Ruth Forbes in documentary

[David Andrews]

Ruth Forbes Paine Young, Ruth Paine's mother, is interviewed in this documentary about her husband Arthur M. Young, designer of the Bell helicopter, gnostic philosopher, and UFO enthusiast.  Forbes appears at about 15:57 and for a few minutes after.

 

Edited January 23, 2018 by David Andrews

[Kirk Gallaway]

Dave, Interesting.

Ruth, tai chi no less!  But Arthur, obviously a brilliant guy, but quite the metaphysician!  I've seen his book, but didn't know it was him. Pretty groovy couple, with high aspirations!

[David Andrews]

I’ve been at the far fringes of Arthur M. Young’s world, so let me mention what I see in my jaundiced imagination.

Graduates Princeton in mathematics, but doesn’t pursue an academic career.  Goes through a crisis period after graduating, deciding what to apply himself to other than mathematical research.  Spends twelve years perfecting rotary flight on his father’s farm.  Achieves the first successful design, then transfers at least one of the patents involved to Bell Aircraft, where he works for under seven years.  Allegedly, the spectre of nuclear destruction causes him to turn his back on yet a second career – though it may again have been mere institutional dissatisfaction, as after Princeton.  Young never speaks about the upgrading of conventional warfare’s destructiveness by the Bell helicopter.

Drawing on a youthful period when he explored astrology, spirit mediumship, and once participated in a séance attempting to contact a UFO hovering over earth, Young takes the money from his one, decisive scientific trick and opens a Foundation for the Study of Consciousness in Philadelphia, with wife Ruth Forbes.  He attempts to draw a process model of the universe to build a philosophy on.  Having first toyed somewhat solipsistically with the helicopter as a “winged self” model of developing human consciousness, he settles on a model of universal development that traces only a quasi-scientific progress from light to matter, moored conservatively in Aristotle’s taxonomy and the hoary, religious Great Chain of Being model, so as not to be thought too weird and non-referential.

The Foundation in Philadelphia mutates into the Institute for the Study of Consciousness at Berkeley.  There, Young can apply variations of his process model to study of multiple disciplines: creative arts, political science, physics, and such.  Now he’s an across-the-board genius, and from his classrooms can recommend likely candidates for sponsored study in the sciences, artificial intelligence, economics – assembling all manner of theory to justify stealing, killing, dominance.  Ruth Forbes Paine Young now has the funding and intellectual connections to develop the International Peace Academy, another equivocating think-tank from which talent for other areas of endeavor may be drawn.  The Academy is an offshoot of Forbes’ past involvement the anti-nuke World Federalist Movement, of whose sister organization, the United World Federalists, Cord and Mary Meyer were members. 

Is all the funding for this from the Youngs' personal capital and investment?  From patents?

I have, in my own process philosophy, spoken of the Kennedy assassination as an affair of couples, high and low: the Kennedys, the Oswalds, the Dulleses, the Paines, the De Mohrenschildts, and so on.  But what of an affair of mothers?  Do a highborn mother and her children help create the circumstances that enmesh in sorrow a lowborn mother and hers?  It sounds like the blueprint for the Vietnam war to me.  Though our taxonomy ought to include the mother of the Kennedy children, for completeness.

Edited January 23, 2018 by David Andrews