Buckminster Fuller: Trending quotes (page 4)

“We need to find within technology that there is something we can do which is capable of taking care of everybody, and to demonstrate that this is so.”

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Norie Huddle interview (1981)
Context: There’s a built-in resistance to letting humanity be a success. Each one claims that their system is the best one for coping with inadequacy. We have to make them all obsolete. We need to find within technology that there is something we can do which is capable of taking care of everybody, and to demonstrate that this is so. That’s what geodesic domes are about and that’s what my whole life has been about. Don't fight forces, use them.

“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.”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Understanding , Happiness

“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.”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Failure , Thinking , Success

“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.”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Feeling

“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.”

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Only Integrity is Going to Count (1983)

Support , Problem , Universe

“The words synergy (syn-ergy) and energy (en-ergy) are companions. Energy studies are familiar. Energy relates to differentiating out subfunctions of nature, studying objects isolated out of the whole complex of Universe—for instance, studying soil minerals without consideration of hydraulics or of plant genetics. But synergy represents the integrated behaviors instead of all the differentiated behaviors of nature's galaxy systems and galaxy of galaxies.”

Buckminster Fuller

105.00 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s01/p0100.html
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

Behavior , Nature , Study , Universe

“Unity is plural and, at minimum, is two.”

Buckminster Fuller

224.12 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s02/p2400.html#224.12
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

“All the categories of creatures act individually as special-case and may be linearly analyzed; retrospectively, it is discoverable that inadvertently they are all interaffecting one another synergetically as a spherical, interprecessionally regenerative, tensegrity spherical integrity. Geodesic spheres demonstrate the compressionally discontinuous--tensionally continuous integrity. Ecology is tensegrity geodesic spherical programming.”

Buckminster Fuller

1005.53 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s10/p0520.html#1005.50
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

“It seemed that the time would come evolutionarily when humans might have acquired enough knowledge of generalized principles to permit a graduation from class-two (entropically selfish) evolution into class-one (syntropically cooperative) evolution, thereafter making all the right moves for all the right reasons.”

Buckminster Fuller

Pg. 246
From 1980s onwards, Critical Path (1981)

Knowledge , Time , Selfishness

“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.”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

World

“Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.”

Buckminster Fuller

From 1980s onwards, Cosmography (1992)

“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.”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)
Context: 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.

Behavior , Parting

“There are progressive degrees of synergy, called synergy-of-synergies, which are complexes of behavior aggregates holistically unpredicted by the separate behaviors of any of their subcomplex components. Any subcomplex aggregate is only a component aggregation of an even greater event aggregation whose comprehensive behaviors are never predicted by the component aggregates alone. There is a synergetic progression in Universe—a hierarchy of total complex behaviors entirely unpredicted by their successive subcomplexes' behaviors. It is manifest that Universe is the maximum synergy-of-synergies, being utterly unpredicted by any of its parts.”

Buckminster Fuller

150.01 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s01/p5000.html
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

Behavior , Universe , Success , Parting

“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 "comprehensivity." Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us.”

Buckminster Fuller

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Universe

“SPACESHIP EARTH: Earth is an automated Spaceship speeding rotatively at 66,000 miles per hour around the sun, which in turn, is on its own course at 6.0 kilometers per second within the Galactic Nebula. The awareness of Earth’s mobile patterning within the cosmos gives the perspective needed to deal with the overall evolutionary event-patterning aboard our spherical space-vehicle Earth, rather than the minute details. The automated events transpiring aboard Earth lend powerful advantages to those who comprehend the automation and attempt to work with it in the most long-term, humanly advantageous ways rather than ignorantly attempting to control or oppose it. Both Earth’s and humanity’s automation are biological.”

Buckminster Fuller

Source: 1960s, Presentation to U.S. Congressional Sub-Committee on World Game (1969), p. 102

Way , Sun , Speed

“The wellspring of reality is the family of weightless generalized principles.”

Buckminster Fuller

1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), The Wellspring of Reality