Money, Energy & Spaceship Earth

“Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.” ~ Bucky Fuller

Let’s go Cosmic Fishing… One of the things I liked best about Buckminster Fuller, aka Bucky, was his ability to entertain multiple Reality Tunnels, and then move on. This ability to look at the world through various lenses, appears to me as circumnavigating getting stuck in the rut of binary thinking, but to continuously seek to see a third alternative, while many people were distracted by arguing over this or that.

Before I dive into the topics of Money, Energy and Spaceship Earth, I want to discuss why Bucky is so much on my mind.

Bucky keeps reminding me to “Don’t fight forces, use them.” because I put that quote up as the background on my laptop. Swimming in Bucky quotes helps me find my happy place, kind of like the penguin scene in Fight Club, I find my mind relaxes, and my thoughts in words, when the come, slide into appearance, and when I write after immersing myself in Bucky quotes, I find I am doing what Bucky liked to call Cosmic Fishing.

“Call intuition cosmic fishing. You feel a nibble, then you've got to hook the fish.” ~ Buckminster Fuller

Some people call Cosmic Fishing mental masturbation, and I am sure they are right, because I do so enjoy it, either with myself, or with playmates, which I guess would then be called mutual mental masturbation, but calling it Cosmic Fishing feels better to me, while I enjoy the braingasms, when my mind suddenly sees connections or distinctions I hadn’t envisioned before. Jokes often give us a similar braingasm, when we suddenly re-frame one reality for another, in a snap.

Most of the time, when we are busy, we’re looking for something specific, or to do the next thing, which can be a vital part of being productive and effective. However, many times, when we go out looking of one specific thing, we don’t find what we’re looking for, because of all the things there are on Spaceship Earth, the odds of finding that exact thing can be trifling small. However, if you go out looking for anything at all, the odds of finding something is quite good, because of all the things there are on Earth, the odds of finding something are quite good, and that’s called Cosmic Fishing.

What some people call Nature or Mother Earth, Bucky liked to call Spaceship Earth, to remind us of what we physically are, passengers on a spaceship called Earth, hurling around our sun at approximately 86,000 mph. Aboard this spaceship, money has become our primary operating system.

Money…

"Real wealth is ideas plus energy." ~ Bucky Fuller

When somebody quotes Bucky to me as saying, “You can either make money or make sense.” I often quote back Bucky as saying, “Don’t expect me to be consistent, I’m evolving.” In the book Cosmic Fishing, Bucky and Applewhite dialogue about how Appelgate could state that Bucky was reckless or irresponsible with money, because Applewhite was critical of Bucky’s practice of draining all his bank accounts at the end of every month. Bucky was a master fundraiser, he had the gift of gab, and was mesmerizing, which was made altogether more astonishing because he held people’s attention with strings of polysyllabic words, which often left people saying something to the extent of, “I have no idea what he said, but it was amazing and important!”

Bucky had money challenges, which contributed to his depression. Bucky had gotten his father-in-law to invest money in a brick company that utilized interlocking bricks, an invention of his which facilitated buildings to be stronger, and built faster. Bucky saw a far superior brick, which should be used to replace the use of traditional bricks everywhere, but what he didn’t see, is that the bricklayers wouldn’t lay this brick because the invention stole jobs from bricklayers. So his company went bankrupt, and I can understand how he felt like saying that you can either make money or make sense.

By the time Applewhite wrote Cosmic Fishing, the story of the two of them collaborating on the book Synergetics, considered by many to be Fuller's master achievement in literature, Bucky had residual streams of income, but his practice of draining his bank accounts every month, with the faith that he’d find more money or resources, came when he was rebounding from a suicidal depression, when he was personally broke, again, and he rode his new strategy of working with money, where you spend everything you have on hand, into a winning wave he rode all the way through to his and his wife’s deaths.

Bucky asked a lot of people, and organizations, for money, or other kinds of resources, and got very good at fundraising for his projects and labs. Bucky’s flow with money was a different configuration, a different relationship, from Applewhite's save-for-retirement money practice. Applewhite’s criticism appears to have really stuck in Bucky’s craw, because in many of the videos of Bucky after the publication of Cosmic Fishing, he often makes a point about how he sees himself as having been very responsible with other people’s money. What Bucky grew to realize, was that when he had projects that did enough good for enough populations, that he could manifest money.

Bucky’s choice to flow the money he took in each month was part of his experiment with the Universe, where he sought to remake himself as a servant of Mankind. We all talk about cash flow, and Bucky saw the way he spent his money as embodying a scientific endeavor, himself, a digital structure made real in the artifacts of his purchases, financial trimtabs that would redirect the financial ships sailing our cash flow. Bucky was a Naval Captain, and often employed nautical metaphors, like trimtab, which means the rudder on the rudder of , massive ships, like the Queen Mary, or barges so big they hold two ships which are so big that they ship other ships. Bucky saw how a small piece of wood redirects a massive ship, and he imagined a small man like him could redirect the world’s economic currents, by refocusing our priorities, to family values, where the human family included 100% of Humanity.

Money & Energy…

"Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value. But if we got onto a planning planning basis, the government could trap pollutants in the stacks and spillages and get back more money than this would cost out of the stockpiled chemistries they'd be collecting." ~ Bucky Fuller

Money flows, and it was called ‘currency’ long before we used that word to represent the flow of electricity. The currency of money powers a business in a very similar way to how the currency of electricity powers a radio, in either case, if the currency stops, everything stops working.

Money flows through me with every purchase I make, and the goods and services I want come to me. I am directing bits of currency to flow as I vote with my dollars for what I want most. Then, in the process of becoming somebody else’s currency, governments and other litigious entities take their entitlements. It is a complex tapestry, and Money is the thread that holds industry and community together, and what is often meant when we hear the phrase, The Economy.

The Economy, however, is not the only currency. In art, we speak of Social Currency, something other than money, which describes the agency, charisma or persuasiveness of a person, or group. This power of influence might be described as brand equity, respect, or leadership in other contexts. However, there is a bigger Energy impact on humans than money or other forms of social influence, and that’s Nature, the human life support system on Spaceship Earth.

Energy is never cheated, and cheating can divert energy and money agreed upon to go for the public good. While people and businesses may cheat on their taxes, what we pay in money, Nature never cheats, and always gives us the energy we deserve. It appears to me that the trick facing humanity today, is to agree on the dashboard by which we steer the operating system of our spaceship. To do this, we need to transcend what in the 1950's was defined as healthy self-interest, where self-interest meant personal, or familial, self-interest, to seeing Humanity as a vested self-interest.

In academia, the study of cheating is criminology. As long as criminology has been a field of study, it has always been haunted by the theory of "the competent criminal." For obvious reasons, criminologists, psychologists, and sociologists only study failed criminals–that is, those persons whose criminal acts led to their conviction and to punishment. If there’s a group of people out there who commit crimes and are not caught, and live happily ever after, then criminology is not a study of criminals, but of incompetents, bumblers, and fuckups and should instead be called fuckupology.

The challenge is that we can't cheat our way to better health. We can invent profitable solutions, and create pathways for sustainability, within The Economy in which we are now embedded, an invented mathematics that has brought wondrous human achievements, but a human invention, nonetheless. The systems of Nature will be here with or without humans. 

Money, Energy & Spaceship Earth…

"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?" ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

The Economy appears to me as the story propagated by The Ruling Elite, and perpetuates a narrative that takes itself very seriously, and as well it should, because The Ruling Elite control what’s being built and destroyed on Spaceship Earth, to remind us of what we physically are, passengers on a spaceship. In this metaphor of a spaceship, money has become our operating manual.

When we look at our planet as a spaceship, we can begin to see world data as the dashboard of our life support system on Spaceship Earth. However, we’re so new to seeing ourselves as on a spaceship, with a limited amount of renewable resources, which when contaminated, take generations or ions to detoxify.

Switching to look through the lens of theatre, Cash Flow often appears to me as strings of Energy. Money directs the flow of human energy, and in this way, our human population appears to me as marionettes, with Earth as our stage, where money, religion and enculturation are pulling our strings, as interconnected puppet masters, but where Money often has the strongest pull. Bucky wrote about the pull by these forces as the Grunch of The Giants, and Humanity being blind to these forces he described as The Dark Ages.

Until we can more honestly teach ourselves about our own drivers, and the dashboard of our spaceship, we will be living in the dark.

I go to Bucky's words when I want to feel happy because his ideas give me hope and practical paths for being more effective, and in better flow with my fellow passengers aboard Spaceship Earth.

Bucky's words appear to me as rallying for us to study Livingry, what some might call sustainable successology, the process of learning to live with increased personal integrity, and enhanced global harmony with Nature. His parting question to Humanity was...

"How do we make the world work for 100% of Humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without economic, or ecological, disadvantage to anyone?" ~ Bucky Fuller