posted on Nov, 3 2009 @ 12:06 PM
I've recently been re-reading some of my Robert Anton Wilson and Bucky Fuller materials. Specifically the stuff from the late 70s and early 80s, and
it's really kind of mind boggling. If you take a look at Fuller's work, particularly Critical Path and the World Game Experiment, you get a
very real picture of viability of a technological utopia of sorts. Compound that with RAW's various reports from the cutting edge/fringes of the
scientific communities and you can see very strong movement towards harnessing the full power of technology available at the time (from roughly the
late-sixties onward) and is still available today in order to secure a basic standard of living for a majority of the world's population.
Admittedly, much of this technology was championed by people whose relatively mushy-minded faith in the inherent good of humanity led them to believe
that various forms of Collectivism would be somehow free of the corruptions and clusterfoolery of our nations distorted Capitalism system, but what
was being put forward was technically sound.
The general vision (and each futurist had their own variation on the theme) was a world where the following resources were "free": Food, Shelter and
Energy. With those three fundamentals being a given simply by providing people with the technology needed to be self-sufficient, people would be
happier in their work since they would be working for Wants rather than Needs, thus eliminating the sense of quiet desperation that causes mankind so
much misery which lay at the heart of so many of our world's plagues (crime, war, religion).
The boost in free/leisure time would allow people to devote their personal resources (skills, labor, thoughts, energy) to that which interested them.
Soon, advancements in the technology and the arts would begin to advance exponentially as humanity's greatest untapped resource (the human mind) was
unleashed from a life of worry and depression.
I know. I know. This is your typical Utopian claptrap; the kind of thing the Global Elites would NEVER allow because it endangers their profits. If
we use technology to give every man woman and child the quality of life of a billionaire (something Fuller calculated as possible using known
resources as of 1979), then what would the billionaires do to feel special?
Still, I look around at how utterly FUBAR we are as a planet, and I have to wonder. Where the heck did all these visionaries go? Is there not one
example of these ideas put into practice? How thoroughly did the TPTB have to squash these people that we see so little real progress in terms of
quality of life while the technology for frivolous distraction advances at a pace that proves a lot about what the futurists were predicting?
RAW's dead, Bucky's World Game was bought by a consortium which now uses it for BS corporate exercises, Barbara Marx Hubbard is hocking abstract
concious evolution seminars, Toffler's stuff is still talked about as fantasy even though much of the technology is viable today.
Architecure and engineering students design "Houses of the Future" that are almost identical to the models built in the seventies. The technology
is negligibly better and as out of the average person's reach as ever if not more so.
The closest thing it seems we have is the amazing work being done at Arcosanti, but considering the momentum that was brewing 30 years ago, it seems a
shamefully small step for humanity.
Thoughts?