-Caveat Lector- Legally Piggily An excerpt from Critical Path by R. Buckminster Fuller Kiyoshi Kuromiya Adjuvant 1981 St Martin's Press 175 Fifth Ave, NY, NY 10010 in print I'M GOING TO REVIEW my prehistory's speculative assumptions regarding the origins of human power structures. In a herd of wild horses there's a king stallion. Once in a while a young stallion is born bigger than the others. Immediately upon his attaining full growth, the king stallion gives him battle. Whichever one wins inseminates the herd. Darwin saw this as the way in which nature contrives to keep the strongest strains going. This battling for herd kingship is operative amongst almost all species of animal herds as well as in the "pecking order" of flocking bird types. I'm sure that amongst the earliest of human beings, every once in a while a man was born much bigger than the others. He didn't ask to be-but there he was. And because he was bigger, people would say-each in their own esoteric language-"Mister, will you please reach one of those bananas for me, because I can't reach them." The big one obliges. Later the little people would say, "Mister, people over there have lost all of their bananas and they are dying of starvation, and they say they are going to come over here and kill us to get our bananas. You're big-you get out in front and protect us." And he would say, "OK," and successfully protect them. The big one found his bigness continually being exploited. He would say to the littles, "Between these battles protecting you, I would like to get ready for the next battle. We could make up some weapons and things." The people said, "All right. We'll make you king. Now you tell us what to do." So the big man becomes king quite logically. He could have become so in either a bullying or good-natured way, but the fact is that he was king simply because he was not only the biggest and the most physically powerful but also the most skillful and clever big one. Every once in a while along would come another big man. "Mr. King, you've got things too easy around here. I'm going to take it away from you. A big battle ensues between the two and after the king has his challenger pinned down on his back, he says, "Mister, you were trying to kill me to take away my kingdom. But I'm not going to kill you because you'd make a good fighter, and I need fighters around here to cope with the enemies who keep coming. So I'm going to let you up now if you promise to fight for me. But don't you ever forget-I can kill you. OK?" The man assents, so The King lets him up but instinctively the king says secretly to himself, "I mustn't ever allow two of those big guys to come at me together. I can lick any one of them, but only one by one." The most important initial instinct of the most powerful individual or of his organized power structure is. "Divide to conquer, and to keep conquered, keep divided". So our special-case king has now successfully defended his position against two or more big guys who are all good fighters. He makes one the "Duke of Hill A," the second "Duke of Hill B," and the third "Duke of Hill C," and tells each one to "mind your own business" because "only the king minds everybody's business," and he has his spies watch them so that they can't gang up on him. Thus, our considered king is doing very well in his tribe-defending battles. However, there are a lot of little nonfighting people who are not obeying the king regarding preparations for the next fighting period. The king says to his henchmen, "Seize that mischievous little character over there who is really being a nuisance around here." To the prisoner the king says, "I'm going to have to cut your head off.' The man says. "Mr. King, you'd make a big mistake to cut my head off." The king asks, "Why?" "Well, I'll tell you, Mr. King, I understand the language of your enemy over the hill, and you don't. And I heard him say what he is going to do to you and when he's going to do it." "Young man, you've got a good idea at last. You let me know every day what my enemy over the hill says he is going to do and so forth, and your head is going to stay on. In addition, you're going to do something else you've never done before. You're going to eat regularly right up here in the castle near me. And I'm going to have you wear a royal purple jacket (so that I can keep track of you)." The king now has that little man under control and useful. Then another little man makes trouble for the king. As he is about to be beheaded, he shows the king that he under stands metallurgy and can make better swords than anybody else. The king says. "You better make a good sword in a hurry." The man makes a beautiful, superstrong, and sharp sword-there's no question about that. So the king says, "OK, your head stays on. You, too, are to live here at the castle." Next, under the threat of beheadment, another man making trouble for the king says, "The reason I am able to steal from you is because I understand arithmetic, which you don't. If I do the arithmetic around here, people won't be able to steal from you." The king makes him court mathematician. As each of these men are given those special tasks to do for life, the king says to all of them, 'Each of you mind only your own business. You, Mr. Languageman, mind only your own business; and you, Mr. Swordmaker, mind only your own business; and you, Mr. Arithmetic, mind only your own business. Each one minds only his own business. I'm the only one that minds everyone's business. Is that perfectly clear?" "Yes sir." "Yes sir." "Yes sir." The king now has his kingdom operating very well. He has great fighters, superior metallurgy, better arithmetic and logistics, better spying and intelligence. His kingdom is growing ever bigger. Years go by, and these experts are getting old. The king says, "I want to leave this kingdom to my grandson. Mr. Languageman, I want you to pick out and teach some younger person about language. You, Mr. Swordmaker, I want you to pick out and teach somebody about metallurgy. You, Mr. Arithmetic, I want you to pick out and teach someone about arithmetic." And his total strategy became the pattern for the ultimate founding of Oxford University. The way the power structure keeps the wit and cunning of the intelligentsia-who are not musclemen, who cannot do the physical fighting-from making trouble for the power structure (if the intelligentsia are too broadly informed, unwatched, and with time of their own in which to think) is to make each one a specialist with tools and an office or lab. That is exactly why bright people today have become streamlined into specialists. Nobody is born a specialist. Every child is born with comprehensive intrests, asking the most comprehensively logical and relevant questions. Pointing to the logs burning in the fireplace, one child asked me, "What is fire?" I answered, "Fire is the Sun unwinding from the tree's log. The Earth revolves and the trees revolve as the radiation from the Sun's flame reaches the revolving planet Earth. By photosynthesis the green buds and leaves of the tree convert that Sun radiation into hydrocarbon molecules, which form into the bio-cells of the green, outer, cambium layer of the tree. The tree is a tetrahedron that makes a cone as it revolves. The tree's three tetrahedral roots spread out into the ground to anchor the tree and get water. Each year the new, outer-layer, green-tree cone revolves 365 turns, and every year the tree grows its new tender-green, bio-cell cone layer just under the bark and over the accumulating cones of previous years. Each ring of the many rings of the saw-cut log is one year's Sun-energy impoundment. So the fire is the many-years-of-Sun-flame-winding now unwinding from the tree. When the log fire pop-sparks, it is letting go a very sunny day long ago, and doing so in a hurry." Conventionally educated grown-ups rarely know how to answer such questions. They're all too specialized. If nature wanted humans to be specialists, she would, for instance, have given them a microscope on one eye, which is what nature has done with all other living organisms-other than humans. Each has special, organically integral equipment with which to cope successfully with special conditions in special environments. The low-slung hound to follow the Earth-top scent of another creature through the thickets and woods ... the little vine that can grow only along certain stretches of the Amazon River... the bird with beautiful wings with which to fly, which bird however, when landed and in need of walking, is greatly hampered by its integral but now useless wings. Humans are not unique in possessing brains that always and only are coordinating and storing for later retrieval the integrated information coming in from each and all the creature's senses-visual, aural, tactile, and olfactory. Humans are unique in respect to all other creatures in that they also have minds that can discover constantly varying interrelationships existing only between a number of special case experiences as individually apprehended by their brains, which covarying interrelationship rates can only be expressed mathematically. For example, human minds discovered the law of relative interattractiveness of celestial bodies, whose initial intensity is the product of the masses of any two such celestial bodies, while the force of whose interattractiveness varies inversely as the second power of the arithmetical interdistancing increases. The human mind of Bernoulli discovered the mathematical expression of the laws of intercovarying pressure differentials in gases under varying conditions of shape and velocity of gas flow around and by interfering bodies. The Wright brothers' wing foils provided human flight, but not the information controlling the mathematics of varying wing foil conformations. Bernoulli's work made possible the mathematical improvement in speed and energy efficiency of various wing designs. Human mind's access to the mathematics of generalized scientific laws governing physical phenomena in general made possible humanity's production of its own detached-from-self wings to outfly all birds in speed and altitude, while being able to loan one another those wings and modify them to produce even better wings. I'm sure our human forebears went through quite a period of giants and giant-affairs evolution. These probably led to all sorts of truth-founded legends from which fairy stories were developed, many of which are probably quite close to the facts of unwritten history. Then humans developed to the point at which a small man made a weapon, a stone-slinger, such as in the story of David and Goliath, with which the little man slays the big man by virtue of a muscle-impelled missile. At the U.S. Naval Academy "ballistics" is defined as: the art and science of controlling the trajectory of an explosively hurled missile. After the sling and spear we got the bow and arrow with which a small man could kill a big man at much greater distance than with spear or sling. So skill and human-muscle-impelled weapons ended the era of giants. Discovery of energetic principles, and human inventiveness in using those principles, such as the invention of catapults and mechanically contracted, steel-spring-coil arrow impelment, advanced the art of weapons. The human power structures that could best organize and marshal the complex of interessential "best" weapons and support an army of best-trained people with each of the special types of weapons were the ones who now won the battles and ran the big human "show." The discovery of gunpowder by the Chinese and the invention of guns introduced the era of ballistics, or as the Navy terms it, "explosively hurled missiles." Going back to the stone-sling, bow-and-arrow, spear, club, and knife era of weapons, we find that territorial battles between American Indian nations were fought over the local hunting and fishing rights, but the land itself al- ways belonged to the Great Spirit. To the Indians it was obvious that hu- mans could not own the land. There was never any idea that the people could own land-owning was an eternal, omniscient omnipotence unique to the greatness, universality, and integrity of the forever-to-humans-mysterious Great Spirit. Until a special human-produced change in the evolution of power structures occurred, the ownership of anything being unique to the Great Spirit in whatever way that might be designated by local humans was held by all people around our planet. In 1851 Seattle, chief of the Suquamish and other Indian tribes around Washington's Puget Sound, delivered what is considered to be one of the most beautiful and profound environmental statements ever made. The city of Seattle is named for the chief, whose speech was in response to a proposed treaty under which the Indians were persuaded to sell two million acres of land for $150,000. How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man. The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man-all belong to the same family. So, when the Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land, he asks much of us. The Great Chief sends word he will reserve us a place so that we can live comfortably to ourselves. He will be our father and we will be his children. So we will consider your offer to buy our land. But it will not be easy. For this land is sacred to us. This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother. We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father's grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care. His father's grave, and his children's birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert. I do not know. Our ways are different from your ways. The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the red man. There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring or the rustle of the insect's wings. The clatter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if a man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs around the pond at night? I am a red man and do not understand. The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of a pond and the smell of the wind itself, cleansed by a midday rain, or scented with piffon pine. The air is precious to the red man for all things share the same breath, the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days he is numb to the stench. But if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred as a place where even the white man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow's flowers. You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children that we have taught our children that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. This we know: the earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. All things are connected. We may be brothers after all. We shall see. One thing we know which the white man may one day discover: our God is the same God. You may think now that you own Him as you wish to own our land; but you cannot. He is the God of man, and His compassion is equal for the red man and the white. This earth is precious to Him, and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator. The whites too shall pass; perhaps sooncr than all other tribes. Contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste. But in your perishing you will shine brightly fired by the strength of the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man. That destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tame, the secret corners of the forest heavy with scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires. Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone. The end of living and the beginning of survival." * * * In my prehistory accounting I talk about the time when each ice age is engaging an enormous amount of the oceans' water, lowering the waterfront and bringing together the islands of Borneo, the Philippines, and others, all to become part of the Malay Peninsula. I also spoke of the ice cap pushing the furry animals southward until they were suddenly pushed into the land of the previous islands now formed into the new p~ninsula-into land they could never before reach. This is how animals like tigers got out to now reislanded places like Bali. Human beings suddenly confronted with these wild animals learned how to cope, hunting some and taming others. In following the evolution of human power structures we are now particularly in terested in the humans who found themselves confronted with a tidal wave of wild animals. Those who were overwhelmed became aggressive hunters, and those who were not overwhelmed became peaceful domesticators of the animals. Some of the most aggressive men mounted horses, moved faster than all others, and went out to seek the beasts. *Chief Seattle's speech was submitted by Dr. Glenn T. Olds at Alaska's Future Frontiers conference in 1979 DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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