The Wisdom of Buckminster Fuller (...on corporations, jobs, and revolution)

[drokhole]

A few of my favorite quotes from a man who was light years ahead of his time:


On problems with "Specialization":

"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."


On revolution:

"The youth of humanity all around our planet are intuitively revolting from all sovereignties and political ideologies. The youth of Earth are moving intuitively toward an utterly classless, raceless, omnicooperative, omniworld humanity. Children freed of the ignorantly founded educational traditions and exposed only to their spontaneously summoned, computer-stored and -distributed outflow of reliable-opinion-purged, experimentally verified data, shall indeed lead society to its happy egress from all misinformedly conceived, fearfully and legally imposed, and physically enforced customs of yesterday. They can lead all humanity into omnisuccessful survival as well as entrance into an utterly new era of human experience in an as-yet and ever-will-be fundamentally mysterious Universe."


On corporations:

"Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys — legally enacted game-playing — agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members."


On jobs:

"We must 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."

"Every child has an enormous drive to demonstrate competence. If humans are not required to earn a living to be provided survival needs, many are going to want very much to be productive, but not at those tasks they did not choose to do but were forced to accept in order to earn money. Instead, humans will spontaneously take upon themselves those tasks that world society really needs to have done.


On where we're going:

"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." - from 1963

"All of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly — right now."

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


http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller
http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Path-R-Buckminster-Fuller/dp/0312174918

[Cassandra]

1. Love this...

""We must 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."

"Every child has an enormous drive to demonstrate competence. If humans are not required to earn a living to be provided survival needs, many are going to want very much to be productive, but not at those tasks they did not choose to do but were forced to accept in order to earn money. Instead, humans will spontaneously take upon themselves those tasks that world society really needs to have done."

[drokhole]

10. Same here. The first one ranks among my absolute favorite insights.

It's what I can't help but think of when I hear "jobs" talked about in the generic "jobs, jobs, jobs" sense.

[OneGrassRoot]

2. Love this, too. Bookmarked. K&R :) n/t

[Gregorian]

3. I said to myself "I love this", and then saw the other replies.

Wild.

What makes me feel good is that the things I've been saying for decades (and feeling bad about because everyone thought I was just whining) are also things that some rather bright people also said.

It's like I'm the guy who he's talking about. Degrees in this that and the other, and all kinds of real skills, yet can't seem to get any traction in any of them. And in the meantime has found a way to simply enjoy life without working for the last 20 years. Everyone is so specialized it's impossible to compete now anyways.

[patrice]

4. Kicking!

[Stinky The Clown]

5. Bucky Fuller is arguably the smartest man to have lived in the last century.

Admiration doesn't come close to saying what I have long felt for him.

[drokhole]

8. Couldn't agree more!

It's almost criminal that he's not a household name.

[snagglepuss]

6. Recommended and bookmarked nt

[bigmonkey]

7. That guy was way ahead of everybody.

I count myself lucky that my life overlapped his. He went from suicidal despair to thinking like this.

The Powers That Were have been obsolete for a while now, they just have been successful at not letting most people find that out.

[Martin Eden]

9. I saw him speak at SIU

Early 80's not long before he passed away. I was in the Design Dept there that he founded, and some of my profs had worked directly with him.

The world needs more thinkers like R. Buckminster Fuller.