Probably some earlier conquerors intent to
reserve the animals for their exclusive consumption as did later the kings
of European nations decreed that God had informed the king that he alone
was to eat animal meat and therefore God forbade the common people under
penalty of death from killing a beef cattle for their own consumption.
One of the myths of the moment suggest that wealth comes from
individual bankers and capitalists. This concept is manifest in the myriad
of charities that have to beg for alms for the poor, disabled, and
helpless young and old in general. These charities are a hold-over from
the old pirate days, when it was thought that there would never be enough
to go around. They also are necessitated by our working assumption that we
cannot afford to take care of all the helpless ones. Counseled by our
bankers, our politicians say we can’t afford the warring and the great
society, too. And because of the mythical concept that the wealth which is
disbursed is coming from some magically-secret private source, no free and
healthy individual wants that "hand out" from the other man, whoever he
may be. Nor does the individual wish to be on the publicly degrading
"dole" line.
After World War II several million of our
well-trained, healthiest young people came suddenly out of the military
service. Because we had automated during the war to a very considerable
degree to meet the "war challenges" there were but few jobs to offer them.
Our society could not say realistically that the millions of their
healthiest, best informed young were unfit because they couldn’t get a
job, which had until that historical moment been the criteria of
demonstrated fitness in Darwin’s "survival only of the fittest" struggle.
In that emergency we legislated the GI Bill and sent them all to schools,
colleges, and universities. This act was politically rationalized as a
humanly dignified fellowship reward of their war service and not as a
"hand out." It produced billions of dollars of new wealth through the
increased know-how and intelligence thus released, which synergetically
augmented the spontaneous initiative of that younger generation. In
legislating this "reckless spending" of wealth we didn’t know that we had
produced a synergetic condition that would and did open the greatest
prosperity humanity has ever known.
Through all pre-twentieth
century history wars were devastating to both winners and losers. The
pre-industrial wars took the men from the fields, and the fields where the
exclusively agricultural-wealth germinated, were devastated. It came as a
complete surprise, therefore, that the first World War, which was the
first full-fledged industrial-era war, ended with the United States in
particular but Germany, England, France, Belgium, Italy, Japan, and Russia
in lesser degree all coming out of the war with much greater industrial
production capabilities than those with which they had entered. That
wealth was soon misguidedly invested in the second World War, from which
all the industrial countries emerged with even greater wealth producing
capabilities, despite the superficial knockdown of the already obsolete
buildings. It was irrefutably proven that the destruction of the buildings
by bombing, shell fire, and flames left the machinery almost unharmed. The
productive tooling capabilities multiplied unchecked, as did their value.
This unexpected increase in wealth by industrial world wars was
caused by several facts, but most prominently by the fact that in the
progressive acquisition of instruments and tools which produce the even
more effective complex of industrial tools, the number of special purpose
tools that made the end-product armaments and ammunition was negligible in
comparison with the redirectable productivity of the majority of the
general-purpose tools that constituted the synergistic tool complex.
Second, the wars destroyed the obsolete tool-enclosing brick-and-wood
structures whose factual availability, despite their obsolescence, had
persuaded their owners to over extend the structures’ usefulness and
exploitability. This drive to keep milking the old proven cow not risking
the production of new cows had blocked the acquisition of up-to-date
tools. Third, there was the synergetic surprise of alternative or
"substitute" technologies which were developed to bypass destroyed
facilities. The latter often proved to be more efficient than the tools
that were destroyed. Fourth, the metals themselves not only were not
destroyed but were acceleratingly reinvested in new, vastly
higher-performance per pound tools. It was thus that the world war losers
such as Germany and Japan became overnight the postwar industrial winners.
Their success documented the fallacy of the whole economic evaluation
system now extant.
Thus again we see that, through gradually
increasing use of his intuition and intellect, man has discovered many of
the generalized principles that are operative in the universe and has
employed them objectively but separately in extending his internal
metabolic regeneration by his invented and detached tool extensions and
their remote operation affected by harnessing inanimate energy. Instead of
trying to survive only with his integral set of tool capabilities-his
hands-to pour water into his mouth, he invents a more effective wooden,
stone, or ceramic vessel so that he not only can drink from it but carry
water with him and extend his hunting and berry picking. All tools are
externalizations of originally integral functions. But in developing each
tool man also extends the limits of its usefulness, since he can make
bigger cups hold liquids too hot or chemically destructive for his hands.
Tools do not introduce new principles but they greatly extend the range of
conditions under which the discovered control principle may be effectively
employed by man. There is nothing new in world technology’s growth. It is
only the vast increase of its effective ranges that are startling man. The
computer is an imitation human brain. There is nothing new about it, but
its capacity, speed of operation, and tirelessness, as well as its ability
to operate under environmental conditions intolerable to the human
anatomy, make it far more effective in performing special tasks than is
the skull and tissue encased human brain, minus the computer.
What
is really unique about man is the magnitude to which he has detached,
deployed, amplified, and made more incisive all of his many organic
functionings. Man is unique among all the living phenomena as the most
adaptable omni-environment penetrating, exploring, and operating organism
being initially equipped to invent intellectually and self-disciplined,
dexterously, to make the tools with which thus to extend himself. The
bird, the fish, the tree are all specialized, and their special
capability-functioning tools are attached integrally with their bodies,
making them incapable of penetrating hostile environments. Man
externalizes, separates out, and increases each of his specialized
function capabilities by inventing tools as soon as he discovers the need
through oft-repeated experiences with unfriendly environmental challenges.
Thus, man only temporarily employs his integral equipment as a specialist,
and soon shifts that function to detached tools. Man cannot compete
physically as a muscle and brained automaton ‹as a machine-against the
automated power tools which he can invent while metaphysically mastering
the energy income from universe with which evermore powerfully to actuate
these evermore precise mass-production tools. What man has done is to
decentralize his functions into a world-around-energy-networked complex of
tools which altogether constitute what we refer to as world
industrialization.


