Great Throughts Treasury

"We are now synergetically forced to conclude that all phenomena are metaphysical; wherefore, as many have long suspected — like it or not — life is but a dream."

"We are on a spaceship; a beautiful one. It took billions of years to develop. We're not going to get another. Now, how do we make this spaceship work?"

"We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think."

"We as economic society are going to have to pay our whole population to go to school and pay it to stay at school. "

"We evolute toward ever lesser brain comprehension lags — ergo, toward ever diminishing error; ergo, ever diminishing misunderstandings; ergo, ever diminishing fear, and its brain-lagging painful errors of objectivity; wherefore we approach eternal instantaneity of absolute and total comprehension. The eternal instantaneity of no lag at all. However, we have now learned from our generalizations of the great complexity of the interactions of principles as we are disembarrassed of our local, exclusively physical chemistry of information-sensing devices — that what is approached is eternal and instant awareness of absolute reality of all that ever existed. All the great metaphysical integrity of all the individuals, which is potential and inherent in the complex interactions of generalized principles, will always and only coexist eternally."

"We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea at first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work. "

"We have reached the point where we are now possessed of sufficient information for each individual human to dare to exercise the option to make it rather than having to depend on the decisions of an educated elite."

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."

"We must progress to the stage of doing all the right things for all the right reasons instead of doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons."

"We must start with scientific fundamentals, and that means with the data of experiments and not with assumed axioms predicated only upon the misleading nature of that which only superficially seems to be obvious. It is the consensus of great scientists that science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience."

"We shall have to stop looking askance on trends in relation to sex merely as a reproductive capability, i.e. that it is normal to make babies. Society will have to change in its assessment of what the proclivities of humanity may be. Our viewpoints on homosexuality, for example, may have to be reconsidered and more wisely adjusted."

"Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives."

"What humans have spontaneously identified as good and bad — or as positive and negative — are evolutionary complementations in need of more accurate identifications."

"What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities."

"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished; if the solution is not beautiful; I know it is wrong."

"When I thought about steering the course of the Spaceship Earth and all of humanity, I saw most people trying to turn the boat by pushing the bow around. I saw that by being all the way at the tail of the ship, by just kicking my foot to one side or the other, I could create the low pressure which would turn the whole ship. If ever someone wanted to write my epitaph, I would want it to say Call me Trimtab."

"When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That's a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do."

"When individuals join in a cooperative venture, the power generated far exceeds what they could have accomplished acting individually."

"Whenever I draw a circle, I immediately want to step out of it."

"Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.... Humanity is in 'final exam' as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe"

"While no politician or political system can ever afford to yield understandably and enthusiastically to their adversaries and opposers, all politicians can and will yield enthusiastically to the computers safe flight-controlling capabilities in bringing all of humanity in for a happy landing."

"You can never learn less; you can only learn more. The reason I know so much is because I have made so many mistakes"

"You can't better the world by simply talking to it. Philosophy to be effective must be mechanically applied."

"You may very appropriately want to ask me how we are going to resolve the ever-acceleratingly dangerous impasse of world-opposed politicians and ideological dogmas. I answer, it will be resolved by the computer."

"You must choose between making money and making sense. The two are mutually exclusive."

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

"You uncover what is, when you get rid of what isn't."

"Let architects sing of aesthetics that bring Rich clients in hordes to their knees. Just give me a home, in a great circle dome Where stresses and strains are at ease. Roam home to a dome, No banker would back with a dime. No mortgage to show, no payments to go, Where you dream, dwell and spend your own time. (Sung to the tune of “Home on the Range”)"

"By "money accounting" (in contradistinction to real-wealth accounting), the U.S.A. is now realistically bankrupt. Since Nixon became president, the U.S.A. has been unable to pay even the interest on its national debt, let alone reduce the principal."

"Carbon blocks-inserted, copper disc-brakes: Invented and successfully demonstrated at Phelps Dodge, 1937. Bunsen-burner-melted, water-cooled centrifuge: For processing low-grade tin ore. Invented and successfully demonstrated at Phelps Dodge, 1937."

"Compact, odorless toilet equipment: For conversion of human wastes into methane gas and fertilizer. Designed, 1928; proven in India; now being refined for production use."

"Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys ? legally enacted game-playing ? agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members. How can little humans successfully cope with this greatest of all history's invisible Grunch of nonhuman Giants?"

"Dymaxion World Map: Discovery and development of a new cartographic projection system by which humanity can view the map of the whole planet Earth as oneworld island in one-world ocean, without any visible distortion in the relative size and shape of any of the land masses and without any breaks in the continental contours. This is the undistorted map for studying world problems and displaying in their true proportion resources and other data. Discovered, 1933; published, 1943."

"For the past thirty years the U.S. government's grand defense strategy has been a puppet of the supranational corporate giants with the strings invisibly manipulated. This policy has concentrated on accumulating greater numbers of atomic bombs than those of the U.S.S.R., while all the while the U.S.S.R. was (only) ostensibly endeavoring to keep pace with the U.S.A. bomb production. In reality the U.S.S.R. was dominantly preoccupied with building an all-oceans, primarily underwater navy from scratch and expanding numerically its conventional-weapons army divisions."

"Geodesic Domes: The unlimited-size, clear-span structures to accommodate both humanity's converging and deploying activities. Invented, 1938; prototyped, 1947. Since then, over 300,000 have been produced and installed around the world from northernmost Greenland to the exact South Pole; over 100,000 installed in children's playgrounds."

"GRUNCH didn't invent Universe. It didn't invent anything. It monopolizes know-where and know-how but is devoid of know-why. It is preoccupied with absolute selfishness and its guaranteed gratifications. It is as blind as its Swiss banks are mute."

"Hanging bookshelves, and other furniture: Invented, 1928; prototyped, 1930. Modeling of all geometric developments of energetic-synergetic geometry: Including tensegrity models of all geometrical structures and the hierarchy of primitive structural systems. The minimum, all-space-filling module. The foldable, seven unique great-circle models. The tetrahelixes. Discovered, 1927; demonstrated, 1936."

"Humanity is an experimental initiative of Universe. The experiment is to discover whether the complex of cosmic laws can maintain the integrity of eternal regeneration while allowing the mind of the species homo sapiens on the little planet Earth to discover and use some of the mathematical laws governing the design of Universe, whereby those humans can by trial and error develop subjectively from initial ignorance into satisfactorily informed, successful local-Universe monitors of all physically and metaphysically critical information and thereby serve objectively as satisfactory local-Universe problem-solvers in sustaining the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe."

"I acquired one of the most important of my life's working assumptions when I undertook to answer my own 1927 self-questioning: "Why have humans been included in the design of Universe?". My hypothetical answer of 1927 was, and as yet is: What impresses me most is the experientially demonstrable fact that all living organisms other than humans have some organically integral equipment that gives them some inherent physical advantage in coping with special environmental conditions? a plant that can and does thrive only under dense Amazon river jungle conditions? a bird that can fly beautifully while in the sky but which cannot divest itself of those wings while awkwardly walking? the fish having equipment to extract oxygen from the water that dies out of water. Common with many creatures humans have brains. Brains of humans and other creatures are always and only coordinating and memory-storing the information reported to their brains by internal and external sensing devices regarding each special-case systemic experience. But humans are given mind's access to objectively realizable mathematical principles whereby humans can produce their own wings to outfly all the special-case, integrally winged birds. In addition to their brains humans have minds, possessed by no other known organism. Weightless, nonphysical minds are concerned with discovering the interrelated significance of all-time humanity's thus-far-experientially-discovered and experimentally-verified inventory of ever-experientially redemonstrable, only-mathematically-expressible cosmic design laws and of those laws' governance of the multi-alternative freedoms of realization as mathematically incisive, omnirational, variously magnituded, structurally associative and dissociative, nonsimultaneous, and only omnicomplexedly intercomplementary, always and only overlapping episodes altogether essential to eternally regenerative scenario Universe. HUMANS: IF successfully evolved physiologically, psychologically, and philosophically from their born naked, helpless-for-months, no-experience state of absolute ignorance to be progressively educated as driven only by innate hunger, thirst, procreative instinct, and curiosity into initiative-takings can thereby discover frequent errors of assumption, identification, or execution wherewith, if the individual's innate courage and sense of the importance of truth are greater than the sense of pride of the individual, error is admitted thus only inadvertently uncovering that which is true which discovered truth may prove to be both physically and metaphysically inspiringly advantageous information suggesting ways of progressively improving physical life-support systems and their environmental realizations together with their operational information agenda whereafter, encouraged by experiencing the ensuing, more favorable environmental circumstances accruing only to their ever abiding by the spontaneous self-admonitions springing intuitively from their innate love of the truth, the thus-inspired individuals persevere with integrity throughout some hundred thousand generations of such only-by-trial-and-error conditioning with each generation's intermatings of those mutually surviving under the evolving environment and mutually educated exclusively by such artifacts-accomplished, creative conversions of negative into positive circumstances and through those regenerative matings to concentrate the DNA-RNA, exclusively angle and frequency-controlled, structural and mechanical design programmings of the creatively imagining faculties and their corresponding crafting dexterities which with their inventing of words their metaphysical tools and electromagnetic-spectrum communications accomplishments might in time attain and sustain a semi-divine level of exclusively artifacts-realized, creative design wisdom adequate to render the cosmic environment healthily supportive of all humanity THEN shall humans discover that they have been included in Universe to function: first, as local Universe information-harvesters; secondly, as critical information-winnowers; thirdly, as generalized patterns-and-principles discoverers; and fourthly, employing those principles objectively to serve as local Universe problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative, only overlappingly inter-episoded scenario Universe."

"I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics. That alternative was through invention, development, and reduction to the physically working stages of mass production prototypes of each member of a complete family of intercomplementary artifacts, structurally, mechanically, chemically, metallurgically, electromagnetically, and cybernetically designed to provide so much performance per each erg of energy, pound of material, and second of time invested as to make it eminently feasible and practicable to provide a sustainable standard of living for all humanity ? more advanced, pleasing, and increasingly productive than any ever experienced or dreamed of by anyone in all history. It was clear that this advanced level could be entirely sustained by the many derivatives of our daily income of Sun energy. It was clear that it could be attained and maintained by artifacts that would emancipate humans from piped, wired, and metered exploitation of the many by the few. This family of artifacts leading to such comprehensive human success I identified as livingry in contradistinction to politics' weaponry. I called it technologically reforming the environment instead of trying politically to reform the people."

"If you ignorantly believe there's not enough life support available on planet Earth for all humanity, then survival only of the fittest seems self-flatteringly to warrant magna-selfishness. However, it is due only to humans' born state of ignorance and the 99.99 percent invisibility of technological capabilities that they do not recognize the vast abundance of resources available to support all humanity at an omni-high standard of living."

"It is now far more risky to buy U.S. government securities than it is to buy shares in what once was risk capital's economic venture corporation shares."

"Land "ownership" and its omni-dependent comprehensive thing-ownership involvements and their legaldocuments-perpetuations constitute the largest socioeconomic custom error presently being maintained by a large world affairs-affecting segment of humanity."

"Limited-liability, abstract corporate "beings" needed no passports to travel altogether invisibly across national borders. Soon after World War II, America's five hundred largest corporations became supranational, taking with them (out of the United States) the invisible legal controls over what had been born as American industry with all its "know-how." The knowhow had been paid for initially by the U.S. people through their government's wartime (or "on the brink of wartimes") underwriting of the prime technologies as initially developed only for the U.S. Department of Defense or the Manhattan Project or the space program, developed in wartime at government ("we the people's") expense and turned over gratis for "operational efficiency" in "peacetime" to privately owned corporations."

"Money is not wealth and that wealth is the organized technological capability to protect, nurture, educate, and accommodate the forward days of humans, whereas money is only a medium of exchange and a cash accounting system. Money has become completely monopolized by the supranational-corporation colossi, which inherently as legal abstractions ignore the problem of how to protect and nurture human lives. In the very largest way of looking at planet Earth's socioeconomic-evolution events, we must observe that humans are designed with legs and not roots. Yesterday, humanity developed temporary roots as it cultivated its life-support food root-grown on the land. The metals made possible metal canning of food and mobilization of machinery. Today, all of human existence depends on the swift, world-around intercommunication system operating at 186,000 miles per second. We have transformed reality from Newton's "at rest" norm to an Einstein's 186,000-miles-per-second norm. Socioeconomically we have synchronized with the omniintertransformative kinetics of the entire Universe."

"Octet Truss: The flooring or roofing structure for unlimited spanning. Designed, 1933; prototyped, 1949."

"Planetary economics has now shifted from a physicalland-and-metals capitalism to a strictly metaphysical, omniplanetary, omnicosmic-wealth know-how capitalism. The once noble and essential but now obsolete nations belonged to the rooted socioeconomic land-capitalism era of humanity. In reality, humanity is now uprooted kinetically and occupying the whole planet. Capitalism is dumping its immobile real estate and depending on science to synchronize its affairs with the invisible realities, misassuming, however, that science knows what it is all about. To successfully dump all its real estate, capitalism has all but ceased "renting" and through enforced selling of "cooperatives" and "nothing else but condominiums" is forcing the citizenry into anchored exploitability, while it is always increasing the corporate deployability and mobile shift-about-ability around the world."

"Since it takes millions of dollars to win U.S. elections, the vast majority of America's crossbreeding youth and an ever-increasing number of its adults concede politics to be so inherently corrupt as to cause increasing numbers of qualified voters to withhold from voting, lest in doing so their action be misconstrued as constituting their approval or acceptance of the present-day corruptibility of politics and its consequent inability to articulate the will of democracy. In 1980, of the 227 million persons in the United States (159 million of whom were eligible to vote), only 78 million, or only one-half, of the eligible persons voted in the most negatively momentous presidential election in nearly a third of a century. Of that number who voted, only 40 million voted for the winning candidate, Ronald Reagan. The "overwhelming majority" that President Reagan repeatedly claims legitimizes his "mandate" for sweeping executive and legislative change consists, in fact, of only 14 percent of the people of"

"Synergetics: Exploration and publishing of the fourdimensional geometrical coordinate system employed by nature. (See Synergetics and Synergetics II [New York: Macmillan, 1975, 1979].) Discovered, 1927; published, 1944."

"Tensegrity: The continuous-tension/discontinuous-compression structuring principle of Universe (i.e., stars not touching planets, electrons not touching their atomic nuclei) introduced to planet Earth to replace the continuously compressioned, secondarily tensioned structuring in present world-around engineering theory. Designed, 1929; prototyped, 1929."