Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for a New Millennium

Rating:
Summary: An opportunity to appreciate Bucky Fuller's contribution.
Review: Anyone who makes Bucky Fuller's wisdom more available to the humankind for which he cared so deeply provides an enormous service. This anthology does that with gleanings of Fuller's writings as well as anecdotes from those whose life he touched. Unfortunately, it does little to explain in easily understood language what Bucky learned and attempted to teach and demonstrate.

The personal stories sandwiched in between excerpts from Bucky's writings do begin to provide insight into Bucky being what he claimed was most important about him - that he was an average healthy human. Throughout his life and work, he proved that the "little individual" can make an enormous difference. Unfortunately, that message often becomes lost in discussions of inventions, science, mathematics and engineering.

Bucky was and is, more than anything, a modern mystic. I feel that the most important writing contained in this book supports this. In her article, Barbara Marx Hubbard recounts that shortly prior to his passing he told her the truth of his famous 1927 mystic experience in which he decided to devote himself to the welfare of all humankind rather than commit suicide.

She writes that he told her that the voice that spoke to him actually said, "Bucky, you are to be a first mini-Christ on Earth. What you attest to is true." And that is how I feel Bucky lived during the next fifty-six years of his life. There is much to learn from the events of those fifty-six years.

I have been studying them and applying them to my life for nearly twenty years, and I find that Bucky did speak and live the truth. His wisdom helped me to write "Buckminster Fuller's Universe" and to recently create (a web site) in order to support others in going beyond his geodesic dome and other inventions and gaining access to Fuller's mystic wisdom.

This book is yet another artifact to help us all in our journey. Do not let Bucky's convoluted language dissuade your pursuit of his wisdom. Use this book and any others you may discover to help claim the legacy that he left us all.

Rating:
Summary: An opportunity to appreciate Bucky Fuller's contribution.
Review: Anyone who makes Bucky Fuller's wisdom more available to the humankind for which he cared so deeply provides an enormous service. This anthology does that with gleanings of Fuller's writings as well as anecdotes from those whose life he touched. Unfortunately, it does little to explain in easily understood language what Bucky learned and attempted to teach and demonstrate.

The personal stories sandwiched in between excerpts from Bucky's writings do begin to provide insight into Bucky being what he claimed was most important about him - that he was an average healthy human. Throughout his life and work, he proved that the "little individual" can make an enormous difference. Unfortunately, that message often becomes lost in discussions of inventions, science, mathematics and engineering.

Bucky was and is, more than anything, a modern mystic. I feel that the most important writing contained in this book supports this. In her article, Barbara Marx Hubbard recounts that shortly prior to his passing he told her the truth of his famous 1927 mystic experience in which he decided to devote himself to the welfare of all humankind rather than commit suicide.

She writes that he told her that the voice that spoke to him actually said, "Bucky, you are to be a first mini-Christ on Earth. What you attest to is true." And that is how I feel Bucky lived during the next fifty-six years of his life. There is much to learn from the events of those fifty-six years.

I have been studying them and applying them to my life for nearly twenty years, and I find that Bucky did speak and live the truth. His wisdom helped me to write "Buckminster Fuller's Universe" and to recently create (a web site) in order to support others in going beyond his geodesic dome and other inventions and gaining access to Fuller's mystic wisdom.

This book is yet another artifact to help us all in our journey. Do not let Bucky's convoluted language dissuade your pursuit of his wisdom. Use this book and any others you may discover to help claim the legacy that he left us all.

Rating:
Summary: still ahead, still the best
Review: During most of his life in the last century, one of the things most often said about Bucky was that he is a man "ahead of his time". Well it was true then and it is much more true today. Because since he left us (sort of) the world has been steadily regressing, until now we are involved in war without end. Fuller was famous for many things, synergetics, Dymaxion car and house, really famous for geodesic domes. But his enduring message, and what the world needs desperately to hear now, is the idea of "making the world work for 100% of humanity". By which he meant using the worlds resources to serve the basic needs of everyone on the planet. He taught us that there are no shortages, that there is enough to go around, and all we need to do this is the will to do it. In the world game he would explain how much it would cost for everyone to have enough- food, shelter, clean water, health care- even eliminate land mines and soil erosion and deforestation. He calculated the total cost for all this and more as about 30% of the world's military expenditures.
Bucky believes we are all world citizens, all fellow pasengers on spaceship earth. And that we need to learn to be together, to be just one people, and stop having wars and wasting the earths riches on weapons.
Utopian? of course it's utopian. It is also perfectly sensible and reasonable and intelligent . And human. It is, it must be, the way we should be, the world we should make, for all of us.
This beautiful book is full of his teachings and the enthusiastic tributes of his friends and students. Just buy it.
And stop the bombing!

Rating:
Summary: still ahead, still the best
Review: During most of his life in the last century, one of the things most often said about Bucky was that he is a man "ahead of his time". Well it was true then and it is much more true today. Because since he left us (sort of) the world has been steadily regressing, until now we are involved in war without end. Fuller was famous for many things, synergetics, Dymaxion car and house, really famous for geodesic domes. But his enduring message, and what the world needs desperately to hear now, is the idea of "making the world work for 100% of humanity". By which he meant using the worlds resources to serve the basic needs of everyone on the planet. He taught us that there are no shortages, that there is enough to go around, and all we need to do this is the will to do it. In the world game he would explain how much it would cost for everyone to have enough- food, shelter, clean water, health care- even eliminate land mines and soil erosion and deforestation. He calculated the total cost for all this and more as about 30% of the world's military expenditures.
Bucky believes we are all world citizens, all fellow pasengers on spaceship earth. And that we need to learn to be together, to be just one people, and stop having wars and wasting the earths riches on weapons.
Utopian? of course it's utopian. It is also perfectly sensible and reasonable and intelligent . And human. It is, it must be, the way we should be, the world we should make, for all of us.
This beautiful book is full of his teachings and the enthusiastic tributes of his friends and students. Just buy it.
And stop the bombing!

Rating:
Summary: Essential wisdom if we are to prosper in the 21st Century
Review: I urge everyone reading this review to not only buy this book but also to tell their friends to do so as well. In our post-Cold War, interdependent world we need to learn what Bucky had the foresight to be talking about - years and years ago. Namely, that prosperity in the future will depend on humans learning to cooperate with - rather than compete against - their fellow human beings. We are all passengers on the same spaceship. With the Cold War over, we have the technology - and the political opportunity - to create a world of "all winners and no losers." What's needed -as Einstein liked to point out - is "new thinking" to bring this about. Bucky's systems-based thinking is what Einstein was referring to.

Reading this book is like attending a black tie dinner for Buckminster Fuller. On a wide-range of subjects, a wonderfully diverse list of people reflect on how Bucky influenced their lives. Each person is introduced by the editor, who acts like the Master of Ceremonies for the evening. And each person's talk is followed by an excerpt from one of Bucky's writings. I think this is great approach to presenting Bucky, because potential readers should be able to relate to at least one of the speakers and topics mentioned. (Bucky was interested and involved in so many things that the book covers a lot of different subjects.)

I hope it will wet people's appetites to want to read more. And, not just to read, but also to want to talk about these ideas and how to get them into common use. Some support for that is available, in fact, from the Buckminster Fuller Institute ...

So, buy this book and have it be the beginning of your journey (if you're new to Bucky) or have it spark you to renewed levels of action. Adopting a systems-based view of the world is the only way Globalization will ever work!

Rating:
Summary: Why bother with Bucky now?
Review: On page 242 of this anthology, in an excerpt from Fuller's second book on "Synergetics," Fuller writes,

"The epistemography of synergetics discovers operationally, experientially, and experimentally that the most primitive of the conceptual systems to be divided or isolated from nonunitarily and nonsimultaneously conceptual Scenario Universe most inherently consist of the simplest minimum considerability none of whose components can exist independently of one another."

Passages in Fuller's writings like this, which sound like schizophrenic word-salads, make me wonder why Fuller still has the cult following he does. Although he was capable of writing reasonably clear explanations of his ideas and discoveries, more often than not he managed to sabotage his efforts at communication by cranking out arcane assertions like the one above. How was he able to get books full of such obscure rhetoric commercially published in the first place? At least technical textbooks are usually written in ways that can be assimilated into the existing context of knowledge. Fuller was writing way outside of the conceptual box, and many of his "ideas," if they could be called that, are still essentially homeless.

This anthology doesn't really demonstrate to my satisfaction why we should continue to study Fuller's legacy nearly two decades after his death. The geodesic dome fad has passed; few people these days advocate providing for "100% of humanity" through some conjectural "design science" based on Fuller's ideas, and doing so now sounds hopelessly naive and utopian; and we're just as burdened with having to "make a living" as ever, despite all the propaganda about the "affluence" and "abundance" in our society. (Just look at the proliferation of nonproductive and low-paying "service" jobs in the U.S. economy. For example, refer to Barbara Ehrenreich's book _Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America_.) Fuller's prediction (on page 212) that we'd have "sustainable abundance for all" by 1985 sounds ridiculous now.

The contrasting posthumous reputations of Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright demonstrate how our culture's priorities have changed since Fuller's heyday in the idealistic 1960's. Wright is still considered a living presence in American architecture, mainly because he built innovative structures for wealthy, paying clients. Fuller has fallen into relative obscurity in part because he tried to design cheap, efficient housing for the world's lumpen-people, like the ones in Muslim countries who view America as their enemy. Our choices in architectural heroes reflect the current belief that financially successful people are better than the rest of us. Fuller advocated a social philosophy that is fundamentally at odds with early 21st Century American ideals. I don't see how his thinking can be re-integrated into the current set of allowable social proposals.

Rating:
Summary: Why bother with Bucky now?
Review: On page 242 of this anthology, in an excerpt from Fuller's second book on "Synergetics," Fuller writes,

"The epistemography of synergetics discovers operationally, experientially, and experimentally that the most primitive of the conceptual systems to be divided or isolated from nonunitarily and nonsimultaneously conceptual Scenario Universe most inherently consist of the simplest minimum considerability none of whose components can exist independently of one another."

Passages in Fuller's writings like this, which sound like schizophrenic word-salads, make me wonder why Fuller still has the cult following he does. Although he was capable of writing reasonably clear explanations of his ideas and discoveries, more often than not he managed to sabotage his efforts at communication by cranking out arcane assertions like the one above. How was he able to get books full of such obscure rhetoric commercially published in the first place? At least technical textbooks are usually written in ways that can be assimilated into the existing context of knowledge. Fuller was writing way outside of the conceptual box, and many of his "ideas," if they could be called that, are still essentially homeless.

This anthology doesn't really demonstrate to my satisfaction why we should continue to study Fuller's legacy nearly two decades after his death. The geodesic dome fad has passed; few people these days advocate providing for "100% of humanity" through some conjectural "design science" based on Fuller's ideas, and doing so now sounds hopelessly naive and utopian; and we're just as burdened with having to "make a living" as ever, despite all the propaganda about the "affluence" and "abundance" in our society. (Just look at the proliferation of nonproductive and low-paying "service" jobs in the U.S. economy. For example, refer to Barbara Ehrenreich's book _Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America_.) Fuller's prediction (on page 212) that we'd have "sustainable abundance for all" by 1985 sounds ridiculous now.

The contrasting posthumous reputations of Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright demonstrate how our culture's priorities have changed since Fuller's heyday in the idealistic 1960's. Wright is still considered a living presence in American architecture, mainly because he built innovative structures for wealthy, paying clients. Fuller has fallen into relative obscurity in part because he tried to design cheap, efficient housing for the world's lumpen-people, like the ones in Muslim countries who view America as their enemy. Our choices in architectural heroes reflect the current belief that financially successful people are better than the rest of us. Fuller advocated a social philosophy that is fundamentally at odds with early 21st Century American ideals. I don't see how his thinking can be re-integrated into the current set of allowable social proposals.

Rating:
Summary: Will the 21st Century Be the Century of Buckminster Fuller?
Review: This is an excellent anthology of the writings of Bucky Fuller, some of which are hard to get, with introductions by individuals ranging from Arthur C. Clark to Valerie Harper.
A Renaissance man--Fuller was an inventor, scientist, architect, poet, philosopher--Fuller may be the person whose hope, vision, and genius may propel this new century to ever greater heights!