COOPERATION 101
cooperation [ koh-op-uh–rey-shuhn ]
an act or instance of working or acting together for a common purpose or benefit
mutually beneficial interaction among organisms [nations] living in a limited area [planet Earth]
Boarding Spaceship Earth in 1895, Buckminster Fuller arrived with very poor vision. This wasn’t realized and corrected until he was in boyhood. As an adult Fuller saw this as a blessing because it had trained him to naturally envision the larger picture – the synergetic whole. This led to the publishing of Fuller’s book, Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth, in 1969.
Thinking of our planet as the large but actual planetary spaceship that it is, Fuller understood that, like any ship, a successful voyage depended on wise and dedicated cooperation. Instead, as Fuller explained, we have 150 different captains, each attempting to steer the ship in a different direction.
Fuller would never have advocated for an end to humanity’s rich cultural and ethnic diversity or even to individual nations. But he absolutely saw the need for dialogue, for acceptance of diversity, of different perspectives. These would be synergetic strengths, assets, in finding mutually beneficial outcomes, in finding win/win avenues for cooperation. Unquestionably, Fuller would have been against any form of militarism or war making as a way of solving international differences.
Astro-physicist Carl Sagan, a master of poetic pros, was also advocating a holistic vision when on February 14, 1990, he had NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft take one last photograph of Earth from 4 billion miles away as it was leaving our solar system for the far reaches of outer space. The image appears as a pale blue dot – a speck of dust suspended in the Cosmos.
Given the current internation turmoil on Earth, which now hints of World War III and even nuclear extinction of human life, a few paragraphs from Sagan’s book, Pale Blue Dot, are worth repeating – often:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.”
“Our posturing’s, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
“There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
The timeless words of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in his “Beyond Vietnam” sermon on April 4th, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City are as relevant today as they were then. They ring loudly of the great discord to the hopeful vision of Fuller and Sagan:
“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.” “A nation that continues to spend year after year more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
For the sake of all humanity, we Americans must honestly, and courageously, face what we have allowed our nation to become. It is our nation that has been waging constant war throughout the world for over 30 years. Not Russia, Not China, not Iran. It is our nation that has caused the deaths of over 4 million people – mostly civilians – in our wars based on lies in Yugoslavia, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Libya. Not Russia, not China, not Iran. It is our nation that has 800 military bases around the world. Not Russia, Not China, not Iran. It is America that has surrounded Russia and China with military bases and missiles. Not the other way around. It is our nation that has overthrown dozens of democratically elected governments in South and Central America, in Africa, in the Middle East and in Asia. Not Russia, not China, not Iran. It is our nation that spends more on its military and arms than the next ten nations combined, including Russia, China, and Iran.
It is the United States that is the world’s giant obstacle to cooperation, to peace, and to nations working for the common good, for the benefit of all. It is the United States that prevents the hopeful vision of Fuller and Sagan from coming to fruition on Spaceship Earth.
Cooperation 102 will begin looking at ongoing hopeful efforts around the world.