Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist
1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), The Wellspring of Reality
Context: 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.
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist
1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)
Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist
attain targets while satisfying constraints
Simon (1997, p. 17); As cited in: Gustavo Barros (2010, p. 460).
1980s and later
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist
1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)
Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …
Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 23
Talal Abu-Ghazaleh (1938) Jordanian businesspeople
January 6, 2004, World Bank Video Series, Amman, Jordan.
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer
What is Art? (1897)
Context: Humanity unceasingly strives forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid. And in this, as in every movement, there are leaders — those who have understood the meaning of life more clearly than others — and of those advanced men there is always one who has in his words and life, manifested this meaning more clearly, accessibly, and strongly than others. This man's expression … with those superstitions, traditions, and ceremonies which usually form around the memory of such a man, is what is called a religion. Religions are the exponents of the highest comprehension of life … within a given age in a given society … a basis for evaluating human sentiments. If feelings bring people nearer to the religion's ideal … they are good, if these estrange them from it, and oppose it, they are bad.
Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist
Section 2, paragraph 30.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
Theodore Roszak (1933–2011) American social historian, social critic, writer
The Making of an Elder Culture (2009)
John D. Barrow (1952–2020) British scientist
The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos (2011), ch. 2, p. 22