WORLD GOVERNMENT, READY OR NOT!, CHAPTER 16
"WHO OWNS THE WORLD?"
In recognizing the human race as a viable species, a drastic revision in economic thinking is imposed. Referring to humankind as a fact deserving immediate attention, as do myriad organizations from the United Nations through UNESCO to religious, social, labor, and educational, implies global or total thinking to cure economic as well as other ills.
Nataraja Guru, in a remarkable essay on economics1 wrote:
There is no textbook on world economics, though economics as a science--if it is really a science--should necessarily be most directly concerned with the happiness of humanity as a whole. Instead, economists visualize a world consisting of differently colored Hitlerish patches of territories from within which each man is thinking hard economically so as to defeat his neighbor.
This conception of wholesale human welfare is even more explicitly spelled out by Buckminster Fuller when he writes:
"It is scientifically clear that we have the ability to make all of humanity physically successful. Industrialization itself relates to the resources of the entire earth, the entire universe. The industrial system is a comprehensive system and if reversingly fractionated will fail."2
Historical Analysis
The religious world view of former centuries endowed governments of the Western world and the political state system as it exists today with a quasi-divine character. The principle of "supreme authority," monopolized by the church and the monarchical system, was refashioned by the 18th- and 19th-century revolutions to serve as the moral basis of nation-state sovereignty.
World War I effectively eliminated the last remnants of the monarchical state which embodied the notion of divinity through the king and queen. What remained and remains is the "sovereign" state, each one a surrogate "world-state" of "absolute" power over the particular parcel of the planetary soil, wherein political democracy briefly flowered in exclusive nations only to flounder as the new "modern" institutions slowly bankrupted themselves in inter-national wars.
Fuller writes that:
"The world's people and their politicians think erroneously in terms of sovereign states with colonial empires.... Today's world people think naively that politicians have always run things. They never have and they never will. Politicians were only the pirates' visible stooges."3
The colonial empires, Fuller claims, were never the product of the ambitions of the people of any nation. The British Empire was built on the greed of the great pirate's admirals and captains. It was the stock market crash of 1929 which eliminated the pirate's power, due principally to the breaking away of science from economic monopoly and mechanism which developed far beyond the financial capabilities of the old pirates to cope with. "Only nations and groups of nations could now cope with the magnitude of capital undertaking."4
Accelerated means of communication coupled with crisis survival conditions triggered by the '29 crash, precipitating ten years later World War II, leads Fuller to conclude that...because of the dawning awareness that the weaponry phase and its quarter-century lag can be eliminated, the second half of the tool-invention revolution is to be identified as the consciously undertaken continuance of the accelerated doing-more-with-less by world society as world society. (Emphasis added.)5
(...To Be Continued.)
1 Values Magazine Vol. 4, No. 2, Gurukula Press, Varkala, India
2 Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion, (The Overlook Press, 1969), p. 242.
3 Ibid., p. 276
4 Ibid., p. 277
5 Ibid., p. 176