Tag Archives: Buckminster Fuller

Brain Books

“Brain Books,” Trajectories, Autumn 1996, No. 16/17.

I have another list that I revise every couple of months.  This is not my “Ten Favorite Books” so much as a list of the ten books I wish everyone would read:  the ten books I most feel the lack of in people who otherwise seem intelligent.  These books would fill anyone’s cranium with useful information.

In order of priority, the list would begin with:

1. Ulysses by James Joyce.  Nobody has really entered the 20th century if they haven’t digested Ulysses.  And if they haven’t entered the 20th century, they’re going to fall pretty far behind pretty soon, as we enter the 21st.  There’s a guy I correspond with occasionally who spends all his time fighting with Fundamentalists over Darwin.  He’s living in the 19th century; nothing in the 20th century has affected him yet.  He’s carrying on the brave battles of Thomas Henry Huxley a hundred years later.  I know some people who are back in the 18th century – Burkian conservatives, trying to apply Burke’s principles to modern times.  I sometimes do that myself – try to apply some of Burke’s principles.  But not all of them!  I don’t think he’s written in stone either.  At any rate, everyone should read Ulysses to get into the 20th century.

And everybody should struggle as much as they can with:

2. The Cantos, by Ezra Pound.  And that means getting to the last page.  You may give up on some pages, and say, “I’ll never figure this stuff out!”  But keep going until you get to the last page.  Pound offers something no other writer except Dante has ever attempted – and Dante does it in a medieval way that doesn’t mean much to modern people.  Pound offers a hierarchy of values.  We’ve heard so many voices from the East telling us “All is One,” and we’ve got so many puritanical duelists of all sorts telling us, “No; there’s good and bad.”  And they all define those terms in their own way:  the Christian “good and evil” duality; the ecologist’s “nature good; man bad” duality; the feminist’s “woman good; man bad” duality, and so on.  Against this monism and dualism Pound offers a hierarchy of values, in which he gives you a panoramic picture of human history, very much like Griffith’s Intolerance, only in it, Pound shows levels of awareness, levels of civilization, levels of ethics and levels of lack of all these things.  And you realize that you have a hierarchy of values too, but you’ve never perfectly articulated it.  Every writer gives you a hierarchy of values.  But by making this the central theme, Pound makes you face the question, “Will I accept this as the best hierarchy of values?”  I can’t, because the guy had a screw loose.  Great poet, but a little bit funny in the head at times, trying to synthesize Jefferson, Confucius, Picasso and Mussolini.  So what you’ve got to do is struggle with Pound, and create your own hierarchy of values to convince yourself that you grok more than he did.  And he combined genius and looniness.  It’s an invigorating book to get you out of dualism, which is the Western trap, and monism, which is the Eastern trap, to attain realism: a hierarchy of values.

Another book I wish everybody would read:

3. Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski.  this one gives you the tools to enable you to avoid most of the stupidity prevalent on this planet at present. It won’t cure all forms of stupidity, and you really have to work at it; it doesn’t do magic.  But if you use its principles, you’ll gradually cure yourself of a lot of prevalent forms of stupidity.  If you work at it hard enough, you may cure yourself of most.  I don’t know; I’m still working at it.

4.  Ovid.  I wish everybody would read Ovid.  The great myths of our particular culture – the Greek and Roman myths – can’t be found in any one book, except Bullfinch or Ovid, and Ovid has a much better style than Bullfinch.  So read Ovid and get the whole panorama of classical myth.  Classical myth has so much meaning that it permeates every bit of modern psychology.  The myths of other cultures have much to offer, but we still need our myths.  So we might as well face up to them.  It’s our culture; let’s not lose it.  And let’s find out something that happened before 1970.

5. The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer – just because it’s so damn good.

6. Justine, by deSade — because everyone needs to be shaken up.  Justine asks you some pretty fundamental questions.  And you may not find them easy to answer.

7. Instead of a Book by a Man Too Busy to Write One, by Benjamin Tucker, which contains the best arguments for minimizing force and maximizing options; the best argument for extreme Libertarianism that anyone has put together.  He deals with concrete issues in economics, and makes a damn good case for a maximum of liberty and a minimum of coercion as a formula for a happy and prosperous society.

8. Progress and Poverty, by Henry George.  Not that I agree with it.  But everyone’s heard of Karl Marx and Adam Smith.  If you read Tucker and George, you get the idea that there are more than two choices.  You don’t have to choose between them.  There are other options, not in between, but at right angles to those choices; a hierarchy of possibilities.  George poses a challenge to both Marxism and orthodox capitalism.

9. The Open Society and its Enemies, by Karl Popper, which introduces you to a lot of aspects of modern scientific thought, but in a different way than Korzybski, and applies them to tearing apart most of the arguments for determinism and totalitarianism.  I think determinism and totalitarianism have done so damn much harm that everybody needs a good inoculation against them.  Popper seems the best inoculation.  He fled both the Communists and the Nazis, and had good emotional reasons for detesting totalitarianism.  He was a physicist, so he expressed himself in terms of a very deep and trenchant philosophical analysis of what’s wrong with theories that claim, “We know what’s best (?) and we know how to achieve it – and we know who has to be killed to make it happen.”

10. Shakespeare.  I think everybody should read Shakespeare, not only because he was such [a] great poet, but because he’s under so much attack these days.  You might as well check him out for yourself, and it will give you an idea of how just dumb the politically correct people who attack him seem in comparison to him.

Other recommended authors:

Jonathan Swift.  All of Gulliver’s Travels.  There are some anthologies which contain not only this, but a selection of his other writings, too.  Swift does a great job of tearing apart conventional ideas about almost everything.  He’s very, very liberating; almost psychedelic in some passages.

Nietzsche.  There are a couple of good one-volume editions which contain both Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ.  The two should be taken together.  They represent Nietzsche at the height of his…whatever it was. More than any other writer in the history of philosophy, Nietzsche set out to refute everyone who came before him, without exception and without mercy, and he had the intellect to do a damn good job.  He tears down so many accepted ideas that you’re left floating in a kind of nihilistic void.  Many people find this terrifying.  I find it exhilarating, and I manage to recover from it every time I subject myself to re-reading something by Nietzsche.  There are a lot of other good books by Nietzsche, but I’d especially recommend those two.

Olaf Stapledon.  There’s a one-volume edition that contains both First and Last Men and Last Men in London.

Then, when somebody has read that much, I think intelligent conversation can begin.  Otherwise, we’re pretty much on the level of grunting.

(digitized and posted to alt.fan.rawilson by Eric Wagner)

Also from Recommended Reading on RAW’s site:

The Mass Psychology of Fascism, by Wilhelm Reich, M.D.
Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce
Machine Art, by Ezra Pound
Selected Prose, by Ezra Pound
Harlot’s Ghost, by Norman Mailer
Go Down, Moses, by William Faukner
The Alphabet vs. the Goddess, by Leonard Shlain
Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects trans. by Ezra Pound
Chaos and Cyberculture, by Timothy Leary, Ph.D.
Critical Path, by R Buckminster Fuller
Digital McLuhan, by Paul Levinson
Saharasia, by James DeMeo, Ph.D.
The Natural Economic Order, by Silvio Gesell

To which RMJon23 once remarked:  “I’m surprised neither list included Peter McWilliams’ Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do. I’ll go out on a limb and suggest RAW wants everyone to read that one, too.

Other recommendations:

Recommended Viewing (scroll to the bottom of that page)

From the Paradigm Shift Interview:
As of today (August 11, 1997) I find the most interesting ideas in traditional Buddhism, Nietzsche, Charles Fort, several quantum physicists (Nick Herbert, David Bohm, Fred Wolfe, David Finkelstein) and in Rupert Sheldrake. Add together the Buddhist yoga of detachment from fixed ideas and emotions, Nietzsche’s and Fort’s merciless assault on the cultural prejudices that are so deeply embedded we usually don’t notice them, quantum uncertainty and holism, Sheldrake’s special variety of holism, and I think we have the beginning of a hint of the New Paradigm we need.  But after looking at this list I realize I should have included Korzybski’s general semantics, Bandler’s neurolinguistic programming and Leary’s evolutionary-existentialist neuro-psychology or info-psychology as he most recently labeled it.

Origin unknown:
The living writers whose work especially interests me at present include Douglas Adams, William Burroughs, who still seems topical no matter how old he gets, Tom Robbins, who writes the best sentences of anybody working in English today, George V. Higgins, who sees humans with a wonderful irony and writes the most realistic dialogue I’ve ever seen (even better than Joyce or Hemingway), and a lot of scientist-philosophers who seem to me to be giving us wonderful new ideas and perceptions: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, Terrence McKenna, Barbara Marx Hubbard, the fuzzy logic people, Riane Easier, Nick Herbert, Nicholas Negroponte, Marilyn Ferguson, Peter Russell, Fred Alan Wolfe . . . and of course, Tim Leary, who is ill, but may have a few unpublished books that might still blow all our minds.

excerpt from Thought of the Month:  30 Apollo 78 p.s.U.:
“There are only two kinds of artists: the plagiarists and the revolutionaries.”  – Paul Gauguin
In my opinion, the primary “revolutionary” Masters of our past century include Picasso, Klee, Pound, Joyce, Faulkner, Ginsberg, Frank Lloyd Wright, D.W. Griffith, Chaplin, Welles, Clint Eastwood, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Epstein, Brancusi, Carlin : the man or woman who doesn’t know their work deeply and richly still lives in the 19th Century as the rest of us prepare to enter the 21st. The artists on that list haven’t become familiar enough to stop surprising us. We still need to interpret our interpreters, as Ellman said of Joyce.

Four Trends That Give Me Hope

“Four Trends That Give Me Hope”

 by Robert Anton Wilson

Published in Loompanics’ Greatest Hits, 1990

Despite superficial impressions caused by our brutally short lifespans (73 years average, at present), something that can be called “progress” clearly exists in history and can be demonstrated mathematically. Brooks Adams, Alfred Korzybski and Buckminster Fuller, among others, have given examples of this “progressive factor” in their books. A recent and more rigorous demonstration comes from the French economist-statistician, George Anderla, who used Information Theory to convert knowledge into binary units and calculated how fast these units increased since the birth of Christ.

Taking all knowledge at 1 AD as x, the rate of acceleration has been as follows: 1500 AD – 2x, 1750 AD – 4X, 1900 AD – 8x, 1950 AD – 16x, 1960 AD – 32X, 1967-64X, 1973 AD – 128x.

That this process is accelerating is immediately obvious; the acceleration of the acceleration is clearer if we express this in terms of the time interludes for each doubling of knowledge. Then we see that the first doubling took 1500 years, the second 250 years, the third 150 years, the fourth 50 years, the fifth 10 years, the sixth 7 years and the seventh 6 years.

All available indicators suggest that the doubling has accelerated further since Anderla completed his study in 1973. Patents granted per year, new books, new computer software, new scientific papers, etc., have all continued to “multiply like rabbits.”

Of course, the pessimist or cynic can say that “we” will just mis-use new knowledge as “we” have, allegedly, misused all previous knowledge. I have disputed this view (and given more details on the Anderla calculations) in my Prometheus Rising; in this brief space, I will say only that as knowledge increases, and as tech­nology increases, human options widen. At the very least, people today can choose from a larger variety of kinds of misery than our forebears in 1888 and much, much more than those in 1788.

I also object to the fictitious “we” that cynics invoke as the omnipresent fuck-up factor in history. I have never met “we” except in books of grammar or politics, or other works of fiction; in experience, I only encounter phalanxes of individuals. Some individuals mis-use knowledge and some use knowledge very intelligently. I assume that as knowledge increases, however much the stupid continue to mis-use it, the intelligent will find in­creased options give them greater free­dom in which to exercise their ingenuity.

A second evolutionary trend that I find hopeful consists in the accelerated speed of travel and communication in the mod­ern world. According to Professor Platt of Michigan State university, speed of travel has increased a thousandfold since 1900 2nd speed of communication a millionfold; and both are increasing faster ail the time. The “one town world” forecast by Bucky Fuller is appearing all around us. Look through the Restaurant section of any large city’s phone directory and you will find the cuisine of the whole planet available; walk through an art museum and you will see all the art of humanity; turn on the TV in a really big city and you will find Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Spanish, English, Jewish, French and vari­ous other imports available at the turn of a dial. Like all increases in options or pos­sible choices, this omni-cosmopolitanization seems to me a liberating and wonderful evolutionary transformation.

Concretely, my childhood reality-tunnel was bordered by one neighborhood in Brooklyn; my current reality-tunnel is bordered by Berlin and Maui, those being the furthest-apart points that I visited last year. They are 12 time-zones, or halfway around the planet, from each other, and I expect to see China next year. (I also expect to visit a space colony sometime in the next 20 years…) Similarly, in a recent computer conference, I spoke to people all over the US and Canada; that would have been science-fiction if I wrote it 30 years ago…

Having friends who are Punk Rockers in Berlin, computer executives in San Jose, actors in London and Dublin, psycholo­gists in Maui, etc., has not only re-edu­cated me but liberated me from mental limitations I didn’t know existed until I lost them. “What one fool can learn, another can,” as the ancient primate proverb says. More and more people are traveling all the time (one man flew the Atlantic in 1928 and 200,000,000 flew it in 1978), so I have high hopes that existen­tial re-education through experience will eventually liberate more and more minds.

As the potential knowledge and the potential human experience available to us both multiply faster, our lifespans are also increasing, a third trend that fills me with joy. In 1976, a survey found 500 people over 100 years old in England; in 1986, a similar study found over 3000. In America, lifespan has increased so fast since the 1970s that life Extension Re­searcher Durk Pearson admitted to being surprised by it (on a recent Donahue show). Ironically, due to AIDS, more money is being spent on immunological research than ever, and research on the immune system is the most likely path to super-longevity. We may all live hundreds of years, or longer.

With more space (due to faster travel), more time (due to longevity) and more knowledge (due to the accelerating In­formation Explosion), I see no reason to believe that any past limits on me or you or “humanity” in general need to be re­garded as permanent. I think we are mov­ing rapidly toward some evolutionary Quantum Jump of which the “Harmonic convergence” is only the Mickey Mouse cartoon version of simple minds.

The fourth trend that gives me hope consists of all the problems and symp­toms of breakdown on this planet which motivate most of the cynicism and panic around these days. Ecological mismanage­ment. The Permanent War Economy. The increase of State power to the point where government has become a pest in everyone’s life. The continuing risk of nuclear war. All these problems seem as real and dreadful to me as they do the cynics, but I see them in a different light. In a world of increasing information, in­creasing richness of experience and in­creasing lifespan, our problems may serve as the evolutionary challenges which will force more and more people to use our new options creatively.

After all, it seems quite likely that there would be no “progress” and no evolution at all, if serious problems did not compel living beings to innovation and experiment.

(submitted to RAWilsonFans.com by R. Michael Johnson)

Doomsday May Be Cancelled

Doomsday May Be Cancelled

By Robert Anton Wilson

from Future Life, #26, May 1981

The publication of R. Buckminster Fuller’s new book, Critical Path, is an event of historical impor­tance, because the survival of humanity might – just might – depend on how many people read and understand what Dr. Fuller has to say.

Everybody knows that we are walking a tightrope over an abyss; that the arms race, for instance, will either bankrupt us, if we continue it indefinitely, or in­cinerate us, if we end it the only obvious way, by “jumping them before they jump us.” Every­body knows that if either Russia or the U.S. launches its nuclear missiles, the other side will have 20 minutes (thanks to satellite sur­veillance) to fire back every thing they’ve got before they’re even hit. And yet, in this no-win situation, we seem trapped. Having gotten into this highly lethal game, we don’t know how to get out. We drift and stagger blindly toward Doomsday, wondering why God or history played such a dirty trick on us.

According to Dr. Fuller, this rendez­vous with apocalypse only seems in­evitable, because 99 percent of the human race believes things that simply are not so. We believe, for instance, that there aren’t enough resources (matter and energy) to go around; that every group has to plot and scheme like Machiavellians to outwit every other group and get enough to survive; that this plotting and scheming is inescapable (even though obviously ever-more-dan­gerous-to-all) because any group that stops plotting and scheming will be jumped and plundered by one or all of the others.

Bucky Fuller roundly asserts that this whole eat-or-be-eaten philosophy (which is the unspoken belief system guiding all governments, capitalist and communist) is not partly but totally wrong. The in­itial assumption is invalid, and every single conclusion drawn from that assumption is therefore unreal. We have created the abyss by misunderstanding the nature of the physical universe.

There is more than enough to go around, Fuller insists. Every  “tough, pragmatic, strategic” plot and scheme based on the assumption that there isn’t enough to go around is fictitious.

“It no longer has to be me or you,” Fuller asserts. “Selfishness is unneces­sary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival.” Machiavelli is obsolete; we now have more to gain by cooperating than by plotting how to plunder each other.

Does this sound too good to be true? It should be remembered that Bucky Fuller is not some idealistic youth left over from the ’60s. At the age of 85, he has nearly 70 years experience as in­ventor, thinker, Naval officer, architect, executive and consultant to corpora­tions and governments. He has time and again proven that his most controversial ideas are practical and workable.

And the Claim that there is abundance for all isn’t Bucky’s alone; it is backed up by more than 20 years of the “World Game,” a computer simulation of energy-resources problems in which he has collaborated with literally thousands of other scientists and technicians. Fuller gives specific, detailed plans to implement each claim he makes (and further details are given in a companion volume, Ho-Ping: Food for Everyone by World Game associate Medard Gabel).

The strategy of scheming and plotting to get the jump on the other guy, then, is not “pragmatic,” not “realistic,” not a “necessary evil.” It is a totally un­necessary evil, continued only because (as Fuller keeps repeating) 99 percent of the human race does not know the facts about the energy available on this planet.

In the last ten years, according to Fuller, humanity crossed an evolution­ary threshold, unnoted by anybody ex­cept a few scientists connected with the WorId Game. We have arrived at the po­sition where we know how to give everybody on the planet enough matter and energy to make them, in terms of money, all as rich as David Rockefeller.

There is not only enough for all; there is abundance for all. And we are still plotting and scheming to bully each other out of nickels and dimes, compar­atively speaking.

At this time when (after thousands of years of invention and discovery) real scarcity has at last been vanquished, we are maintaining artificial scarcity be­cause of sheer ignorance. “Technologi­cally,” Fuller writes, “we now have four billion billionaires onboard Spaceship Earth who are entirely unaware of their good fortune. Unbeknownst to them, their legacy is being held in probate by general ignorance, fear [and] selfishness. You can also consult Estate Planning Attorney in Bloomfield Hills before transferring the property. In such cases it is important to consult estate planning lawyers for hire as they can help you legally in knowing your rights. ” No estate planning attorneys serving Austin can save them from them unless they do it themselves. To know your right and its legal sides, you need to consult lawyers from a reputed law firm like the Morey Law Firm, P.A. serving in Orlando who are expert in estate planning and its management.

In short, humanity has already achieved, technically, the total success all Utopians ever dreamed of; our prob­lems now are entirely due to wrong thinking. We are in the tragic-comic pre­dicament of two crazed men dying of thirst, fighting over a teaspoon of water in the middle of a rainstorm. We cannot see the rainstorm because we are hypno­tized by emergency-reflexes fixated on the teaspoon.

(Specifically, Fuller indicates, for in­stance, that investment in nuclear energy has made our corporate elite unwilling to see, hear, think or know anything about the much safer, cheaper and more abun­dant energy available by utilizing solar power (check out SolarChat – Solar everything) to the utmost and interconnecting our electrical networks worldwide.)

Of course, it is impossible to review adequately a book like Critical Path, in which every word in its 448 pages has been carefully chosen by a mind of genius to convey maximum information with maximum precision. All I can add is that, while I got my review copy free, I intend to buy ten more copies of Critical Path and send them to ten of the most in­telligent people I know.

Our future depends on how many people understand what Fuller is saying.

Robert Anton Wilson, PhD, is a director of the Institute for the Study of the Human Future in Berkeley, Cal., and the author of several science-fiction novels including Illuminatus (with Robert Shea) and the Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy.