We can’t defeat the existing system; we must build a better one instead

By David McElroy · June 12, 2012

Buckminster Fuller was an architect, engineer, writer, inventor and futurist, but he was also a rebel who was kicked out of Harvard twice and never finished there. After he was admitted for the second time, he was expelled for “irresponsibility and lack of interest.” He had no interest in the existing systems and practices he found. He was only interested in inventing the future — in bringing to life the vision he saw in his own mind.

Fuller saw different ways of designing and engineering buildings, among other things. He didn’t try to convince architects and engineers that their conventional designs were wrong. He didn’t care about fighting them. He simply went about the work of inventing what he saw in his mind’s eye. He was very conscious of this approach.

“You never change something by fighting the existing reality,” Fuller said. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Fuller was miserably unsuccessful in the early years of his life. In addition to being kicked out of Harvard twice, he was financially unsuccessful. At one point in the 1920s, he was doing so poorly that he and his family were living in government-owned housing for poor people. Most people would have either given in and joined in doing things the way everybody else did them or spent years bitterly trying to fight a system that didn’t show any appreciation for the genius his ideas offered.

Instead, Fuller persisted in doing things his way — and great success eventually followed him. He’s now considered one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.

I started thinking about Fuller Monday — and especially his quote about not fighting to change existing reality, but rather building a new model entirely — when I was thinking more about the whole debate about whether to vote and about how the world can change (since I know it can’t happen through electoral politics). It helped me to crystalize something in my mind that I already knew, but just hadn’t put into words.

We can’t change political reality by fighting it. We can’t change the oppressive nature of coercive governments by voting for more favorable politicians. We can’t bring about individual freedom by convincing everyone to want it. We can’t bring about the kinds of societies we want by trying to tear down the parts of the old ones that we don’t like. We can only defeat the coercive state by building a new model that is so desirable and so successful that people around the world will clamor for it.

For those of us who are unhappy with the way the world is now — and particularly for those of us who ache to see how much of the world is mired in painful poverty and ignorance — the only solution is to build something new. Political scientist Vincent Ostrom (who built much of his work on the thinking of early 20th century Austrian economists) pointed out that self-government is the key to ending the painful gap between the wealthy and the poor.

“The most radical source of inequalities in human societies is the ‘ruler-ruled’ relationship,” Ostrom said. “The fashioning of a truly free world depends upon building the fundamental infrastructures that enable different peoples to become self-governing.”

If we’re going to have any hope of building a world where poverty is reduced and hundreds of millions of people can have an opportunity for a better life, we have to do more than just fight the existing system. We have to do more than just take money from successful people and hand it to the poor. And we have to do more than just help people in poverty through existing models of charity or ministry. We have to invent something brand new.

The coercive state as we know it isn’t going to suddenly go away. I believe it’s going to collapse in time, but if we haven’t invented a better model — and shown that it works — something even worse than the existing state might take its place.

Pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay famously said in 1971, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Most people don’t have the vision for how to invent much of anything. Fewer still have the practical ability or the patience or the determination. But what we need now are people who are willing to have a vision for a different societal model — even though nobody around us will understand how it can work — and then struggle for ways to plant that model and prove its viability.

I don’t know exactly how we’re going to pull that off. I don’t know how long it will take. It might be our children or grandchildren who complete whatever we’re laying the foundation for. But I know we won’t make it happen by fighting the coercive state. We will only do it by inventing an alternative that makes people willingly give up the old model and insist that they live under a new paradigm.

The time we spend fighting the system is wasted time. Whether the answer is to be found in free cities or micro nations or seasteads or something we haven’t even thought of, the answer isn’t going to exist until we invent it and build it and show it to the world. I’m still looking for partners who are trying to figure this out and make it happen.

The path is very fuzzy, but we have to find a way to make our way down that path. I believe the future of the civilized world might depend on it.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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