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GRUNCH OF GIANTS

by Buckminster Fuller

Table of Contents:

1. Fee-fie-fo-fum
2. Astro-age David's Sling
3. Heads or Tails We Win, Inc.
4. Invisible Know-How, Inc.
5. Paper into Gold Alchemists
6. Can't Fool Cosmic Computer

Chapter 1.  Fee-fie-fo-fum

Fee-fie-fo-fum
I smell the blood of a Britishman
Be he alive or be he dead
I'll grind his bones To make my bread.

There is no dictionary word for an army of invisible giants, one thousand miles tall, with their arms interlinked, girding the planet Earth. Since there exists just such an invisible, abstract, legal-contrivance army of giants, we have invented the word GRUNCH as the group designation—"a grunch of giants." GR-UN-C-H, which stands for annual Gross Universe Cash Heist, pays annual dividends of over one trillion U.S. dollars.

GRUNCH is engaged in the only-by-instruments-reached-and-operated, entirely invisible chemical, metallurgical, electronic, and cybernetic realms of reality. GRUNCH's giants average thirty-four years of age, most having grown out of what Eisenhower called the post World War II "military-industrial complex." They are not the same as the pre-World War II international copper or tin cartels. The grunch of giants consists of the corporately interlocked owners of a vast invisible empire, which includes airwaves and satellites; plus a vast visible empire, which includes all the only eighteen-year-old and younger skyscraper cluster cities around the world, as well as the factories and research laboratories remotely ringing the old cities and all the Oriental industrial deployment, such as in Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore. It controls the financial credit system of the noncommunist world together with all the financial means of initiating any world-magnitude mass-production and -distribution ventures. By making pregraduation employment contracts with almost all promising university science students, it monopolizes all the special theoretical know-how to exploit its vast inventory of already acquired invisible know-how technology.

Who runs GRUNCH? Nobody knows. It controls all the world's banks. Even the muted Swiss banks. It does what its lawyers tell it to. It maintains technical legality, and is prepared to prove it. Its law firm is named Machiavelli, Machiavelli, Atoms & Oil. Some think the second Mach is a cover for Mafia.

GRUNCH didn't invent Universe. It didn't invent anything. It monopolizes know-where and know-how but is devoid of know-why. It is preoccupied with absolute selfishness and its guaranteed gratifications. It is as blind as its Swiss banks are mute. Much, much more about GRUNCH later on.

• • •

When blimp photographs are taken of giant stadia packed full of rock-concert or football fans, we get an idea of what 100,000 people look like. We all think of Hiroshima as the worst single killing of humans by humans. That was about a 75,000-capacity-coliseum-full. Each day of each year, year after year, a 75,000-capacity-stadium full of around-the-world humans perish from starvation or its side effects, despite an annual average 5-percent world food-production overage of the amount of food adequate for the total world's population. This daily kill of innocents dwarfs the awful Auschwitz killing.

GRUNCH did not bring this about, but it could very profitably bring it to an end. Just because it is possible does not mean that it is easy. With the computers' guidance, however, and some executive vision, courage, initiative, and follow-through, it can be done very profitably in terms of money and lasting kudos for GRUNCH and prohumanity enterprise. It would cost only 3 percent of Grunch's annual dividend earnings to not only feed all those now starving to death but also to alleviate the dire poverty around the entire planet, since the population explosion is occurring strictly amongst impoverished people. Such a world initiative on the part of Grunch would eliminate one of the two great threats to humanity's continuance on planet Earth: nuclear bombing and overpopulation.

The great communism vs. capitalism, politico-economic world stand-off assumes a fundamental inadequacy of life support to exist on our planet. So too do the four major religions assume that it must be you or us, never enough for both. Jointly the two political camps have spent $6.5 trillion in the last thirty-three years to buy the capability to kill all humanity in one hour.

Jointly, we Earthians have always had adequate physical resources to take care of all humanity but lacked the metaphysical know-how resources with which to employ effectively the Earth's physical wealth. Adequate know how could only accrue through trial-and-error experience combined with synergetically acquired wisdom, altogether employed with absolute faith in the intellectual integrity omni-lovingly governing regenerative Universe. However, in 1970 our cornucopia of ever more swiftly accruing know-how overflowed and its content integrated synergetically, so that we may now care for each Earthian individual at a sustainable billionaire's level of affluence while living exclusively on less than 1 percent of our planet's daily energy income from our cosmically designed nuclear reactor, the Sun, optimally located 92 million safe miles away from us and safely interlinked with us by photosynthesis, wind, rain, wave, and all other weather behaviors.

In technology's "invisible" world, inventors continually increase the quantity and quality of performed work per each volume or pound of material, erg of energy, and unit of worker and "overhead" time invested in each given increment of attained functional performance. This complex process we call progressive ephemeralization. In 1970, the sum total of increases in overall technological know-how and their comprehensive integration took humanity across the epochal but invisible threshold into a state of technically realizable and economically feasible universal success for all humanity.

This actual but invisible threshold crossing began in 1969 when humans' scientific knowledge and technological ingenuity, backed exclusively by adequate citizens' tax-raised government financing, learned how to do so much with so little as to be able to place humans on the Moon and return them safely to Earth. Other typical 1970 to 1980 manifests of our option to do so much with so little as to be able to take care of all humanity were:

1. The single-flight delivery and installation of a 140 foot-diameter, 23,000-square-foot-floor-space, stainless steel and aluminum geodesic dome at the mathematically exact South Pole of our planet, together with its capability of carrying the snow loads of complete burial;

2. The rocket-launched satellites able to relay Earth-around TV and other programs;

3. The solar system's planetary inspection by TV-communicating, Earth-dispatched explorer satellites;

4. The computer revolution, and its progressive miniaturization;

5. The laser-beam and its many capabilities, such as its color-TV-reading of polished disc records;

6 . MacCready' s successful human-muscle-powered, over-the-English-Channel flight; and

7. His subsequent Paris-to-England, exclusively by direct-Sun-powered flight; and finally,

8. That MacCready's ninety-five-foot-wingspan plane weighed only forty-five pounds due to its carbon-fiberalloy structuring and mylar skinning.

In 1970 it could, for the first time, be engineeringly demonstrated that, applying the most advanced know-how to the conservation and use of the world's resources, we can, within ten years of from-killingry-to-livingry reoriented world production, have all humanity enjoying a sustainably higher standard of living than any humans have ever heretofore experienced. It could further be demonstrated that we can do this while simultaneously phasing out all further Earthians' use of fossil fuels and atomic energy.

Humanity is so specialized and these epochally significant technological facts are so invisible that it seems an almost hopeless matter to adequately inform humanity that from now on, for the first time in history, it does not have to be "you or me"—there is now enough for "both" —and to convince humanity of this fact in time to permit it to exercise its option and save itself.

There is now plenty for all. War is obsolete. It is imperative that we get the word to all humanity—RUSH—before someone ignorantly pushes the button that provokes pushing of all the buttons.

What makes so difficult the task of informing humanity of its newborn option to realize success for all is the fact that all major religions and politics thrive only on the for-all-ages-held, ignorantly adopted premise of the existence of an eternal inadequacy of life-support inherent in the design of our planet Earth.

That it is possible for us all to win—and how—is what Grunch of Giants is about. (Grunch of Giants is an intimately related sequel to Critical Path, published by St. Martin's Press, New York, 1981.)

Chapter 2. Astro-age David’s Sling

In each herd of wild horses there is a king stallion. Every once in a while a young stallion is born bigger and more powerful than the herd's other colts. When the new big colt matures, the king stallion engages him in battle. Whichever one wins becomes the inseminator of the herd's mares. Darwin saw this phenomenon as the way in which nature contrives to maintain the strongest, best coordinated, most alert, and fastest strains in the species. Twentieth-century racing stable operators progressively inbreed the fast-running genes. Nature uses this progressive, only-by-generation-to-generation, (DNA-RNA)-genes-concentrating method in selecting, evolving, and maintaining the physically fittest biological types to serve the vast variety of planet Earth's omniintercomplementary ecological regeneration functions to become operative under each and every uniquely variant set of environmental conditions.

Nature employs the same solely-by-survival-through-successive-generations, genes-concentrating principle when introducing humans into the complex ecological scheme of intercomplementary regenerativity of life on planet Earth.

While nature undoubtedly initiated the installation of humans on planet Earth with semi-giant leaderships, she had eventually to disclose to humans through direct experience lessons that human muscle is naught as compared to the competence of the mind-directed brain.

• • •

• • •

 In order that humans might so evolvingly function, they were first given brains and then access to mind.

As already mentioned but worth repeating, human brains, as with those of many creatures, function always and only as coordinators of all the sense-apprehended information regarding each special-case temporal experience, all of which special-case experiences have beginnings and endings.

In contradistinction to brains, which are constructed of physical matter, the weightless, matterless, metaphysical mind has the unique capability, from time to time, to discover eternal interrelationships existing invisibly between special-case experiences, which interrelationships cannot be discovered by any or all of the brain's physical sense systems—for instance, the mathematical law governing gravity's invisibly cohering not only the Sun and its multi-millions-of-miles-apart planets as discovered by the weightless invisible conceptual thought-relaying from the mind of Kepler to Galileo to Newton and as also cohering the never-anywhere-intertouching parts of local Universe systems of galaxies, and electrons remote from their nuclei.

The relative interattractiveness invisibly operative between any two remote-from-one-another cosmic bodies, as compared to any other pair of cosmic bodies, equally distanced from one another, is proportional to the multiplicative product of the respective couple's masses, and the interattractiveness of any pair of celestial bodies varies inversely as the second power of the distance between them. Halve the intervening distance and the interattractiveness increases fourfold.

Human minds were given the semi-divine capability to discover and employ some of the only-mathematically communicable eternal laws governing the design of eternally regenerative Universe itself.

When I was born in 1895 humanity was 95-percent illiterate and needed leaders. Today the situation is reversed. Humanity is now 65-percent literate and capable of doing its own thinking, decision-making, and initiative-taking.

• • •

 Returning to the genetic evolution and the history of humans aboard our planet, we observe that only by the genes-concentrating of successive generations of survivor matings were design-produced the best all-around average-size humans for average as well as special environmental conditions. Both giants and pygmies were design evolved for coping with extremes of environment.

Bare-handed giants could physically overwhelm both bare-handed average humans and pygmies, except when the littler ones escaped into caves or thickets through entryways too small for giants.

People think of the size of people in terms of height. Mathematics shows, however, that if we double human height while maintaining equal proportionment we have four times as much surface (skin) and eight times as much volume (flesh and bone—weight). "Twice as big" is really eight times as big. Giants were indeed overpowering.

Tools are the only-intermittently-used, noncorporeal extensions of integral functioning capabilities of biological species. Spider webs are tool extensions of spiders. Nests are short-term tool extensions of birds whose regenerative functioning occupies only a minor fraction of their lifetime activity. In order to be light enough to be able to fly, the birds must physically separate out all those of their overall essential lifetime functions not continuously required in their survival and development. Momentarily containing both embryo and nutriment, eggs are externalizable, system-separable, new-life-gestation tools which together with insulating nests provide the means by which the mother bird may fly unencumbered to seek out the worm or insect-packaged energy-intake-as-heat to be transferred to the embryo inside the heat conductive eggshell in its heat-conserving nest and do so before the eggs become too cold. Later she brings the worms and insects directly to the hatched chicks themselves, secure in their heat-conserving nest—an environment-controlling tool.

Nests and eggs are indeed tools, as is the womb—an only-once-in-a-while, carried-with-mammalian , new-life production tool. Mammals don't have to fly so they can carry tools integrally, internally, as do they also carry their hearts, livers, and other continuously interlinked high-frequency-of-use tools. All tools exist in Universe only as essential functional components of development programs of living organisms.

A cut-off finger can be swiftly stuck back onto the hand to seemingly function again as an apparently integral part of the organism. The comprehensive fact, however, is that nothing in Universe touches anything else. There are no solids. There are, in fact, no things. There are only complex critical-proximity and -frequency, unique event aggregates interoperative in pure principle. The event electron is as remote from its nuclear events as is the Moon from the Earth as size-referenced to their respective event diameters.

Biological organisms, like all systems in Universe, are constituted of locally interregenerative functions in pure principle. So too with all species. Humans have a vast range of overall essential functionings whose frequency and duration of use can be developed either as integral or non-integral, inorganic or organic tool-extensions of their pounding, cutting, scratching, marking, formative, or transformative and transportive functions of survival and development.

Simple tool-inventing, such as picking up a stone to throw in self-defense, requires only the brain's instinctive functioning. Almost everywhere stones lie ready to serve as heavier "fists" for powerful, but only occasionally needed, punching, pounding, or smashing. Mind, which alone comprehends the complex interaction of principles, is required to anticipatorily invent stone-throwing slings, spring-loaded catapults, or bow-and-arrows archery.

Tools of self-defense or aggressive warfare, called weapons, frequently embody principles that can be constructively rather than destructively employed. Beyond even that, they can solve positively the originally negative, aggression-aggravating problem—a basic precept of design science. Conversely, ballpoint pens, carried with us in our breast pockets because so frequently used, can be employed either constructively to write a life-saving prescription or destructively as a dagger. My hearing aids and my eyeglasses are more permanent components of my awake hours than are millions of daily dying-and-being-replaced protoplasmic cells of which my flesh is constructed—otherwise I could not lose a pound a day. My eyeglasses and hearing aids together weigh only a quarter of a pound. The same tool can become the extensions of many individuals, and for longer years than human generations. Bridges and transcontinental highways are universally social tools.

Airplanes are mutually interchangeable human flying tools. There are metaphysical as well as physical tools. Mathematics are metaphysical tools. Inter-relevant metaphysical informations are tools. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Mathematics states officially: "Mathematics is the science of structure and pattern in general." Physical structures are tools. Mathematics makes possible the synergetic organization of metaphysical information which can be progressively objectivized as pattern-controlling or evolving tools systems which can advantageously alter the physical environmental circumstances of human existence.

The comprehensive name for the omni-interrelated significance of all physical and metaphysical tools is "technology." All technology is governed by generalized physical laws. All of these can be physically demonstrated and mathematically expressed. The physical Universe itself is omnitechnology—a complex of various frequencies of intercomplementary functions altogether producing nonsimultaneous, multi-frequenced, multimagnituded, only overlappingly inter-episoded, eternal regeneration.

Man-made laws, legal agreements, royal fiats are not tools. Man-made laws and customs are not technology. They are political power ploys, originally instituted only by-physical-might-asserted and -sustained "rights." Corporations are not tools. They are conventionally accepted power-proclaimed legal contrivances.

There are two fundamental types of tools: those which can be produced by one human unaided in any way physically or metaphysically by any other humans and those which could not be invented, developed, or operated by one human alone. The latter, multi-human-involvement tools, are the industrial tools.

The solo-evolved tools are craft tools. The solo-developed craft tools can be complex and even powered, as by a harnessed creature or a dammed stream of water. Craft tools used as weapons make it possible for physically small humans to overwhelm physically either big humans or even bigger animals—tiger pitfall traps are one example.

This brings us to the slaying of the giant Goliath by David and to the generalized principle of brain-mastered brawn by mind-mastered brain, of the metaphysical mastering the physical.

This in turn brings us to the present confrontation of humanity by the Grunch of Giants—the supranational corporate conglomerates—the greatest giants in all history invisibly "Rough-Riding" planet Earth. While you can see their skyscrapers and factories, these are only the physical properties occupied by the human-drone workers employed by the elusively invisible corporate conglomerates.

Chapter 3. Heads or Tails We Win, Inc.

Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys—legally enacted game-playing—agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members. How can little humans successfully cope with this greatest of all history's invisible Grunch of nonhuman Giants? First of all, we humans must comprehend the giants' games and game-playing equipment, rules and scoring systems. But before we can comprehend their game-playing, we must study the history and development of giants themselves.

One of my many-years-ago friends, long since deceased, was a giant, a member of the Morgan family. He said to me: "Bucky, I am very fond of you, so I am sorry to have to tell you that you will never be a success. You go around explaining in simple terms that which people have not been comprehending, when the first law of success is, 'Never make things simple when you can make them complicated.'"

So, despite his well-meaning advice, here I go explaining giants.

• • •

In addition to the B.C. David and Goliath theme, we have the A.D. 800 story of Roland (Childe Roland), legendary son of Charlemagne's sister Gilles. There are many poetical chronicles of young Roland's enfances (a very young person's heroic exploits), such as vanquishing giants—one named Ferragus and another Eaumont. From the eighth to the seventeenth century, many variations of the story occur, published in Latin, Italian, French, and English.

Much esteemed in Italy, Roland was known there as "Orlando Furioso"—the order of the name's first two letters is reversed from ro to or—as immortalized in the A.D. 1502 poem by Ludovico Ariosto.

The first comprehensive chronicling of Roland was written in Latin by Turpin, Archbishop of Reims, before A.D. 800. Roland (or Orlando) is mentioned by Dante in his Paradiso and is the subject of songs sung at the Battle of Hastings in the Chanson de Roland (c. A.D. 1100). Shakespeare mentions him in King Lear.

With the advent of radio and television, the children's Mother Goose-type storybooks of yesterday have been progressively abandoned. Few people today are familiar with the thousand-year-old story of the roaring of the giant as Roland approached his tower: "Fee-fie-fo-fum/ I smell the blood of an Englishman/ Be he alive/ Or be he dead/ I'll grind his bones/ To make my bread."

Supreme horse-mounted monarchs in the days of Roland could and did award vast hunting and farming lands to their horse-mounted blood kin and military henchmen, who together hunted their lands and had them cultivated by on-foot, tithe-paying tenant farmers.

In ancient North China a new kind of giant had developed long, long before Roland's time a three-component-parts giant, i.e., the little man, with a club, mounted on a horse—who could and did overwhelm the big, onfoot, tribe-leading shepherd. This new composite giant, the horse-mounted bully, could divert to his sole advantage as much as he wanted of the life-support productivity of the on-foot peasantry. (Pa ys = land; ped = foot = ped ant = pa ys antry = peasantry = combination of on the land and on foot = pa y of lands = pa of patriot = pa of pagans = patois = po-gan, pa-gan peasantry.)

The horse-mounted, clubwielding bully asserted—as do the twentieth-century racketeers—that he owned the land on which the shepherds were grazing their sheep or the farmers were growing their crops. There was no way in which the shepherd could realistically contradict the bully. Each night, many of the shepherd's sheep disappeared until the shepherd agreed to "accept" the horse-mounted bully's "protection." This was the origin of "property." The most powerful amongst the leaders of gangs of horsemen became the emperor.

The emperor rewarded his henchmen with deeds to the land in proportion to the deeds at arms they performed for him.

There is no historical record of religion founders who have been so bold as to assert that God had deeded land to anyone. History shows that religious leaders have, however, frequently complied with their king's instructions to plant a cross or other symbol of God's approval of their king's sword-accomplished vast lands-seizure and ownership-claiming.

Over thirty thousand years ago, these prehistoric horsemounted "landowners" began expanding their territory northwardly and westwardly beyond the Himalayas into Mongolia and then ever westward into Europe.

Also, starting at least thirty thousand years ago, South Pacific islanders and south and northeast continental Asians came to the West Coast of North, Central, and South America from the Orient by rafts swept along by the Japan Current. Many if not most of the rafted Southeast Asians colonized the West Coast of the Americas and islands of the east Pacific. The current then returned some of the rafters to Southeast Asia, as Thor Heyerdahl demonstrated with his raft Kon-Tiki. This circum-Pacific ovaling of the Japan Current raft-travel outlined the Polynesian world within which was spoken a commonly based language. The Polynesians became the world's water people. Polynesia comprised more than one-quarter of the planet Earth. The great West Coast mountain ranges and deserts slowed both the North and South American coastal, raft-landed colonists' eastward migrations. Landed at many North and South American coastal points from Alaska to Chile, these raft-landed Polynesians separated into many groups as they moved eastward over many routes to both North and South America, to become known as the American Indians.

As water people, the Indians assumed that the "Great Spirit" (not an anthropomorphic God) gave them fishing, hunting, and cultivating rights, but never ownership of land. Obviously, to them, only the Great Spirit could own the land. Centuries later the Indians thought they were selling the Europeans only fishing and hunting licenses, not property rights. These were water people. No sailor can think realistically of "owning" a specific area of the ever transforming oceanic waters. Many pirates tried vainly to do so.

• • •

We have, historically, two prime, oppositely directed world-encirclings, both starting about thirty thousand years ago: (1) from the Orient via water, eastbound from Southeast Asia, and (2) westbound via land from northeast Asia. Mastery of all the sea finally went to one landbased nation after another.

• • •

Millennia after the first club-swinging Oriental horseman claimed land ownership, the man on the horse westbound from the Orient to Europe became helmeted and armored in metal. Due to the horses' weight-carrying limit and the penalty of weight on the horses' speed, the most effective of the horse and armored riders was, like the present-day jockey, the wiry, strong, little man. Inspection of the European museums' armor discloses the diminutive size of the most successful knights. The main significance of what we are learning is that, to the man on foot, the horse-mounted and armed men became a new and formidable "giant."

Because the armored knight required many helping hands to mount him and maintain his horses and arms, he had to have their goodwill and support lest his helpers overwhelm him when dismounted and encased in his armor. As a consequence, the little, wiry man in horsemounted armor frequently became the champion of traveling bands of the little people. The little armored knight was more maneuverably effective than the armored giant when the latter's multifolded weight overburdened his mount.

As a special consequence of this trending, we have the nongigantic, successfully armored King Arthur's Round Table Knights, who used their mounted and armed might to rectify wrongs wrought against people by local bullies and clumsily armored, horse-mounted landowners.

Arms, armor, precious stones, skins, furs, fabrics, spices, incense, hand-looms, and other hand-tools were the principal goods traded in Roland's time. Gold, silver, and pewter served as money. Trading was accomplished on foot, on the backs of animals, or on river-borne small craft. The land of the overlord was the principal wealth.

Squads of armed horsemen could protect caravans of goods-carrying horses, camels, and elephants along with human bearers. These caravans could transport the initially culture-evolved riches of the Orient westward to the ever more westwardly advancing frontiers of humanity, where the newly powerful cultures could acquire the historically recognized appurtenances of Oriental courts of power.

A new kind of wealth-making occurs historically with the invention and development of stoutly and heavily keeled, ribbed, and planked, high-seas-keeping, deep-bellied, and, in much later times, cannon-armed sailing ships.

These great ships were built in vertical shorings. Their keels were laid upon heavy wooden cross-ties and blocked against premature sliding. These cross-tie "ways" led down very gently sloped banks into the harbor's deep waters. When the ships' hull was completed and watertight, the cross-tie ways were greased and the blockings mauled out from under the ship. Gravity slid the ship swiftly seaward, maintaining its vertical balance long enough to plunge it deck-side-skyward into the water.

After launching, the ship was floated progressively into a succession of wooden crane-equipped outfitting docks— the interior decks and bulkheading dock; the chain-plating dock; the mast-stepping dock; the rigging and sail-bending-on dock; the winch-, capstan-, and armaments-installing dock. Finally she sailed away to various lands where superior masts, fabrics, ropes, etc., progressively replaced the original make-do equipment. (World's best masts from the Pacific Coast of British Columbia; best rope-making fiber from Manila, in the Philippine Islands; best cotton fiber for the sails from Egypt; best teakwood for the decks from Thailand.) It took complete circumnavigation to incorporate the "best in the world" of everything to produce a "gallant" ship—one capable of around-the-world sailing.

It is probable that the first moving-line shipyard in history was established on the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok. However, the earliest now known militarily secure shipyard is to be found on the Greek island of Milos. It is in a miniature rock-walled fjord, well hidden from enemies by a deep-channeled, curved entrance. On the many rock platforms lining the fjord's walls, many shipbuilding artifacts were found. The Milos shipbuilding fjord was so well hidden that the Germans used it for their Aegean Sea submarine hideaway during World War II. (The Venus de Milo, now in the Louvre in Paris, came from Milos.)

History's next great moving-line shipyard is as yet to be found in Venice. So strategically important was the Venice shipyard that it was initially seized by Napoleon early in his campaigning.

Centuries later this progressively-moved-forward-and-added-to shipbuilding pattern as yet clearly evidenced in the Venice shipyard became the prototype for all of mass production industry's "moving lines."

The ship was, of course, a tool, but not a craft tool produced by one man. It was an industrial tool, mass producible and operable only by large numbers of highly skilled craftsmen, metalworkers, woodworkers, sailclothmakers, rope-makers, iron chain- and anchor-makers, seasoned sailors, and the coordinated muscle of "all hands." The merchant ship was a wind-energized industry, a tool that could sail around the world and carry cargoes worth many fortunes to lands not containing the materials brought by the ships, which when integrated with the home-port-occurring materials produced real wealth of increased life-support for more and more people.

The building, rigging, and arming of such vessels and the production of the materials with which to build them, as well as the production of the food and other necessities to feed and clothe all those engaged in the shipbuilding, required an effectively powerful military authority able to command the full-time commitment of the work and skills of the large numbers of humans involved. It also called for the amassing of large sums of negotiable wealth. Preferably the negotiable wealth was in the form of trade-implementing precious metals and jewels, commercially acceptable around the world.

For ages earlier the negotiable wealth had been the efficiently demonstrable products of labor and its produce, the grains and the livestock. Of the latter, the protein-amassed cattle constituted the most concentrated possible yet maneuverable realization of actual life-support wealth. Cattle were put up as collateral for the banker's loan of gold, silver, and copper coinage. When the voyage was successfully completed, the merchant-ship venturers repaid the banker and paid the banker his "interest" in the form of calves that had been interimly produced by the collateraled cattle. This was called "payment in kind"— kind being the kinder or "children" of the cattle. When bankers eliminated live cattle as collateral and dealt only in gold or silver, there were no gold coins being bred by gold coins as calves had been by cows, so interest was taken out of the capital gold by diminishing the equity of the borrower when he repaid his debt. The banker's interest was cut out of—that is, deducted from—the depositor's original "cap"-ital (head of cattle) stake.

As I made clear in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, (Published by E. P. Dutton, 1969) when the farmer or cattlemen producers of "real wealth" of one hundred forward days of life support each for one hundred people—i.e., one thousand man-days of life-support—deposited their monetary specie equivalent in the bank and the banker loaned it out at 10 percent, it meant that the banker stole one hundred man-days of life support from the farmer depositor instead of providing the farmers the bank-advertised "safekeeping." The banker could hide this situation by price increase in the profits the banks made by using the depositor's real wealth units. But the depositor's dollar could buy him ever less real life support units.

The safe return of the merchant venturer's ships was so unpredictable as to constitute a capital investment of high risk but also of very high potential gain—most significantly a risk whose rewarding payoff might take several "crop" seasons to realize. The voyage might take several or even many years to complete. These risks in turn could be lessened by insurance.

As a consequence of all the foregoing, a half-millennium after Roland a new and overwhelmingly greater form of invisible seagoing and land-strutting giants appeared on planet Earth. This was a legally contrived, abstract giant —"legal" because the physically uncontradictable "topsword" king decreed it was legal. Having the most favored privileges accorded real humans, the giant, abstract, corporate "man" is inventively created in 1390 in England. (The corporate "human" may have been invented in ancient Babylon to cover the potentates' voyaging venture, but we have as yet no written record of such.) "His" abstract name is the "Merchant Venturers Society." This composite man was formed by the king of England with a small group of his very powerful friends, who lorded over their king-deeded vastlands.

By royal prerogative, the venture-financing riskers could not be held liable for any losses of the venture. With limited liability, individuals might sue the company but not the human individuals who underwrote the venture. If the enterprise failed and went bankrupt, its shareholders lost their ventured stake but were not to be held responsible in any way for its debts. The creditors of the company were the losers, and not the shareholders. Bankruptcy could reflect no credit stigma upon the companies' shareholders. The shareholders were held absolutely blameless for any misfortunes of their ships' crew or for damage caused by collision of their ship with another ship. If the ship and its cargo were lost, the shareholders lost their original shares, but no more. As long as the ship operated successfully, the shareholders shared its trading profits

Whether the ship was lost or not, the banker who loaned the gold for the merchant ship's trading held the life-support-producing lands and their cattle as collateral. Since many voyages ended in disaster, the banker occupied a long-time, steadily profitable position in the overall merchant venturing—and as yet does.

Naturally, the shareholder's limited-liability advantage, granted by sovereign decree, encouraged a swift expansion of such enterprises.

In 1522 Magellan's ship demonstrated that the world is not a laterally extended plane off the edge of which a ship might plunge, nor an ocean extended laterally to infinity from which there was no return. Magellan's ship's circumvoyaging proved that the Earth is a sphere—a closed system with enormous trade-monopolizing potentials. Laws of the land could not be enforced on the sea. The seagoers were outlaws—privateers or pirateers. The most powerful outlaws became the sovereigns of the ocean sea.

In 1580, Queen Elizabeth was the largest shareholder in Sir Francis Drake's merchant ship The Golden Hind. Naturally, the queen granted Drake's venture "legal" freedom from liability. After paying Elizabeth her conspicuously major share, Drake and his other shareholders each realized almost 5,000 percent profit on their risked capital.

Enthusiastic over her Golden Hind venture, in 1600 Queen Elizabeth chartered the limited-liability East India Company. This time the shareholders acquired shares in a fleet of ships, docks, and warehouses in both England and India—not shares in just one ship, as in the earlier "venturing."

Employing her sovereign power, Elizabeth limited the losses of its chartered riskers to their initial monetary or equivalent capital stakes, while continuing their right to receive their proportional profit dividends for as long as the venturing company might exist—in perpetuity.

Known later in England as "Ltd." (for "limited liability"), in France as "Societe en Commandite," in Germany as "Kommanditgesellschaft," and as "Corporation" under the U.S.A.'s "Inc." (for incorporated) status, this newborn abstract legal giant was to be treated as a human personality, empowered to do anything humans can do but also accredited to operate as an abstract, legal entity able to enter or leave any nation without a passport. As such it was able to employ millions of people and any amount of money, tools, buildings, and equipment, and to perform its giant acts anywhere about the oceanic world exclusively for the profit in perpetuity only of its shareholders.

When the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S.A. Constitution was passed in the post-Civil War railroad-expansion days, the U.S. Supreme Court required that the individual states grant the corporation all the privileges and protection granted to human citizens. A hundred years later, in 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a corporation had the same rights of free speech as all U.S. citizens.

To allow its corporate bodies to make a colossal new grab, Grunch has ordered its pet puppets to take over the world ocean-bottom resources. As of February 1982, the United States, Britain, France, and West Germany have reached preliminary agreement to bypass the stalled Law of the Sea Conference and proceed with development of seabed mineral resources, the Japanese foreign ministry said. Japan expressed opposition to the agreement—unconfirmed by the four other countries—and said such a program should operate under U.N. auspices. The United States and other developed countries have refused to agree to developing nations' demands that seabed development be overseen by a U.N. agency dominated by the poorer countries.

The fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and sixteenth-century rulers who instituted and empowered those abstract corporate giants were able to popularize their acts by celebrating the visual wealth of goods it brought to their country and to the political satisfaction of their many citizens. The profit to society was visibly distributed as the goods, services, museums, and public-place rarities the enterprising produced. The shareholders' dividend checks were invisibly distributed.

With the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, the risk-capital powers backing the "British Empire" became the "Sovereigns of the Seas." Until that time the high-sea venturers had carried gold and silver as their trading medium. This induced world-around high-seas piracy. The behind-the-scenes masters of the British Empire then invented the annual balance of trade" as a world-around bookkeeping system which kept its gold off the seas and instead, after the year-end tallying of the trade interactions, transferred the gold from one country's London vault to another country's London vault. This withdrew the gold from the seagoing pirate's reach. However, it brought many of the pirates into the financial districts of great cities.

Naturally, shareholding in Ltd. enterprise became increasingly attractive as an investment risk, but soon the monetary size of investment required for share participation grew beyond the acquisition means of all but the wealthy. Stock-exchange brokers, for their own convenience, imposed trading only in hundred-share "lots" or "blocks," which quickly raised the equity-purchasing increments to so great a price that only the very wealthy could any longer participate in such venture-sharing. The capital games' playing-rules "kept the pikers out," the original pikers being the on-foot, pike-bearing castle guards.

In the nineteenth century the limited-liability corporate venturing began not only putting its shipyard donkey engines' steam engines in ships, but also mounting them on steel wheels on rails and powering them out of the shipyards. Thus they began railroading heavy loads inland. This initiated new mass-production industry centers at inland water-power sites. For instance, industrial venturing underwrote water-wheel-driven mass-yardage cottonmill fabric production, preferably in such low-wage-paying countries as India. The annual balance-of-trade accounting brought about many obviously inequitable economic conditions, such as, for instance, India's burlapbag-makers working for a penny a day. It was the vast profits made on burlap bags so produced which financed the early-twentieth-century expansion of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S.A.

Such cotton and woolen fabric production-venturing was logically followed by thread and needles, pins, buttons, and small hardware mass-production moving-line ventures. With the introduction of electricity and the electricity-driven motor, industry began moving-line mass-production of dollar watches, tin cans, safety razor blades, big-city clothing-production sweatshops, then bicycles, then motor cars. In World War I, it introduced steel steamship mass-production; in World War II, transoceanic aircraft mass-production; and, in the "cold," puppet-nation-waged war (World War III), extraterrestrial travel and transport, and mass-production of invisible mass-killingry potential.

• • •

There is a fundamental evolutionary patterning in which, with each new era and phase of technology and social-economic venturing, both the tools and their products get bigger and bigger, and the numbers of humans involved multiplies. A period of doing more with more until a mammoth peak magnitude is attained which is followed by evolutionary production of ever more effective results with ever less pounds of material, ergs of energy, and seconds of time, all of which integrating synergy produces ever more comprehensively effective tools with ever smaller technological artifacts produced by ever fewer unskilled human workers—the 1895 to 1929 model "T" waxing to the 1960s Cadillac limo, then waning to the 1980 Japanese Honda.

For example, trans-ocean traffic brought into use ever more gargantuan ocean liners leading eventually to the five-day-Atlantic-crossing leviathans, such as the 81,000 ton Queen Mary and her sister ship the Queen Elizabeth. Using the World War II technology's new, lightweight, high-strength, saltwater-impervious aluminum alloys in her superstructures the S.S. United States was built to carry the same number of passengers and the same amount of cargo, and to cross the Atlantic at the same speed as the Queen Mary, though weighing only forty-five thousand tons, that is, 55 percent of the weight of the Queens.

These five-day-Atlantic-crossing passenger carriers are now obsolete. In 1961, three jet airplanes outperformed the S.S. United States in carrying capacity, in hours instead of days and at less expense.

In 1980, ever lighter, swifter "liner"-type steamships are being built, but only for luxury cruise ships. For twenty years, these obsolete ocean liners have been progressively replaced by ten-to-thirty ton, one-third-of-a-day-transatlantic-crossing jet aircraft.

Another example of the little-to-big-to-little evolution is manifest in the world of mathematical computing. In developing trigonometry and its solution by logarithms, thousand of monks worked for hundreds of years to produce the one-degree tables of sines, cosines, tangents, and cotangents. During the Great Depression years of 1930 to 1936 the British and German mathematicians were hired by their governments in a joint project to calculate the table of functions to a one-minute of arc exactitude. Then came the big post-World War II calculating machines, Univac et al., filling whole university buildings with thousands of thermionic tubes. Then came the tubeless transistor and computers weighing and bulking far less, until we came to printed circuits and "chips" and table-top equipment doing better work than the whole-building-filling equipment. Before all this, I myself spent two pre-calculator or -computer years carrying out the trigonometric calculations for geodesic domes. I had to do so "longhand." Then appeared seventy-five-pound electric calculating machines, followed by the pocket-size computers with which the trigonometric problems that took me two years of work became solvable in one day by one person.

This process promises within a few years to become so miniaturized and so comprehensively capable as to be the size of a hearing aid, though able to interact with all the world-around computers and able to discern how best to operate our planet, making obsolete the opinions of corporate or government executives.

• • •

As mass-capital-venturing flourished after World War I, General Foods Company absorbed many pre-World War I individually owned, independent mass-producers of canned and packaged food. General Electric acquired other successful electrical goods manufacturers. The growth of corporate venture activity was, however, at that time yet identified by unique product categories.

After World War II, "mergers and acquisitions" and outright "takeovers" agglomerated almost all successful industrial capital ventures, regardless of their class of produced goods and services. The great conglomerates found it more profitable, safer, and more credit-powerful to diversify their risking. The successful "biggies" became ever more gargantuan—for example, the Dupont chemical company's 1981 acquisition of Conoco, America's ninth-largest oil company, for $7.57 billion, to form the seventh-largest industrial corporation in the U.S. Because many of these conglomerations embraced all the national defense weaponry production, they "legally" qualified for guaranteed government "bailout" should their operation become financially "embarrassed" or debts unmeetable. The U S government's decade-ago bailout of Lockheed Aircraft or its multibillion-dollar guaranteed loan to private Chrysler Corporation (the government's military-tank producer) are the current outstanding examples.

Chapter 4. Invisible Know-How, Inc.

As mentioned earlier, limited-liability, abstract corporate “beings” needed no passports to travel altogether invisibly across national borders. Soon after World War II, America's five hundred largest corporations became supranational, taking with them (out of the United States) the invisible legal controls over what had been born as American industry with all its "know-how." The know-how had been paid for initially by the U.S. people through their government's wartime (or "on the brink of wartimes") underwriting of the prime technologies as initially developed only for the U.S. Department of Defense or the Manhattan Project or the space program, developed in wartime at government ("we the people's") expense and turned over gratis for "operational efficiency" in "peacetime" to privately owned corporations.

World War I brought vast munitions-buying on credit by the U.S. government, and the figures ran into multi-millions of dollars as private U.S. industrial corporations acquired postwar operational rights to all the wartime government-financed new-era technology production machinery. Stockholders prospered. World War II saw the same U.S. government credit employed to produce "multi-vaster" new-technology munitions, with the dollar figures running this time into the multi-billions of dollars. World War III's third-of-a-century of "cold-warring" between the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., waged vicariously through many hot-war puppeted nations, has seen the annual munitions figures running into the multi-trillions of dollars. The U.S.A. 1981 "national" debt is over a trillion dollars, and the U.S. cannot pay even the interest on that debt. We can very properly call World War I the million-dollar war and World War II the billion-dollar war and World War III the trillion-dollar war.

In the meantime, all the industrial research and development as well as its products have become involved with the invisible technologies of atomics, electronics, chemistry, molecular alloying, and information processing. All the research and development of all the products and services that are going to affect all of our forward days are now being conducted in the realm of the electromagnetic spectrum "reality" not directly apprehendible by any of the human senses.

While the North American-situated factories and spectacular city buildings seem to be and are thought of by humans as being American property because they are located on American land, most are no longer U.S.A. people-owned. For instance, though thought of as "American," a majority of the skyscrapers of Honolulu belong to Japanese bankers. Arabian oil billionaires own many U.S. city skyscrapers. Kuwait owns the large South Carolina coastal island of Kiawah.

What was once world-around high credit for American ingenuity and friendliness is no longer existent. On February 1, 1982, the United States ambassador to the United Nations stated to the media that all the “United Nations now hate the U.S.A.” What they hate is Grunch, but Grunch is able to deceive the world into blaming the very innocent people of the United States.

All the continental U.S.A.'s industrial factories and grounds and 90 percent of all that can and does produce physical wealth has already become or is about to become the humanly invisible property of inhumanly operative supranational corporations controlled by the invisible human owners of invisible Swiss bank account code numbers.

A vast new giant of approximately no-risk capitalism is now astride the world. "Earning" over a trillion dollars a year, this supranational giant's monopoly over know-how, wealth, research and development, and production and distribution facilities is worth at least $20 trillion (U.S.A. dollars, September 1981). While the giant now owns and controls four-fifths of the planet Earth's open-market bankable assets, $1 trillion of those giant's assets are in monetary gold bullion. Astride spherical Spaceship Earth, the supranational corporate Grunch of Giants faces a political giant of noncapitalistic forces controlling the lives of two-thirds of humanity.

In making these observations in regard to inanimate corporations we do not infer antisocial attitudes on the part of the corporate officers. A corporation's executives are elected by its board of directors. The directors are elected by the number of shares of stock as voted directly by their holders or as voted by the holders of their share's proxies. This voting is not on a democratic one stockholder/one vote basis but on an as-many-votes-as-shares-owned basis. This being so, the corporations' lawyers have no alternative to reminding any altruistic, socially concerned executives that the corporation is committed by law only to making money for its shareholders, and therefore that any socially concerned, altruistic proclivities of any corporate executive must be realized outside the corporation and at the executive's own expense. For all the same basic reasons, the inanimate, literally soulless and heartless corporations cannot feel and express human sensitivities and thoughts, such as I find printed on desk-top cards in my hotel rooms around the world. I find it specious for a hotel chain to assume the role of moral arbiter by, for instance, printing cards displayed in their hotel rooms which define "love" as being the act of forbearance from stealing the hotel's towels or by exploiting the public concern over energy problems by asserting on their room cards that "love is saving the electric current costs." Since the corporation is only a legal device, the only possible reason for paying those "love" cards' printing costs is to reduce the hotels' operating costs, thus hopefully to increase the corporate dividends. Such operational tricks may well bring about promotion for the "ingenious" executives who conceive them.

In the August 3, 1981, issue of Time appeared the following article:

"President [Reagan] appointed William Baxter, a Stanford law professor who firmly believes in the virtues of large-scale enterprises unfettered by excessive Government regulation, to be his antitrust chief in the Justice Department. Baxter's boss, Attorney General William French Smith, succinctly stated the new Administration's philosophy in an oft-quoted speech before the District of Columbia Bar. Said Smith: "Bigness in business is not necessarily badness. Efficient firms should not be hobbled under the guise of antitrust enforcement."

Baxter openly accepts some responsibility for the merger phenomenon. Said he last week: "The statements we've made at the Justice Department have allowed people to think about mergers that they really wouldn't have thought about in past Administrations." Mobil's bid for Conoco is a case in point. Such a merger between two of the top ten petroleum companies would never have been seriously considered during Jimmy Carter's term. Baxter insists that his trustbusters will not allow any acquisition that significantly reduces competition within the oil industry or any other. He also maintains that a Mobil-Conoco combination would be subjected to tough scrutiny in Washington. [That is one reason why the subsequent alternative deal which united non-oil Dupont and oil Conoco was countenanced— R.B.F.]

Baxter should be wary if only because the American public has long been apprehensive about excessive corporate power. [Attorney General Smith] admits, "The strains of populist hostility toward large companies are deeply ingrained in the U.S.A. Government trustbusters have enjoyed broad public support as they attacked both concentration within an industry and combinations between corporate giants in unrelated business." Yet the burgeoning growth of corporate America has outpaced all the antitrust efforts. Since World War II, the portion of U.S. industry controlled by the 200 largest manufacturing firms has risen from 45% to 60%. [Socioeconomically, that is from majority to minority control—R.B.F.]

The attorney general chooses his words carefully. What he speaks of as U.S. industry is not the ownership of the corporations conducting the industrial activity; he speaks exclusively of the physical production activity itself taking place under the roofs of factory buildings situated within the geographical borders of the U.S. of North America. The capital title to and productive earnings of these are 60-percent owned and controlled by the entirely unknown majority owners of the escaped-from-America, supranational corporations—the Grunch.

One-third of humanity lives outside the lands controlled by socialism. All unbeknownst to and undetected by the one-fifth of the one-third of humanity residenced within the U.S.A., gradually cross-breeding "worldians," their one-third-of-a-century-ago kudos for realistically articulated generosity to and concern for others, as well as the U.S. peoples' legal ownership and control of their economic assets, have been altogether exploited, usurped, or stolen from them by the invisibly integrated supranational corporate giants. The Grunch has conducted its ruthlessly selfish activity always in the name of the U.S.A. people.

• • •

The now majorly literate crossbreeding world humans are now looking askance at both the socialist and capitalist giants as these politically opposed powers multiply their to-anywhere-deliverable, humanity-annihilating bombs.

"Modern weapons are growing so sophisticated and so small [ephemeralization—R.B.F.] that any future arms control agreement would be impossible to monitor and enforce," according to a Knight-Ridder News Service dispatch. "What we are going to see ["experience"—R.B.F.] in the next generation of weapons is invisibility, which translates into insecurity," according to William Kincade, a former naval intelligence officer.

Even such an informed source as Admiral Stansfield Turner, former head of the grand-naval-strategy-formulating U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, then commander-in-chief of the U.S. Navy's Mediterranean fleet, and then Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, says: "Any hope of limiting total destructiveness is slipping past us."

In the affairs of the supranational corporate giants, real quality of product, consciously sustained, has given way to packaging-allure and advertising-proclaimed "quality" as commensurate only with the best interests of corporate moneymaking. As already mentioned, heads of great corporations are elected by the stockholders' directors, who in turn are chosen by those controlling the majority of voting shares, who make their choices only on the basis of greatest earnings performance. Operating only as abstract, global-magnitude legal entities, all the unknown-ownered-and-controlled supranational corporations have no human-community consideration other than as potential customers, consumers, or fighting-force conscriptees.

At the termination of his presidency, Eisenhower expressed his shocked dismay over the exclusively self-concerned military-industrial complex that he had found to be growing inexorably as a malignant economic organism. There is no question of Eisenhower's innocence of such a phenomena as he assumed his great responsibility. In the same way I am confident that Reagan is utterly unaware of the existence, magnitude, and nature of the supranational colossus. He knows he is dealing with rich and business-wise-proven individuals whose organizational management effectiveness is of a high order. Because the colossus is operating an invisible technology, and society is so specialized that each individual is acquainted with only a few of the billions of other specialized invisibilities, and because of the invisibility of who the supranational shareholders may really be and where they are, I am confident that Reagan truly thinks that he is operating strictly within the historic limits of a U.S.A. national government and not as a stooge of an invisible Grunch of literally soulless supranational giants. I don't think David Rockefeller or any of the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, or Volcker, head of the Federal Reserve Bank, or Margaret Thatcher, or the heads of any of the world's governments think of their problems in the realistic terms of their being governed entirely by the inanimate, socially unconcerned, supranational colossi, as the possibly lethally nonhuman growth could prove to be. However, Grunch could also prove to be an army of benign giants, because it will depend more and more on its complex, world-around computerization integration, and the data entered into that integrated network will continually evidence that the present technology could make the world work for everyone, and at a much more profitable level than realized from weapons production. Nor do I think these present power structure spokespeople see the supranational corporations as the unwittingly benevolent agent of evolution about to close the historical era of separate "nation-states" and to institute in its stead the era of omni-economically successful, omni-integrated planetary society.

For the past thirty years the U.S. government's grand defense strategy has been a puppet of the supranational corporate giants with the strings invisibly manipulated. This policy has concentrated on accumulating greater numbers of atomic bombs than those of the U.S.S.R., while all the while the U.S.S.R. was (only) ostensibly endeavoring to keep pace with the U.S.A. bomb production. In reality the U.S.S.R. was dominantly preoccupied with building an all-oceans, primarily underwater navy from scratch and expanding numerically its conventional-weapons army divisions.

At the time Eisenhower became president of the United States, the military experts of both the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. had independently concluded that a missile-delivered atomic war would be the first war in history in which both sides would be utterly devastated. In gun-munitioned warfare, whoever shot first and accurately won. The other man's shot never got away. In 14,000 miles-per-hour delivery rocketry warfare, the 670,000,000 miles-per-hour operating radar vision of both sides gives each side enough advance notice after its respective enemy has fired to let loose all of its arsenal before the enemy's missiles arrive. For the first time in warfare history, both sides utterly lose. For those hotheads in the capitalist world who as yet contemplate pre-emptive firing of the U.S.A. arsenal of atomic warheads, it is importantly relevant that the Russians have accurate, geographically triangulated positioning of their U.S.A. targets, while the U.S.A. does not have accurate geodetic triangulation of the location of most of the U.S.S.R. targets. (See Critical Path, "Triangulation Mapping," pp. 184-188.)

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