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My First Crackpot

When I was young, I believed, as all children do, what I read in books. My father had many books about him, including books on philosophy, history, and science, so I naturally came to regard books as unimpeachable authorities on all subjects.

But as I grew older, I began to see that books were not always trustworthy. The first book I read that started my doubts was a book by George Adamski on visitations by space travelers. I was old enough to know that Venus was a waterless pressure cooker, and that Saturn was frigid balls of gas, so Adamski's tales of conversations with people (and I mean people, not humanoids) from Venus and Saturn made me think of the book as no more than a fairy tale. I thought of it as a joke on the level of Zha Zha Gabor being a brilliant and beautiful scientist on the female-only Venus in the movie Queen of Venus.

Reading books on astronomy and space travel as a kid, I quickly ran across many peculiar ideas. In the early 70s, Erich Van Daniken made his mark with his book Chariots of the Gods, where he argued that ancient Greek mythology about Minotaurs and other strange hybrid creatures were actually factual accounts of alien-created hybrids. In the beginning of his book, Van Daniken has the reader imaging a NASA trip to an inhabited planet. As he lays out his description of what NASA would do during this expedition, he casually mentions that NASA would create alien-human hybrids. I fell out of my chair when I read this. I've yet to run across this idea in NASA's plans for future mission, although I see that the X-Files took the idea and ran with it.

But the flying saucer stories were always mixed with science fiction in mind, so I never really regarded their writers as anything other than science fiction writers. I couldn't imagine that anyone took this stuff seriously.

So my first crackpot came from a different corner of the intellectual universe: he came from the technology side. Technology was king when I was growing up. Rocketry, aviation, nuclear power, and skyscrapers were all at the forefront. Diesel locomotives didn't fully replace steam locomotives until around 1960, around the same time that computers began appearing in large air-conditioned room at the universities. The technology was big, rapidly changing, and visible. And along with the technology came the futurists, who wrote about how technology would change society.

I knew of R. Buckminster Fuller because of articles about him in Time and other popular magazines. I also knew of him because my father, who was an aerospace engineer, spoke of him. I knew about his main claim to fame, his geodesic dome; I had gone to the 1967 Worlds Fair in Montreal, Canada, and I had seen the giant transparent geodesic dome that the United States had erected as its pavilion. I knew of Fuller's three-wheeled Dymaxion Car, and his peculiar Dymaxion Map of the world. And I knew that he had popularized the word synergy. All of these things made Fuller seem a giant to me. That is why I bought one of his books.

The book I bought is called Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, a title that today would raise alarm bells in my mind. But when I bought this book, I doubt I was much older than 15, so I didn't think twice about the title. All I knew about the book was that it explained the term synergy.

The book starts out fine; Fuller seems like a modest but far-seeing writer. But slowly, and in much the manner of a flying saucer book or a speech by Noam Chomsky, the narrative that Fuller tells becomes more and more peculiar, until by the end of the first chapter he is telling me that Great Pirates who lived on the oceans controlled the kings of the land by forcing them to train their most gifted subjects as specialists, while the Great Pirates kept general knowledge of the world to themselves. Pirates? Did I really read this right? At this point I began from the beginning again; perhaps I had misread something.

The point of Fuller's book is that in a society of specialists, no thought is given to the comprehensive solution of complex problems. He then goes on to explain the origin of specialization in society, which he feels is not only unnecessary in the modern economy, but is a historical artifact imposed upon society by those who ruled it. In other words, we are in conspiracy theorist territory.

The conspiracy that Fuller develops is unique: there are no Illuminati or Templar Knights; instead there are sea masters, and the reason is the difference between agriculture and seamanship. According to Fuller, the development of agriculture created a specialized society on land, because each member of a farming society needed to know only one task, such as how to grow wheat or how to create pottery, while the development of sea travel created a generalist society at sea, because seamen needed to know a broad range of subjects, such as astronomy and geography, to successfully travel from port to port. With time, because the seamen knew about the various lands spread across the globe, while the specialized land kingdoms knew only of their own lands, the seamen came to rule the land kingdoms through proxy kings. To enforce their power, the seafaring masters told their proxies to send their brightest subjects to school to become specialists in particular fields of study, and in this way the universities came into existence.

But specialization is in fact 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. But only the king's son received the Kingdom-wide scope of training.

However, the big thinking in general of a spherical Earth and celestial navigation was retained exclusively by the Great Pirates, in contradistinction to a four-cornered, flat world concept, with empire and kingdom circumscribed knowledge, constricted to only that which could be learned through localized preoccupations. Knowledge of the world and its resources was enjoyed exclusively by the Great Pirates, as were also the arts of navigation, shipbuilding and handling, and of grand logistical strategies and of nationally-undetectable,therefore effectively deceptive, international exchange media and trade balancing tricks by which the top pirate, as (in gambler's parlance) ?the house,? always won.1

Interestingly, Fuller believed that this secret seafaring society ceased to exists with the invention of radio, because the seamen could no longer controlled the flow of information. But the specialization that they created still exists, to the detriment of modern society.

In this short book Fuller totally destroyed my admiration for him. Years later, thinking that perhaps I had simply misread his meaning, as I was only a boy at that time, I reread him; but no, I had read him correctly.

Rereading the excerpt of the Time magazine article at the Buckminster Fuller Institute web site, I was struck by the article's statement that many people in 1964 consider Fuller to be a crackpot. Today he is probably best remembered through the chemical name for the carbon molecule Buckminsterfullerine, colloquially known as Bucky Balls. The Dymaxion car is forgotten, and the geodesic dome has a retro look. But I doubt that he would be regarded by many now as a crackpot; his fame, as slight as it now is, has outstripped his work.

Jim Brainerd

1 Fuller, R. B. An Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.

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