Tuesday, January 11, 2011

GRUNCH of Giants

I wanted to share with you some words from Buckminster Fuller which I feel are extremely pertinent to today's world financial crisis. The words are from the book Grunch of Giants by Buckminster Fuller. The book is a 'sequel' to Bucky's Critical Path. The title of the book includes the word GRUNCH which is Fuller's acronym for:
GRoss Universal Cash Heist
Written in the 1980's in allegorical form, this serious satire about the rise of multi-national corporations, capitalistic selfishness and the technological revolution emphasizes that our present economic system, and the theories on which it is based are no longer useful because of its false assumption of scarcity.

Following is the quote from the book,

Buckminster Fuller on economic turmoil and social revolution

grunch

An excerpt from Grunch of Giants by R. Buckminster Fuller:
Greater justice and economic improvement for the many is not always the result of social revolution. The Europeans' guns overwhelming of the American Indian bow-and-arrow weapons was in most ways a retrogressive social revolution implemented by design-science revolution. It is always the design revolution that tips the social scales one way or the other. However, sum totally the combined design and social revolutions ultimately favor the many. Between 1900 and today, 60 percent of humans in the U.S.A. have attained a standard of living far in advance of those of the greatest potentates of 1900 while concurrently doubling the life-span of that fortunate 60 percent.

Never before in all history have the inequities and the momentums of unthinking money-power been more glaringly evident to so vastly large a number of now literate, competent, and constructively thinking all-around-the-world humans. There's a soon-to-occur critical-mass moment when the intuition of the responsibly inspired majority of humanity, in contradistinction to the angered Luddites and avenging Robin Hoods, faced with comprehensive functional discontinuity of nationally contained techno-economic system, will call for and accomplish a world-around reorientation of our planetary affairs. At this critical moment will occur a realization by the responsibly inspired majority that the adequate capacity of the invisible technology to sustainingly support all humanity depends on all the resources, physical and metaphysical, being always and only employed for all of world-around humanity as a completely integrated techno-economic system operating entirely on its daily income principally of Sun-emanating energy.

You can read Grunch of Giants on the www.bfi.org website or purchase it from the Buckminster Fuller Institute online store.

4 comments:

Roan Carratu said...

We in the Zeitgeist Movement salute you! Buckminster Fuller is a 'grandfather' of our movement just as Jacque Fresco is, and revered by many of us as a gifted 'prophet'... (not talking myth here)

This describes the Zeitgeist Movement to a 'T'... "At this critical moment will occur a realization by the responsibly inspired majority that the adequate capacity of the invisible technology to sustainingly support all humanity depends on all the resources, physical and metaphysical, being always and only employed for all of world-around humanity as a completely integrated techno-economic system operating entirely on its daily income principally of Sun-emanating energy."

Brave New Dawn said...

> This describes the Zeitgeist
> Movement to a 'T'...

You mean this..

> angered Luddites and avenging
> Robin Hoods


I still think we are some distance from this, which I assume you mean/meant to be:

> responsibly inspired majority
> of humanity


I do see a slow march towards this, but at the moment I see more of the former and not enough of the latter. (You yourself are one of the shining lights, but the view is so dim, we need more to shine so we can see our way more clearly.)


> At this critical moment will
> occur a realization by the
> responsibly inspired majority

I think refers not to everyone at the top letting those at the bottom have their share, but rather the majority at the bottom to realise that together they can build something better, if only they would pool their resources and physically work at it!

Eg. it does not mean, shout loud enough and someone else will do all the work for you..

Karmatetra said...

Wouldn't it be wonderful to see the Design Science Revolution come to fruition?

"There is now plenty for all. War is obsolete. It is imperative that we get the word to all humanity — RUSH — before someone ignorantly pushes the button that provokes pushing of all the buttons." R. Buckminster Fuller, Grunch of Giants (1983)

Brave New Dawn said...

All it takes is for us to cooperate and start building today.

Now, who has a shovel for these foundation ditches ;-)