Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller, American architect, author, designer, and inventor, was the popularizer of “Spaceship Earth” and the “geodesic dome”.
Interestingly, he was a grand nephew of the American Transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, one of the most amazing women of the early American Renaissance, and a close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
As a young man, Fuller worked at a wide variety of jobs, until, at age 32, in 1927, he experienced a pivotal time in his life. His daughter Alexandra died of polio and spinal meningitis when she was nearly four. Fuller lost his job, and he and his wife had no savings just as their daughter Allegra was born. This led to Fuller actually contemplating suicide as a way for his family to benefit from their life insurance policy.
About this time, Fuller experienced an incident that was to profoundly influence his life. He stated that at one time he felt as though he became suspended several feet above the ground, enclosed in a white sphere of light. A voice spoke to him, saying:
“From now on, you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.”
Fuller decided that, from then on, he would embark on “an experiment to find what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.”
He decided to “search for the principles governing the universe and help advance the evolution of humanity in accordance with them… finding ways of doing more with less to the end that all people everywhere can have more and more.” This led him eventually to popularizing the structure of the “geodesic dome.
I made notes in the past of some of Fuller’s sayings, and the following are some of his comments that struck me:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
“Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren’t any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn’t be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life’s challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person. ”
“The minute you choose to do what you really want to do, it’s a different kind of life.”
“Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is quite staggering.”
“If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do… HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO?”
This is the kind of spirit and vision young people, especially, need to foster in their lives.
