Buckminster Fuller and Pythagoras Architect, mathematician, inventor, poet, lecturer and whole-systems thinker, R.

Buckminster Fuller was above all a planetary visionary who passionately believed that the human race was on the brink of Utopia or Oblivion. Best known for his geodesic domes, Dymaxion car, and his concept of synergetics, Bucky (as he preferred to be called) would have celebrated his centennial on July 12, 1995 but, alas, he was recalled by Mission Headquarters in 1983. Meanwhile, the rest of us on Spaceship Earth continue to waver between warfare and welfare, between killingry and livingry when we could so easily focus our attention on regaining for ourselves and for posterity a perfectly functional paradise... WE HAVE THE WHEREWITHAL to ensure that every single human life on Spaceship Earth is a total success. That was Buckminster Fuller s credo and he devoted his adult life to demonstrating how integrity and intelligence must eventually triumph over fear (ignorance/insularity) and greed (scarcity conditioning). While established experts with vested interests dismissed him as a maverick and a crank, Bucky focused on the Big Picture. Aided by legions of bright, earnest university students, Bucky inaugurated the World Game, wherein players unlearn their built-in prejudices, develop trust in reciprocity, and cooperatively design win-win scenarios that will give everyone access to the glorious options awaiting us. Forget about Us and Them, Bucky advised. Remember it s all us. Universe is a plural unity. And so Buckminster Fuller awoke to the cosmic dimensions of his being and his real mission on Earth: to restore a Fuller Perspective (pun fully intended) to a humanity blinded by primordial fears, force of habit, and sloppy thinking. If we now agree that the Earth isn t flat, why do we still say the sun rises and sets? We spin in and out of the sun s sight. The world is spherical, and the surface of all spheres is at the same time concave and convex. Nothing is a fixed asset: everything is in dynamic flux. Reality cannot be grasped: it simply slips through the spaces between your atoms, the vast dimensions within your sub-atomic consciousness. Let go of it and you become Real: for in reality you are a perfect hologram of the One and the All. These aren t Bucky s words (he had a unique syntax and vocabulary which was a miracle of economy and precision, but also made his writings less than transparent to the uninitiated). However, they do provide a glimpse into his essential work in epistemology and teleology. (Pardon me? Well, er let s just say epistemology and teleology are analytical and synthetical approaches to understanding the general principles and patterns underlying all phenomena.) Bucky was a practitioner of mental weight-lifting. Every day he would raise a larger and larger question for private inspection. By the time he went public with his newfound insights, Bucky was prepared to tackle issues of any apparent size and gravity, including age-old questions like: So what do we do about human nature?

The human being is a marvelous, self-teaching, self-correcting, self-regenerating organism, perfectly equipped for survival in any physical and/or metaphysical context. No need to reform humans. Instead, let s re-design our everyday reality so that it brings out the noblest in all of us. [This is a paraphrase, not a quote!]

Both minds were effective crossover zones open to inputs from all directions and disciplines; and each found his spiritual ground in the study of energetic-synergetic or sacred geometry. Born 25 centuries apart, each arrived at the same realization that provoked Pythagoras to exclaim: Astonishing! Everything is intelligent! Bucky was constantly reminding his lecture audiences that Reality (or the Electromagnetic Spectrum) was 99.99% undetectable to our senses and our measuring instruments. In other words, the world defined by our physical senses occupies less than 0.1% of our full range of options. Yet the Great Unknown is not necessarily unknowable so long as we re anchored in the awareness of the interactive, interconnected integrity and unity of the Whole of which we are each an integral and intimate part, as well as a microcosmic wholeness with an incredible degree of autonomy (Free Will?) This neo-hermetic perspective was certainly a foreshadowing of the current hologram theory, which is an essential conceptual tool for thinking beyond the third dimension. On a pragmatic level, Bucky applied his dynamic imagination and Yankee know-how to designing alternative transport, shelter, and socioeconomic systems. Ironically, the only faction that took his work seriously was the military. All their remote installations and bases are today housed in Fuller domes from the Antarctica to the dark side of the moon. With the help of a growing network of dedicated young thinkers and doers, Bucky compiled comprehensive inventories of the planet s food and energy resources and proposed workable alternatives that would make hunger and scarcity merely a bad dream of an infant humanity. With our priorities set right, poverty and injustice will quickly become subjects of purely historical interest. Each free citizen of the planet must be regarded as an invaluable crewmember of Spaceship Earth and given unlimited access to the infinite abundance and wealth which is everyone s divine inheritance. What Bucky foresaw was that once the basic needs of individuals have been fulfilled, they will automatically move on to the next level of needs. Therefore, by fulfilling the material needs of all humanity (and Bucky insisted that we do have the technical wherewithal to achieve this; only the ethical and political will to bring it about are lacking), we shall as a species swiftly evolve into spiritual consciousness (though Bucky generally preferred to use the term metaphysical ). I was born far-sighted, Bucky was fond of quipping, that s why I find it easier to think universe rather than me.

Perhaps some of us were born near-sighted. Not to worry, if you re one of them, you can take a vacation from Myopia (and the present Dystopia) into Buckminster Fuller s vision of Utopia simply by following up on the selected bibliography: RECOMMENDED BUCKYBOOKS Nine Chains to the Moon (J.B. Lippincott, 1938; Doubleday, 1982) Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization Ideas and lntegrities No More Secondhand God (Southern Illinois University Press, 1963) Education Automation Utopia or Oblivion (Pelican, 1968) Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Southern Illinois University Press, 1969) And It Came To Pass - Not To Stay (Macmillan, 1976) Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking Critical Path (St. Martin's Press, 1981) He finally chose to embark on "an experiment, to find what a single individual [could] contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity."[5] In 1927 Fuller resolved to think independently which included a commitment to "the 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." During 1965, Fuller inaugurated the World Design Science Decade (1965 to 1975) at the meeting of the International Union of Architects in Paris, which was, in his own words, devoted to "applying the principles of science to solving the problems of humanity." Fuller believed human societies would soon rely mainly on renewable sources of energy, such as solarand wind-derived electricity. He hoped for an age of "omni-successful education and sustenance of all humanity." For his lifetime of work, the American Humanist Association named him the 1969 Humanist of the Year. Buckminster Fuller was an early environmental activist. He was very aware of the finite resources the planet has to offer, and promoted a principle that he termed "ephemeralization", which, in essence according to futurist and Fuller disciple Stewart Brand Fuller coined to mean "doing more with less".[17] Resources and waste material from cruder products could be recycled into making more

valuable products, increasing the efficiency of the entire process. Fuller also introduced synergetics, an encompassing term which he used broadly as a metaphoric language for communicating experiences using geometric concepts and, more specifically, to reference the empirical study of systems in transformation, with an emphasis on total system behavior unpredicted by the behavior of any isolated components. Fuller coined this term long before the term synergy became popular. Fuller was a pioneer in thinking globally, and he explored principles of energy and material efficiency in the fields of architecture, engineering and design.[18][19] He cited Franois de Chardenedes' opinion that petroleum, from the standpoint of its replacement cost out of our current energy "budget" (essentially, the net incoming solar flux), had cost nature "over a million dollars" per U.S. gallon (US$300,000 per litre) to produce. From this point of view, its use as a transportation fuel by people commuting to work represents a huge net loss compared to their earnings.[20] An encapsulation quotation of his views might be, "There is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance."[ Fuller was concerned about sustainability and about human survival under the existing socio-economic system, yet remained optimistic about humanity's future. Defining wealth in terms of knowledge, as the "technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growth needs of life," his analysis of the condition of "Spaceship Earth" caused him to conclude that at a certain time during the 1970s, humanity had attained an unprecedented state. He was convinced that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of major recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had attained a critical level, such that competition for necessities was not necessary anymore. Cooperation had become the optimum survival strategy. "Selfishness," he declared, "is unnecessary and hence-forth unrationalizable.... War is obsolete."[24] He criticized previous utopian schemes as too exclusive, and thought this was a major source of their failure. To work, he thought that a utopia needed to include everyone.[25] Fuller also claimed that the natural analytic geometry of the universe was based on arrays of tetrahedra. He developed this in several ways, from the close-packing of spheres and the number of compressive or tensile members required to stabilize an object in space. One confirming result was that the strongest possible homogeneous truss is cyclically tetrahedral.[26] In his 1970 book I Seem To Be a Verb, he wrote: "I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process an integral function of the universe." He had become a guru of the design, architecture, and 'alternative' communities, such as Drop City, the community of experimental artists to whom he awarded the 1966 "Dymaxion Award" for "poetically economic" domed living structures. Alternative map projection Fuller also designed an alternative projection map, called the Dymaxion map. This was designed to show Earth's continents with minimum distortion when projected or printed on a flat surface.