How may we use our intellectual capability to higher advantage? Our muscle is very meager as compared to the muscles of many animals. Our integral muscles are as nothing compared to the power of a tornado or the atom bomb which society contrived-in fear-out of the intellect’s fearless discoveries of generalized principles governing the fundemental energy behaviors of physical universe.
In organizing our grand strategy we must first discover where we are now; that is, what our present navigational position in the universal scheme of evolution is. To begin our position-fixing aboard our Spaceship Earth we must first acknowledge that the abundance of immediately consumable, obviously desirable or utterly essential resources have been sufficient until now to allow us to carry on despite our ignorance. Being eventually exhaustible and spoilable, they have been adequate only up to this critical point. This cushion-for-error of humanity’s survival and growth up till now was apparently provided just as a bird inside of the egg is provided with liquid nutriment to develop it to a certain point. But then by design the nutriment is exhausted at just the time when the chick is large enough to be able to locomote on its own legs. And so as the chick pecks at the shell seeking more nutriment it inadvertently breaks open the shell. Stepping forth from its initial sanctuary, the young bird must now forage on its own legs and wings to discover the next phase of its regenerative sustenance.
My own picture of humanity today finds us just about to step out from amongst the pieces of our just one-second-ago broken egg shell. Our innocent, trial-and-error-sustaining nutriment is exhausted. We are faced with an entirely new relationship to the universe. We are going to have to spread our wings of intellect and fly or perish; that is, we must dare immediately to fly by the generalized principles governing universe and not by the ground rules of yesterday’s superstitious and erroneously conditioned reflexes. And as we attempt competent thinking we immediately begin to reemploy our innate drive for comprehensive understanding.
Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth – R. Buckminster Fuller
