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Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
In this essay on man Mr. Fuller expresses what may well be his penultimate view of the human condition. Here, in a mood at once philosophical and involved, Mr. Fuller traces man's intellectual evolution and weighs his capability for survival on this magnificent craft, this Spaceship Earth, this superbly designed sphere of almost negligible dimension in the great vastness of space.
Mr. Fuller is optimistic that man will survive and, through research and development and increased industrialization, generate wealth so rapidly that he can do very great things. But, he notes, there must be an enormous educational task successfully accomplished right now to convert man's tendency toward oblivion into a realization of his potential, to a universe-exploring advantage from this Spaceship Earth.
It has been noted that Mr. Fuller spins ideas in clusters, and clusters of his ideas generate still other clusters. The concept spaceship earth is Mr. Fuller's, and though used by Barbara Ward as the title of a work of her own the idea was acknowledged by her there as deriving from Mr. Fuller. The brilliant syntheses of some fundamental Fuller principles given here makes of this book a microcosm of the Fuller system.
Mr. Fuller is optimistic that man will survive and, through research and development and increased industrialization, generate wealth so rapidly that he can do very great things. But, he notes, there must be an enormous educational task successfully accomplished right now to convert man's tendency toward oblivion into a realization of his potential, to a universe-exploring advantage from this Spaceship Earth.
It has been noted that Mr. Fuller spins ideas in clusters, and clusters of his ideas generate still other clusters. The concept spaceship earth is Mr. Fuller's, and though used by Barbara Ward as the title of a work of her own the idea was acknowledged by her there as deriving from Mr. Fuller. The brilliant syntheses of some fundamental Fuller principles given here makes of this book a microcosm of the Fuller system.
128 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1969
180 people are currently reading
4898 people want to read
About the author
R. Buckminster Fuller
131 books762 followersRichard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor.
Fuller published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetic. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres.
Buckminster Fuller was the second president of Mensa from 1974 to 1983.
Fuller published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetic. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres.
Buckminster Fuller was the second president of Mensa from 1974 to 1983.
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September 2, 2010
I came to this 1969 cult 'classic' in the fervent hope that it might allow me, finally, to 'get' modern environmentalism for which this is a seminal text.
Part of my subsequent lack of enthusiasm is down to style. There is no doubt that Buckminster Fuller was a genius of sorts - at least as an engineer, planner and technologist - but he writes like a 'speak your weight' machine with a propensity for creating neologistic compound words that would put German philosophy to shame.
Far from inspiring, the man just cannot write imaginative prose and yet his subject cries out for imagination. I am sure that he says precisely what he means but it is next to impossible to sustain an interest while being hectored by a person, no doubt kindly in intention in his way, who is egotistical to the nth degree - a 'speech-talker', as my daughter would term such types.
Still, great thoughts are only made easier, no more, by great language skills. There are many prose poets whose ideas can be distilled down to mere mystical garbage when the beauty of the formulation has passed from one ear and out of the other.
Sadly, his are not such great thoughts either ... instead we get a self assured, somewhat egotistical, reasoning that patronises the reader in a step-by-step and apparently logical approach that blinds us with pseudo-science. If persons were just units of existence with blank slates for minds, he might conceivably have a point. But we are not and so he does not.
Buckminster Fuller is a sort of monster despite all his fine aspirations for humanity. He is so, in part, because he sees us all not truly as intrinsically flawed individuals (which we are and which makes us who we are at our best) but as units of existence who can be made nobler by planners. He is a planner and we are the crooked timber that must be used to fulfil the plan for our own good.
Where have we heard such sentiments before? Why, from pretty well every 'great' Western ideologue and thinker whose ego has extended itself to encompass the known human universe.
Far from being ready to consider deep globalist environmentalism (as opposed to human-centred localist environmentalism) as a reasonable possibility for humanity, Buckminster Fuller has converted me into its sworn enemy.
I now know, if there are others like him within the contemporary environmentalist movement (for we can see his influence in the 'Zeitgeist Movement' and in the eco-hysteria surrounding the circle of Al Gore), that, when we ordinary humans fail to meet the needs of the Plan, whatever his personal benignity, his heirs will make old Joe Stalin look like a pussy cat as they enforce their will on a global scale - always in the interests of us and of humanity, of course.
If you are the sort of personality who would have loved dear old Karl Marx before '36, then you'll just love Buckminster Fuller today!
This philosophical primitivism is a shame because there is a great deal of merit in his analysis of capitalism even if he seems loathe to be direct about his primary enemy lest he get accused of being a fellow-traveller with the equally flawed communist alternative that had divided up the world with Washington while he wrote.
He gets close to a truth in his myth of the Great Pirates (the one entertaining and worthwhile section of what is otherwise a monument to the turgid) but it is still not the truth.
The tale of the Great Pirates is a sound enough mythic critique of what we have inherited (as of 1969) but it is about as historically plausible as pretty well every other evangelical motivating myth that has come out of the Anglo-Saxon imperium, from those of the Mormons and Madame Blavatsky to those of Margaret Murray and L. Ron Hubbbard.
The history in this book is mostly just simplistic nonsense that seems to depend on the reading of a few geostrategists and very little experience of practical politics, the sort of simplistic populism, mixed with technocracy, that is standard fare when a certain type of engineer tries to make sense of human complexity and builds societies as he might build bridges.
Old political activists will know that the heart sinks when an engineer or scientist tries to apply engineering or scientific principles to knotty political problems ...
He does make us think, to his credit, about excessive cultural specialisation and about what 'wealth' actually means to humanity. On the latter, he adopts an American populist approach that is analytically correct even if it may not be pragmatically meaningful, given where we are today.
He has also done us a service in suggesting that we are going to be more socially productive and creative if we are given more freedom to think at leisure. The science of daydreaming suggests that our mind does benefit from idling.
And he did the West a great service by joining those who pointed out the effects of pollution within the capitalist world long before it was forced to the notice of Soviet planners by their bullied dissidents.
Failure to consider polluting effects was undoubtedly a major contributing factor to the fall of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of its Communist model - Buckminster Fuller's dissident voice helped the West adjust more effectively to the threat of environmental degradation.
Finally, the analysis of the way that wealth is easily created in war but not in peace is a criticism that stands today of how sovereign 'piratical' states have served the interests of their historically continuous institutions far more often than they have of their peoples.
Buckminster Fuller's somewhat stylistically suppressed righteous anger at global inequity, imperialism, elite corruption, planetary dispoliation and inefficiency leads him to some wise analytical conclusions but not to equally wise solutions.
The Spaceship Earth concept is, of course, seductive, like those of Gaia or the Clash of Civilisations or the End of History, but such book-selling catch-phrases are either so general as to have no meaning for humanity (unless you remove humanity from the equation altogether) or are grossly simplistic when it comes to trying to decide what humanity (which really means individual persons in societies and not some essentialist reified thing with one hive mind) is to do next.
The truism in Spaceship Earth (which we must accept) is that, as a species, we sink or swim with the planet. If it dies, we die - end of story. But there is one heck of a leap from that simple and true proposition to the determination for a planned world government of happy free people living in leisure guided by philosopher kings like our dear Buckminster Fuller.
Self-appointed Platonic Guardians have not had a great record in the humanity stakes. The Buckmister Fullerenes are unlikely to be much better if they actually get their hands on any directive power. I am, for example, not an 'Earthian' but a person who happens to live on Earth. So are you?
As for his faith in computers and automation, this is a belief and nothing more. A sort of instinctive scientific progressivism that over-estimates what computers can do to model our universe and underestimates the logic of an AI displacing us as soon as it can model it better than us.
In the end, one fears that this brave new world (and we are reminded of Huxley here) requires the behavioural normalisation of humanity on a mass scale in order to ensure that the computers can cope with the variables!
His advocacy of 'synergy' and general systems theory reminds one of nothing less than the contemporaneous Rand Corporation, the cold calculations of Hermann Kahn and the vicious number crunching of the latterly contrite Robert McNamara as he judged the success of a war by the body bags.
This is the world of American technocrats at the height of the Cold War and it is salutary to remember that the US lost the Vietnam War and that central planning ruined the Soviet Union just as it would no doubt eventually ruin the planet.
On top of this, there is in the introduction to the book by his grandson all the barely concealed hysteria that drives an environmental 'enthusiasm' that seems to owe as much to a peculiarly charismatic frame of mind in American small town populism as it does to genuine scientific endeavour.
This is a text that believers may love but that the rest of us should question more critically and ask how or why an engineer, who experimented with sleep patterns for himself and then was puzzled that his colleagues could not keep up, can or should have anything to say about the workings of the human soul.
Buckminster Fuller's genius lay in the observation, management and manipulation of matter - and he should not have strayed from that territory.
Part of my subsequent lack of enthusiasm is down to style. There is no doubt that Buckminster Fuller was a genius of sorts - at least as an engineer, planner and technologist - but he writes like a 'speak your weight' machine with a propensity for creating neologistic compound words that would put German philosophy to shame.
Far from inspiring, the man just cannot write imaginative prose and yet his subject cries out for imagination. I am sure that he says precisely what he means but it is next to impossible to sustain an interest while being hectored by a person, no doubt kindly in intention in his way, who is egotistical to the nth degree - a 'speech-talker', as my daughter would term such types.
Still, great thoughts are only made easier, no more, by great language skills. There are many prose poets whose ideas can be distilled down to mere mystical garbage when the beauty of the formulation has passed from one ear and out of the other.
Sadly, his are not such great thoughts either ... instead we get a self assured, somewhat egotistical, reasoning that patronises the reader in a step-by-step and apparently logical approach that blinds us with pseudo-science. If persons were just units of existence with blank slates for minds, he might conceivably have a point. But we are not and so he does not.
Buckminster Fuller is a sort of monster despite all his fine aspirations for humanity. He is so, in part, because he sees us all not truly as intrinsically flawed individuals (which we are and which makes us who we are at our best) but as units of existence who can be made nobler by planners. He is a planner and we are the crooked timber that must be used to fulfil the plan for our own good.
Where have we heard such sentiments before? Why, from pretty well every 'great' Western ideologue and thinker whose ego has extended itself to encompass the known human universe.
Far from being ready to consider deep globalist environmentalism (as opposed to human-centred localist environmentalism) as a reasonable possibility for humanity, Buckminster Fuller has converted me into its sworn enemy.
I now know, if there are others like him within the contemporary environmentalist movement (for we can see his influence in the 'Zeitgeist Movement' and in the eco-hysteria surrounding the circle of Al Gore), that, when we ordinary humans fail to meet the needs of the Plan, whatever his personal benignity, his heirs will make old Joe Stalin look like a pussy cat as they enforce their will on a global scale - always in the interests of us and of humanity, of course.
If you are the sort of personality who would have loved dear old Karl Marx before '36, then you'll just love Buckminster Fuller today!
This philosophical primitivism is a shame because there is a great deal of merit in his analysis of capitalism even if he seems loathe to be direct about his primary enemy lest he get accused of being a fellow-traveller with the equally flawed communist alternative that had divided up the world with Washington while he wrote.
He gets close to a truth in his myth of the Great Pirates (the one entertaining and worthwhile section of what is otherwise a monument to the turgid) but it is still not the truth.
The tale of the Great Pirates is a sound enough mythic critique of what we have inherited (as of 1969) but it is about as historically plausible as pretty well every other evangelical motivating myth that has come out of the Anglo-Saxon imperium, from those of the Mormons and Madame Blavatsky to those of Margaret Murray and L. Ron Hubbbard.
The history in this book is mostly just simplistic nonsense that seems to depend on the reading of a few geostrategists and very little experience of practical politics, the sort of simplistic populism, mixed with technocracy, that is standard fare when a certain type of engineer tries to make sense of human complexity and builds societies as he might build bridges.
Old political activists will know that the heart sinks when an engineer or scientist tries to apply engineering or scientific principles to knotty political problems ...
He does make us think, to his credit, about excessive cultural specialisation and about what 'wealth' actually means to humanity. On the latter, he adopts an American populist approach that is analytically correct even if it may not be pragmatically meaningful, given where we are today.
He has also done us a service in suggesting that we are going to be more socially productive and creative if we are given more freedom to think at leisure. The science of daydreaming suggests that our mind does benefit from idling.
And he did the West a great service by joining those who pointed out the effects of pollution within the capitalist world long before it was forced to the notice of Soviet planners by their bullied dissidents.
Failure to consider polluting effects was undoubtedly a major contributing factor to the fall of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of its Communist model - Buckminster Fuller's dissident voice helped the West adjust more effectively to the threat of environmental degradation.
Finally, the analysis of the way that wealth is easily created in war but not in peace is a criticism that stands today of how sovereign 'piratical' states have served the interests of their historically continuous institutions far more often than they have of their peoples.
Buckminster Fuller's somewhat stylistically suppressed righteous anger at global inequity, imperialism, elite corruption, planetary dispoliation and inefficiency leads him to some wise analytical conclusions but not to equally wise solutions.
The Spaceship Earth concept is, of course, seductive, like those of Gaia or the Clash of Civilisations or the End of History, but such book-selling catch-phrases are either so general as to have no meaning for humanity (unless you remove humanity from the equation altogether) or are grossly simplistic when it comes to trying to decide what humanity (which really means individual persons in societies and not some essentialist reified thing with one hive mind) is to do next.
The truism in Spaceship Earth (which we must accept) is that, as a species, we sink or swim with the planet. If it dies, we die - end of story. But there is one heck of a leap from that simple and true proposition to the determination for a planned world government of happy free people living in leisure guided by philosopher kings like our dear Buckminster Fuller.
Self-appointed Platonic Guardians have not had a great record in the humanity stakes. The Buckmister Fullerenes are unlikely to be much better if they actually get their hands on any directive power. I am, for example, not an 'Earthian' but a person who happens to live on Earth. So are you?
As for his faith in computers and automation, this is a belief and nothing more. A sort of instinctive scientific progressivism that over-estimates what computers can do to model our universe and underestimates the logic of an AI displacing us as soon as it can model it better than us.
In the end, one fears that this brave new world (and we are reminded of Huxley here) requires the behavioural normalisation of humanity on a mass scale in order to ensure that the computers can cope with the variables!
His advocacy of 'synergy' and general systems theory reminds one of nothing less than the contemporaneous Rand Corporation, the cold calculations of Hermann Kahn and the vicious number crunching of the latterly contrite Robert McNamara as he judged the success of a war by the body bags.
This is the world of American technocrats at the height of the Cold War and it is salutary to remember that the US lost the Vietnam War and that central planning ruined the Soviet Union just as it would no doubt eventually ruin the planet.
On top of this, there is in the introduction to the book by his grandson all the barely concealed hysteria that drives an environmental 'enthusiasm' that seems to owe as much to a peculiarly charismatic frame of mind in American small town populism as it does to genuine scientific endeavour.
This is a text that believers may love but that the rest of us should question more critically and ask how or why an engineer, who experimented with sleep patterns for himself and then was puzzled that his colleagues could not keep up, can or should have anything to say about the workings of the human soul.
Buckminster Fuller's genius lay in the observation, management and manipulation of matter - and he should not have strayed from that territory.
May 22, 2009
This is a classic, published in 1969, first read by me back in 1970 or 1971, when we thought we would soon experience either the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius or, alternately, the Eve of Destruction. Definitely Utopian, still visionary, and in some ways quite wrong, Fuller makes interesting reading even now, 40 years later and 26 years after his death in 1983. One important area in which Fuller has turned out to have been wrong was his prediction that global population would stabilize at the then current 4 billion thanks to world-wide industrialization, which he expected to be complete by 1985. Now almost 7 billion, world population has nearly doubled since he wrote this book and has not yet even peaked.
Another issue that Fuller wasn’t exactly wrong about, but that he didn’t take fully into account, is that of waste; for example, what to do with all the plastic, such as the Texas-sized mat now floating out in the middle of the Pacific ocean, or nuclear waste (though it must be said that he categorized atoms similarly to fossil fuels as non-renewable capital, to be used only sparingly and then only for start-up purposes). He doesn’t mention climate change or global warming except by implication (i.e., if we don’t smarten up soon, we will use up or destroy our life support and enhancement system on this planet). However, Fuller placed great faith in human evolution proceeding in such a way as to result in a favorable outcome for humans on this planet. What has saved us in the past, he said, is our built-in (by evolution) trial and error approach in conjunction with a bank account of energy resources. Meaning, we have evolved in such a way as to enjoy enough breathing space to be able to make errors and then adjust our behavior accordingly and progress.
Some of his prognostications seem uncannily prescient considering the world's current economic crises, for example :
"The constantly put-off or undermet costs and society’s official bumbling of them clearly prove that man does not know at present what wealth is nor how much of whatever it may be is progressively available to him," and "The wisest humans recognized in 1810 only one three-hundredth of 1 per cent of the immediately thereafter 'proven value' of the United States’ share of the world’s wealth-generating potentials. Of course, those wisest of men of the times would have seen little they could afford to do."
R. Buckminster Fuller is still well worth reading, if only to ponder his definitions of democracy and wealth:
"Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgment what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect’s function in universe. . . . .
Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives.”
Another issue that Fuller wasn’t exactly wrong about, but that he didn’t take fully into account, is that of waste; for example, what to do with all the plastic, such as the Texas-sized mat now floating out in the middle of the Pacific ocean, or nuclear waste (though it must be said that he categorized atoms similarly to fossil fuels as non-renewable capital, to be used only sparingly and then only for start-up purposes). He doesn’t mention climate change or global warming except by implication (i.e., if we don’t smarten up soon, we will use up or destroy our life support and enhancement system on this planet). However, Fuller placed great faith in human evolution proceeding in such a way as to result in a favorable outcome for humans on this planet. What has saved us in the past, he said, is our built-in (by evolution) trial and error approach in conjunction with a bank account of energy resources. Meaning, we have evolved in such a way as to enjoy enough breathing space to be able to make errors and then adjust our behavior accordingly and progress.
Some of his prognostications seem uncannily prescient considering the world's current economic crises, for example :
"The constantly put-off or undermet costs and society’s official bumbling of them clearly prove that man does not know at present what wealth is nor how much of whatever it may be is progressively available to him," and "The wisest humans recognized in 1810 only one three-hundredth of 1 per cent of the immediately thereafter 'proven value' of the United States’ share of the world’s wealth-generating potentials. Of course, those wisest of men of the times would have seen little they could afford to do."
R. Buckminster Fuller is still well worth reading, if only to ponder his definitions of democracy and wealth:
"Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgment what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect’s function in universe. . . . .
Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives.”
April 16, 2020
I'd be lying if I said I understood much of this book: a lot of it simply went over my head, a fault of either the writing style or my own ignorance. I'll have to re-read it one of these days.
What I did understand, though, I agree more often than not.
What I did understand, though, I agree more often than not.
January 24, 2025
Incredible to think that this was published in 1969, in the wake of the famous Earthrise photo taken by Apollo 8, with the crew quoting from Genesis on Christmas Day 1968, which is sure one way to guarantee Western Christianity’s hegemony over the planet.
Luckily Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, was here to remind us that we were all astronauts, on an incredible spaceship of the most astonishing complexity – and, it turns, out resilience. In Fuller’s own words:
I’ve often heard people say, “I wonder what it would be like to be on board a spaceship,” and the answer is very simple. What does it feel like? That’s all we have ever experienced. We are all astronauts. … I’m sure you don’t immediately agree and say, “Yes, that’s right, I am an astronaut.” I’m sure that you don’t really sense yourself to be aboard a fantastically comprehensively commanded automation real spaceship—our spherical Spaceship Earth. Of our little sphere you have seen only small portions. However, you have viewed more than did pre-twentieth-century man, for in his entire lifetime he saw only one-millionth of the Earth’s surface.
Indeed, for over two million years, humans have not even realised they are on-board a spaceship. This seminal text in the burgeoning environmental movement would be followed by the likes of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, who went even further to argue that our spaceship is our collective consciousness, and dreams, combined. Indeed, the personification of the final frontier, or Sun Ra’s mantra that ‘space is the place’.
Luckily Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, was here to remind us that we were all astronauts, on an incredible spaceship of the most astonishing complexity – and, it turns, out resilience. In Fuller’s own words:
I’ve often heard people say, “I wonder what it would be like to be on board a spaceship,” and the answer is very simple. What does it feel like? That’s all we have ever experienced. We are all astronauts. … I’m sure you don’t immediately agree and say, “Yes, that’s right, I am an astronaut.” I’m sure that you don’t really sense yourself to be aboard a fantastically comprehensively commanded automation real spaceship—our spherical Spaceship Earth. Of our little sphere you have seen only small portions. However, you have viewed more than did pre-twentieth-century man, for in his entire lifetime he saw only one-millionth of the Earth’s surface.
Indeed, for over two million years, humans have not even realised they are on-board a spaceship. This seminal text in the burgeoning environmental movement would be followed by the likes of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, who went even further to argue that our spaceship is our collective consciousness, and dreams, combined. Indeed, the personification of the final frontier, or Sun Ra’s mantra that ‘space is the place’.
December 22, 2010
One of Cambridge Sustainability's Top 50 Books for Sustainability, as voted for by our alumni network of over 3,000 senior leaders from around the world. To find out more, click here.
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is a fascinating combination of Fuller's deep scientific grounding and his philosophical and metaphysical way of looking at the world. The main thesis of the book is that humanity has been too shortsighted and siloed in its thinking and, as a result, we have lost the ability to see the whole system, the big picture. He argues that this is the main cause of our impending ecological crisis.
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is a fascinating combination of Fuller's deep scientific grounding and his philosophical and metaphysical way of looking at the world. The main thesis of the book is that humanity has been too shortsighted and siloed in its thinking and, as a result, we have lost the ability to see the whole system, the big picture. He argues that this is the main cause of our impending ecological crisis.
December 17, 2021
Ο αρχιτέκτονας/εφευρέτης/οραματιστής Buckminster Fuller ανήκει στίς σπάνιες περιπτώσεις ανθρώπων πού η εποχή τούς δεν ήταν έτοιμη για τό μυαλό καί τίς ιδέες τους.
Το όραμα τού για τον πλανήτη μας, καί οι απόψεις του για μια πληθώρα επιστημών όπως η Ιστορία,η Φυσική καί άλλες είναι πραγματικά εντυπωσιακές.
Ο Fuller πίστευε στην ενότητα καί την αλληλεγγύη. Έδειχνε τόση εμπιστοσύνη στους ανθρώπους, που μοιάζει να είναι σχεδόν από άλλον πλανήτη αυτός, όμως τα κείμενα τού είναι διαχρονικά καί επαναστατικά.
Όι προτάσεις τού καί οι ελπίδες τού έτσι ώστε να μπει σε εφαρμογή ένα σχέδιο για να επιτευχθεί μια σχέση εμπιστοσύνης καί συνεργασίας ανάμεσα στους "γήινους", έχουν βγεί σήμερα πιο αναγκαίες από ποτέ.
Εύχομαι ο λόγος του νά εισακουστεί κάποια στιγμή.
Ένα υπερσύγχρονο καί αισιόδοξο βιβλίο, από μια εξαιρετικά υποτιμημένη μεγαλοφυΐα πού έβλεπε βαθιά μέσα στο μέλλον.
5/5
Το όραμα τού για τον πλανήτη μας, καί οι απόψεις του για μια πληθώρα επιστημών όπως η Ιστορία,η Φυσική καί άλλες είναι πραγματικά εντυπωσιακές.
Ο Fuller πίστευε στην ενότητα καί την αλληλεγγύη. Έδειχνε τόση εμπιστοσύνη στους ανθρώπους, που μοιάζει να είναι σχεδόν από άλλον πλανήτη αυτός, όμως τα κείμενα τού είναι διαχρονικά καί επαναστατικά.
Όι προτάσεις τού καί οι ελπίδες τού έτσι ώστε να μπει σε εφαρμογή ένα σχέδιο για να επιτευχθεί μια σχέση εμπιστοσύνης καί συνεργασίας ανάμεσα στους "γήινους", έχουν βγεί σήμερα πιο αναγκαίες από ποτέ.
Εύχομαι ο λόγος του νά εισακουστεί κάποια στιγμή.
Ένα υπερσύγχρονο καί αισιόδοξο βιβλίο, από μια εξαιρετικά υποτιμημένη μεγαλοφυΐα πού έβλεπε βαθιά μέσα στο μέλλον.
5/5
August 8, 2010
I really wanted to like this book. But I found that Bucky's arguments were let down by his style of writing. He has lots of clever, relevant points but they're drowned out in his weird, 'comprehensive' perspective where he keeps going on about universe in a way that seems completely irrelevant to the operating issues at hand.
It is a fascinating document, considering it was written in 1968 and doesn't seem that dated. I would have liked a little less background and a lot more focus on the actual operating manual aspect, which he only touches upon in the last chapter with a whole lot of hand waving.
I guess he was better at lecturing in-person...
It is a fascinating document, considering it was written in 1968 and doesn't seem that dated. I would have liked a little less background and a lot more focus on the actual operating manual aspect, which he only touches upon in the last chapter with a whole lot of hand waving.
I guess he was better at lecturing in-person...
July 28, 2008
World economics have been based on false values- as all the gold in the world cannot possibly help to sustain life on our planet! Acclaimed author/inventor/architect Buckminster Fuller reviews the irreducible facts of physics, the fallacy of governments, and an introduction to systems theory.
March 26, 2011
A regret of youth which may be remediated is that I read so little of Buckminster Fuller. Indeed, this is likely the only complete book of his I finished as a kid and it wasn't even my copy. A friend loaned it to me one night at the Cogswell Dance Studio in Park Ridge which, for a while, served as an informal youth center for the disaffected youth of our community.
June 21, 2020
Contains a handful of interesting ideas, which are mostly in the zeitgeist fifty years later and better expressed elsewhere. This is some convoluted, pompous writing, full of arguments backed mostly by ahistoric speculations — with not a citation in sight.
This book did not age well.
This book did not age well.
February 27, 2023
Satisfying, convoluted, boring in places, but, satisfying.
I can’t fault Fuller b/c I find his language to be dated and tedious, nor is it his fault that I’ve heard most of these ideas before, and was already swayed to agree, as this book was first published in 1969.
Forward thinking? ABSOLUTELY! But…it’s 54 years old.
Still, he’s dead on the money in so many ways.
Humanity’s systems of government and ownership (even some of the worst ones) are what they are, it’s irrelevant to argue them now, as we are here, and the future is marked by human evolution through technology, science, engineering, and shared wealth.
Fuller is adamant in his argument that wealth isn’t monetary, nor is it a sum of ownership, but rather that true wealth exists only when all humans have equal access to resources.
Getting rid of specialized education (or ANY prejudice or separation by design) in our education system is imperative for continued growth and overall planetary salvation, as the collective ‘we’ will always be greater than our individual parts, especially if those parts are in ANY way taught that they are separate from the collective. This is not an indictment on individuality, only on any idea that we are less than, or greater than, to an extent where we are not contributing to.
In short, abandon things that we’ve grown past as a culture, make sure all humans have adequate resources, so that instead of struggling for survival, or stockpiling possessions for ego or “power,” we are contributing to the evolution of the species through synergy, science, technology, cooperation and a collective optimism about our future, and our glorious, more than adequately stocked spaceship home.
I can’t fault Fuller b/c I find his language to be dated and tedious, nor is it his fault that I’ve heard most of these ideas before, and was already swayed to agree, as this book was first published in 1969.
Forward thinking? ABSOLUTELY! But…it’s 54 years old.
Still, he’s dead on the money in so many ways.
Humanity’s systems of government and ownership (even some of the worst ones) are what they are, it’s irrelevant to argue them now, as we are here, and the future is marked by human evolution through technology, science, engineering, and shared wealth.
Fuller is adamant in his argument that wealth isn’t monetary, nor is it a sum of ownership, but rather that true wealth exists only when all humans have equal access to resources.
Getting rid of specialized education (or ANY prejudice or separation by design) in our education system is imperative for continued growth and overall planetary salvation, as the collective ‘we’ will always be greater than our individual parts, especially if those parts are in ANY way taught that they are separate from the collective. This is not an indictment on individuality, only on any idea that we are less than, or greater than, to an extent where we are not contributing to.
In short, abandon things that we’ve grown past as a culture, make sure all humans have adequate resources, so that instead of struggling for survival, or stockpiling possessions for ego or “power,” we are contributing to the evolution of the species through synergy, science, technology, cooperation and a collective optimism about our future, and our glorious, more than adequately stocked spaceship home.
July 12, 2014
I haven't read any Buckminster Fuller in a long time. The writing is a bit opaque yet the thoughts are still quite contemporary. The author writes in metaphor describing the people who really run the world as pirates. Pirates to the author are the only people who really know how the world works; the vast majority of people have no idea how things really work.
This book sees the world as complex and interconnected and is one of many books of its time that advocated a holistic approach to life.
One thing the author overestimated is computer technology. Like many of the time he saw what today would be called the singularity happening soon.
Overall a great book with only a few outdated ideas.
This book sees the world as complex and interconnected and is one of many books of its time that advocated a holistic approach to life.
One thing the author overestimated is computer technology. Like many of the time he saw what today would be called the singularity happening soon.
Overall a great book with only a few outdated ideas.
December 25, 2010
Although it's not a manual it points to the real manual: yourself. The book is clearly a manifest of world centric perspective showing the need to not exploit the planet but rather value it and play. By valuing the planet we also value ourselves. The books reminds us that our biggest strength is to understand and therefore find a adequate response instead of reacting compulsively to events.
April 6, 2025
Do not agree with a decent number of things Fuller says in the book, but he definitely had a very unique way of thinking about the world and conveying its message. Very thought provoking. And very motivational. Time to go build a better world for all of humanity.
January 7, 2025
At times obviously outdated (written in the 60s) and often incredibly prescient. This book is one that you’re supposed to take your time with, I think. Bucky’s (that’s what he likes to be called) writing style can sometimes be hard to parse, with frequent super-long sentences that take at least two reads at 0.25x speed to really get.
For example:
"Man can and may metaphysically comprehend, anticipate, shunt, and meteringly introduce the evolutionarily organized environment events in the magnitudes and frequencies that best synchronize with the patterns of his successful and metaphysical metabolic regeneration while ever increasing the degrees of humanity’s space and time freedoms from yesterday’s ignorance sustaining survival procedure chores and their personal time capital wasting.”
I’m going to try to briefly state some of his main points. It might make that quote make a little bit more sense. (I'm mainly doing this so I remember this stuff)
1. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, thus wealth, being tied to our use of energy and resources, can only increase.
2. Human beings are meant to be generalists, but we have created an economic system that forces a majority of humans to be specialists. Many years ago, certain powerful and ambitious generalists (captains, explorers, entrepreneurs), who Bucky calls the Great Pirates, realized that if they could employ specialists, their power and capabilities would only increase. For a while, the specialists - being experts in one area (ship-building, mathematics, biology, etc.) but ignorant of most others and how they all interconnect - depended on the Great Pirates. Then, specialists involved in industrial automation and computation gained extraordinary power and made the Great Pirates obsolete.
3. Human beings create tools that extend the range and power of the physical body as well as its limits of usefulness. All tools are extensions of ourselves. The microscope & telescope extend the eye. Most tools are extensions of the body, but computational tech is an extension of the brain.
4. As tech advances, wealth will become abundant, people will be liberated from work and chores, and we will become generalists. Most menial physical and mental tasks required by industry will be automated, and we will have to educate people in interdisciplinary systems thinking & design thinking. His idea is to do this through “mind fellowships.” I love this idea.
5. We have to shepherd this revolution, with the ultimate goal being distributed wealth, high standards of living for all, with no one nation-state prevailing over another. If we don’t manage this, we will “nose dive into oblivion.” There is a point of no return, after which initiating this massive restructuring will be futile. So we have to start soon (written in the 1960s 🙃).
6. Embrace automation. Turn all obsolete office-space into housing. The birth rate is declining, and fewer people will be on the planet when automation has progressed enough to make most work obsolete. This makes wealth distribution even easier.
I definitely missed some important things, because some of it went way over my head. Probably would be a good idea to read this again at some point. Even though this is an old book written about what we should do before the 21st century, there’s a lot of great stuff in it. Most of the philosophy can be reshaped to fit this era, even though it does seem like the situation is more dire and urgent than it was when the book was written. 5 stars.
For example:
"Man can and may metaphysically comprehend, anticipate, shunt, and meteringly introduce the evolutionarily organized environment events in the magnitudes and frequencies that best synchronize with the patterns of his successful and metaphysical metabolic regeneration while ever increasing the degrees of humanity’s space and time freedoms from yesterday’s ignorance sustaining survival procedure chores and their personal time capital wasting.”
I’m going to try to briefly state some of his main points. It might make that quote make a little bit more sense. (I'm mainly doing this so I remember this stuff)
1. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, thus wealth, being tied to our use of energy and resources, can only increase.
2. Human beings are meant to be generalists, but we have created an economic system that forces a majority of humans to be specialists. Many years ago, certain powerful and ambitious generalists (captains, explorers, entrepreneurs), who Bucky calls the Great Pirates, realized that if they could employ specialists, their power and capabilities would only increase. For a while, the specialists - being experts in one area (ship-building, mathematics, biology, etc.) but ignorant of most others and how they all interconnect - depended on the Great Pirates. Then, specialists involved in industrial automation and computation gained extraordinary power and made the Great Pirates obsolete.
3. Human beings create tools that extend the range and power of the physical body as well as its limits of usefulness. All tools are extensions of ourselves. The microscope & telescope extend the eye. Most tools are extensions of the body, but computational tech is an extension of the brain.
4. As tech advances, wealth will become abundant, people will be liberated from work and chores, and we will become generalists. Most menial physical and mental tasks required by industry will be automated, and we will have to educate people in interdisciplinary systems thinking & design thinking. His idea is to do this through “mind fellowships.” I love this idea.
5. We have to shepherd this revolution, with the ultimate goal being distributed wealth, high standards of living for all, with no one nation-state prevailing over another. If we don’t manage this, we will “nose dive into oblivion.” There is a point of no return, after which initiating this massive restructuring will be futile. So we have to start soon (written in the 1960s 🙃).
6. Embrace automation. Turn all obsolete office-space into housing. The birth rate is declining, and fewer people will be on the planet when automation has progressed enough to make most work obsolete. This makes wealth distribution even easier.
I definitely missed some important things, because some of it went way over my head. Probably would be a good idea to read this again at some point. Even though this is an old book written about what we should do before the 21st century, there’s a lot of great stuff in it. Most of the philosophy can be reshaped to fit this era, even though it does seem like the situation is more dire and urgent than it was when the book was written. 5 stars.
December 14, 2019
Buckminster Fuller is one of those people up there with Nikola Tesla who fascinate me: a technical visionary with an interest in reframing big world systems who is famous despite not fitting cleaning into the current system or the elite's political interests.
I've tried to read a few books of his but never finished any before this shorter one. I'd highly recommend reading this one if you feel similar to me as it is easier to get through and shorter at ~115 smaller pages.
The takeaways for me from this book are the following:
- Fuller believes national sovereignty is antithetical to the type of progress we need and a global system or a World Man mentality is needed.
- Fuller makes an interesting but strange argument that seafaring "great pirates" actually controlled many countries in the past, and that their corruption and development of specialization led to their downfall
- He makes an interesting argument overall about specialization and how biologically several researchers shows it leads to extinction.
- He wrote this book in 1969, claiming that the next 25 years were a critical time to stop a series of identity specialization beliefs like "what nationality am I? What religion?". He writes "By the 21st century it will either have become evident to humanity that these questions are absurd and anti-evolutionary or men will no longer be living on Earth"
- He believed in 1969 we could solve poverty easily without nationalism: "Science now finds there can be amble for all, but only if the sovereign fences are completely removed. The basic you-or-me-not-enough-for-both--ergo, someone-must-die--tenants of the class warfaring are extinct"
- He has some interesting ideas on how with computers we should all be free from needing to specialize, calling them superspecializers or something like this.
The book gets a little weird in the middle section and I could see a case to be made to skip to chapter 8 if you get bored in there. There he has a really fun metaphor about us being a spaceship as a planet and nations being different parts: "Paradoxically, at the present moment our Spaceship Earth is in the perilous condition of having the Russians sitting at one set of the co-pilot's flying controls while the Americans sit at the other. France controls the starboard engines, and the Chinese control the port engines, while the United Nations controls the passenger operation. The result is an increasing number of U.F.O. hallucinations of sovereign states darting backwards and forwards and around in circles, getting nowhere, at an incredibly accelerating rate of speed." Whether or not you buy this, the parallels to today with US/China is interesting and the metaphor is fun.
Maybe my favorite quote of all from the entire book is on page 107. He talks about how if someone is fired they should be given a life long research scholarship and the fear of automation. "Our labor world and all salaried workers are now at least subsconsiously if not consiously, afraid that automation will take away their jobs. They are afraid they won't be able to do what is called "earning a living," which is short for earning the right to live."
Wow. They are afraid they won't be able to do what is called "earning a living," which is short for earning a right to live. This quote really hits home with me as being true today and very sad.
There's a lot more in the book, and as I mentioned Fuller is a little hard to read sometimes so if you enjoy this book skip parts and get to some of the interesting ideas he posits that still seem true today.
I've tried to read a few books of his but never finished any before this shorter one. I'd highly recommend reading this one if you feel similar to me as it is easier to get through and shorter at ~115 smaller pages.
The takeaways for me from this book are the following:
- Fuller believes national sovereignty is antithetical to the type of progress we need and a global system or a World Man mentality is needed.
- Fuller makes an interesting but strange argument that seafaring "great pirates" actually controlled many countries in the past, and that their corruption and development of specialization led to their downfall
- He makes an interesting argument overall about specialization and how biologically several researchers shows it leads to extinction.
- He wrote this book in 1969, claiming that the next 25 years were a critical time to stop a series of identity specialization beliefs like "what nationality am I? What religion?". He writes "By the 21st century it will either have become evident to humanity that these questions are absurd and anti-evolutionary or men will no longer be living on Earth"
- He believed in 1969 we could solve poverty easily without nationalism: "Science now finds there can be amble for all, but only if the sovereign fences are completely removed. The basic you-or-me-not-enough-for-both--ergo, someone-must-die--tenants of the class warfaring are extinct"
- He has some interesting ideas on how with computers we should all be free from needing to specialize, calling them superspecializers or something like this.
The book gets a little weird in the middle section and I could see a case to be made to skip to chapter 8 if you get bored in there. There he has a really fun metaphor about us being a spaceship as a planet and nations being different parts: "Paradoxically, at the present moment our Spaceship Earth is in the perilous condition of having the Russians sitting at one set of the co-pilot's flying controls while the Americans sit at the other. France controls the starboard engines, and the Chinese control the port engines, while the United Nations controls the passenger operation. The result is an increasing number of U.F.O. hallucinations of sovereign states darting backwards and forwards and around in circles, getting nowhere, at an incredibly accelerating rate of speed." Whether or not you buy this, the parallels to today with US/China is interesting and the metaphor is fun.
Maybe my favorite quote of all from the entire book is on page 107. He talks about how if someone is fired they should be given a life long research scholarship and the fear of automation. "Our labor world and all salaried workers are now at least subsconsiously if not consiously, afraid that automation will take away their jobs. They are afraid they won't be able to do what is called "earning a living," which is short for earning the right to live."
Wow. They are afraid they won't be able to do what is called "earning a living," which is short for earning a right to live. This quote really hits home with me as being true today and very sad.
There's a lot more in the book, and as I mentioned Fuller is a little hard to read sometimes so if you enjoy this book skip parts and get to some of the interesting ideas he posits that still seem true today.
March 26, 2015
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth - Bucky Fuller
As I have return to serious reading, am devouring the works of Bucky and understanding it in a whole new light. Bucky is a genius in the league of Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo. He was an architect, engineer, geometrician, cartograher, philosopher, futurist, inventor, inspirer.. you get the idea.
His work was very instrumental in my life and in almost everything I do, esp his emphasis on generalized principles. I got back to his classic work Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth after many years. This is an easy introduction to some of the bigideas of this brilliant man. IMHO his works shuold be required reading to every kid in high middle/high school.
If you have not read this book, you MUST READ IT! If I was making something a must read, this would definitely be one of the 25 books.
Key Ideas:
1. Speclialization is unnatureal
2. The great pirates were the origins of specialization, they profited from no one knowing the whole picture
3. Most people are unaware that we are still rules by the "great Pirates" who employ divide and conquer
4. Earth is a spaceship and the sun is the energy sourse
5. How big can we think is the real question - employ General Systems Theory
6. Synergy - whole is greater than the sum of its parts
7. Integral functions - wealth is expanded by development of tools which go beyond what was integral to man
Awesome Quotes from the book
Only our minds are able to discover the generalized principles operating without exception ineach and every special-experience case which if detected and mastered will give knowledgeableadvantage in all instances.
Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable, and desirable. Yet in observing a little child,we find it is interested in everything and spontaneously apprehends, comprehends, and coordinatesan ever expending inventory of experiences. Children are enthusiastic planetarium audiences. Nothing seems to be more prominent about human life than its wanting to understand all and put everything together.
Pirates were the first interconnectors. And it followed that these Great Pirates came into mortal battle with one another to see who was going to control the vast sea routes and eventually the world. Their battles took place out of sight of landed humanity. The wider and more long distanced their anticipatory strategy, the more successful they became.
Leonardo da Vinci is the outstanding example of the comprehensively anticipatory design scientist. Finally, the sea-dwelling Leonardos became Captains of the ships or even Admirals of Fleets, or Commandants of the Navy yards where they designed and built the fleets, or they became the commandants of the naval war colleges where they designed and developed the comprehensive strategy for running the world for a century to come.
Then came the grand strategy which said, "divide and conquer." You divide up the other man’s ships in battle or you best him when several of his ships are hauled out on the land for repairs. They also had a grand strategy of anticipatory divide and conquer. Anticipatory divide and conquer was much more effective than tardy divide and conquer
But specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the "expert" is fooled into accepting his slavery by making him feel that in return he is in a socially and culturally preferred, ergo, highly secure, lifelong position. But only the king’s son received the Kingdomwide scope of training.
Extinction in both cases (biology and anthropology) was the consequence of over-specialization.
I’m sure that you don’t really sense yourself to be aboard a fantastically real spaceship our spherical Spaceship Earth. Of our little sphere you have seen
only small portions. However, you have viewed more than did pre-twentieth-century man, for in his entire lifetime he saw only one-millionth of the Earth’s surface. You’ve seen a lot more. If you are a veteran world airlines pilot you may have seen one one-hundredth of Earth’s surface.
Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship. And our spaceship is so superbly designed as to be able to keep life regenerating on board despite the phenomenon, entropy, by which all local physical systems lose energy. So we
have to obtain our biological life-regenerating energy from another spaceship the sun.
I define universe, including both the physical and metaphysical, as follows: The universe is the aggregate of all of humanity’s consciously-apprehended and communicated experience with the nonsimultaneous, nonidentical, and only partially overlapping, always complementary, weighable and unweighable, ever omni-transforming, event sequences
synergy is the only word in our language meaning behavior of wholes unpredicted by behavior of their parts
It is obvious that the real wealth of life aboard our planet is a forwardly-operative, metabolic, and intellectual regenerating system.
Wealth is anti-entropy at a most exquisite degree of concentration. The difference between mind and brain is that brain deals only with memorized, subjective, special-case experiences and objective experiments, while mind extracts and employs the generalized principles and integrates and interrelates their effective employment. Brain deals exclusively with the physical,
and mind exclusively with the metaphysical. Wealth is the product of the progressive mastery of matter by mind Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth - Bucky Fuller
MUST READ IMHO
Mahipal Lunia
www.TheRenaissancePath.com
www.MahipalLuniaOutloud.com
www.RadicalChangeGroup.com
As I have return to serious reading, am devouring the works of Bucky and understanding it in a whole new light. Bucky is a genius in the league of Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo. He was an architect, engineer, geometrician, cartograher, philosopher, futurist, inventor, inspirer.. you get the idea.
His work was very instrumental in my life and in almost everything I do, esp his emphasis on generalized principles. I got back to his classic work Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth after many years. This is an easy introduction to some of the bigideas of this brilliant man. IMHO his works shuold be required reading to every kid in high middle/high school.
If you have not read this book, you MUST READ IT! If I was making something a must read, this would definitely be one of the 25 books.
Key Ideas:
1. Speclialization is unnatureal
2. The great pirates were the origins of specialization, they profited from no one knowing the whole picture
3. Most people are unaware that we are still rules by the "great Pirates" who employ divide and conquer
4. Earth is a spaceship and the sun is the energy sourse
5. How big can we think is the real question - employ General Systems Theory
6. Synergy - whole is greater than the sum of its parts
7. Integral functions - wealth is expanded by development of tools which go beyond what was integral to man
Awesome Quotes from the book
Only our minds are able to discover the generalized principles operating without exception ineach and every special-experience case which if detected and mastered will give knowledgeableadvantage in all instances.
Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable, and desirable. Yet in observing a little child,we find it is interested in everything and spontaneously apprehends, comprehends, and coordinatesan ever expending inventory of experiences. Children are enthusiastic planetarium audiences. Nothing seems to be more prominent about human life than its wanting to understand all and put everything together.
Pirates were the first interconnectors. And it followed that these Great Pirates came into mortal battle with one another to see who was going to control the vast sea routes and eventually the world. Their battles took place out of sight of landed humanity. The wider and more long distanced their anticipatory strategy, the more successful they became.
Leonardo da Vinci is the outstanding example of the comprehensively anticipatory design scientist. Finally, the sea-dwelling Leonardos became Captains of the ships or even Admirals of Fleets, or Commandants of the Navy yards where they designed and built the fleets, or they became the commandants of the naval war colleges where they designed and developed the comprehensive strategy for running the world for a century to come.
Then came the grand strategy which said, "divide and conquer." You divide up the other man’s ships in battle or you best him when several of his ships are hauled out on the land for repairs. They also had a grand strategy of anticipatory divide and conquer. Anticipatory divide and conquer was much more effective than tardy divide and conquer
But specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the "expert" is fooled into accepting his slavery by making him feel that in return he is in a socially and culturally preferred, ergo, highly secure, lifelong position. But only the king’s son received the Kingdomwide scope of training.
Extinction in both cases (biology and anthropology) was the consequence of over-specialization.
I’m sure that you don’t really sense yourself to be aboard a fantastically real spaceship our spherical Spaceship Earth. Of our little sphere you have seen
only small portions. However, you have viewed more than did pre-twentieth-century man, for in his entire lifetime he saw only one-millionth of the Earth’s surface. You’ve seen a lot more. If you are a veteran world airlines pilot you may have seen one one-hundredth of Earth’s surface.
Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship. And our spaceship is so superbly designed as to be able to keep life regenerating on board despite the phenomenon, entropy, by which all local physical systems lose energy. So we
have to obtain our biological life-regenerating energy from another spaceship the sun.
I define universe, including both the physical and metaphysical, as follows: The universe is the aggregate of all of humanity’s consciously-apprehended and communicated experience with the nonsimultaneous, nonidentical, and only partially overlapping, always complementary, weighable and unweighable, ever omni-transforming, event sequences
synergy is the only word in our language meaning behavior of wholes unpredicted by behavior of their parts
It is obvious that the real wealth of life aboard our planet is a forwardly-operative, metabolic, and intellectual regenerating system.
Wealth is anti-entropy at a most exquisite degree of concentration. The difference between mind and brain is that brain deals only with memorized, subjective, special-case experiences and objective experiments, while mind extracts and employs the generalized principles and integrates and interrelates their effective employment. Brain deals exclusively with the physical,
and mind exclusively with the metaphysical. Wealth is the product of the progressive mastery of matter by mind Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth - Bucky Fuller
MUST READ IMHO
Mahipal Lunia
www.TheRenaissancePath.com
www.MahipalLuniaOutloud.com
www.RadicalChangeGroup.com
August 6, 2011
Fuller seems to be missing some important points, these being 1) that specialization is necessary at times and 2) that our resources are in fact finite. He mentions that our society is ever focused on specialization and that this characteristic can be cited as causing the extinction of species. Though this claim is true and perhaps we should be wary of it at times most of our advances do in fact come about by some form of specialization. If we all try to think in the comprehensive manner suggested very little would actually be accomplished, instead our time would be spent trying to learn as much as we possibly could about everything. Though I understand his point, which to some extent is valid, I do not think it wise to completely do away with specialization in the manner suggested.
My main contention with the work is his seemingly naive acceptance of the fallacy that our intellect will be forever able to overcome our surroundings. I actually picked the work up after reading, somewhere, his claim about the use of fossil fuels, thinking that he might offer some reasonable arguments against our blatant disregard of our limiting resources.Though this was present to a certain extent I just could not get over the constant reiteration of man's ability to overcome matter. He cites the laws of conservation of energy and matter as some how helping his case that man's intellect will be able to overcome the problems of limited resources.Though I do value and admire humanities ability to work with what we have and, as he states "constantly do more with less" I think it irrational to believe that we are not limited by our surroundings. Our minds my be able to come up with solutions to problems but those solutions are only feasible based on our resources, and though matter and energy are conserved that does not mean they are conserved as RESOURCES. This conflation of conservation with actually being infinitely available for our use is really where the problem lies.
Of course I do not want to claim that its not worth reading. Though I disagreed with some of what was said overall it was an interesting little book, though not worth the $20 I had to pay for it...
My main contention with the work is his seemingly naive acceptance of the fallacy that our intellect will be forever able to overcome our surroundings. I actually picked the work up after reading, somewhere, his claim about the use of fossil fuels, thinking that he might offer some reasonable arguments against our blatant disregard of our limiting resources.Though this was present to a certain extent I just could not get over the constant reiteration of man's ability to overcome matter. He cites the laws of conservation of energy and matter as some how helping his case that man's intellect will be able to overcome the problems of limited resources.Though I do value and admire humanities ability to work with what we have and, as he states "constantly do more with less" I think it irrational to believe that we are not limited by our surroundings. Our minds my be able to come up with solutions to problems but those solutions are only feasible based on our resources, and though matter and energy are conserved that does not mean they are conserved as RESOURCES. This conflation of conservation with actually being infinitely available for our use is really where the problem lies.
Of course I do not want to claim that its not worth reading. Though I disagreed with some of what was said overall it was an interesting little book, though not worth the $20 I had to pay for it...
December 19, 2016
There are some enjoyable parts to this book, but the author writes as if he is proceeding through a logical argument while doing nothing of the sort. Careful attention is given to dead-end sections of argument while points required to establish the author's case are hand-waved with assertions and false analogies. By the end of the book, the author decided to throw in some random observations and even bolder claims as well (e.g. we should rebuild the cities of antiquity for metaphysically regenerate the world--an interesting idea to explore perhaps, but a non sequitur in the final pages of the book).
That doesn't mean the author is completely wrong--just that he hasn't proven a sound case for his arguments, and has as a result made some blunders. Ultimately I didn't get much more out of the book than the ideas that (1) we're on board a spaceship and should treat it as a limited resource and (2) a total is more than the sum of its parts. Not bad ideas, but not much more than I could have gleaned from simply reading the book's title.
That doesn't mean the author is completely wrong--just that he hasn't proven a sound case for his arguments, and has as a result made some blunders. Ultimately I didn't get much more out of the book than the ideas that (1) we're on board a spaceship and should treat it as a limited resource and (2) a total is more than the sum of its parts. Not bad ideas, but not much more than I could have gleaned from simply reading the book's title.
January 3, 2020
As a designer and lifelong curious person, this book has been on my must read list ever since learning about the geodesic domes and fullers visions of the future. The book starts out telling a fascinating tale of the history of accessible knowledge and education. The middle of the book kind of lost me, then the last chapter, for me made it all worth it. The last chapter alone is worth everyone reading. The book was written in 69 but is still so valid today. He makes so many important points and was trying to get the world to cooperate to save itself 40 years ago. To put it frankly, Bucky knows what's up.
December 5, 2020
Operating Manual reads like a deranged hobo rant. This is not even taking into account his comments about India, which are awesome. I'm sure it's helpful to think of earth as a Spaceship, but can we please stop with pleonastic garbage.
March 20, 2016
Interesting read. Three chapters didn't make any sense to me at all and reeked of pseudo-science.
April 30, 2022
A huge hallucination; a pile of nonsense.
November 28, 2023
Fascinating.
Not unlike Daniel Quinn and Jared Diamond, Buckminster Fuller rewrites the cosmogony of what we call modern society and rightly structures it not as a gradual emergence of civility through struggle but rather as subjugation through force and cunning. The lack of polymathy I see today in people of all ages, classes, and education levels would be shocking if I hadn't become so desensitized to it so long ago.
From this rewriting, the author builds an argument that the world we have today is built on inertia and inherited systems, including a host of assumptions that we know for a fact are faulty or downright incorrect. He posits that the games we play with resources, especially money, are self-evidently fraudulent. As he points out, capitalists and communists both drop the pretense of the game when something happens that could permanently end it, for example in war. Suddenly, all the resources that are required exist, fabricated as though from nowhere. Suddenly we have all of the innovation, motivation, and, importantly, remuneration, required to win.
Buckminster Fuller goes on to argue that, based on the things we now know to be true, we can and must build a different model of interacting with reality. We play the scarcity game but there is nearly unlimited power that we can harvest from our local star and from the movement of the moon (tidal and wind). If we keep milking renewable resources (oil), we'll eventually deplete them permanently. Every innovation brings us to a new point where less human effort is required, and eventually we'll just need to give people the freedom to not have to work to live so that they can take up creative pursuits, including moving forward science and technology to further improve our society (what we might call Universal Basic Income today).
I don't recommend this book. Buckminster Fuller talks in loops and word-constructions that are going to be extremely confusing for the average reader, plus they're very likely not going to digest the sentiments well even if they work to understand them. Someone else will come around and say it again soon enough.
Not unlike Daniel Quinn and Jared Diamond, Buckminster Fuller rewrites the cosmogony of what we call modern society and rightly structures it not as a gradual emergence of civility through struggle but rather as subjugation through force and cunning. The lack of polymathy I see today in people of all ages, classes, and education levels would be shocking if I hadn't become so desensitized to it so long ago.
From this rewriting, the author builds an argument that the world we have today is built on inertia and inherited systems, including a host of assumptions that we know for a fact are faulty or downright incorrect. He posits that the games we play with resources, especially money, are self-evidently fraudulent. As he points out, capitalists and communists both drop the pretense of the game when something happens that could permanently end it, for example in war. Suddenly, all the resources that are required exist, fabricated as though from nowhere. Suddenly we have all of the innovation, motivation, and, importantly, remuneration, required to win.
Buckminster Fuller goes on to argue that, based on the things we now know to be true, we can and must build a different model of interacting with reality. We play the scarcity game but there is nearly unlimited power that we can harvest from our local star and from the movement of the moon (tidal and wind). If we keep milking renewable resources (oil), we'll eventually deplete them permanently. Every innovation brings us to a new point where less human effort is required, and eventually we'll just need to give people the freedom to not have to work to live so that they can take up creative pursuits, including moving forward science and technology to further improve our society (what we might call Universal Basic Income today).
I don't recommend this book. Buckminster Fuller talks in loops and word-constructions that are going to be extremely confusing for the average reader, plus they're very likely not going to digest the sentiments well even if they work to understand them. Someone else will come around and say it again soon enough.
November 26, 2024
This was a book written by a smart man in 1970 about how his ideal world would function. At the crux, he suggests that there is more than enough wealth to go around for everyone — people shouldn’t be living in abject poverty. I think most people can agree with this. But this then suggests that there will be those that won’t “work for a living”. Which in itself is paradoxical because it suggests that if you don’t work you should cease to live. Rather, Fuller suggests that those who no longer need to work, shouldn’t. He fully supports automation, and proposes humans should instead do what they’re best at: think and innovate. This is very similar to how most big tech companies work nowadays. The breakthrough of 1 employee pays for the salary of 1000. And tech companies are massively profitable and responsible for a great portion of technological advancement in this day and age. Why can’t our society as a whole function the same way? Further, he gives an example that I quite enjoy which is the US gvt giving returning WW2 soldiers education via the GI bill since their jobs no longer existed. Instead of spouting typical nonsense about how “if they can’t get a job, they don’t provide value to society “. We can instead celebrate that we no longer have to do menial labor, and instead sit around, socialize and innovate together without pressure of the bottom falling out.
June 30, 2023
Are some of his sentences long to the point of exhaustion? Yes. Is his ability to zoom out and situate the evolution of humanity on Earth in the context of survival and self-actualization brilliant? Yes. At first, hard to believe this was written 55 years ago since some of these ideas have yet to be fully realized; however, given the concept of time, I guess 55 years is like an hour. Academic, wordy, philosophical — this felt like a frenzied lecture and I enjoyed the challenge of keeping up. Having said that, not for everyone.
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July 29, 2024saw a reference to this book in a hardcore song and I thought I'd read it :)) (song Pretend by Totem Skin)
kinda typical techno-optinist but it's interesting how he juxtaposes his collective(ist)/regeneratism with Darwinism/entropy. Probably the thing that is most likely to stick with me is the idea that knowledge is no longer limiting our needs but we can create new knowledge through our desires and needs. (he gives the example of creating an entirely new metal alloy that didn't exist before for airplanes depending on what temperature/stress we need it to resist)
kinda typical techno-optinist but it's interesting how he juxtaposes his collective(ist)/regeneratism with Darwinism/entropy. Probably the thing that is most likely to stick with me is the idea that knowledge is no longer limiting our needs but we can create new knowledge through our desires and needs. (he gives the example of creating an entirely new metal alloy that didn't exist before for airplanes depending on what temperature/stress we need it to resist)
August 29, 2019
Bucky challenges us to see our planet as the spaceship we live on. He says we can, and must, emerge from the era of the robber barons and use our resources to create true wealth; not just the consensual hallucination of money, but true wealth - which can be measured as a function of how long and well our species can survive into the future.
January 23, 2019
Wealth is universal to all mankind. Wealth is a illusion.
Fuller paints both optimistic and pessimistic perspectives of the future of mankind on this planet.
After going through some of the history of our species' expansion, exploitation, and innovations of the past, we are provided with economics and technology and sociological lessons of current contrasted to past and potential future states of being as a culture.
As this edition was published in 1978, the ensuing 40 years have not been kind toward achieving Fuller's vision. To whit, we are further separating as haves and have-nots.
5 stars for concept and vision. 4 stars for presentation. I had to read the text twice over the past month to be able to cogitate on his concepts and ideas.
Fuller paints both optimistic and pessimistic perspectives of the future of mankind on this planet.
After going through some of the history of our species' expansion, exploitation, and innovations of the past, we are provided with economics and technology and sociological lessons of current contrasted to past and potential future states of being as a culture.
As this edition was published in 1978, the ensuing 40 years have not been kind toward achieving Fuller's vision. To whit, we are further separating as haves and have-nots.
5 stars for concept and vision. 4 stars for presentation. I had to read the text twice over the past month to be able to cogitate on his concepts and ideas.
November 16, 2017
beautiful ideas, not beautiful prose
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