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Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

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Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
AuthorBuckminster Fuller
Publication date
1969
Media typePrint

Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth is a short book by R. Buckminster Fuller, first published in 1969, following an address with a similar title given to the 50th annual convention of the American Planners Association in the Shoreham Hotel, Washington D.C., on 16 October 1967.[1]

The book relates Earth to a spaceship flying through space. Noting the lack of any user manual to help Earthians steward this ship, Fuller offers some reflections, prognostications, and guidance, based on contemporary concepts of linked relationships, that may help in the understanding, management, preservation, and sustainment of this ship. The spaceship has a finite amount of resources and cannot be resupplied.

Chapters

  • Comprehensive propensities
  • Origins of specialization
  • Comprehensively commanded automation
  • Spaceship Earth
  • General systems theory
  • Synergy
  • Integral functions
  • The regenerative landscape

Main themes

History

Fuller describes two epochs within modern and contemporary history.

The first epoch was one run by Great Pirates or "great outlaws." The source of their power is that they are the only masters of global information in a time where people are focused locally. They were aware that resources are not evenly distributed around the world, so that items which are abundant in one area are scarce in another. This gives rise to trade which the Great Pirates exploit for their own advantage. They established sea-trade routes to connect previously-isolated populations throughout the globe. As these people took to the sea they left the local, regional laws of their original communities and entered a transitional space where they invented their own laws based their interests in retaining special access to the Earth's dispersed resources and to gaining power through trade. The Great Pirates had a special ability to comprehend and activate a wide range of skills and knowledges required to generalize, translate, navigate, and integrate existing systems.

Fuller posits that these Great Pirates established governments in various areas and supported leaders who will defend their trade routes. By providing the leaders with special access to global resources, the Great Pirates controlled regional politicians, military, and leaders; these puppets leaders served the role of facilitating the Great Pirates' work, and in exchange for providing the Great Pirates with special privileges the Great Pirates would reward them with a cut of their profits. This historical era found a vast increase in the circulation and advancements of tools, goods, and services.

Power struggles for waterways ensue, requiring people such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo to design better defenses for the Great Pirates. As engineers become involved with the Great Pirates many new concepts appear, but the main one was of the Navy. As the size of the people in the Great Pirates' employment grow, training becomes a necessity, and the beginnings of schools and colleges ensue. Monarchs are encouraged to develop civil service systems to provide secure but specialized employment for their brightest subjects, which prevents them from competing with the Great Pirates in their lucrative global trading. Thus the Great Pirates guarded the advantages that their unique global perspective revealed.

This previous epoch set in place the current system of political organization rooted in the concept of sovereign nations which control the planet's natural resources and distribution networks. Fuller describes as an outdated and illogical structure. This structure is based on colonization, imposing servility on anyone born outside of the borders of the privileged nations, and installing "identity classification" based on race, birth-nation, and citizenship as a status quo, and encouraging competitive ideologies based on politics, science, and religion.

Fuller describes that these separate sovereign nations with their competitive identities led to World War I and continued through World War II. World War I emerged out of the struggle between the 'out-pirates' (electronic and chemical warfare) and the 'in-pirates' (electromagnetics). This change from the visible to the invisible forced the Great Pirates to rely on experts, which causes the end of the Great Pirates (who previously had been the only ones that were truly multi-disciplined). The public is unaware that Great Pirates had been ruling the earth, and the role falls back to kings and politicians, though the frameworks of trade, rating and accounting remain. Fuller declares that the Great Pirates society became extinct as a result of advances in industrial production and technology. Yet the systems that they had created were not altered. National leaders assumed the role of the Great Pirates, without having the necessary skills and experiences of a generalized world view. By default they reinforced the outdated systems of sovereignty.

In the current era, Fuller predicts that "planners, architects, and engineers take the initiative".

Education

Specializations

One of the strategies used by the Great Pirates to control individuals by disconnecting them from the comprehending the whole picture was the concept of specializations. Schools, colleges, and intellectual associations encourage individuals to devote themselves to a specialization at a young age. Fuller describes that "specialization is... only a fancy form of slavery wherein the 'expert' is fooled into accepting his slavery by making him feel that in return he is in a socially and culturally preferred, ergo, highly secure, lifelong position."[2] Specializations were used as a way to fragment society by dividing individuals into only having one place in society, and to discourage them from understanding how their job relates to other disciplines and feeds into the larger picture. This form of control is used to limit one's experience, knowledge, focus, viewpoint, and network within only one segment, subservient to their specific organized societies. Specialists are discouraged from comprehension; Wide-ranging ambitions that span across larger networks, and are controlled by their superiors. Specialization is described as a loss of general adaptability, and leads to extinction.

Life fellowship

Since many jobs will be replaced by automation, and sustain life does not need to be dictated by labor, humans are free to be engaged in other pursuits. To realize potential wealth each person who is or becomes unemployed should be provided with a life fellowship in research and development, or just simply experience and experiments. Fuller states that for every 100,000 fellowships given out one person will come up with something so valuable that it will pay for the remaining 99,999 fellowships.

Economics

The economic accounting systems that are most widely in use only measure physical matter, which is only actually one quality of wealth.

Access to vital resources

Fuller critiques the prevalence of poverty throughout the entire publication. He states that one of the qualities that make humans unique is their inventiveness. Human inventiveness is driven by curiosity, desire to communicate, adaptability, resourcefulness, and intellectual capabilities. Poverty injures all of Earth's population, by limiting a large percentage of the population's ability to realize their potential and engage in the furthering and betterment of the world's population. So far many of the solutions activated have been short-sighted and superficial, aimed at removing poverty from view.

It is also a outdated concept that tries to dictate which people are allowed to live the fullest lifespan possible.

Wealth

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it is only ever transformed. Thus the concept that energy is "spent" and that the universe could run out of energy is outdated. There is a finite amount of energy available to us that lives within a closed system where it cannot be expended with. The concepts of "spending" energy and of entropy are used to support outdated systems of thought which believe that in order for one group of lifeforms to survive, others must be make extinct.

Fuller argues instead that "Wealth is the product of the progressive mastery of matter by the mind."[3] Wealth is rather better defined as the potential that one has to survive.

There is enough wealth in the world to satisfy all of the world's needs.

Industry

Contemporary industry requires the coordination of international networks and access to global resources.

Technology

Defines tools as either craft tools that can be invented by one man, such as bows and arrows, and industrial tools that cannot be produced by one man, such as the S.S. Queen Mary. Finds language to be the first industrial tool. States that craft tools were used to create industrial tools.

Automation

The new technology of the computer allows that the computer can now specialize and allow humans to overcome their former roles, as specialists and laborers, and gain freedom to focus instead on their special abilities to comprehend and invent.

Fuller acknowledges that one of the largest critiques against automation comes from humans themselves, who fear the loss of their livelihoods, and thus their lives. This issue is easily solved through universal basic income.

Communication

Humans are uniquely driven by the desire to communicate. New technologies will enhance our ability to develop and strengthen connections.

Ecology

One of the keys to survival of the human species involves further understanding of how to sustain life through managing energy in sustainable ways. The idea of the Earth is a spaceship alludes to it as a mechanical vehicle that requires maintenance, and that if we do not keep it in good order it will cease to function. Fuller critiques the pollution of air, water, and information as counter to survival.

Fossil fuels

Throughout this book Fuller heavily critiques the continued use of fossil fuels. Our scientific understanding of the planet Earth has taught us that not only is the continued use of fossil fuels unsustainable, it is self-destructive as well. Additionally, Fuller refers to fossil fuels as our savings account, if we will burn through the finite amount available rather than reserving it our energy potential will only become bankrupt.

He encourages instead the harvesting of regenerative sources, specifically the Sun's radiation and Moon's gravity via wind, solar, and water tools. Fuller states that we "must operate exclusively on our vast daily energy income from the powers of wind, tide, water, and the direct Sun radiation energy".

Systems theory

It is not possible to identify the whole of the system through only analyzing its parts.

Synergy

Fuller describes synergy as the "behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system's separate parts or any sub-assembly of the systems' parts."[4]

See also

Wherever Mankind chooses to set our feet, the freedom or right to claim a portion of the land comes with a price also regarded as a license.

The Most Socially Just Tax

Our present complicated system for taxation is unfair and has many faults. The biggest problem is to arrange it on a socially just basis. Many companies employ their workers in a variety of ways and pay them differently. Since these companies are registered in various countries within a number of categories, the determination the general criterion for a just tax system based on earnings becomes impossible, particularly when it depends on a fair measure of the quality and amount of human work-activity. Similarly a tax based on what we purchase is unethical because everyone has different needs and will pay different sums for these utilities. Some of us will spend less and prefer to invest instead (the profits of which are also being taxed). So why try to tax our efforts and hopeful futures when there is a much better means available for taxation, which is really a true and socially just method?

Adam Smith’s (“Wealth of Nations”, REF. 1) says that our natural resource of the land is one of the 3 factors of production (the other 2 being human labor and durable capital goods). The usefulness of a particular site is expressed by its purchase price and in the amounts that tenants willingly pay as rent, for its access rights. Land is often considered as being a form of capital wealth, since it is traded similarly to other durable capital goods items. However it is not actually man-made, so rightly it does not fall within this category. Indeed, the land was originally a gift of nature (if not of God), for which all the people in the region should have equal rights for sharing in its opportunities for accessibility for residence, use and enjoyment.

However over many years, as communities became established and grew, the land has been traded as if it was an item of durable goods and today it is often treated as a form of capital investment. It is apparent that for a particular site, its current site-value greatly depends on location, size and to the population density in its region, as well as the amount of natural resources that it can steadily provide. Such bounty is manifest in the exploitation of its rivers, minerals, plants and animals of specific use or beauty. These are available only after local developments have made possible easy access to the particular locality. Consequently, much of the land value is created by man within his society, by his need and ability to reach it and take from it materials, growing plants and live creatures, as well as the opportunities its space provides for working near to population centers. These advantages should ethically and logically be justly returned to the community, as if for its general use within the government, as explained by Martin Adams (in “LAND” REF 2.).

However, due to our existing laws, the land is owned and formally registered and its value is traded, even though it can’t be moved to another place, like other kinds of capital goods. This right of ownership gives the landlord two big advantages over the rest of the community. He/she can determine how it may be used, or if it is to be held out of use for speculative reasons, until the city grows and the site becomes more valuable. Secondly the land owner enjoys the rent from a tenant or its equivalent (if he uses the land him/herself). Speculation in land values and its rental earnings are encouraged by the law, in treating a site of land as personal or private property as if it were an item of capital goods, even though this is not true, see Prof. Mason Gaffney and Fred Harrison: “The Corruption of Economics”, REF. 3.

Regarding taxation and local community spending, the municipal taxes we pay are partly used for improving the infrastructure. This means that the land becomes more useful and valuable without the landlord doing anything—he/she will always benefit from our present tax regime from which the land value grows when the status of unused municipal land is upgraded and it becomes more fitting for community development. When the news of an upgrade is leaked, after landlords and banks corruptly pay for this valuable information, speculation in land values is rife. There are many advantages if the land values were taxed instead of the many different kinds of production-based activities such as earnings, purchases, capital gains, home and foreign company investments, etc, (with all their regulations, complications and loop-holes). The only people due to lose from this different regime of taxation are those who exploit the growing values of the land over the past years, when “mere” land ownership confers a financial benefit without the owner doing a scrap of work. Consequently, for a truly socially just kind of tax to apply there can only be one method–Land-Value Taxation.

Consider how land becomes valuable. Pioneers and new settlers in a region begin to specialize and this slowly improves their efficiency in producing specific kinds of goods. The land central to the new colony is the most valuable, due to its easy availability and the least necessary transport of its produce. After an initial start, a graduated distribution in land values is created by the community. It is not due only to the natural land resources. As the city expands, speculators in land values will deliberately hold potentially useful sites out of use, until planning and development have permitted their more intensive use and for their values to grow. Meanwhile there is fierce competition for access to the most suitable sites for housing, agriculture, manufacturing industries, transport byways, etc. The limited availability of the most useful land means that the high rents paid by tenants make their residence more costly and the provision of goods and services more expensive. Entrepreneurs find it difficult or impossible to compete with the big organizations who have already taken full advantage of their more central sites. The greater cost of access, or the greater expense in transportation from less costly outlaying regions, discourages these later arrivals. It also creates unemployment, causing wages to be lowered by the land monopolists, who control the big producing organizations, and whose land was previously obtained when it was relatively cheap. Consequently this basic structure of our current macroeconomics system, works to limit opportunity and to create poverty, see above reference.

The most basic cause of our continuing poverty is the lack of properly paid work and the reason for this is the lack of opportunity of access to the land on which the work must be done. The useful land is monopolized by a landlord who either holds it out of use (for speculation in its rising value), or charges the tenant heavily for its right of access. In the case when the landlord is also the producer, he/she has a monopolistic control of the land and of the produce too, and can charge more for this access right than what an entrepreneur, who seeks greater opportunity, normally would be able to afford. A wise and sensible government would recognize that this problem of poverty derives from lack of the opportunities to work and earn. It can be solved by the use of a tax system which encourages the proper use of land and which stops penalizing everything and everybody else. Such a tax system was proposed about 140 years ago by Henry George, a (North) American economist, but somehow most macro-economists seem never to have heard of him, in common with a whole lot of other experts. (I would guess that they even don’t want to know, which is even worse!) In “Progress and Poverty”, REF. 4, Henry George proposed a single tax on land values without other kinds of tax on earnings, sales of produce, services, capital-gains etc. This regime of land value tax (LVT) has 17 features which benefit almost everyone in the economy, except for landlords, tax collectors and banks, who/which do nothing productive and find that land dominance and its capitalistic exploitation have their own (unjust) rewards. 17 Aspects of LVT Affecting Government, Landowners, Communities and Ethics

Four Advantages for Government:

1. LVT, adds to the national income as do other taxation systems, but it should replace them. The author has shown in REF.5, that taxation of any kind is beneficial to the whole country, due to its national income providing for more work too, but that when the tax applies to land the topology and spread of its effects are about 3 times as beneficial as when the same amounts of income are taken directly from labor. 2. The cost of collecting the LVT is less than for all the production-related taxes–tax avoidance becomes impossible, because the sites are visible to all and who owns each site is public knowledge. The army of tax collectors who are opposing a similar set of lawyers, are no longer busy with tax loopholes in the law, so the number of people more productively employed will grow and the penalty on the country of having complicated taxation is less. 

3. Consumers pay less for their purchases due to lower production costs (see below). They can buy more goods and enjoy a raised standard of living. This creates greater satisfaction with the management of national affairs and more prosperity.

4. The national economy stabilizes—it no longer experiences the 18-year business boom/bust cycle, due to periodic speculation in land values (see below). The withholding of unused land is eliminated see item 7, so there is less need for the complications of frequent land sales, with developers searching and buyers hunting for unused sites.

Six Aspects Affecting Landowners:

5. LVT is progressive—this tax depends on the site area as well as its position. The owners of the most potentially productive sites pay the most tax per unit of area. Urban sites provide the most usefulness and their owners will pay at greater rates, whilst big rural sites have less value and can be farmed appropriately, to meet their ability to provide useful produce. Smallholder farming closer to population centers becomes more practical, due to local markets and reduced distribution costs. 6. The landowner pays his LVT regardless of how his site is used. A large proportion of the present ground-rent from the tenants (who do use the land properly), becomes transformed into the LVT, with the result that the land has less sales-value but retains a significant “rental” value. 7. LVT stops speculation in land prices, because the withholding of land from its proper use is not worthwhile. 8. The introduction of LVT initially reduces the sales price of sites, even though their rental value can grow over a longer term. As more sites become available, the competition for them is less fierce and entrepreneurs have more of a chance to get started. 9. With LVT, landowners are unable to pass the tax on to their tenants as rent hikes, due to the reduced competition for access to the additional sites that come into use. 10. Speculators in land values will want to foreclose on their mortgages and withdraw their money for reinvestment. Therefore LVT should be introduced gradually, to allow these speculators sufficient time to transfer their money to company-based shares etc., and simultaneously to meet the increased demand for produce (see below, items 12 and 13).

Three Aspects Regarding Communities:

11. With LVT, there is an incentive to use land for production, transport, or residence, rather than it being vacant and held unused. 12. With LVT, greater working opportunities exist due to cheaper land and a greater number of available sites. Consumer goods become cheaper too, because entrepreneurs have less difficulty in starting-up their businesses, and because they pay less ground-rent–consequently demand grows, whilst unemployment and poverty decrease. 13. Investment money is withdrawn from land and placed in durable capital goods. This means more advances in technology and cheaper goods too because the effectiveness of labor has been raised.

Four Aspects About Ethics:

14. The collection of taxes from productive effort and commerce is socially unjust. LVT replaces this national extortion by gathering the surplus rental income, which comes without any exertion from the landowner or by the banks–LVT is a natural system of national income-gathering. 15. Previous bribery and corruption for gaining privileged information about land, cease. Before, this was due to the leaking of news of municipal plans for housing and industrial development, causing shockwaves in local land prices (and municipal workers’ and lawyers’ bank accounts!) 16. The improved use of the more central land of cities reduces the environmental damage due to unused sites being dumping-grounds, and the smaller amount of fossil-fuel use (with its air-pollution), when traveling between home and workplace. 17. Because the LVT eliminates the advantage that landlords currently hold over our society, LVT provides a greater equality of opportunity to earn a living. Entrepreneurs can operate in a natural way– to provide more jobs because their production costs are reduced. Then untaxed earnings will correspond more closely to the value that the labor puts into the product or service. Consequently, after LVT has been properly and fully introduced as a single tax, it will eliminate poverty and improve business ethics.

References:

1. Adam Smith, 1776: “The Wealth of Nations”, UK 2. Martin Adams, 2015: “LAND– A New Paradigm for a Thriving World”, North Atlantic Books, California, USA 3. Mason Gaffney and Fred Harrison, 2005: “The Corruption of Economics”, Shepheard-Walwyn, London, UK 4. Henry George: “Progress and Poverty” 1897, reprinted 1978 by the Schalkenbach Foundation, New York, USA 5. David Harold Chester, 2015: “Consequential Macroeconomics—Rationalizing About How Our Social System Works”, Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbüchen, Germany

Notes

  1. ^ WorldCat list of editions including 1967 speech and 1968 Carbondale Southern Illinois University Press edition
  2. ^ Fuller, p. 41
  3. ^ Fuller, p. 101
  4. ^ Fuller, p. 78
  • Fuller, Buckminster (2020) [1969]. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Zurich, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers. ISBN 978-3-0377-8126-5.
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