The Bucky Stops Here: Why Buckminster Fuller Remains Relevant
“There is enough to go around for everyone”
This country is in a state of collapse. There has been a perfect storm of what can be considered catastrophic events (Covid-19, economic collapse, open racism, massive unemployment) This collapse is unprecedented in our lifetime. Because of this, all of us are being forced to see gaps in an economic system built around a deeply embedded, trance-inducing reliance on false scarcity. We are being affected by it on a personal level. The system’s failure is evident and in all of our faces.
Buckminster Fuller was relentless in his pursuit of solutions that would benefit all humanity. Known by many as “Bucky”, he is considered to be the Leonardo Da Vinci of the 20th Century. Fuller could be considered a democratic anarchist and polymath outlier. (Polymath meaning a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning.) Mathematicians wouldn’t call him a mathematician. Designers refused to call him a designer. Architects denied him the term “architect.” “He was a lousy architect. But we loved him anyway”, said architect Philip Johnson. Philosopher Alan Watts considered him to be an “engineer/poet”. Author Arthur C. Clarke took Watts description even further. ‘I feel that Fuller is our first engineer/saint.” One generation knew Bucky as the inventor of the geodesic dome. Another considered him to be the “father of sustainability”. To many he is now known as the inspiration behind the allotrope of carbon known as “Buckyballs” or “Buckminsterfullerene”. Because of his outlier status, Bucky’s impactful life left deep imprints in architecture, chemistry, design, nanotechnology, social media, mathematics and art, encouraged the development of cross-disciplines, and currently continues to inspire reevaluations of patriarchal, neoliberal, uber-capitalist, and racist structures. These re-evalutions are fueled by the simple principle of wealth stated in the opening of this piece.
Fuller took the issue of false scarcity head-on. Because of this, he remains deeply subversive. He emphasized that by the late 20th Century, we would have the capabilities and know-how so that each person could have a high standard of living. This didn’t mean that we “would” have it. He meant that we would have the tools, and ability to “make the world work for everybody”
This means that one has to question current economic and social systems in light of what is available to us now as humans. We find a market that relies on the momentum of a false sense of scarcity. That there is not enough to go around. This type of market emphasizes a “you’re with us or you’re left behind”, hitting deep primal buttons that leads to racism, war, conflict, neoliberal policies and influence, greed and zero-sum games. Debt can only flourish in a market of scarcity. A sense of lack and diminishment fuels its flame.
Fuller emphasized 3 important pragmatic points
1) You can’t run out of money than you can run out of inches. Human’s don’t need money to be a success
2) When someone asks “How much will it cost to do this?” your response can be, “How much will it cost not to do this?”
3) Humanity changes when it is at the pinch point of pain
These points are worth bearing out. During the Great Depression of 1929, people starved not for a lack of food but for a lack of money. Or, as entertainer/philosopher Alan Watts blithely puts it, “We can’t build this house today. We’ve run out inches.” The ‘to do/not to do” statement can easily be applied to many aspects of national and state response to Covid-19 and stimulus packages. “Humanity change” is something that almost all of us have experienced on a personal level.
Because of this and the simplicity of many of his insights and solutions, Fuller was thought of by many as a naïve dreamer. Fuller’s reply to this was “Dare to be naïve.” One way of his validating this is him often saying, “A raindrop doesn’t bring a committee together to decide when to fall. It just does what nature requires it to do.” Fuller always emphasized that he worked from Universe inward. From big picture to small. This reminds me of what a friend wrote as he studied Fuller’s work.
“Since the Universe always reduces itself to the most simple, discovering the Universe is available through the simple approach”
At minimum, Fuller asks us to do three things: remove, relanguage and reframe. Remove relates to thinking, which Fuller describes as a removal of irrelevancies in order to work only with what is relevant. Relanguage is to seek and use what he calls “operational language.” An example of this substituting the word “sunsight” and “sunclipse” for “sunrise and “sunset.” Reframe means to see the world as it is rather than what you’ve, being misled by education and social propriety, accepted it to be. “The sun doesn’t rise or set. If it did the earth would be the center of our solar system.” “There is no such thing as up or down on a spherical planet. Only out and in”. The Three R’s are interchangeable. One influences the other. And Fuller, sailor that he was, felt that a lack of clarity in any of them would throw the sailboat off course and possibly run it aground. In real terms, this means life on this planet.
Fuller’s first impacted my life with the sentence, “You are a tremendous bundle of experience”. In saying such, he encourages us to develop platforms where we can leverage this experience in unique directions that advantage others. Bucky was convinced that our purpose as humans was to bring local order to chaos or unstable systems. For me, Fuller validates my experiences and the felt sensual wholeness of childhood. A childhood where divine Universal principles are felt and expressed through our bodies just by the fact of being alive.
In doing such, he repeatedly brings us back to a sense of wholeness. I think he would agree that the powers to be: neoliberalism, uber-capitalism or patriarchal structures, requires one to be partial. To literally have a split personality. For me, Bucky’s words are alive. They mirror wholeness.
How can I not become a Glad Fool wanting others to experience Buckminster Fuller?
(This article was written in celebration of Buckminster Fuller’s 125th birthday.)
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