© Antony V. Trowbridge [1] INTER AFRIKA PLAN

INNOVARSITY offers e-Learning For Life experiences

- that come from-

e-Learning about demonstrable innovations - with -

e-Learning from people whose ideas foresaw them - and -

e-Learning to implement them – by -

e-Learning to recognise -

The GREAT DIVIDES* that inhibit human progress – because –

“Sometimes we need to look at those things that ‘go without saying’– to make sure they are still going”

[ Carl Becker 1920 ]

“The world we have created today has problems which cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them “

[ Albert Einstein ]

“Synergetics presents a picture of the multi-optional operational field of cosmic favourabilities, inter-transformabilities and complimentary

inter-accommodations within each human individual in his life, his world [ Buckminster Fuller ]

BUCKMINSTER FULLER’S AFRICAN LEGACY

INNOVARSI

THE GREAT SYNERGETIC DIVIDE GD/3

- between ‘UTOPIA and OBLIIVION

OTHER TRIUNE IMPERATIVES

GD/1 YOUR TRIUNE BRAINGD/2 SMUTS : ‘Holism and Evolution’.

GD/3

SYNERGETIC GEOMETRY : BUCKY’S AFRICAN LEGACY

In 1958 Richard Buckminster [ Bucky] Fuller gave a ten-day workshop to a group of final year architectural students at the University of Natal. to whom he brought them the concept of Synergetics on which twenty years later he wrote two manuals, that some twenty years before Jan Christian Smuts had written his seminal work ‘Holism and Evolution’ [1926 ]

"Synergetics is the system of holistic thinking that is multi-faceted: It involves geometric modeling, exploring inter-relationships in the facts of experience and the process of thinking. Synergetics endeavors to identify and understand the methods that Nature actually uses in coordinating Universe (both physically and metaphysically). Synergetics provides a method and a philosophy for problem-solving and design and therefore has applications in all areas of human endeavor." [ Courtesy Buckminster Fuller Institute ]

World renowned for his innovations across multiple fields of endeavour - greater must have been the impact since on generations of young minds who have responded to his call to think less as specialists and experts and more as comprehensive designers.

Each morning he would greet us. Then close his eyes for a moment before launching without any notes into a series of subjects that seemed not to have and direct connection, these being his deep knowledge and history of geometry and mathematics, nautical and automobile engineering, world politics, architecture, cartography, education, industrial age history and metaphysics. But gradually we saw how he was linking them all together as components of what he later called ‘Space-ship Earth’

In so doing and through his explanations of geodesics and its fundamental origin in the Tetrahedron, he demonstrated the principle of the whole and the part played by the tetrahedron as a fundamental pattern of the universe.

“With the general systems discovery of the tetrahedron as the basic structural unit of physical universe quantation, we find that there is a fundamental hierarchy of vectorial-geometric relationships that coincides with and integrate topology, quantum mechanics and chemistry”

In the afternoon, we designed and built a geodesic dome out of corrugated iron, without a drawing board, only using a calculator. He also explained how fascinating it was that geometry could play such a part in solving problems –which he had demonstrated, and was later to be applied by virologists discovering a proliferation of his geodesic structures in their studies.

THE TRIUNE BRAIN As a master pattern-maker, he was not to know then that his prediction was to apply to the patterns of human thinking some thirty years later with the publication of Paul D. MacLean’s book of 29 chapters “Triune Brain in Evolution – Role in Paleocerebral Functions” that has subsequently brought together, not only the three substrates of the brain, but also the facility of creative insight, or Intuition as another state of consciousness about which Bucky wrote in 1973 in a book from his own experience, as the origin of his incredible findings.

“Our brains are physical tuning capabilities consisting of uniquely resonant atoms and cells. Life is the present experience. Experience begins with awareness. Every individual is an evolutionary pattern integrity”

“I am deeply interested in the play of our intuitions. I am inclined to think that our integrated organic capability is much more powerful than any of us tend to accredit. I have learned how much we can apprehend in just the flash of an eye. But they don’t usually trust their own capabilities, so they spend hours trying to find out whether their first flash impression was right or wrong”

“Only about one-half of the total brain is now employed. I surmise that our higher potentials are unrealized because inauspicious environmental conditions into which life has been born have heretofore frustrated realization of most of man’s potentials”

“Synergetics presents a picture of the multi-optional operational field of cosmic favourabilities, inter-transformabilities and complimentary inter-accommodations within each human individual, his life, his world

It is through the application of Synergetics that our human capacities can and have found expression in being able to bridge the Great Divides that are separating humankind from its God-given potential.

© Antony V. Trowbridge [2] INTER AFRIKA PLAN

THE GREAT DIVIDES – between ‘ UTOPIA AND OBLIVION’ [ Cox and Wyman Ltd 1969]

Spaceship EarthBucky’s fundamental concern was for the planet as a whole and his pleading for it and our survival was forever in his thinking and practice. On the first published photographs of the earth from outer space, Bucky drew the parallel of the astronaut’s need to be self-sufficient in order to survive to the concept of our living on ‘Spaceship Earth” and the dangers both of it and ourselves as a species facing oblivion.

“In his evolutionary unconscious participation in the past he has ruptured his earth, polluted his air and water, corrupted his children in order to sell any kind of toy, guns, dope smut and anything that would make money, and make all money-making sacrosanct. There are many indications, however, that man is just about to begin to participate consciously and somewhat more knowingly and responsibly in his own evolutionary transformation”

“Nature operates only convergently and divergently, never in parallel. Even radiant energy does not operate in parallels but in passively alternating, convergent-divergent contractions and expansions which occur in cones”

GD/5. THE GREAT EDUCATION DIVIDE ‘Art in Proportion’ His reference to ‘cones’ and his acknowledgement in ‘Synergetics’ of the geometric/ mathematical basis of what is known as the ‘Fibonacci Series’ which has been proven to be the neurological genetic basis of a Proportional Visual scale of Aesthetics, as the equivalent, indeed the same as that of the musical scale.

GD/5/1 : A CURRICULUM FOR THE BRAINBucky made a special point of the need to train comprehensive designers, but his observation also apply to general education

“Changes in curriculum intended to prepare the individual to take the design initiative in Economic, Scientific and Industrial Technology matters:

Based on the Triune Brain model of Paul MacLean, the new educational approach reverses the conventional system of memory learning of subjects in order to pick up a few skills - to a focus on some 64 mental, emotional and physical skills to serve society at large, and the future beyond a saturated industrial market

GD/6 THE GREAT AGRICULTURAL DIVIDE. World Hunger An application of geometry in the most unexpected area of solving one of the world’s greatest problems – Hunger and the attainment of Food Security which is escaping two-thirds of the population can be attained through the Natural Circle Cultivation method, that in addition to preserving the environment and its biodiversity, also saves that other threatened world resource - Water.

GD/12 THE GREAT HABITAT DIVIDEBucky was greatly concerned with the great problem of housing being :

GD/12 THE GREAT HABITAT DIVIDEBucky was greatly concerned with the great problem of housing:

“By and large, the great world housing problem is an educational problem. Man’s inertia’s are only to be overcome by virtue of his own personal discoveries, discernment and understanding what is happening to him. Quite clearly, man enabled to enjoy his total earth, enabled him to research the bottom of the sea, and to re-explore earlier patterns of life around earth. Within decades we will know whether man is going to be a success around the earth, or whether he is going to frustrate his own success with negatively conditioned reflexes of yesterday and will bring about his own extinction. My intuitions foresee success despite his negative inertias. This means things are going to move fast:

He moreover identified a number of constraints to the realisation of genuine human settlements

© Antony V. Trowbridge [3] INTER AFRIKA PLAN

1. The lack of attention to the ratio of weight-to-performance of conventional construction

“Even today, neither architects nor their clients nor the public has any though of how much buildings weigh. Practicing professional architects and students may say ‘This is not in the architectural curriculum’ What authority decreed that architectural students might be allowed to take the design initiative. …and who is going to pay us ? The answer is ‘What authority told the Wright brothers to invent the aeroplane ? ‘Who told Bell Laboratory to invent the transistor ?’ Initiative can only be take by the individual on his own self-conviction of the necessity to overcome his conditioned reflexes which had accustomed him to yield authority to the wisdom of others”

2. The size of houses“The size of houses greatly decreased as servants were replaced by machines. Size of families decreased. Despite this, the cost per square foot of the enclosing structure has rocketed skywards. Because of these trends, what we now call ‘home trailers are simply modern, lightweight, aluminium houses, full of mechanical package which constitutes an improved standard of living- minus the expensive house, compacted into an array of ‘mobile homes’ as the home market has never prospered, despite the lack of aesthetic appeal.

3. The non-use of modern materials and technologies, “Housing is an energetic environment-controlling mechanism “In 1920, eighty-five percent of the cost of production of a single-family dwelling went into the house’s shell and foundation. Only fifteen per cent went into what we call ‘‘mechanical inclusions’, the electric refrigerator, , hot water heater , the radio etc. By 1940 sixty-five per cent of the general contract went into ‘mechanical inclusions’

4. Technology and Materials Bucky also impressed on us the economical use of materials – not by substitution but by designing especially for that material, such as timber in boat building. This was the basis for building six triangular houses of 80 sq metres – the first to be approved by the Durban Municipality using engineering criteria of laminated beams. And with the roof construction being configured with minimum size rafters, the consequent curved covering provided both strength and lightness. Also, more accommodation was also provided to include a combined kitchen family room with the different shapes of the rooms providing an impression of larger rooms. Six were built only, because being a standard shape, it suffered the same aesthetic disadvantage in repetition, as other mass housing and indeed Bucky’s domes.

5. The obsolescence of the city and urban sprawl.“The concept of cities as they now exist, developed entirely before the existence or thought of electricity or automobiles. Cities developed as warehouse trading posts. All warehousing has become dynamic and is now mostly on wheel, wings or in ships. The cities were later used to house vast hordes of immigrants to work in the factories

“Cities, as we know them are obsolete in all respects of yesterday’s functions. Trying to rebuild cities to make them accommodate the new needs of modern man is like trying to reconstruct and improve a wrecked ship, as the shipwreck rests upon the reef, pounded by the surf – the surf of technological obsolescence is invisible but is more inexorably powerful in its destruction than are the pounding of the waves of a visible ocean .

“Man now sprawls horizontally upon the land – uncheckable by the planners who enjoy the right to ‘suggest’. Visionless realtors, backed by government funds, operate indiscriminately in acquiring low-cost options on farmland upon which they install speculator houses.”

GD/12 An e-Village fulfils the objectives of the World Summit for Sustainable Development by working with PEOPLE and creating PROSPERITY with concern for the PLANET:

An e-Village combines the quality of rural community life with the benefits of contemporary urban living, and is ecologically sustainable and economically viable by providing opportunities for entrepreneurs and the creation of employment to attain greater community self-reliance.Moreover, it was the geometric layout that provided the essential factors of community cohesion and safety.

© Antony V. Trowbridge [4] INTER AFRIKA PLAN

GD/10 : THE GREAT ECONOMIC DIVIDE [ Page 223-4 “Wealth has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of ‘money’, as a metallic species such as goldReal wealth is irreversibly self-augmentingReal wealth cannot be used alter yesterdayReal wealth can only be used to alter today and tomorrow”

The remote rural village of Kgautswane discovered that their community’s real wealth is in its Triune Human capital – individual skillsSocial Capital collective, co-operative efforts of its local organisations, clubs and associationFinancial Capital – indeed – the people’s ‘life savings’ [Dead Capital ]were accumulated and placed with a commercial link bank on behalf of their self-owned Micro-Bank as a fixed deposited account on which collateral over 4 000 micro-loans have been made from the formal financial sector – primarily for training and small enterprises – and with a 98% repayment. [ World Bank Development Market Place Award 2000]Such a banking system is the basis for an e-Village becoming sustainable and economically viable.

GD/8 : THE GREAT DEMOCRATIC DIVIDE“We know that scientifically that for the first time in history there can be enough to support continually all of expanding humanity. But we are frustrated from realizing our success by our different political systems and laws.

“We are confronted with an ideological struggle of the world’s major political systems. Each assumes that the poverty-stricken people’s problems can only be solved by political organization.Each seeks to prove its respective political system to be superior to the other..Each spends far more time trying to frustrate the other than on real plans to make the world work Each pours its technology into weapons to people who only want to eat, love, speculate and laughWorld society is as yet unappreciative of industrialization’s significance…..to master the physical – intellectually – will bring into human intercourse a level of integrity of exploration of the metaphysical capabilities of man“All the political theories and all the concepts of political functions are completely obsolete.Malthusian economics – the “You or me” decisions.”

Co-operative GovernanceIt has been estimated that 2.4 billion people world-wide owe allegiance to some form of traditional leadership who are often portrayed as being autocratic, which brings them into direct conflict with the ‘Culture of Politics’ that decrees inherited traditional leadership to be a modern anachronism and ‘undemocratic’- as ‘no-one voted for them’. The assumptions about ‘democracy’ are as varied in theory as they are in practice. As applied in Africa the process of ‘representation’ is mostly that of voting for a party whose candidates and their ‘manifestos’ can be largely unknown to the general public – which in any case is inappropriate for the illiterate and the majority in rural areas.

HUMAN CAPITALThe people are represented in a triple Co-operative structure that serves a Traditional Leader with a second “Council of Expertise’ comprising the above Triune Brain Capital resources. The form of the new structure is a Wheel that replaces the conventional dominating Top-dog, Top-Down hierarchical pyramid thereby facilitating a community’s capacity of local decision-making and actions in generating their own social and economic development

SOCIAL CAPITAL FINANCIAL CAPITAL GD/7. THE PEACE and DEVELOPMENT DIVIDE All the above developments are all facilitated by an Open Distance Learning programme of self-instruction covering : Community Awareness : Community Leadership Community Ethics : Community Information ; Community Economics : and Community Management – all with the intention of their attaining greater self-confidence, self- worth and self-reliance - for people to create their own Utopias.

GD/4/1 TRIUNE SYNERGETIC MANAGEMENTManagement theories and systems periodically explode in the business firmament like rockets. They may illumine a particular situation for a while, but inevitably the gravity pull of tradition, apathy, suspicion or plain opposition to change, exhausts their upward momentum and they plunge earthwards to make a relatively small dent in the organizational environment. Only changes in perception and attitudes can produce the kind of changes that are necessary to meet contemporary problems and complexities.

The Triune Brain offers a fresh awareness of how every aspect is reflected in how we structure and organize an organization and the varying types of leadership required for every level and activity in the efficient and sustainable use of human, material and technical resources..

© Antony V. Trowbridge [5] INTER AFRIKA PLAN

THE PRACTICAL REALITY OF INTUITION

n his book ‘INTUITION’ [1972] Bucky Fuller the very practical, technologically motivated individual, outlines his personal experience of that source of his discoveries, and his faith in the future of humankind, despite the seeming evidence of the disintegration of society and a civilization to which we have become accustomed.

“I am aware that humanity is approaching a crisis and circumstance-biased viewpoints may dominate thus carrying humanity beyond ‘the point of no return’. I have long been intuitively aware and am now scientifically confident that a physically permitted design revolution is indeed feasible which can increase fourfold.. Again and again. step by step intuition opens the doors that leads to man’s designing of more advantageous rearrangements of the physical complex of events which we speak of as the environment whose evolutionary transition ever leads toward the physical and metaphysical success of all humanity. It was thus that intuition as the most favorable tool for self-effectiveness conditioning within our individual ken for ships sailors and the sea have been my greatest teachers and conditioners.

Our spaceship earth which witnessed a condition only two-thirds of a century ago when less than one percent of its human passengers enjoyed in an anyway comparable standard of living. I am also acutely aware that only a very small percentage of humanity has enough comprehensive experience and cerebrated reconsideration of those experiences to know that all the foregoing is true. I also realize intuitively that the elimination of the condition of resource inadequacy and thereby the elimination of human want may probably eliminate war or quick death of the slow and more anguished poverty’s consequent slow dying as brought about by lethal ignorance in respect to the design revolution potentials as society takes its only known recourse in political actions which can but throw the “ins” out or pull down the higher levels of advanced living that has yet to be realised by any humans’ without taking away or diminishing the advantages of any.

For the norm of all yesteryears was failure as unwittingly conceded by the sometimes vainly boastful and disease-bewildered people. We are also unaware that the other vast numbers of ‘have-nots’ who are almost entirely unorganized politically have for so many millennia suffered intensely both physically and metaphysically throughout their short-termed lives that there has been no suggestion in their experience that life was meant to be anything other than a tortuous trial. Ergo, they rationalize that the only explanation of such negative experience that could be hopefully contemplated is that life on earth constitutes only a period of qualification for an eternal life hereafter and elsewhere

Little humans preoccupied with the immediate needs of their physical regeneration have locked their zoom-lens focusing mechanism on the close-ups only. But evolution is apparently intent that life in the universe must survive. And because evolution is apparently intent upon accomplishing humanity’s total economic success whenever society delays overlong in adopting, producing distributing and using in peaceful spontaneity the evolutionary essential discoveries and inventions of the technological innovations evolution then forces humanity to adopt and develop all the progressively advancing technologies as emergency commitments under the negative aegis of group fear of defeat and the consequent defensive action taking.

On planet earth, agricultural economics accounts only the strictly physical, short-term realizabilities Agricultural metabolic differ from the industrial which deal exclusively with the eternal metaphysical principles impersonally governing the external detached processes of the inherently imperishable forever regenerative physical energy inter-transformings of cosmic evolution whose inexhaustible inventory of unique capabilities human minds may employ to produce with ever less units of time, weight and effort for each accomplished function.

Educators and politicians who even now utterly regard the mysterious realization that synergy now permits the logically predictable humanly conceivable and executable rearrangements of environmental constituents in ways which are sufficiently favorable for the regeneration of all life aboard the planet earthIn direct contradiction to present specialization all education processes must henceforth commence at the most comprehensive level of mental preoccupation and that level is the one that consists of the earnest attempt to embrace the whole eternally regenerative phenomenon Scenario Universe And this is what children try to do spontaneously whenever they ask their parents embarrassingly important cosmological questions

In view of all the foregoing it is equally evident hat whatever we can contribute as individuals which might lead to humanity’s choosing to abandon with sufficient alacrity its futile preoccupation with politics and the latter’s inevitable recourse to war and negatively accounted ‘spending’ is dependent upon our continuing physical health and agility metaphysical clarity and spontaneous initiative and its inherently required educational-process revolution. A second intuitive awareness regarding what the conceiving individual must do at once to capture the awareness of and secure the usefulness of that eternally reliable generalized principle for all humanity for now and henceforth”

© Antony V. Trowbridge [6] INTER AFRIKA PLAN

THE BUCKMINSTER FULLER INSTITUTEThe following extracts from the Buckminster Fuller Institute provide

a broader description of the multiple aspects of Bucky’s thinking and purposes,

‘Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment’[ R. Buckminster Fuller, 1981 ]

Comprehensive— applies a whole systems approach to all facets of the design and development

process; aims to simultaneously address multiple goals, requirements, conditions and issues;

Anticipatory— factoring in critical future trends and needs as well as projected impacts of

implementation in the short and long term;

Ecologically responsible— reflecting nature's underlying principles while enhancing the Earth's life-

support systems;

Feasible— relying on current know-how, technology and existing resources;

Verifiable— able to withstand rigorous empirical testing;

Replicable— able to scale and adapt to a broad range of conditions.

WORLD GAME REPORTWe are here to be problem-solvers; that is our function in the Universe.

We have the capability and the responsibility.[ R. Buckminster Fuller, 1973 ]

In the 1960's Buckminster Fuller proposed a “great logistics game” and “world peace game” (later shortened to simply, the “World Game”) that was intended to be a tool that would facilitate a comprehensive, anticipatory, design science approach to the problems of the world. The use of “world” in the title obviously refers to Fuller's global perspective and his contention that we now need a systems approach that deals with the world as a whole, and not a piece meal approach that tackles our problems in what he called a “local focus hocus pocus” manner.

The entire world is now the relevant unit of analysis, not the city, state or nation. For this reason, World Game programming generally used Fuller's Dymaxion Map for the plotting of resources, trends, and scenarios essential for playing. We are, in Fuller's words, onboard Spaceship Earth, and the illogic of 200 nation state admirals all trying to steer the spaceship in different directions is made clear through the metaphor--as well in Fuller's more caustic assessment of nation states as “blood clots” in the world's global metabolism.

The World Game that Fuller envisioned was to be a place where individuals or teams of people came and competed, or cooperated, to: “Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”The logic for the use of the word “game” in the title is even more instructive. It says a lot about Fuller's approach to governance and social problem solving. Obviously intended as a very serious tool, Fuller choose to call his vision a “game” because he wanted it seen as something that was accessible to everyone, not just the elite few in the power structure who thought they were running the show. In this sense, it was one of Fuller's more profoundly subversive visions. Fuller wanted a tool that would be accessible to everyone, whose findings would be widely disseminated to the masses through a free press, and which would, through this ground-swell of public vetting and acceptance of solutions to society's problems, ultimately force the political process to move in the direction that the values, imagination and problem solving skills of those playing the democratically open world game dictated. It was a view of the political process that some might think naive, if they only saw the world for what it was when Fuller was proposing his idea (the 1960s)--minus personal computers and the Internet.

The playing field was not to be so much as leveled, or expanded, but the good 'ol boy political process was to subverted out of existence by a process that brings Thomas Jefferson into the twentieth century. In order to have this kind of power, the game needed to have the kind of information and tools for manipulating that information that empowers. It needed a comprehensive database that would provide the players of the world game with better data than their politically elected or appointed counterparts. They needed an inventory of the world's vital statistics--where everything was and in what quantities and qualities, from minerals to manufactured goods and services, to humans and their unmet needs as well as capabilities. They also needed an information source that monitored the current state of the world, bringing vital news into the “game room” live. None of this existed when Fuller began talking about a world game. And then something funny happened on the way to the twenty-first century: CNN, personal computers, CD ROMS, the Internet and worldwide web, supercomputer power on personal computers and reams of data about the world, its resources, problems and potential solutions started to bubble to the surface and transform the world and the way we communicate, do business, research and govern.

© Antony V. Trowbridge [7] INTER AFRIKA PLAN