Before 1900, less than 1 per cent of humanity could be considered economically successful. Between 1900 and today this figure has risen to 40 per cent, and people now enjoy a higher standard of living than was known or dreamt of by any king born before the twentieth century. During this period world population has doubled, so there has been an eightyfold increase in those who are benefiting from our growing understanding of the operating principles of the universe and our ability to support all humans while safely conserving terrestrial ecology.
These facts alter altogether the economic premise of human existence. They require the immediate discarding of the old, historic assumption that the majority of humans are failures and must perish prematurely. They now require the premise that all humanity was designed to be an economic success, just as the chemical element hydrogen was designed to be a success. Ergo, all who fail to give themselves completely to the realization of this now cosmically manifest mandate are guilty of abetting genocide.
All our thinking up to now has been relevant to yesterday’s conditions, when men were widely separated and the bigger man was the stronger, controlling tightly his land and his property. Today, very suddenly, there is no more logic in taking of such sovereignty. This fact must be faced. There is no longer logic in employing an economic accounting system based on the era of agriculture. Still, all our accounting is geared to agricultural failures, great droughts and famines, real failures of life. This persists in spite of the fact that today it is technically feasible to take care of all humanity at higher standards of living than any man has yet dreamt of, and this without any further inventions at all.
But we are so tied to yesterday’s ways of accounting, so limited by our concept of local sovereignty, that even as we are producing annually twice the amount of food necessary to support all humanity, we have more than half of humanity dying prematurely of starvation. This is the kind of problem we must solve, or it’s all over for everybody. This fact—that the great majority of humanity are still starving have-nots—may cause the bloodiest revolution ever. The alternative is that we give ourselves over to making sense—making sense through courage and integrity of mind, going along with the truth, whatever it may be.
I can see that abstract rearrangement of the accounting system could really take care of the material problem facing humanity. We have to evolve a new kind of accounting system based on a new concept of wealth. Exploring to discover what wealth is in cosmic reality, we find that no matter how much of it we have, we cannot alter one iota of the past, you cannot change yesterday. Whatever wealth is, it has to do only with now and with tomorrow.
Now consider a man who is worth a billion dollars. He has all his checkbooks with him, all his stock certificates, deeds, bonds, and agreements, along with a few bars of gold and some bags of diamonds as well. He is aboard a sinking ship in mid-Atlantic that has suffered a catastrophe with all its lifeboats burned. If the billionaire holds onto his gold and bags of diamonds, he is just going to sink faster than anybody else. A fellow passenger has brought along a pneumatic life preserver and is floating safely away. The billionaire calls out to him, “Hey, mister, I’ll give you a billion dollars cash for that preserver.” “No thank you” is the reply. So the billionaire’s billions can do nothing about either the past or the future. His kind of wealth is unreal, it is only a game imposed by yesterday’s strong on the weak.
Having eliminated what wealth is not, we gradually discover, as we continue our search for its true meaning and magnitude, that wealth has to do with the extent to which society has rearranged the environment to take care of X number of lives for X number of days at such and such a specified standard of living. Take water, for instance. Though essential to human life, humans cannot drink it all when it rains, so we have to develop a water-holding technique that allows us to valve it into human presence at the times and magnitudes most favorable to human life support. When we have rearranged the constituents of the environment in this way—to take care of more lives for more days—we have created real wealth.
Wealth consists of two ingredients: (1) the physical; (2) the metaphysical. Physicists have discovered that all physical experiences are reducible to two fundamental phases, as matter and as radiation, each of which can be converted into the other. Physics finds no evidence that energy can be created or lost. The modern astrophysicist sees the universe itself as the minimum perpetually self-regenerating system. The energy component of wealth is therefore inexhaustible. The other component of wealth, the metaphysical, is popularly identified as “know-how.” It is the intellectual input. Only intellect sees the need to rearrange the environmental constituents in a way that will take care of more lives for more days, in contrast to the instincts of the brain, which say, “Look out for yourself and yours, and never mind the strangers.” Every time man makes an experiment, he always, and can only, learn more, he can’t learn less. Knowledge is an inherently irreversible process of discovering what is not true as well as what is true, and all the evermore refining truths integrate synergistically to inspire the ever-wiser use of the ever-increasing knowledge.
We have discovered, then, that wealth consists of the physical, which is inexhaustible, and the metaphysical, which only multiplies itself irreversibly. Every time we put knowledge to the physical test we learn more. It follows that every time we employ energy intelligently to do work, we increase man’s capability to take care of more lives. Consequently, humanity’s wealth can only increase from history. That is the new fact that makes the new economic accounting system mandatory.
Among all creatures, humans are the most generally adaptable. We have beautiful mental equipment to acquire information, to be used in discovering the great principles of the universe and consciously to put them to work. Only man can alter the equipment and processes of his ecological regeneration. Only humans have the capability of altering their relationship to the environment. Only humans have metaphysical access to the discovery and use of the eternal, weightless principles governing all the regenerative processes of the universe. Man’s total muscle power does not equal one minute part of a hurricane, but his mind has been able to apprehend and inventory the present and relative abundance of the ninety-two self-regenerative chemical elements and all the stars in the heavens. At present there is no entry in the world’s bookkeeping account for the metaphysical inputs; the present system accounts only for the physical, only for property.
Due to the second law of thermodynamics—that relating to entropy—all local systems are always losing energy. Individual physical properties therefore deteriorate. Physical bookkeeping continually depreciates its only physically listed assets. Because world accounting does not enter metaphysical assets on its balance sheets, it is continually, happily surprised by discovering that the system is showing a profit. Monetary or political management claims credit for this profit, without any disputability, due to the lack of any entries of the continually self-multiplicative metaphysical factor. For this reason all of humanity has been continually surprised to discover that it has more capability than is shown on the book. World-around wealth generation at the present moment is supporting more lives for more days at higher standards, despite the only entropically generated popular fear of the dangers of so-called spending. The present accounting system forces humanity to realize its greater wealth potential only as a sequitur fallout of its full employment of the metaphysical to organize the productivity of the physical resources only in preparation for world warring.
Were it not for the coevolutionary development of the computer, the task of converting the world’s economic accounting from a failure into a success, system-cognizant of the realities of today, would be almost impossible. Such adjustment can be made and is critically essential if we are to break through our historically conditioned fear-of-failure complexes and recognize in a way that will promptly secure a higher living standard for all. Fortunately it is a problem to be coped with by the human mind. It cannot be licked by muscle, or by sword, or by gun any more. If we start using these, it’s all over.
© 1973 by R. Buckminster Fuller
