Books |
Buckminster Fuller
By
Published: Oct 15, 2018
Category:
Memoir
For a genius, he’s not very well known.
In the 1930s, he invented the Dymaxion Car, a three-wheeled, teardrop-shaped vehicle that carried 11 passengers, got 30 miles per gallon and topped out at 120 miles an hour.
And then there was the Dymaxion House — round as a top, aluminum, extremely weather resistant. And never mass-manufactured.
In the 1940s,his realization that the triangle is the strongest shape in nature led him to invent the geodesic dome. Huff and puff all you want, domes are all but impossible to blow down. And shockingly cheap to build.
But his greatest invention was in the realm of ideas. Long before Stewart Brand slapped a picture of the Earth on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog, Bucky Fuller was thinking about the earth as a spaceship. He started with a simple truth:
There is one outstanding important fact regarding spaceship earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.
From there, Fuller built out ideas that he thought would be as strong as triangles. In the l960s and early 1970s — the last great era of free thought and idealism — he was in demand as a speaker. He died in 1983, and although several of his ideas have become more and more relevant, he’s drifted into a kind of oblivion.
Now he’s like a dotty uncle who’s remembered for his bow ties.
He deserves better.
All the biographical information you need: Fuller was born into a distinguished New England family. He was thrown out of Harvard, bounced around, had a hardscrabble life. When he was 32, his young daughter died. He contemplated suicide. Then he decided to turn his life into "an experiment, to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity."
“Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth” is the shortest, most accessible statement of his thinking. It’s a beautiful, challenging book, exciting even when it’s flat-out wrong — like: “By 2000, politics will simply fade away. We will not see any political parties.” The book is a short (150-page) collection of essays and talks. For many, the most fascinating comes right at the start, “Origins of Specialization.” He’s no specialist – “I’m just a tremendous bundle of experience” — and he has no admiration for them. [To buy the paperback of “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here. To buy “Bucky Works: Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas for Today” from Amazon click here.]
As he sees it, all men were once equal. Then men took to the sea. They realized that brains mattered to help them rule the natives they met. The masters of the sea became “Great Pirates” — others call them “kings”. They started schools and created “experts”. (These “experts” were, he says, really slaves who were tricked into accepting their slavery through court positions.)
So what are nations? For Fuller, they’re organized business scams that mostly benefit the Great Pirates:
Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.
But then World War I came along, and ended the reign of the Great Pirates. Why? There was terrible destruction, but outside of the loss of life, property and industry were quickly replaced. Clearly, Darwin, Malthus and Marx were wrong — there was plenty to go around.
The ultimate liberator, for Fuller, is the computer. It does repetitive work so we don’t have to. It frees us to look up and out and see we are on a spaceship — and that we have a cosmonaut’s destiny.
Fuller grasped that life is a miracle. That scarcity is unnecessary. That knowledge is stronger than nations. And that we can still blow it:
We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.
But do not, for a second, look out your window, see the division and stupidity, and conclude the worst. Bucky Fuller thought big and learned from experience. He believes you can too. Indeed, that you must:
If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.
BONUS VIDEO
[Many thanks to D.C. Galvin]
