Bucky Fuller. The only person in history to have a form of carbon named after him†.
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.
Yes very nice theories he came up with and very sad to live in a world that's like the dirty, bloody, stained picture of this utopia.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
These approaches fall under positive political theories with name social choice theory, public choice theory etc. The idea is to apply the formal tools of economics, statistics, game theory, etc. to analyze politics.
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
1. How do you dare to think you'd know that he would've done that just because you read some things he wrote?
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?
The soviets also thought the same, unfortunatelly a system with bad actors cannot be solved from within.
Especially when the "bad" actors controls means of production and distribution, and have incentives to continue acting such and in return creating incentives for "good" actors to imitate the "bad" behaviours. Anyway, defining what's good and what's bad when you are an actor within a system is a very subjective exercice, a seemingly "good" actor will turn "bad" overnight given the right incentive and vice versa. The real question is determining who distributes the incentives, and who should. And for all the systems in this world, it spans from random to being concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs or a single dictator.
> He calculated (he was an engineer) that, if we applied our tech and resources efficiently, we could provide for everyone "without disadvantaging anyone."
I find this physics problem / psychological problem distinction totally unconvincing. The variety of scientific advancement that makes peoples' lives better has always required the joint effort of pure scientists solving physics problems, and business-types/political-types solving psychological problems. Communists love to point out that the internet grew out of the government program ARPANET; they are less inclined to acknowledge that it ran on machines built by IBM and DEC - giant companies who were beholden to market forces and shareholder pressures.
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.
I have a ~77 year old friend who was recently telling me about going to Buckminster Fuller's lectures at his engineering university, circa 1968. He quoted Mr. Fuller as saying something like, "entropy takes things apart, life puts them back together."
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.
Life reverses entropy only locally, it still needs to "spend" entropy to do so. In this way, life is an efficient entropy accelerating machine, and we're the pinnacle.
That's actually a really good question. It does make me question the hypothesis, which is essentially, is the entropy any different to a lifeless planet just re-radiating solar energy. The answer is probably, not in the long term. You may be able to use the principle to determine what stage intelligent life is in though? If we were talking plants only, the re-emitted radiation would be expected to be reduced, as it is bound up in the growth. But our species is now expending that, so at this moment, solar re-radiation we would expect to be above lifeless levels.
I used his ventilated prose method to parse out and simplify complex statutes. One example was the definition of a slot machine, which consisted of two paragraphs with two sentences each, that took up an entire page of text. It had some deeply nested clauses and an ungodly amount of commas and semi colons. I started with one sentence per line, then broke to one clause per line. From there, I used indentation to sort out exactly which clauses were dependent on what. It made explaining the law to others a lot easier.
I’d start with “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.” He has a really interesting, albeit super rambling type of prose that is an acquired taste (I personally love it). This particular book is a great introduction to his worldview without being too exhausting. Check it out!
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.
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene