This knowledge probably originated in prehistoric times, was certainly known to the Ancient Greeks, but was then suppressed for centuries by organised religion because it was incompatible with the official story of a Heaven above and a Hell below (p. 43).
There has been an evolution of religious ideas from those of the Egyptian pyramid-builders, whose ambition was to deliver a single individual, the pharaoh, into the afterlife, to the modern belief that everybody has a right to enjoy life on Earth (p. 51).
Corruption in the form of "lawyer-capitalism" has led the US to become effectively bankrupt (p. 114), with the common people obliged to fund the profitmaking activity of corporations.
(p. 101) Eventually the U.S. taxpayers will be asked to make "free-of-risk" bail-outs of "private" enterprisesThe second part of the book explains Fuller's getting a perspective.
The mechanical principle of precession is used as a metaphor for the ability of a person to influence the world by applying pressure in an unconventional direction (p. 144).
Wherefore, I concluded that I would be informed by nature if I proceeded in the following manner: (A) committed myself, my wife, and our infant daughter directly to the design, production, and demonstration of artifact accommodation of the most evident but as-yet-unattended-to human-environment-advantaging physical evolutionary tasks, and (B) paid no attention to "earning a living" in humanity's established economic system, yet (C) found my family's and my own life's needs being unsolicitedly provided for by seemingly pure happenstance and always only "in the nick of time," and (D) being provided for "only coincidentally," yet found (E) that this only "coincidentally," unbudgetable, yet realistic support persisted, and did so (F) only so long as I continued spontaneously to commit myself unreservedly to the task of developing relevant artifacts, and if I (G) never tried to persuade humanity to alter its customs and viewpoints and never asked anyone to listen to me and spoke informatively to others only when they asked me so to do, and if I (H) never undertook competitively to produce artifacts others were developing, and attended only to that which no others attended then I could tentatively conclude that my two assumptions were valid: (1) that nature might economically sustain human activity that served directly in the "mainstream" realization of essential cosmic regeneration, which had hitherto been accomplished only through seeming "right-angled" side effects of the chromosomically focused biological creatures; and (2) that the generalized physical law of precessional behaviors does govern socioeconomic behaviors as do also the generalized laws of acceleration and ephemeralization.The Geoscope is a large-scale, animated globe of the Earth intended to help people visualise the spatial and temporal patterns of human activity, either in real time or replayed at different speeds.
If the human mind is presented with all of this information at once, it should be able to use its visual pattern-detecting abilities to solve complex problems such as weather-forecasting, resource conflicts, and wars (p. 183).
I am certain that none of the world's problems...have any hope of solution except through total democratic society's becoming thoroughly...self-educated.Corn is wasted in generating unnecessarily fatty but more profitable beef (p. 272).
Billions of dollars of government subsidies now go to the conglomerate farmland owners.The drive to make money...seeks to monopolize order while leaving...disorder to overwhelm others.In Los Angeles, private-incinerator and later car-pollution laws were passed to shift the blame for smog from industry to citizens (p. 279).
Mr. Fuller has always made himself easy to dismiss by wandering off the deep end of optimism, but a reading of Critical Path shows that the author, like Karl Marx, arrived at his vision of the ideal only after a serious attempt to understand the evolution of human affairs.