Buckminster Fuller

(July 12, 1895-July 1, 1983) is a , , and .

Table of contents

1 Verified Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)">2 from Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963) Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975)">3 from Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975) 3.1 Moral of the work 3.2 Introduction: The Wellspring of Reality 3.3 Synergy onwards… 3.4 Afterpiece 4 from Critical Path (1981) Grunch of Giants (1983)">5 from Grunch of Giants (1983) 6 Attributed

Verified

• "Dare to be naïve."
  • Source: Motto of R. Buckminster Fuller used in many of his speeches and writings.

• "Don't fight forces, use them."
  • Source: Shelter (1932)

• "God is a verb."
  • Source: No More Secondhand God (1963)

• "Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies."
  • Source: Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects of Humanity (1969)

• "The Things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done —that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual."
  • Letter to "Micheal" (February 16, 1970)
    • Micheal was a 10 year old boy who had inquired of Fuller whether he was a "doer" or a "thinker".

• "I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing —a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process —an integral function of the universe."
  • I Seem to Be a Verb (1970)

• "...I seek through comprehensive anticipatory design science and its reductions to physical practices to reform the environment instead of trying to reform humans, being intent thereby to accomplish prototyped capabilities of doing more with less..." ()
  • Source: Page 1, Earth, Inc. by Buckminster Fuller ISBN 0-385-01825-8 (1973)
    • This is just part of a really long sentence that covers the whole first page. But in this part of the quote, the true intention of the entire book is stated.

• "It seems to demonstrate that periods of industrial activity in technical syntheses of principles, data, free energy and energy as "matter," find highest employment by the fear-amassed credits of warfare. Therefore the assumption approaches fact that war promotes the major technical advances of civilization.... What has not been clear is that the potential of this emergency-born technology has always accrued to human's prewar individual initiatives taken in a humble but irrepressible progression of assumptions, measurements, deductions, and codifications of pure science." (1947)
  • Source: Page 20, Earth, Inc. by Buckminster Fuller (1973)
    • Notes: In this passage, Fuller begins to explain why technological progress seems to make great gains in war time and states his view that this is a reflection of advances mainly made in peacetime - wars simply force nations to take notice of their advances in the pure science and then they apply those advances to the war effort. Later in the book Fuller will explain why he thinks war is not necessary to bring advances in the pure sciences into actual production. He uses this to advance the notion that humans can very comfortably live at a high standard of living by "doing more with less."

• "Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment."
  • Interview (April 30, 1978)

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)">

from Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

• " Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences. Only our minds are able to discover the generalized principles operating without exception in each and every special-experience case which if detected and mastered will give knowledgeable advantage in all instances."

• "Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking."

• "One of humanity’s prime drives is to understand and be understood. All other living creatures are designed for highly specialized tasks. Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender and co-ordinator of local universe affairs."

• "As a consequence of the slavish "categoryitis" the scientifically illogical, and as we shall see, often meaningless questions "Where do you live?" "What are you?" "What religion?" "What race?" ’"What nationality?" are all thought of today as logical questions. By the twenty-first century it either will have become evident to humanity that these questions are absurd and anti-evolutionary or men will no longer be living on Earth."

• "There’s a major pattern of energy in universe wherein the very large events, earthquakes, and so forth, occur in any one area of universe very much less frequently than do the small energy events. Around the Earth insects occur more often than do earthquakes. In the patterning of total evolutionary events, there comes a time, once in a while, amongst the myriad of low energy events, when a large energy event transpires and is so disturbing that with their general adaptability lost, the ultra-specialized creatures perish."

• "Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate "comprehensivlty." Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us."

• "Evolution consists of many great revolutionary events taking place quite independently of man’s consciously attempting to bring them about. Man is very vain; he likes to feel that he is responsible for all the favorable things that happen, and he is innocent of all the unfavorable happenings. But all the larger evolutionary patternings seeming favorable or unfavorable to man’s conditioned reflexing are transpiring transcendentally to any of man’s conscious planning or contriving."

• "Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space./…/ Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship."

• "Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it."

• "Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system’s separate parts or any subassembly of the system’s parts. There is nothing in the chemistry of a toenail that predicts the existence of a human being."

• " Universe is synergetic. Life is synergetic. "

• "Topology provides the synergetic means of ascertaining the values of any system of experiences. Topology is the science of fundamental pattern and structural relationships of event constellations."

• " The procedure we are pursuing is that of true democracy. Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgement what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect's function in universe."

• "Einstein, Planck, and other leading scientists said, 'We’re going to have to reassess and redefine the physical universe.' —They defined the physical universe as 'an aggregate of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping transformation events.'"

• "Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less. He may learn that what he thought was true was not true. By the elimination of a false premise, his basic capital wealth which in his given lifetime is disembarrassed of further preoccupation with considerations of how to employ a worthless time-consuming hypothesis. Freeing his time for its more effective exploratory investment is to give man increased wealth."

• "Sum-totally, we find that the physical constituent of wealth-energy-cannot decrease and that the metaphysical constituent-know-how-can only increase. This is to say that everytime we use our wealth it increases."

• " The difference between mind and brain is that brain deals only with memorized, subjective, special-case experiences and objective experiments, while mind extracts and employs the generalized principles and integrates and interrelates their effective employment. Brain deals exclusively with the physical, and mind exclusively with the metaphysical."

• "Synergy is the only word in our language which identifies the meaning for which it stands. Since the word is unknown to the average public, as I have already pointed out, it is not at all surprising that synergy has not been included in the economic accounting of our wealth transactions or in assessing our common wealth capabilities."

• "You may very appropriately want to ask me how we are going to resolve the ever-acceleratingly dangerous impasse of world-opposed politicians and ideological dogmas. I answer, it will be resolved by the computer."

• "While no politician or political system can ever afford to yield understandably and enthusiastically to their adversaries and opposers, all politicians can and will yield enthusiastically to the computers safe flight-controlling capabilities in bringing all of humanity in for a happy landing."

• "Take the initiative. Go to work, and above all co-operate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe."

Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975)">

from Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975)

Moral of the work

• "Dare to be naïve."

• "It is one of our most exciting discoveries that local discovery leads to a complex of further discoveries. Corollary to this we find that we no sooner get a problem solved than we are overwhelmed with a multiplicity of additional problems in a most beautiful payoff of heretofore unknown, previously unrecognized, and as-yet unsolved problems."

• "Each age is characterized by its own astronomical myriads of new, special-case experiences and problems to be stored in freshly born optimum capacity human brains-which storages in turn may disclose to human minds the presence of heretofore undiscovered, unsuspectedly existent eternal generalized principles."

Introduction: The Wellspring of Reality

• "We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. /…/ In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual's leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war."

• "Lack of knowledge concerning all the factors and the failure to include them in our integral imposes false conclusions."

• "There is an inherently minimum set of essential concepts and current information, cognizance of which could lead to our operating our planet Earth to the lasting satisfaction and health of all humanity."

• "We must start with scientific fundamentals, and that means with the data of experiments and not with assumed axioms predicated only upon the misleading nature of that which only superficially seems to be obvious. It is the consensus of great scientists that science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience."

• "The word generalization in literature usually means covering too much territory too thinly to be persuasive, let alone convincing. In science, however, a generalization means a principle that has been found to hold true in every special case. /…/ The principle of leverage is a scientific generalization.

• "Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction."

• The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic. It is spontaneously inquisitive. It sorts out and endeavors to understand.

• "We are now synergetically forced to conclude that all phenomena are metaphysical; wherefore, as many have long suspected — like it or not '—life is but a dream.' "

• " It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday, which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction. "

Synergy onwards…

• "Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken seperately." (101.00)

• "Unity is plural and, at minimum, is two. (224.12)

• " The explicable requires the inexplicable. Experience requires the nonexperienceable. The obvious requires the mystical. This is a powerful group of paired concepts generated by the complementarity of conceptuality." (501.13)

• " The eternal is omniembracing and permeative; and the temporal is linear. This opens up a very high order of generalizations of generalizations. The truth could not be more omni-important, although it is often manifestly operative only as a linear identification of a special-case experience on a specialized subject." (1005.52)

• " Truth is cosmically total: synergetic. Verities are generalized principles stated in semimetaphorical terms. Verities are differentiable. But love is omniembracing, omnicoherent, and omni-inclusive, with no exceptions. Love, like synergetics, is nondifferentiable, i.e., is integral." (1005.54)

• " The highest of generalizations is the synergetic integration of truth and love. " (1005.56)

Afterpiece

• "We evolute toward ever lesser brain comprehension lags —ergo, toward ever diminishing error; ergo, ever diminishing misunderstandings; ergo, ever diminishing fear, and its brain-lagging painful errors of objectivity; wherefore we approach eternal instantaneity of absolute and total comprehension. The eternal instantaneity of no lag at all. However, we have now learned from our generalizations of the great complexity of the interactions of principles as we are disembarrassed of our local, exclusively physical chemistry of information-sensing devices —that what is approached is eternal and instant awareness of absolute reality of all that ever existed. All the great metaphysical integrity of all the individuals, which is potential and inherent in the complex interactions of generalized principles, will always and only coexist eternally."

from Critical Path (1981)

A summing up of Fuller's views and outlooks on the prospects for human survival and progress. One of his more accessible works, and the only major work currently in print.

• "What humans have spontaneously identified as good and bad —or as positive and negative —are evolutionary complementations in need of more accurate identifications."

• "This book is written with the conviction that there are no 'good' or 'bad' people, no matter how offensive or eccentric to society they may seem./…/ You and I didn't design people. God designed people. What I am trying to do is to discover why God included humans in Universe."

• "All of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly —right now."

• "I am convinced that human continuance depends entirely upon: the intuitive wisdom of each and every individual /…/ the individual's integrity of speaking and acting only on the individual's own within-self-intuited and reasoned initiative /…/ the individual's never joining action with others as motivated only by crowd-engendered-emotionalism, or a sense of the crowd's power to overwhelm, or in fear of holding to the course indicated by one's own intellectual convictions."

• "Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment./…/ Humanity is in 'final exam' as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe…"

• "The nearest each of us can come to God is by loving the truth."

• "It is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate. You can decieve others, you can decieve your brain-self, but you can't decieve your mind-self —for mind deals only in the discovery of truth and the interrelationship of all truths. The cosmic laws with which mind deals are noncorruptible. Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate."

• " Humans have always unknowingly affected all Universe by every act and thought they articulate or even consider. /…/ Realistic, comprehensively responsible, omni-system-considerate, unselfish thinking on the part of humans does absolutely affect human destiny."

• "There are no solids. There are no things. There are only interfering and noninterfering patterns operative in pure principle, and principles are eternal. Principles never contradict principles. /…/ The synergetic integral of the totality of principles is God, whose sum-total behavior in pure principle is beyond our comprehension and is utterly mysterious to us, because as humans —in pure principle —we do not and never will know all the principles."

Grunch of Giants (1983)">

from Grunch of Giants (1983)

• "I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics."

• "I set about fifty-five years ago (1927) to see what a penniless, unknown human individual with a dependent wife and newborn child might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity…"

• "I do not look upon human beings as good or bad. I don't think of my feet as a right foot and a wrong foot. /…/ I am a student of the effectiveness of the technological evolution in its all unexpected alterations of the preoccupations of humanity and in its all unexpected alterings of human behaviors and prospects."

• "I do know that technologically humanity now has the opportunity, for the first time in its history, to operate our planet in such a manner as to support and accommodate all humanity at a substantially more advanced standard of living than any humans have ever experienced."

• "Humanity is now experiencing history's most difficult evolutionary transformation."

• "The new human networks' emergence represents the natural evolutionary expansion into the just completed, thirty-years-in-its-buildings world-embracing, physical communications network. The new reorienting of human networking constitutes the heart-and-mind-pumped flow of life and intellect into the world arteries."

• "When blimp photographs are taken of giant stadia packed full of rock-concert or football fans, we get an idea of what 100,000 people look like. We all think of Hiroshima as the worst single killing of humans by humans. That was about a 75,000-capacity-coliseum-full. Each day of each year, year after year, a 75,000-capacity-stadiumfull of around-the-world humans perish from starvation or its side effects, despite an annual average 5-percent world food-production overage of the amount of food adequate for the total world's population. This daily kill of innocents dwarfs the awful Auschwitz killing."

• "Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys — legally enacted game-playing — agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members."

• "I have been a deliberate half-century-fused inciter of a cool-headed, natural, gestation-rate-paced revolution, armed with physically demonstrable livingry levers with which altogether to elevate all humanity to realization of an inherently sustainable, satisfactory-to-all, ever higher standard of living. Critical threshold-crossing of the inevitable revolution is already underway."

Attributed

• "When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."

• *"Don't oppose forces, use them."

• "It is not for me to change you. The question is, how can I be of service to you without diminishing your degrees of freedom?"

• "All of humanity now has the option to "make it" successfully and sustainably, by virtue of our having minds, discovering principles and being able to employ these principles to do more with less."

• "It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a 'higher standard of living than any have ever known.' It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival."

• "There is something patently insane about all the typewriters sleeping with all the beautiful plumbing in the beautiful office buildings —and all the people sleeping in the slums."

• "Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers."

• "We are on a spaceship; a beautiful one. It took billions of years to develop. We're not going to get another. Now, how do we make this spaceship work?"

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