Chapter 9
Comprehensive Designing
2The Comprehensive Designer emerges as the answer to the greatest problem ever addressed by mankind: The Human Family now numbering three billion is increasing at an annual rate of three per cent and is trending toward seven billion expected by the end of the second half of this century. Of this number, sixty-five per cent are chronically undernourished, and one third are doomed to early demise due to conditions which could be altered or eliminated within the present scope of technology; specifically, that area of technology comprising the full ramifications of the building arts, which now contains the negatives or blanks which match the lethal factors. Relative to this premise, Jawaharlal Nehru once said in Chicago: ‘‘It is folly to attribute the disquietude of the Orient to ideological pressures.’’ Nehru went on to point out that the de-energized and doomed are prey to any political shift of the wind that might promise arrest of their fate.
3 At present all the world’s industrial, or surfaced, processed and reprocessed functional tonnage (the Industrial Logistics') is preoccupied in the service of four tenths of the world’s population, though one hundred per cent are directly or indirectly involved in its procurement, processing and transportation.
4 All the politician can do regarding the problem is to take a fraction of that inadequate ratio of supply from one group and apply it to another without changing the over-all ratio. The politician can, of course, recognize and accept the trend rather than oppose it, but this does not accelerate it in adequate degree to arrive at a solution in our day and generation, and, more importantly, before the deadline of the doomed.
5 All that money can do is shower paper bills of digits on the conflagration. Relative denominations neither decrease nor increase the velocity of combustion.
6 How and by whom, if at all, may the problem be solved? Scientists are often charged with the task, but scientists as a class (irrespective of their proclivities as individuals) do not function in the comprehensive capacity, they function as specialists in taking the universe apart to isolate and inventory its simplest behavior relationships. Engineers function as invoked specialists in reproducing satisfactory interactions of factors ascertained as ‘‘satisfactory’’ by past experience and a wealth of behavior measurement. Both engineers and politicians would lose their credit from society if they incorporated the unprecedented in wholesale manner.
7 We hear and read frequently in scientific and philosophical journals of the desirability of ways in which problems of the universe may once more be approached by comprehensive and scientific principles.
A New Social Initiative
8There emerges the need for a new social initiative which is not another function or specialization but is an integral of the sum of the product of all specializations, that is, the Comprehensive Designer.
9 The Comprehensive Designer is preoccupied with anticipation of all men’s needs by translation of the latest inventory of their potentials. Thus he may quickly effect the upping of the performance-per-pound of the world’s industrial logistics in fourfold magnitude through the institution of comprehensive redesign, incorporating all of the present scientific potentials that would otherwise be tapped only for purposes of warfaring, defensively or offensively.
10 In view of our myriad of performance-per-pound-advances of multi-fold degree (in contrast to percentage degrees) typified by pounds of rubber tire upped in performance from one thousand miles to thirty thousand miles expectancy without poundage increase (yet with complete chemical, though invisible, transformation), or of communication advance from one message to two-hundred-fifty concurrent messages per unit of cross-section of copper wire (and both of these multi-fold advances have been accomplished within a quarter of a century), it is seen as a meager technical problem to consider advancing the over-all efficiency of worldwide industrial and service logistics fourfold (to serve one hundred per cent of the population).
11 Some may tend to underestimate the comprehensive nature of the problem, saying the people are thus starving and we have the land capacity to raise the food. This conception voiced by the theoretical specialist or casual observer is without benefit of logistic experience. It is not just a matter of raising food but getting food to people, anywhere from zero to twenty-five thousand miles distant. And then it is not just a matter of getting food to people zero to twenty-five thousand miles away—it is a matter of getting it there at certain velocities; and it is not just a matter of getting it there at certain velocities, but it is a matter of getting it there on schedules in certain conditions, conditions of nourishing content, palatability and vital preservation.
12 And even then it is not a matter of success concerning all the preceding conditions, for the dumping of a year’s food supply in front of a helpless family huddled on the street-curb is but an unthinkable tragedy. The maggots appear in hours. And once again the continuing energy controls providing progressive freezes, heatings, etc. cannot be effected by refrigerators and stoves dumped in the street along with a year’s tonnage of food. Obviously, a world continuity of scientific-industrial controls resultant from comprehensive and technical redesign is spelled out as the irreducible minimum of solution.
13 For those who think that this minimum can be obtained through legislative enactment by the politician or by the establishment of new dollar credits, and who are forgetful that the total world tonnage is already preoccupied with service of only forty-four per cent of the world-people, it is to be noted that the economic-statistical approach has been voiced by the press in conjunction with water shortages in the great American cities, such as New York and Los Angeles.
14 These are not problems unique to those cities, but symptomatic of the trend of the great industrial interactions. The economic-statistical solution, voiced by the politicians and the news, proposes further encroachments of the watershed origins through the rerouting of waters otherwise destined to lesser centers.
15 A typical question asked by the Comprehensive Designer is: What do people want the water for? They are using two hundred gallons per day per capita, consuming only one gallon for their vital processes while employing one hundred ninety-nine gallons to dunk themselves, and gadgets, and to act as a liquid conveyor system of specks of dirt to the sea. We note that scientists do not need water to dunk their instruments in, nor industrialists water to soak their machinery in. Are there not superior ways to effect many of the end purposes involving no water at all, and where water is found to be essential, can it not be separated out after its combining functions and systematically recirculated as chemically pure, sterilized, ‘‘sweet’’ and clear, and with low energy expense or even an improved energy balance sheet as a result of comprehensive redesign?
16 The specialist in comprehensive design is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist. He bears the same relationship to society in the new interactive continuities of world-wide industrialization that the architect bore to the respective remote independencies of feudal society.
17 The architect of four hundred years ago was the comprehensive harvester of the potentials of the realm. The last four hundred years have witnessed the gradual fade-out of feudalism and the gradual looming of what will eventually be full of world-industrialization—when all people will produce for all people in an infinity of interacting specialized continuities. The more people served by industrialization, the more efficient it becomes.
Positive Constituents of Industry
19In contrast to the many negative factors inherent in feudalism (such as debt, fear, ignorance and an infinite variety of breakdowns and failures inevitable to dependence on the vagaries of Nature), industrialization trends to ‘‘accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative,’’ first by measuring Nature and converting the principles discovered in the measurements to mastery and anticipation of the vagaries. Day and night, winter and summer, fair weather or bad, time and distance are mastered. Productive continuities may be maintained and forwardly scheduled. There are three fundamental constituents of industry; all are positive.
20 The first consists of the aspect of energy as mass, inventoried as the ninety-two regenerative chemical elements which constitute earth and its enclosing film of alternating liquid-gaseous sequence.
21 The second fundamental component of industry consists of energy but in a second and two-fold aspect—that is: (a) energy as radiation and (b) energy as gravitation, both of which we are in constant receipt of from the infinite cosmic fund. The third and most important component of the industrial equation is the intellect factor, which secrets a continually amplifying advantage in experience-won knowledge.
22 Complex-component No. 1 cannot wear out. The original chaotic disposition of its ninety-two regenerative chemical elements is gradually being converted by the industrial principle to orderly separation and systematic distribution over the face of earth in structural or mechanical arrangements of active or potential leverage-augmentation. Component No. 2, cosmic energy, cannot be exhausted.
23 Constituent No. 3 not only improves with use but is interactively self-augmenting.
24 Summarizing, components No. 1 and No. 2 cannot be lost or diminished and No. 3 increases, with the net result inherent gain. Inherent gain is realized in physical advantage of forward potential (it cannot be articulated backwards; it is mathematically irreversible). Thus, industrial potential is schematically directional and not randomly omni-directional. Thus, the ‘‘life’’ activity, as especially demonstrated by man, represents an anti-en-tropic phase of the transformations of non-losable universal energy.
25 The all-positive principle of industry paradoxically is being assimilated by man only through emergent expedients, and only in emergency because of his preponderant fixation in the direction of tradition. Backing up into his future, man romantically appraises the emergent dorsal sensations in the negatively parroted terms of his ancestors’ misadventures.
26 The essence of the principle of industry is the principle of synergy, which I have explained in an earlier chapter. This principle is manifested both in the inorganic and organic. The alloying of chrome and nickel and steel provides greater tensile strength than that possessed by any of its constituents or by the constituents in proportional addition. Three or more persons by specialized teamwork can do work far in excess of that of three independently operating men. Surprisingly, and most contradictory to the concept of feudal ignorance, the industrial chain’s strength is not predicated on its weakest link. So strong is the principle that it grows despite a myriad of superficially failing links! In fact, there are no continuous ‘‘links’’ in industry or elsewhere in the universe because the atomic components are, interiorly, spatially discontinuous.
27 The strength of ‘‘industry’’ as with the strength of the ‘‘alloy’’ occurs through the concentric enmeshment of the respective atoms. It is as if two non-identical constellations of approximately the same number of stars each were inserted into the same space, making approximately twice as many stars, but none touching due to the difference in patterns. The distances between stars would be approximately halved. It is the same with alloyed atoms whose combined energetic cohesion increases as the second power of the relative linear proximities of the component parts. Though the parts do not ‘‘touch,’’ their mass cohesive dynamic attraction follows the gravitational law of proportionment to second power of the distance apart of centers. Therefore, alloying strength is not additive arithmetically but is advantaged by gravity, which, as Newton discovered, is inversely proportional to the ‘‘square’’ of the distance apart.
28 Man has now completed the plumbing and has installed all the valves to turn on infinite cosmic wealth. Looking to the past he wails, ‘‘How can I afford to turn on the valve? If I turn it on, somebody’s going to have to pay for it!’’ He forgets that the bill has been prepaid by men through all time, especially by their faithfully productive investments of initiative. The plumbing could not have been realized except through absolute prepayment of intellectually organized physical work, invested in the inherent potentials of Nature.
Epochal Transformations
30Not only is man continually doing more with less—which is a principle of trend which we will call ephemeralization, a corollary of the principle of synergy—but he is also demonstrating certain other visible trends of an epochal nature. Not only does he continue to increase in literacy but he affords more years of more advanced study to more people. As man becomes master of the machine—and machines are introduced to carry on every kind of physical work with increased precision, effectiveness and velocity—his skilled crafts, formerly intermittently patronized, graduate from labor status to continuity of employment as research and development technicians. As man is progressively dis-employed as a quantity-production muscle-and-reflex machine, he becomes progressively re-employed in the rapidly increasing army of research and development—or of production-inaugurating engineering—or of educational and recreational extension, as a plowed-back increment of industrialization.
31 Product and service production of any one item of industry trends to manipulation by one man for the many through push-button and dial systems. While man trends to increasing specialized function in anticipatory and positive occupations of production, he also trends to comprehensive function as consumer. Because the principle of industry improves as the number of people it serves is increased, it also improves in terms of the increase of the number of functions of the individual to which it is applied. It also improves in terms of its accelerated use.
32 Throughout the whole history of industrialization to date, man has taken with alacrity to the preoccupation of the specialist on the production side of the ledger; but the amplifications of the functions of the individual as a comprehensive consumer have been wrenched and jerked and suffered into tentative and awkward adoption in the mumbo-jumbo and failure complex of obsolete feudal economics. Up to yesterday man was unaware of his legacy of infinite cosmic wealth. Somewhere along the line society was convinced that wealth was emanating from especially ordained mortals, to whom it should be returned periodically for mystical amplification. Also with feudal fixation man has looked to the leaders of the commercial or political states for their socioeconomic re-adjustments—to the increasingly frequent ‘‘emergencies.’’
33 Throughout these centuries of predominant ignorance and vanity, the inherently comprehensive-thinking artist has been so competent as to realize that his comprehensive thoughts would only alienate him from the economic patronage of those who successfully exploited each backing up into the future. The exploiters, successively successful, have attempted in vain to anchor or freeze the dynamic expansion at the particular phase of wealth generation which they had come to monopolize.
34 The foolhardy inventors and the forthright prospectors in humble tappings of greater potentials have been accounted the notable failures. Every industrial success of man has been built on a foundation of vindictive denouncement of the founders.
35 Thus the comprehending artist has learned to sublimate his comprehensive proclivities and his heretic forward-looking, toward engagement of the obviously ripening potentials on behalf of the commonwealth. The most successful among the artists are those who have effected their comprehensive ends by indirection and progressive disassociations. So skillful have the artists of the last centuries been that even their aspiring apprentices have been constrained to celebrate only the non-utilitarian aspects of the obvious vehicles adroitly employed by the effective artists to convey their not-so-obvious but all-important burden.
36 Thus the legend and tradition of a pure art or a pure science as accredited preoccupations have grown to generally accepted proportion. The seemingly irrelevant doings of the pure scientist of recent decades exploded in the face of the tradition of pure mathematical abstraction at Alamogordo. No one could have been more surprised than the rank and file of professional pure scientists. The results were implicit in the undertakings of artist-scientists whose names are in the dim forefront or are anonymous in the limbo of real beginnings. How great and exultant their secret conceptioning must have been!
The Time Has Come
38The time has arrived for the artist to come out from behind his protective coloring of adopted abstractions and indirections. World society, frustrated in its reliance upon the leaders of might, is ready to be about-faced to step wide-eyed into the obvious advantages of its trending. We will soon see the emergence of comprehensive training for specialists in the husbandry of specialists and the harvesting of the infinite commonwealth.
39 Will the Comprehensive Designer, forthrightly emergent, be as forthrightly accepted by the authorities of industrialization and state? If they are accepted, what are the first-things-first to which they must attend?
40 The answer to the first question is yes. They will be accepted by the industrial authority because the latter has recently shifted from major preoccupation with exploiting original resource to preoccupation with keeping the ‘‘wheels,’’ which they manage turning, now that the original inventory of wheels, or tools in general, has been realized from original resource. Though original resource-exploiters still have great power, that power will diminish as the mines now existing above grade, in highly concentrated use forms (yet in rapidly obsoleting original design), become the preponderant source of the annual need. Severe acceleration in the trend to increase of performance per pound of invested material now characterizes all world-industry. With no important increase in the rate of annual receipt from original mines, the full array of mechanics and structure requisite to amplifying the industrial complex, from its present service to approximately one-fourth the world’s population to serve all the world’s population, may be accomplished by the scrap ‘‘mined’’ from the progressively obsoleting structures and mechanics.
41 World-industrial management will be progressively dependent upon the Comprehensive Designer to accelerate the turning of his wheels by design acceleration. Each time the wheels go round, the infinite energy wealth of cosmos is impounded within the greater receptive capacities of the ninety-two regenerative-element inventory of earth, and those who manage the wheels can make original entry on their books of the new and expanding wealth increments even as the farmer gains cosmic energy wealth in his seasoned cycles.
42 An answer as to whether the designer will be accredited by political leadership has been made. Political leadership in both world camps has announced to the world of potential consumers their respective intents to up the standard of living of all world peoples by ‘‘converting the high technical potential to account through design.’’
43 Only the designer can accomplish this objective. Legislative mandate and dollar diplomacy cannot buy the realization.
44 As first of the first things, the designer must provide new and advanced standards of living for all peoples of the world. He must progressively house and re-house three billion people in establishments of advanced physical control. The mechanically serviced sheltering must be a continuity of roofs, stationary and mobile, sufficient to allow for man’s increasing convergent-divergent interactions of transciency or residence, of work, play or development, interconnecting every center of the world and penetrating to autonomous dwelling facility of the most advanced standard, even in the remotest of geography. The logistics of this greatest phase of industrialization must impound cosmic-energy wealth, within the inventory of ninety-two chemical elements, to magnitudes, not only undreamed of, but far more importantly, adequate to the advancing needs of all men. Implicit is man’s emancipation from indebtedness to all else but intellect.