
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth - Chapter II
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Obviously we need to pursue further the origins of specialization into deep history, hoping thereby to correct or eliminate our erroneous concepts. Historically we can say that average human beings throughout pre-twentieth-century history had each seen only about one-millionth of the surface of their spherical Earth. This limited experience gave humans a locally-focused, specialized viewpoint. Not surprisingly, humanity thought the world was flat, and not surprisingly humans thought its horizontally extended plane went circularly outward to infinity. In our schools today we still start off the education of our children by giving them planes and lines that go on, incomprehensibly "forever" toward a meaningless infinity. Such oversimplified viewpoints are misleading, blinding, and debilitating, because they preclude possible discovery of the significance of our integrated experiences.Under these everyday, knowledge-thwarting or limiting circumstances of humanity, the comprehensively-informed master venturers of history who went to sea soon realized that the only real competition they had was that of other powerful outlaws who might also know or hope to learn through experience "what it is all about." I call these sea mastering people the great outlaws or Great Pirates-the G. P.s simply because the arbitrary laws enacted or edicted by men on the land could not be extended effectively to control humans beyond their shores and out upon the seas. So the world men who lived on the seas were inherently outlaws, and the only laws that could and did rule them were the natural laws-the physical laws of universe which when tempestuous were often cruelly devastating. High seas combined with natures fog and night-hidden rocks were uncompromising.
And it followed that these Great Pirates came into mortal battle with one another to see
who was going to control the vast sea routes and eventually the world. Their battles took place out of sight of landed humanity. Most of the losers went to the bottom utterly unbeknownst to historians. Those who stayed on the top of the waters and prospered did so because of their comprehensive capability. That is they were the antithesis of specialists. They had high proficiency in dealing with celestial navigation, the storms, the sea, the men, the ship, economics, biology, geography, history, and science. The wider and more long distanced their anticipatory strategy, the more successful they became.
But these hard, powerful, brilliantly resourceful sea masters had to sleep occasionally, and therefore found it necessary to surround themselves with super-loyal, muscular but dull-brained illiterates who could not see nor savvy their masters stratagems. There was great safety in the mental dullness of these henchmen. The Great Pirates realized that the only people who could possibly contrive to displace them were the truly bright people. For this reason their number-one strategy was secrecy. If the other powerful pirates did not know where you were going, nor when you had gone, nor when you were coming back, they would not know how to waylay you. If anyone knew when you were coming home, "small-timers" could come out in small boats and waylay you in the dark and take you over-just before you got home tiredly after a two-year treasure-harvesting voyage. Thus hijacking and second-rate piracy became a popular activity around the worlds shores and harbors. Thus secrecy became the essence of the lives of the successful pirates; ergo, how little is known today of that which I am relating.
Leonardo da Vinci is the outstanding example of the comprehensively anticipatory design scientist. Operating under the patronage of the Duke of Milan he designed the fortified defenses and weaponry as well as the tools of peaceful production. Many other great military powers had their comprehensive design scientist-artist inventors; Michelangelo was one of them.
Many persons wonder why we do not have such men today. It is a mistake to think we cannot. What happened at the time of Leonardo and Galileo was that mathematics was so improved by the advent of the zero that not only was much more scientific shipbuilding made possible but also much more reliable navigation. Immediately thereafter truly large-scale venturing on the worlds oceans commenced, and the strong sword-leader patrons as admirals put their Leonardos to work, first in designing their new and more powerful world-girdling ships. Next they took their Leonardos to sea with them as their seagoing Merlins to invent ever more powerful tools and strategies on a world-around basis to implement their great campaigns to best all the other great pirates, thereby enabling them to become masters of the world and of all its people and wealth. The required and scientifically designed secrecy of the sea operations thus pulled a curtain that hid the Leonardos from public view, popular ken, and recorded history.
Finally, the sea-dwelling Leonardos became Captains of the ships or even Admirals of Fleets, or Commandants of the Navy yards where they designed and built the fleets, or they became the commandants of the naval war colleges where they designed and developed the comprehensive strategy for running the world for a century to come. This included not only the designing of the network of world-around voyaging and of the ships for each task but also the designing of the industrial establishments and world-around mining operations and naval base-building for production and maintenance of the ships. This Leonardo-type planning inaugurated todays large-scale, world-around industrializations vast scale of thinking. When the Great Pirates came to building steel steamships and blast furnaces and railroad tracks to handle the logistics, the Leonardos appeared momentarily again in such men as Telford who built the railroads, tunnels, and bridges of England, as well as the first great steamship.
You may say, "Arent you talking about the British Empire?" I answer, No The so-called British Empire was a manifest of the world-around misconception of who ran things and a disclosure of the popular ignorance of the Great Pirates absolute world-controlling through their local-stooge sovereigns and their prime ministers, as only innocuously and locally modified here and there by the separate sovereignties internal democratic processes. As we soon shall see, the British Isles lying off the coast of Europe constituted in effect a fleet of unsinkable ships and naval bases commanding all the great harbours of Europe. Those islands were the possession of the topmost Pirates. Since the Great Pirates were building, maintaining, supplying their ships on those islands, they also logically made up their crews out of the native islanders who were simply seized or commanded aboard by imperial edict. Seeing these British Islanders aboard the top pirate ships the people around the world mistakenly assumed that the world conquest by the Great Pirates was a conquest by the will, ambition, and organization of the British people. Thus was the G. P.s grand deception victorious. But the people of those islands never had the ambition to go out and conquer the world. As a people they were manipulated by the top pirates and learned to cheer as they were told of their nations world prowess.
The topmost Great Pirates Leonardos discovered-both in their careful, long-distance
planning and in their anticipatory inventingthat the grand strategies of sea power made it
experimentally clear that a plurality of ships could usually outmaneuver one ship. So the
Great Pirates Leonardos invented navies. Then, of course, they had to control various
resource-supplying mines, forests, and lands with which and upon which to build the ships
and establish the industries essential to building, supplying, and maintaining their navys ships.
Then came the grand strategy which said, "divide and conquer." You divide up the other mans ships in battle or you best him when several of his ships are hauled out on the land
for repairs. They also had a grand strategy of anticipatory divide and conquer. Anticipatory
divide and conquer was much more effective than tardy divide and conquer, since it enabled
those who employed it to surprise the other pirate under conditions unfavorable to the latter, So the great top pirates of the world, realizing that dull people were innocuous and that the only people who could contrive to displace the supreme pirates were the bright ones, set about to apply their grand strategy of anticipatory divide and conquer to solve that situation comprehensively.
The Great Pirate came into each of the various lands where he either acquired or sold goods profitably and picked the strongest man there to be his local head man. The Pirates picked man became the Pirates general manager of the local realm. If the Great Pirates local strong man in a given land had not already done so, the Great Pirate told him to proclaim himself king. Despite the local head mans secret subservience to him, the Great Pirate allowed and counted upon his king-stooge to convince his countrymen that he, the local king, was indeed the head man of all men the god-ordained ruler. To guarantee that sovereign claim the Pirates gave their stooge-kings secret lines of supplies which provided everything required to enforce the sovereign claim. The more massively bejeweled the kings gold crown, and the more visible his court and castle, the less visible was his pirate master.
The Great Pirates said to all their lieutenants around the world, "Any time bright young people show up, Id like to know about it, because we need bright men." So each time the Pirate came into port the local king-ruler would mention that he had some bright, young men whose capabilities and thinking shone out in the community. The Great Pirate would say to the king, "All right, you summon them and deal with them as follows: As each young man is brought forward you say to him, Young man, you are very bright. Im going to assign you to a great history tutor and in due course if you study well and learn enough Im going to make you my Royal Historian, but youve got to pass many examinations by both your teacher and myself." And when the next bright boy was brought before him the King was to say, "Im going to make you my Royal Treasurer," and so forth. Then the Pirate said to the king, "You will finally say to all of them: But each of you must mind your own business or off go your heads. Im the only one who minds everybodys business. "
And this is the way schools beganas the royal tutorial schools. You realize, I hope, that I am not being facetious. That is it. This is the beginning of schools and colleges and the beginning of intellectual specialization. Of course, it took great wealth to start schools, to have great teachers, and to house, clothe, feed, and cultivate both teachers and students. Only the Great-Pirate-protected robber-barons and the Pirate-protected and secret intelligence-exploited international religious organizations could afford such scholarship investment. And the development of the bright ones into specialists gave the king very great brain power, and made him and his kingdom the most powerful in the land and thus, secretly and greatly, advantaged his patron Pirate in the world competition with the other Great Pirates.
But specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the "expert" is fooled into accepting his slavery by making him feel that in return he is in a socially and culturally preferred, ergo, highly secure, lifelong position. But only the kings son received the Kingdom-wide scope of training.
However, the big thinking in general of a spherical Earth and celestial navigation was retained exclusively by the Great Pirates, in contradistinction to a four-cornered, flat world concept, with empire and kingdom circumscribed knowledge, constricted to only that which could be learned through localized preoccupations. Knowledge of the world and its resources was enjoyed exclusively by the Great Pirates, as were also the arts of navigation, shipbuilding and handling, and of grand logistical strategies and of nationally-undetectable,therefore effectively deceptive, international exchange media and trade balancing tricks by which the top pirate, as (in gamblers parlance) "the house," always won.






