Everything I Know – 1975 Lectures by Buckminster Fuller
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He calculated (he was an engineer) that, if we applied our tech and resources efficiently, we could provide for everyone "without disadvantaging anyone."
> Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before - that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.
We endure the current situation because of the greed and narcissism of a few who don't want to share. I suppose it was their parents and kindergartners who did a really lousy job showing them how to share and collaborate with others.
Why should they care if people have to starve when they could have a new yacht, beach house or another 50 motorbikes in their garage?
R.I.P. Fuller - you did a great service to all of us who dream of a better future.
Buckminster Fuller was known as a systems philosopher. He would think that your diagnosis is utterly misguided.
Our society is not worse than it could be because there are bad people in the world. They will always exist. If few bad apples destroys the happiness in the society it's arranged in a wrong way. We have lots of incentives, policies, ideologies and systems where completely normal people are behaving in a way that produces harm to others. People with less empathy get rewarded when you create systems where they thrive.
People should learn systems thinking.
"Grunch\* of Giants" by R. Buckminster Fuller (\*GRoss UNiverse Cash Heist)
> Here Buckminster Fuller takes on the gigantic corporate megaliths that exert increasing control over every aspect of daily life. In the form of a modern allegory, he traces the evolution of these multinational giants from the post-World War II military-industrial complex to the current army of abstract legal entities known as the corporate world.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/285349.Grunch_of_Giants
PDF available from here:
https://fullerfuturefest.com/humanitys-critical-path-from-we...
The "Er.. " makes it sound like you think it's a counterpoint.
> Buckminster Fuller ... would think that your diagnosis is utterly misguided.
I think Bucky did identify greed as a major part of the problem, eh?
Although he says,
> Each of the giants of today's great Grunch is a quadrillionfold more formidable than was Goliath. Each is entirely invisible, abstract, and completely ruthless—not because those who run the show are malevolent but because the giant is a non-human corporation, a many-centuries old, royal-legal-advisor-invented institution.
Which kind of sounds like what you're saying, no?
BTW, I agree with you that,
> We have lots of incentives, policies, ideologies and systems where completely normal people are behaving in a way that produces harm to others.
However, I used to believe that we could solve all our problems by setting up the "right" system (I read "Walden II" at an impressionable age.) But now I think that (as I said in this thread elsewhere) all our problems are now at root psychological or spiritual. Our systems (I believe) would rapidly become sane if we ourselves were to become sane. I don't think it's possible to "impose" sanity, as it were, from the system "down" to the individuals.
I do believe in Bucky's vision:
> What I hoped I had made clear in Critical Path is that the inherently half-century-long design science-revolution phase of attainment of universal economic success has been successfully completed and now needs only the bloodless socioeconomic reorientation instead of the political revolution to exercise humanity's option to "make it" for all.
And his conclusion:
> ...the individual discovery of God by a vast majority of human individuals—not the discovery of religions, but the discovery that each and every individual has an always-instantly-open, no-intermediary-switchboard-authority-to-contend-with, no-interference-of-any-kind, direct "hot-line to God": i.e., the weightless, nonphysical communication occurring teleologically between the differentially limited, weightless, nonphysical, temporal, special-case mind of the individual human and the comprehensively integrated, macro-micro unlimited, weightless, eternal, generalized mind of God.
Cheers! :-)
The old classics:
- The Theory of Political Coalitions (1962) by William H. Riker
- Social Choice and Individual Values (1952) by Kenneth Arrow.
- The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (1962) by Buchanan and Tullock
2. Just because I may have other thoughts doesn't mean that I'm wrong.
3. Of course the system matters and I'm not a fool who doesn't understand that. So there's no need to belittle me because of that (FYI I know about systems theory etc. so thanks for the hint Mr. teacher).
4. Maybe you just have to learn to think more differentiated to see that every component in a system matters.
5. You claim that bad people will always exist but you can't even know or prove that, it's an empty hypothesis at this point. Scientists have struggled for a long time to find out if it's based on DNA or society but they didn't arrive at a conclusion. How smart do you think you are that you know more about that?
6. I agree that society and other systems need to be designed in a way that such individuals/organizations can't harm anyone. But ATM we see that they are too powerful and stop nearly every actor who tries to introduce changes in that manner.
So in our world as it is you and me have no power to change systems at a scale that would matter. How would you propose we can achieve this (bonus best-case scenario: in a legal way)?
Let me tell you something that you may not know or realize in it's magnitude: (Bad) actors who gain power struggle hard to keep it. If you don't have equal / comparable power (an/or money) only a major scandal _could_ help you if you manage to get media, a lot of people and powerful other entities to raise their voices and act.
But look at people like Trump. He has harassed women and doesn't even hide how he thinks that women and people with migration background have less value than the supreme white race.
A lot of people tried to attack him but no-one achieves something here. Do you have a clue, why?
This is just putting a name on the problem.
The obvious corollary is that our problems are all psychological now (or spiritual, if you prefer.)
The idea that we can take a system like western capitalism and then just uniformly distribute the profits is self-undermining. The system as it is is what generated the wealth, and if you completely change the system you can't assume it will continue to have the same dynamics. You don't need to be Robert Lucas to see this.
Utopianism is just a form of intellectual laziness that further entrenches the status quo.
The quote he referenced was probably something like this one:
“The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic. It is spontaneously inquisitive. It sorts out and endeavors to understand” - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1222650-the-physical-is-inh...
Many people are so sure of their belief in entropy (aka "thermodynamics"). I like the idea that there's anti-entropy too.
I sincerely hope that you are wrong, I fear that you may be right.