A 'Critical Path' primer

From the great Anxiety Culture webzine:

Buckminster Fuller's acclaimed book, Critical Path, hasn't reached the mass audience it deserves, possibly because people see it as "difficult". With the following excerpts, we hope to show Fuller's easy-to-follow ideas – the subversive (socially and economically) utopian ideas, scathing of politicians, bureaucrats and power elites, but realistic and essential.

[On money, work & idleness]

Those who make money with money deliberately keep it scarce. Money is not wealth. Wealth is the accomplished technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growful needs of life. […]

[Fuller shows how money was adopted as a convenient way to exchange "real wealth", leading eventually to the erroneous (and destructive) equating of money with wealth.]

History's political and economic power structures have always fearfully abhorred "idle people" as potential troublemakers. Yet nature never abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails, coral reefs, and clouds in the sky. […]

In 1953 my friend the late Walter Reuther, then president of the United Auto Workers, was about to meet with the board of directors of General Motors. [...] Walter had all his fine-tuning machinists put the following problem into their computers: "In view of the fact that most of General Motors' workers are also its customers, if I demand of General Motors that they grant an unheard-of wage advance plus unprecedented vacation, health, and all conceivable lifetime benefits for all of its workers, amounting sum-totally to so many dollars, which way will General Motors make the most money: by granting or refusing?" All the computers said, "General Motors will make the most profit by granting."

Thus fortified, Walter Reuther made his unprecedented demands on General Motors' directors, who were elected to their position of authority only by the stockholders and who were naturally concerned only with the welfare of those stockholders. Reuther said to the assembled General Motors board of directors: "You are going to grant these demands, not because you now favor labor (which, in fact, you consider to be your enemy), but because by so granting, General Motors will make vastly greater profits. If you will put the problem into your new computers, you will learn that I am right."

The directors said, "Hah-hah! You obviously have used the wrong computers or have misstated the problem to the computers." Soon, however, all their own computers told the directors that Walter was right. They granted his demands. Within three years General Motors was the first corporation in history to net a billion-dollar profit […]

[Fuller applies the idea of a computer – fed with all the relevant data – to other issues…]

The computer will show that 70 percent of all jobs in America and probably an equivalently high percentage of the jobs in other Western private-enterprise countries are preoccupied with work that is not producing any wealth or life support – inspectors of inspectors, reunderwriters of insurance reinsurers, Obnoxico* promoters, spies and counterspies, military personnel, gunmakers, etc. […]

We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their 1980 jobs in their cars or buses, spending trillions of dollars' worth of petroleum daily** to get to their no-wealth-producing jobs. It doesn't take a computer to tell you that it will save both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home.

[* "Obnoxico" was Fuller's invented name for enterprises which make money out of thin air with little or no benefit to humankind. ** Fuller estimates the value of the "petroleum used daily" at "trillions of dollars" based on research by oil geologist Francois de Chardenedes which quantifies the cost to nature of producing petroleum (eg in terms of energy employed as heat and pressure).]

One would hope the at-home-staying humans will start thinking – "What was it I was thinking about when they told me I had to 'earn my living' – doing what someone else had decided needed to be done? What do I see that needs to be done that nobody else is attending to? What do I need to learn to be effective in attending to it in a highly efficient and inoffensive-to-others manner?"

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