A very brave and remarkably successful, for one only man, working for the resolution of the main issues of the current state of humanity and the planet was the comprehensive anticipatory design scientist Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983).
He was very good example of the psychology of the planetary scale human being, in the service of the totality of humanity and the planet.
He may be considered that he introduced of a new science and discipline that may be called
Global Design for the prosperity of all humanity, and life on the planet.
Buckminster Fuller was continuously pondering on the question
What the little individual can do, that cannot be done by large nations, governments , financial institutions, and large enterprises? And in what the little individual would of greater virtue and value, to be helped by the invisible cosmic powers of nature and cosmic evolution, for a prosperous life on the planet in harmony with the universe?
Always the answer was hitting clear to his mind:
Truth, integrity, humility, good intentions for planetary and cosmic scale prosperity, and genuinely spontaneous inspired innovations, are some of the virtues and qualities of the little individual that the previous larger entities do not have in this civilization contingency. For this reason the hopes of the Planet's prosperity and cosmic evolution are higher towards the little individual.
And when we speak of the integrity of the individual , we speak of that which life has taught the individual by direct experience, expressed with honesty and truth.
Quotes by Buckminster Fuller in his book
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)
- 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.
- 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" (16 February 1970) Micheal was a 10 year old boy who had inquired in a letter as to whether Fuller was a "doer" or a "thinker".
- Dare to be naive.
- 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 stores in turn may disclose to human minds the presence of heretofore undiscovered, unsuspectedly existent eternal generalized principles.
- The youth of humanity all around our planet are intuitively revolting from all sovereignties and political ideologies. The youth of Earth are moving intuitively toward an utterly classless, raceless, omnicooperative, omniworld humanity. Children freed of the ignorantly founded educational traditions and exposed only to their spontaneously summoned, computer-stored and -distributed outflow of reliable-opinion-purged, experimentally verified data, shall indeed lead society to its happy egress from all misinformedly conceived, fearfully and legally imposed, and physically enforced customs of yesterday. They can lead all humanity into omnisuccessful survival as well as entrance into an utterly new era of human experience in an as-yet and ever-will-be fundamentally mysterious Universe.
- 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 deceive others, you can deceive your brain-self, but you can't deceive 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 non-corruptible Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate.
- 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.
- 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 every time we use our wealth it increases.
- 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.
- Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives.
- 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.
- 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.
- The effective decisions can only be made by the independently thinking and adequately informed human individuals and their telepathically intercommunicated wisdom--the wisdom of the majority of all such human individuals--qualifying for continuance in Universe as local cosmic problem-solvers--in love with the truth and in individually spontaneous self-commitment to absolute faith in the wisdom, integrity, and love of God, who seems to wish Earthian humans to survive.
- 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
- We are here as local information harvesters, local problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. The fact that we get away from physical problems doesn't mean we go away from problems. The problems are really rarely physical.
- The courage to cooperate or initiate are based entirely on the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as the divine mind within you tells you the truth is. It really does require a courage and a self-disciplining to go along with that truth.
- One of my working assumptions which has been proven successful so often as seemingly to qualify it as a reliable tenet is that A problem adequately stated is a problem solved theoretically and immediately, and therefore subsequently to be solved, realistically. Others have probably stated the principle in many ways. The assumption is that the inevitability of a solution's realization is inherent in the interaction of human intellect and the constantly transformative evolution of physical universe. At first the, only subconsciously apprehended, approaching confluences of complex events make themselves known intuitively within the intellectual weather. Then comes a gradually awakening consciousness of the presence of new families of differentiating-out challenging concepts of every day prominence. It is with these randomly patterning families of separate concepts that evolution is about to deal integratively. As a now specific unitary problem it may be disposed of effectively when and if that unified problem becomes "adequately stated" and thereby comprehensibly solvable.
World Design Science Decade 1965-1975 Phase I (1965), Document 3 : Comprehensive Thinking, "Venus Proximity Day", p. 33
