Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution – Page 6

2009/06/272009/12/04

Review: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

6 Star Top 10%, Atlases & State of the World, Change & Innovation, Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Crime (Government), Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Future, Games, Models, & Simulations, Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Philosophy, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Not What I Expected But Hugely Satisfying,

June 27, 2009

R. Buckminster Fuller

I was actually expecting an Operating Manual. Although what I ended up with is a 136-page double-spaced “overview” by Buckminster Fuller, a sort of “history and future of the Earth in 5,000 words or less, bracketed by a *wonderful* introduction by grandchild Jamie Snyder, an index, a two-page resource guides, and some photos and illustrations including the Fuller Projections of the Earth.

First, the “core quote” that I can never seem to find when I need it:

OUR MISSION IS “To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.” Inside front cover.

The introduction is a treat–I note “impressive” and appreciate the many insights that could only come from a grandchild of and lifelong apprentice to Buckminster Fuller.

Highlights for me:

Founder of Design Science, a company by that name is now led by Medard Gabel who served as his #2 for so long. I just attended one of their summer laboratories and was blown away by the creativity and insights. It is a life-changing experience for those with a passion for Earth.

He imagined an inventory of global data. I am just now coming into contact with all of this great man's ideas, but my third book, Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time, also online at the Strategic Studies Institute in very short monograph form, is totally in harmony with this man's vision for a global inventory of global data.

“Sovereignness” was for him a ridiculous idea, and a much later work out of Cambridge agrees, Philip Allot tells us the Treaty of Westphalia was a huge wrong turn in his book The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State.

“Great Pirates” that mastered the oceans as the means of linking far-flung lands with diversity of offerings was the beginning of global commerce and also the beginning of the separation between globalists who knew the whole, and specialists whom Buckminster Fuller scathingly describes as an advanced form of slave.

He was frustrated with the phrases “sunrise” and sunset” as they are inaccurate, and finally settled for “sunsight” and “suneclipse” to more properly describe the fact that it is the Earth that is moving around the sun, not the other way around.

In 1927 he concluded that it is possible for forecast with some accuracy 25 years in advance, and I find this remarkably consist with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's view that it takes 25 years to move the beast–see for instance Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy.

He has an excellent discussion of the failure of politics and the ignorance of kings and courtiers, noting that our core problem is that everyone over-estimates the cost of doing good and under-estimates the cost of doing bad, i.e. we will fund war but not peace.

He described how World War I killed off the Great Pirates and introduces a competition among scientists empowered by war, politicians, and religions. He says the Great Pirates, accustomed to the physical challenges, could not comprehend the electromagnetic spectrum.

He states that man's challenge is to comprehend the metaphysical whole, and much of the book is focused on the fact, in his view, that computers are the salvation of mankind in that they can take over all the automaton work, and free man to think, experiment, and innovate. He is particularly forceful in his view that unemployed people should be given academic scholarships, not have to worry about food or shelter, and unleash their innovation. I am reminded of Barry Carter's Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era as well as Thomas Stewart's The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization.

There is a fascinating discussion of two disconnected scholars, one studying the extinction of human groups, the other the extinction of animal species, and when someone brings them together, they discover that precisely the same cause applied to both: over-specialization and a loss of diversity.

Synergy is the uniqueness of the whole, unpredictable from the sum of the parts or any part individually.

On page 87 he forecasts in 1969 when this book was first published, both the Bush and the Obama Administration's ease in finding trillions for war and the economic crisis, while refusing to recognize that we must address the needs of the “have nots” or be in eternal war. I quote:

“The adequately macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive solutions to any and all problems never cost too much.”

I agree. I drove to Des Moines and got a memo under Obama's hotel door recommending that he open up to all those not represented by the two party crime family, and also providing him with the strategic analytic model developed by the Earth Intelligence Network. Obviously he did not attend, and today he is a pale reflection of Bush. See the images I have loaded, and Obama: The Postmodern Coup – Making of a Manchurian Candidate.

Early on he identified “information pollution” as co-equal to physical pollution, I am totally taken with this phrase (see my own illustration of “data pathologies” in the image above). I recognize that Buckminster Fuller was about feedback loops and the integrity of all the feedback loops, and this is one explanation for why US Presidents fail: they live in “closed circles” and are more or less “captive” and held hostage by their party and their advisor who fear and block all iconoclasts less they lose their parking spot at the White House.

Most interestingly, and consistent with the book I just read the other day, Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change (The Changing Face of War), he concludes that wars recycle industry and reinvigorate science, and concludes that every 25 years is about right for a “scorched earth” recycling of forces.

He observes that we must preserve our fossil fuels as the “battery” of our Spaceship Earth, and focus on creating our true “engine,” regenerative renewable life and energy.

He joins with Will Durant in Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers: education is our most formidable task.

I am astonished to have him explain why the Pacific coast of the US is so avant guarde and innovative (as well as loony). He states that the US has been a melting pot for centuries, and that the West Coast is where two completely different cultural and racial patterns integrated, one from Africa and the east, the other from the Pacific and the west.

I learn that he owned 54 cars in his lifetime, and kept leaving them at airports and forgetting when and where. He migrated to renting, and concluded that “possession” is burdensome.

2009/06/042009/12/04

Review: Anthropological Intelligence–The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Intersection of Humanity, Intelligence (Spy Type), and Ethics, June 4, 2009

David H.Price (ed)

I stumbled across this at a time when I was trying to understand the problems associated with the Human Terrain Teams (HTT) that according to their sponsor (a training and doctrine command without real-world ties),

[Human Terrain System] HTS is a new proof-of-concept program, run by the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), and serving the joint community. The near-term focus of the HTS program is to improve the military's ability to understand the highly complex local socio-cultural environment in the areas where they are deployed; however, in the long-term, HTS hopes to assist the US government in understanding foreign countries and regions prior to an engagement within that region.

There are many flaws in the above official statement, not least of which that there is nothing new in this idea, and–as the book I am reviewing puts forward so well–the ethics of the method merits–demands–thoughtful discussion.

This book–and the modern anthropologists who are acutely–and righteously–aggrieved by the mis-direction of their craft–are a blessing. The USA in particular is so far removed from ground truth realities that as one World Bank executive put it to me (describing CIA analysts seeking explanations of an African failed state) as to be “breathtaking in their ignorance.” We *need* deep and broad anthropological understanding, but we must not pervert that craft in the process of engaging it.

I appreciated this book very much. We need more like it, addressing each of the social and scientific disciplines and the manner in which they might serve (or mis-serve) the public interest.

Here are some of my notes from this excellent work:

1. Professionally developed, a useful glossary.

2. Seeks to reconcile humanism with patriotism, the latter to be subordinated (in blunt terms, this means that rendition and torture are never okay, even when Presidents and General lie to you and say it is necessary).

3. The book provides an excellent tour of the past in which anthropologists and their craft have been used not to understand, but to manipulate and deceive.

4. I acquired an insight: we have failed to lead the social sciences toward educating our publics and our leaders so as to adapt to the globalized world. We persist in treating academia as a means to get what we want, regardless of whether or not it is righteous.

5. One learns in this book that the Japanese in the 1930's and the 1940's fully explored Islamic alliances against the West.

6. On multiple fronts across varied contributors the book suggests that we have made a mistake in subordinating education to nationalistic versions of history and nationalistic version of rights, and we have failed to raise generations of *humans* [and I can more or less self-certify we have also failed to raise generations of educated engaged citizens].

7. I come away from the book with a very strong feeling of respect for anthropologists–properly led and listened to–as the first line of expertise on all foreign affairs. [I wonder in passing how many anthropologists are serving in the Department of State today, or if the Secretary of State has ever asked for an anthropological study–and I do not mean the simple guides to local customs.]

8. As the Department of Defense declares that “stabilization & reconstruction” are co-equal to waging war (my own General Al Gray, then Commandant of the Marine Corps, called in 1988 for open source intelligence to justify peaceful preventive measures) it is not only clear that the social sciences must be applied to assure the development of healthy human relationships at all levels, but that anthropologists must be marshaled in the most constructive way possible–as many of them as possible, as soon as possible, and NOT wearing uniforms, body armor, and sunglasses.

9. I am persuaded by the book that British anthropologists are more nuanced and sophisticated than Americans (and probably spend more time in their countries of study, are more fluent in the language, and more patient in the observation).

10. As I seek to summarize what anthropology does I come up with two phrases: a) at its best, and b) the theory and practice of intra-cultural and inter-cultural exchanges, both positive and negative.

11. I put the book down realizing that there are millions and millions of displaced peoples that we have failed to study, assist, and resettle, and that in the end, this is anthropologies greatest failure.

Other notes from the margins:

a. “Justifiably disgruntled” domestic minorities are not being heard

b. Cultural cohesion is an antidote to propaganda

c. Rockefeller pioneered the use of anthropology to catalog Latin American resources, including cheap foreign labor, and then started foundations to carry on the work in the guise of charitable efforts.

d. Quotes to ponder: “our memory gaps have political consequences” and “socially-disengaged science is blind science”

e. Social formations are as important as scientific formations.

f. Anthropology will love have to live down its service to colonialism, militarism, and predatory immoral capitalism (as opposed to moral capitalism that does well by doing good)

g. Eugenics is anthropology in the devil's hands.

Sensational quote on the effects of secrecy on academic study:

“One of the side effects of secret programs like the M Project was that, as secrecy disengaged the normative, potentially self-correcting features of the open academic scientific process, members of research groups who became mired in fallacious thinking labored unchecked under increasingly questionable assumptions and flawed logic.” Page 141

We come full circle to the Army's Human Terrain Teams of today.

Other books I recommend:
Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking Out on War, Peace, and American Power
Strategic Intelligence & Statecraft: Selected Essays (Brassey's Intelligence and National Security Library)
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Statecraft as Soulcraft
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
The Rise of Global Civil Society: Building Communities and Nations from the Bottom Up
A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them

2009/05/302009/12/04

Review: Global Values 101–A Short Course

5 Star, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Deep Insights into Values as the Core of Being Human, May 30, 2009

Kate Holbrook et al

This is the book that forced me to realize I was a radical, not a moderate. As Howard Zinn defines it, a radical is someone of any political persuasion who realizes that government is the problem, not the solution. I've always been a small government fiscal conservative with socially liberal tendencies, but as I watch Obama emulate Bush, I realize that it does not matter who is President–the existing two-party crime system and the existing bureaucracy married to entrenched special interests have no interest at all in “the public interest.”

The best thing I can say about this book is that it forced me to think, it gave me several “aha” experiences, and it gave me hope at the same time that if affirmed the roots of my anger at how badly we are governed….because we have failed to self-govern and abdicated to those who would profit from the public rather than help the public profit.

Among my many flyleaf notes:

1) Voices not heard; need to reinvent the wheel of stakeholders

2) 40 million at the bottom in the USA–make it possible for them to vote without losing work time and the pendulum with swing.

3) Education of the young must begin now. We must break the paradigm of rote education (indoctrination) in which we beat the creativity out of our kids by the fourth grade.

4) RETURN women to the executive ranks with appreciation for their skills and mindsets (among which I count smaller egos and more insight)

5) CREATE the online national ballot and use it whether or not the two criminal parties now dominated by their extremists accept it or not. It will achieve a public momentum of its own.

6) CONSIDER a tax revolt (this was written long before tea parties today, and I am still waiting for Grover Norquist to actually ask for a tax revolt, but we are getting there).

7) DEMAND line item votes by the public, at the DISTRICT level.

8) Robert Reich calls for a return to grass roots democracy, I think of a Sunshine Cabinet and Jim Rough's Citizen Wisdom Councils.

9) Juliet Schor of the Center for the New American Dream is especially inspiring, focusing on quality of life that is full of connections (leaps in connectivity are what power leaps in civizilational advances).

10) Consumer culture reduces health of society and the mental health of individuals.

11) Need to restore local manufacturing bases and regional approaches [to the twelve core polices that we define at Earth Intelligence Network.]

12) CAMPAIGN for bringing your money home, NOT spending $1 trillion a year to wage war “over there” and “in our name”

13) Focus on making government corruption and corporate crime NOT pay.

14) Lani Guinier for Attorney General!

15) Create Artists Network [for each of the twelve policy domains]. This book finally persuaded me that art is an absolutely essential part of cultural communications of substance.

16) Follow the money, illuminate the money. [I believe we need to get to “true costs” being available at any cell phone by looking at the bar code.]

17) Prisons down, schools up. [There is growing demand for the legalization of marijuana, and I personally believe all those serving sentences on marijuana should have their terms commuted).

18) Need a Minister for Families and Gender. Swanee Hunt is memorable; I see the need to mandate the presence of women in all negotiations and strategic forums. The men are not doing well.

19) Martha Minow on truth and reconciliation grabs me. I have notes on contrition and forgiveness training, on transcending boundaries.

20) Jennifer Leaning for Surgeon General.

21) Paul Farmer is gripping as well, 21st Century is a whole new ballgame, our children will shape the future, we are the last of the destroyers.

22) Peter Singer is great on ethics. Amy Goodman inspires (as do all the authors, these are the ones that made it into my notes), Democracy Now. I have a note; we need a Truth News Network (TNN). I actually offered that idea to Ted Turner years ago, never head back. CNN is no where near reality or coherence, nor are any of the other networks.

I have a lot of other notes to myself; I will end with some other book recommendations that accentuate the positive, and the observation that this book is fundamental to our future. We all need to absorb the wisdom of the authors that came together under the four editors.

2009/01/082012/10/27

2008 World Brain as EarthGame

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