Total Thinking
Written at Black Mountain College in 1949, before the electronic computer's rise and before Fuller had read Wiener's Cybernetics (1948), this essay sketches an analytical epistemology that, in retrospect, Fuller saw as anticipating computer programming and powerful forecasting capabilities. It was republished in Ideas and Integrities.
Origin and claim
Preparing Ideas and Integrities for publication, Fuller rediscovered "Total Thinking," which he had written at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, in 1949 — prior to the computer's massive development and the popularization of Norbert Wiener's cybernetics. He had not read Cybernetics when he wrote the piece, and published it because its "analytical epistemology unexpectedly provides a broad view of computer programming conceptions and experimental strategies which embrace potentially powerful forecasting capabilities."
Man as evolution-modifier
The essay opens by arguing that man, beyond all other creatures, consciously participates — however meagerly — in the selective mutations and accelerations of his own evolution. Because no energy is lost from universe and all parts act on all others, man can modify his evolution only by relatively reordering the aspects of universe, pictured as a "kaleidoscope of sum-total symmetry." Every shift in the energy balance at earth's crust affects all universe; even "thinking about truth alters truth." The system is inherently irreversible: modification proceeds only forward in time, "magnitude vanishes; only principles endure."
A priori ignorance and its dissipation
Fuller holds that man is born helpless and "a-priori ignorant," backing into his future, his survival historically secured by "indirectly-arrived-at advantages, only ignorantly induced." Vanity and superstition are the "plus and minus springs of ignorance," the raison d'être of boast and fear. Ignorance is a diminishing negative residue — "the obscuring mist of the receding mental wilderness" — progressively dissipated by intellect through designed physical experiment, which resolves eventually into general behavior laws that make the universe increasingly predictable. Education means being led out (educente) from ignorance's fixations and led into (intro-ducente) awareness of dynamic universal principles.
From "up/down" to "in/out"
A central illustration of revised thought-habits is the rejection of "up" and "down" as non-sense inherited from a flat-earth worldview. On a curved earth, two people's "up" directions are non-identical radii of a common energy center; in the time it takes to speak a sentence, one's "up" toward the stars sweeps billions of miles. Reliable communication requires speaking of in and out relative to designated centers: the sky is "outward" to all people, at all places and times, while each enjoys an infinity of individual "ins." Fuller likewise prefers "realization" over "create" — "Man creates naught"; he rearranges locally by realizing the interactions of principles.
Relativity, the comprehensive realizer, and synergy
Fuller frames a "schematically kinetic tapestry" of relativity in which both the frame of reference and the observed are in continual motion — dramatized by his recurring metaphor of an observer in a refueled airplane watching a round-the-world relay ocean race. The "comprehensive designer" or "comprehensive realizer" learns to resolve phenomena into internal and external aspects, to reduce the astronomical complexity of events to a few pervading principles (e.g., the ninety-two tendencies to self-impoundment of energy, inwardness/outwardness, convergence/divergence, spin, torque, tension/pressure). Such a realizer becomes a synergist: synergy is "wholistic behavior unpredicted by parts," and is "inherently surprising," since the great confluences of remote events cannot be foreseen forwardly, only made acceptable when viewed in reverse.
Three requirements of total thinking
To apply knowledge of position, direction, and relative acceleration to everyday environment-shaping, Fuller specifies that the designer must be able to write the "cogent formula" of his life as embraced by dynamic universe. This requires, in essence:
- the comprehensive-intuitive — total subjective-objective thinking;
- assumption of the systematic or comprehensive idea in view of its reciprocal implications;
- rigorous physical trial by precision tools, under variable conditions accelerated and amplified beyond working requirements.
He adds that residual ignorance has used mathematics in "linear diametrics" — the "either yes or no" of two-dimensional oversimplification — and predicts a complete reorganization of mathematics within a generation, with advanced intuitions shifted to elementary priority. Where the periodicity of interference is low (e.g., warm equatorial land near sea level), ignorance dissipates slowly; high-frequency, high-magnitude environments (seas, poles, cosmos) accelerate intellectual ordering. "Bias precludes synergetic advantage."
Sources
- total_thinking/ — book project directory (repo-local source tree)
- total_thinking/index.md — full essay text and project index