Richard Buckminster Fuller - Everything I know

We tried to think about the most primitive information we have regarding our extraordinary experience, is that, I think we choose the fact that, all humanity has always been born naked, absolutely helpless, for months, and though with beautiful equipment, as we learn later on, with no experience, and therefore, absolutely ignorant. That's where all humanity has always started. And we've come to the point where, in our trial and error finding our way, stimulated by a designed in hunger designed in thirst these are conscious inputs; designed in procreative urge we have such an enormous amount of, as we learn later on, of designed in automated processing of the inter-relationships of all the atoms in our organism, starting then, with a consciousness of the hunger, giving a drive to go after...to seek to experiment. Man having, then, no rulebook, nothing to tell him about that Universe, has had to really find his way entirely by trial and error. He had no words and no experience to assume that the other person has experience. The at first, very incredibly limited way of communicating. We now know, human beings being on our planet for probably 3 1/2 million years, with, as far as we can see, not much physiological change pretty much the same skeleton, and from what we can learn of human beings in their earliest recorded communicating, in an important degree, people in India 5,000 years ago, and in China 5,000 years ago, were thinking very extraordinarily well in the terms of anything we know about our experience, the way we've been able to resolve experiences into the discovery of principles that seem to be operative in our Universe.

I'm astonished at how well the early Hindu and Chinese thinker how well he was able to process his information, in view of the very limited amount of information humanity had as of that time in comparison to anything we have today.

Just making a little jump in information, as we, as humanity on board of our planet, entered into what it called World War I, the scientists around the world have ways of reporting to one another officially; and chemists have what they call Chemical Abstracts. Chemical Abstracts are methodical publications of anything and everything any chemist finds that he publishes information regarding, it becomes Chemical Abstracts. As the world entered World War I, what was called the twentieth century it's a very arbitrary kind of accounting matter, we had some hundred I think we had (I'm doing this off the top of my head from memory) about 175,000 known substances, approximately almost a quarter of a million substances by the time the United States came into the war, known to chemistry. And we came out of World War I with almost a million substances known. By the time we ended World War II, we were well up into 10 million, and we've come out of it now where the figures really are getting astronomical. We can't really keep track of the rate at which we are discovering more. Just to talk about differentiable substances chemically distinct from one another. Those are typical of the information, really it is a bursting rate now in relation to just I'm speaking just in relationship to my own life. One life in the extraordinary numbers of lives there must have been on board of our planet. The information is multiplying at that rate during just one lifetime indicates that something is going on here right now that is utterly unprecedented, and we're in such indication of acceleration of experiences of human beings the integration of the accelerated, the experienced, to produce awarenesses that are indicative of Humanity going through some very, very important kind of transition into some kind of new relationship to Universe, I'd say, the kind of acceleration that would occur after the child has been formed in the womb, taking the nine months, and suddenly begins to issue from the womb out into an entirely new world. So I think we are apparently coming out of some common womb of designedly permitted ignorance, given faculties which we gradually discovered and learned to employ by trial and error, and we're at the point where I now have, which would also seem absolutely incredible to a generation before, I've now completed 37 circuits of our earth kind of zig-zagging circuits not straight around not as a tourist just carrying, just responding to requests to appear here and there, to lecture in Universities, or to design some structure whatever it may be. So, that is in the everyday pattern that I am circuiting that earth. It certainly makes it in evidence that we are dealing in a totality of humanity, not the up to my generation completely divided humanity, spread very far apart on our planet.

My father was in the leather importing business in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States, and he imported from two places, primarily, Buenos Aires and India for bringing in leathers for the shoe industry, which was centered at that time in the Boston area. And his mail, or a trip that he would like to make to Argentina took two months each way, and his trips to India in the mail took exactly three months each way. And, it seemed absolutely logical to humanity when early in this century, Rudyard Kipling, the English poet, said "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." It was a very, very rare matter for any human being to make such a travel as that, taking all those months there were not many ships that could take them there. All that has changed in my lifetime, to where I'm not just one of a very few making these circuits of the earth, but I am one of probably, getting to be pretty close to 20 million now who are making living a life like that around our planet, and very much of the whole young world doing so. I keep meeting my students of various universities from around the world, half way around the world again. They are all getting to be living as world people. So, this is a very sudden emergence into some new kind of relationship to our Universe is being manifest. None of it was planned. There was nobody in the time of my father or my mother, as I was brought up, prophesying any of the things I've just said.

The year I was born Marconi invented the wireless, but it did not get into any practical use until I was 12 years of age when the first steamship sends an S.O.S., its in distress, by wireless so think of it a great many miles and the world began to know the ship was in distress and ships began to rush to its aid. Absolutely unexpected! My father and mother would say "wireless! such nonsense!"

And when I was three the electron was discovered, and nobody talked about that. It wasn't in any of the newspapers nobody was interested in electrons didn't know what an electron was that had been discovered.

I was brought up that humanity would never get to the North Pole absolutely impossible, they'd never get to the South Pole; and our Mercator maps didn't even show anything... the Northern-most points were kind of a rugged line, but you didn't see or know anything up beyond that.

When I was 14 man did get to the North Pole, and when I was 16 he got to the South Pole, so impossibles are happening.

Like all other little boys, I was making paper darts, which you could make at school; and boys must have been making them for a very long time; and we were hoping we might be able to get to flying. But the parents, your parents were saying "Darling, it's very amusing for you to try that, but it is inherently impossible for man to fly. So when I was 7 the Wright brothers suddenly flew and my memory is vivid enough of seven to remember that for about a year the engineering societies were trying to prove it was a hoax because it was absolutely impossible for man to do that.

So then, not only was there the radio, but when I was 23, which you think well I guess many in this room are not 23 yet when I was 23 the human voice came over the radio for the first time, and that was an incredible matter. When I was 27 we had the first licensed radio broadcasting. When I was 38 I was asked to go on an experimental TV program in New York where the Columbia Broadcasting had 70 sets in various scientists' and their Board of Directors' homes, and they had experimental programs going on, they didn't have any money for paying anybody. The man who ran it, Gilbert Seldes was a friend of mine, and ran the studio, and so, I often appeared on his program, but we don't have television operating in the United States until after World War II. So we're talking about when I was 45 when we had our first television. So this is very it couldn't be a more recent matter; and yet nobody thought at that time we were going to have they didn't know you were going to have transistors; they didn't know man was going to have satellites going around the earth; they didn't know we were going to have radio relay satellites, that we were going to be able to have programs coming out of any part of the earth, going to any other part of the earth. Absolutely not one of these steps was ever anticipated by any of the others, so that having experienced that, I also experienced living with my fellow human beings, who I find, no sooner has it happened, then he says "I knew it all the time. I'm not one of those to be surprised I was sort of in on it you know... I was a little bit responsible" There is a strange vanity of man, and I think the vanity that he has, was essential to his being born naked and helpless, and having to make the fantastic number of mistakes he had to make in order to really learn something. And I think he would have been so disgruntled, so dismayed by the mistakes, the errors, that he would never have been able to carry on. He would just have been absolutely discouraged, so he was given this strange vanity to say, to continually sort of make himself exempt, and he was some kind of privileged, and always in. And he was able, then, quite clearly, to deceive himself a great deal. So I find everybody today saying "getting to the moon anybody can do that. That's absolutely simple and logical." Now, it is obvious, and simple, and logical provided you were born and this has happened in your lifetime, you can see how it happened. I began to realize that with that rapid changing going on, which was not anticipated then what people called "natural" when I was young... the natural related to the state before these great changes occurred... where we were supposed to stay we were inherently remote from other human beings... no way you could get to other human beings. And all the customs that developed over millions and millions of years of tribes and little communities being isolated one from another... how you get on with one another, seeing everybody, you saw everybody a great deal all the time. The conditions that were really brought about by that constant proximity, brought about human behaviors which we have now rules and everybody the older people say that's the way you carry on; but it is really no longer germane to the conditions that are prevailing. And, I began to realize that, for instance, to me, having been born before flying, before the Wright brothers, to me it was a very extraordinary matter that man could fly. And certainly, his first flying was fraught with a great deal of danger, and you admired very much the people who were able to accomplish it without failing; and our first automobiles that I had, my first automobile; the automobile tires, on my first car would probably blow out within a hundred miles. You were stopping really very, very frequently getting out and taking off that tire and repairing it... with ways of vulcanizing it and getting it back on. We didn't have the easy mounting tires that we have today, so it was a very great task to do it. The engine continually broke down. The brakes burnt out and wore out very, very rapidly, so that driving a car doing your own cranking and cleaning your own spark plugs, and often taking out the spark plugs and priming them with gasoline so you could get the engine going you were very intimate with your machine. And, if you were, you knew how relatively unreliable it was. Therefore, you drove with great caution. I still drive in the terms of brakes that fade out, and I allow certain distances, and I find the space that I'm allowing to the next car inviting young people who have good brakes, and who assume that they have good brakes, to drive into that spot with great safety.