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Spirit of Ma'at: "Living Off the Grid" — Vol 2 April 2002 by Celeste Adams
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) — known to almost everyone simply as "Bucky" — was one of the world's first futurists and global thinkers. If anyone deserves the title of "father of alternative lifestyles," it was Bucky Fuller. He set forth ideas that would overthrow all the old paradigms, and shift the course of the future. He pioneered the geodesic dome, the Dymaxion world-map, the Dymaxion 4-D house, and the Dymaxion 4-D automobile. Hugh Kenner writes, "There are times when he seems not native to this planet. The pink dome is surely not terrestrially cranial; those Coke-bottle-bottom lenses shield extragalactic eyes . . . The face is quizzical, gnomelike, its gamut of public expressions rather slight: Intensity 1, Intensity 2, Intensity 3 — and 4, a sudden furrowed blankness. There are crisp black trousers, as though studied from the naval Dress Code."[1] Imperfect vision Fuller was born cross-eyed and presbyopic. "Until four I could see only large patterns, houses, trees, outlines of people with blurred coloring. While I saw two dark areas on human faces, I did not see a human eye or a teardrop or a human hair until I was four."[2] As a kindergartner in 1899, he reportedly was given toothpicks and dried peas, and manipulated them into a tetrahedron — a three-legged pyramid — and an octahedron. He said that he had not been fitted for glasses at that age, and so he did not know that houses were shaped like cubes. It may be that his imperfect vision led him to focus on large-scale patterns, rather than details. "One day, rethought and equipped with engineered hubs, it was to be the subject of U.S. Patent #2,986,241. By then he was calling it the Octet Truss."[3] School is an ignorance factory Fuller believed that school limits the mind and suppresses original thinking. He said, "What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed, and paralyzed, so that by the time most people are mature they have lost many of their innate capacities." Although he received forty-seven honorary doctorates, including a Phi Beta Kappa key from Harvard, Fuller was self-educated. In avoiding the educational factory, he missed both the advantages and drawbacks of being part of a shared culture, but he also avoided majoring in a specific area that would have boxed him into a category such as architecture or engineering. Instead, he became what he called a "comprehensivist" — interested in just about everything. Adam Trombly, who founded Project Earth with Fuller (see Adam Trombly's February article), explained in a recent interview: Bucky once said that those who are educated to death are only able to communicate that in which they were educated. One of the problems we've had in the US and worldwide is the complete failure of the educational system to educate members of the species. Education, as Buckminster Fuller pointed out a long, long time ago, is very controversial. He incorporated himself in the educational system, even though he was uncredentialed. He was a college dropout, and he didn't encourage that in his college students. He once took hold of my head and said, "You must promise me that you will never allow this instrument to die of an overspecialized death." He was a very intense man, and he was not always happy with the way that I lived my life."Finding a language of one's own In 1927, Fuller decided to stop talking — he had decided that it was important to hold a moratorium on speech. This went on for approximately two years. "All this was pretty difficult for my wife, because we were in Chicago and didn't have any money. We had an apartment in the least expensive fireproof tenement I could find, because we did have our baby. I really did stop all sounds, and then gradually started wanting to use a particular sound. I was finally pretty sure I would know what the effects would be on my fellow man if I made a particular sound. I wanted to be sure that when I did communicate that, I really meant to communicate thusly, and that this was me communicating and not somebody else." Fuller felt that he had acquired bad rules and conflicting thoughts through words that were not of his own making. He did not want to carelessly repeat concepts that were not part of the true way in which he perceived the world. "I became very suspicious of words. I said, 'Words seem to me to be one of the most extraordinary tool acquisitions of men; I don't think men were born with words, but rather from what I have learned in education and of the educational system I suspect that men have evolved words. . . . I know of people inventing words, but most of the words were here before me and they are tools. They are obviously tools, and I'm enough of a mechanic to know that you can use tools in the wrong way. It seems to me that the facility with which we can make these sounds, as a parrot can copy a sound, is possibly one of the ways in which the trouble starts.' " The purpose of human existence During a particularly difficult time in Fuller's life, he contemplated suicide, but managed to turn his life around when he discovered some great truths about the purpose of human existence. The year was 1927 — his "year of silence" — and Fuller was living with his wife, Anne, in Chicago. He had just been asked to leave a top position, and was unable to find another job. "I had not been vicious," he wrote, commemorating a lakeside dialogue with himself, "yet even to myself, I appeared, in retrospect, a black, horrendous mess. I had wanted to give, not take, but I seemed to have converted the opportunities to give into negative waste." He discovered that he had a great diversity of experience that might be used for benefit, that would be lost to others if he destroyed himself. He realized, "You do not have the right to eliminate yourself, you do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. The significance of you will forever remain obscure to you." Later, he said, ". . .you may assume that you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience to highest advantage of others. You and all men are here for the sake of other men." So Fuller decided to devote the rest of his earthly existence to discovering what he, as one man, could do to benefit all of humanity. This decision was the beginning of a 50-year experiment to find the principles that ruled the universe. He wanted to apply these same principles to solving the problems that troubled humankind. Although he had neither money of his own nor the support of corporate or government financing, he was determined to redirect the focus of humanity away from utilizing its most important resources for creating weapons of destruction. He was determined to teach us how to use these resources for "livingry," which he described as the betterment of all human beings. Fuller felt that if technology were used with this intention, it could create a radical change in society and "raise 100% of humanity to a level of previously unimagined success." In search of nature's geometry Thus, driven by a desire to save the world, Fuller dedicated himself to exploring the principles working in nature which would be the key to elevating humanity. He wanted to understand nature's geometry, which he believed was a set of economical statements about patterns in the universe — how they came into existence, and how they maintain themselves. Fuller said (according to Kenner): Pi is a very old scandal. Generations of circle-squarers attested to the persistent intuition that it ought to have a rational value, but nobody ever found one. Eventually it was proved that none was findable. The decimal sequence for pi is 3.141592653589793 . . . and will go on forever. This appears to mean that infinity will invade any circular system, which feels wrong since circles are closed."[4]Geodesic dome Fuller then spent two decades focusing on ways to improve the global housing crisis and considered the problems that existed in conventional construction. When Dr. Jonas Salk asked Fuller what kind of work he did, the latter commented that he had been thinking of a way to define it for a long time, and settled on calling his work "comprehensive anticipatory design science." He once explained that this phrase assumes that the client knows nothing about what he needs or what should be done. He compared the strength of conventional structures to the strength inherent in natural ones, and became convinced that he could create manmade structures that would reflect the perfection of nature. He felt that he would have to work with spherical trigonometry in order to perfect spherical construction techniques. As a result, in the 1940s he invented the geodesic dome, made of a complex network of triangles set into a spherical structure. "His initial dome models were nothing more than spheres or sections of spheres constructed from crisscrossing curved pieces of material (each of which represented an arc of a great circle) that formed triangles. Later, he expanded the concept and formed the curved pieces into even more complex structures such as tetrahedrons or octahedrons, which were then joined to create a spherical structure. Still, the simple triangulation of struts remained, as did the initial name of the invention."[5] The geodesic dome, which was Fuller's one commercial success, addressed a universal need for housing. Kenner describes it as a metaphor that would have freed humanity even if it hadn't gone into production. "They are metaphors: Whole Systems, first of all. They draw together functional shelter, elusively simple laws of Nature's structuring, symmetry, medium-high math, countercultural community (or solitude, as you wish), Eskimo simplicity, utter up-to-dateness."[6] The geodesic dome offered total mobility to people and freed them from getting into debt and spending their lives to pay off a home. Fuller imagined that these houses would be mass-produced and available to everyone — they could even be delivered by zeppelin. The Dymaxion car Fuller insisted that his Dymaxion Car was not a car at all, but was like a jet plane in certain ways. "I knew everybody would call it a car. It was the land-taxiing phase of a wingless, twin-orientable-jet-stilts flying device." This car had two powered wheels in the front and a single rear wheel with a rudder post for steering — it looked like a plane without wings. Fuller used to drive the car in New York, but it attracted so much attention that it created traffic jams. "She was the most stable car in history. Front-steered cars act like pushed wheelbarrows, always having to skid their turns. With my rear-steering car she's never skidding." After a car accident that killed the driver of a Dymaxion Car and injured a distinguished passenger, the newspapers ran a headline that said, "Freak Car Rolls Over, Driver Killed." This put a halt to the production of the Dymaxion Car, and it is believed that only one is in existence today. Utopia or oblivion Fuller wanted to build a new city on earth, designed in a way that would benefit all people and would be in harmony with the plan of the rest of the universe. In 1980, he said, "We know now what we could never have known before — that we now have the option for all humanity to 'make it' successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be utopia or oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment." Fuller was proposing a new paradigm for humanity and a synergetic vision. By synergy, he meant behaviors of whole systems, unpredicted by behaviors of their parts. We are designed, he told an audience once, so that we can accelerate evolution "in directions that will yield a minimum of disconnects and irretrievabilities. We may not achieve this. We may become extinct." After saying this, Fuller slammed the lectern and announced, "We can achieve it!" Humanity and genius Fuller believed that it was possible for everyone on earth to have a higher standard of living than they had ever known before. He believed that all humanity could become enduringly successful with the "more with less" technology, and he strove to make the world work for all of humanity without harming the ecology. "What makes him more than a walking computer," says Peter Blake, "is his humanity and his imagination. For whether he likes it or not, Bucky is, above all, an artist and a poet — that rare contemporary poet who does not despair of the human condition."[7] Footnotes:
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