From killingry to livingry
My mentor, R.Buckminster Fuller, introduced the terms killingry and livingry nearly 100 years ago.
As a naval cadet, he was trained in ballistics. He determined that the precessional effects – the effects at 90 degrees to the goal – of making weapons to kill – killingry – would advantage living – livingry.
When people are oppressed, starved and bombed, they either capitulate or they become extraordinarily creative. They use what they have, the resources in their immediate surroundings, to increase survival. The tool we use for this type of creative resourcing is Synergistic Accounting.
The Vietnamese defeated the mighty USA through remarkable adaptation backed by the sheer will to resist.
Ukraine remains on the battlefield against the might of Russia. They lead the world in the inventive use of drones. By necessity.
David has a way of bringing down Goliath.
The large systems of the world are crumbling. Too big to fail has become too big to last. All Empires fall. As Luke Kemp proposes in his book, Goliath’s Curse, collapse begins when inequality escalates. This pattern has been tracked to the beginning of human history.
The technology used to kill can be adapted to increase living.
Just as AI can be used to colonise humanity’s mind or find the solutions to cancer, the tools created under systems of oppression are translatable, and given their early stage in the development cycle, have not become too big to fail. (One might argue this point about AI, where the investment has created a bubble, and all bubbles burst. Yet the rubble from AI’s bursting can be used for livingry.)
We can look at the technology of killingry as evil, or we can look at it with the question of convertibility to livingry.
When we do an all systems account – Synergistic Accounting – which includes the good, bad, ugly, marginalised, shadow, broken and corrupt, we might begin to cohere possibility for good where none existed.
This is a significant aspect of Syntropic World’s work.
Photo Taken October 16th 2025, Article published November 16th, 2025
