Part II
Fuller’s Faith: An Introduction to Bucky Fuller
4 It was 1927, the year a bashful young pilot named Charles Augustus Lindbergh fired the world’s imagination by making his solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. It was a very different world from the one we know today. There was no television; and until that very year, all the movies ever filmed had been silent, save for the impromptu musical accompaniment played live on organs and pianos in theatres where the films were shown.
5 America seemed prosperous and at peace. There was an unprecedented economic boom, and just over the horizon shone an era when everyone would be rich---a dream fueled by an ever-accelerating bull market. The music heard on the radio (still a relatively new invention) was happy. Two of the year’s biggest hits were ‘‘Blue Skies’’ and ‘‘Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella.’’ It was also the year the fifteen-millionth ‘‘Tin Lizzie’’ rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly lines.
6 The twin horrors of the Great Depression and World War II lay ahead, in a future undreamed of save by a few savants labeled doomsayers and gloom spreaders.
7 But for the young man standing on the Chicago shoreline, life looked hopelessly bleak. He was a small bulldog of a man, short and broadly built with a large head. He walked with an erect, almost military bearing that struck some as Napoleonesque. His jaw was prominent, commanding. He peered out at the world through bottle-thick lenses that magnified his already owlishly wide hazel eyes. He had a broad patrician mouth that could break into a dazzling, infectious smile when he was happy.
8 But there was no joy on this bleak night. Had any passerby noticed, he or she would have seen a face racked with anguish.
9 Bucky Fuller had decided to kill himself.
10 He was going to swim out into the icy dark waters until he could go no farther. Then he would surrender himself to the waves. It would be easy, he reflected. He had always loved the water, and there was something oddly reassuring in the thought of surrendering to its final embrace. Life had become unbearable for this gentle, loving man.
11 If there was a single root cause for his misery, it lay in his inability to see things the way others did. Oh, he had tried---and hard. But somehow, every time he accommodated himself to the insecurities and fears of others, he found himself once again confronting the specters of failure and financial ruin.
12 It had started in school, with his incessant questioning of teachers. Why and how mattered deeply to him, and he could not content himself with the glib explanations provided by men and women who had obviously never asked themselves the same basic questions the young Fuller was always asking himself. The teachers often seemed upset and provoked by his inquiring mind, seeing in this small bespectacled child a threat to their own authority. He was early branded a troublemaker. But the teachers failed to recognize that all he wanted was to understand.
13 Somehow he managed to adapt and make his way through primary and secondary school.
14 Richard Buckminster Fuller came from an old New England family. For five generations, Fuller men had graduated from Harvard. When it came time for Bucky to go to college, he followed in the family tradition.
15 It may have been that being branded a rebel turned him into one. For whatever reason, the young Fuller found himself engaged in all sorts of benign mischief (including one remarkable evening when he spent an entire semester’s allowance on a champagne dinner for a troupe of Broadway chorines). Such antics were poorly thought of in the tradition-bound halls of Harvard, and Fuller was expelled.
16 After his ouster from academia, Bucky found a job as a machinist, thanks to the intervention of a kindly relation. He loved the work, especially the almost alchemically magical alloys---those strange combinations of metals that turned out far stronger than the combined strengths of their individual components. They hinted to the young Fuller of a world unseen by the senses where forces only vaguely discerned might hold untold promise (or menace) for the future.
17 He managed to win his way back into the university’s good graces for a second time---only to find himself booted out again. That was to mark Fuller’s final assault on the corridors of formal education. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to learn. It was just that the things he was being taught didn’t make that much sense. And, besides, there were all those lovely young chorines, all that exciting life.
18 His happiest years came during World War I, the ‘‘Great War’’ or the ‘‘War to End All Wars.’’ During the war, Bucky served in the Navy, first commanding a family-owned boat that had been volunteered as a vessel for seeking out German submarines along the New England coastline.
19 Bucky’s inventiveness surfaced during his military years. One assignment involved the rescue of pilots of the day’s primitive aircraft. When the biplanes crashed into the water, the craft often flipped over, drowning the trapped pilots. Fuller promptly designed a mechanical arm for righting the planes, saving the lives of countless airmen. Fuller’s brilliance drew the attention of superiors, and he was selected to attend a three-month crash course at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. He emerged an officer.
20 It was in the Navy that Fuller discovered a way of thinking about the world that was to profoundly influence the course of his life. He became viscerally aware that the world was a single entity, not a collection of nations separated from each other by imaginary lines. This may sound strange today, to us who have seen the world as it appears from the surface of a moon a quarter-million miles distant. But in those days, humanity was confined to the surface of the earth. Airplanes were still novelties, held close to the ground by the limitations of the day’s technology. Maps were generally multihued pastel affairs where each nation bore its own color, and differences stood out far more than commonalities.
21 But ships sailed the seas freely, traveling continent to continent over the mantle of water that was the one-world ocean, despite the arbitrary labels assigned by man to its various aspects. From the cabin of a ship, the world is a single vast expanse of water over which move vessels filled with food, clothing, metals, fuels, machines, and a host of other manufactured goods and raw materials.
22 This new perception of the earth was to have a profound effect on Fuller’s thought. He came to realize that our planet itself was like a ship, containing vast but nonetheless limited resources, like the food and fuel carried aboard an ocean-going ship. Like the seafaring vessel, the earth also carries its complement of passengers---each living thing that dwells in or on its soil, water, and atmosphere. Seeing our world as ‘‘Spaceship Earth’’---a term Bucky later coined to describe this way of looking at things---convinced him that each of us must take more care to think about how our actions affect other beings, human and non-human. This was decades before the popularization of the word ‘‘ecology.’’
23 During the war, Bucky had married the one and only love of his life, Anne Hewlett. Theirs was a formal naval wedding, complete with a recessional march under the crossed sabers of fellow officers clad in their resplendent dress whites.
24 Toward the close of the war, Bucky was involved in a momentous experiment. His tiny ship ferried the inventor of the voice-carrying radio out into a calm bay where history’s first conversation between aircraft and ground---or ship, to be more accurate---took place. Fuller was present at the birth of an era. When the war ended, the newly married officer was assigned to serve on the communications staff of President Woodrow Wilson as he sailed to the international peace conference in Paris. Bucky made two trips aboard the presidential ship, and during the second was present in the communications room for the first radio broadcast to carry a human voice across an ocean. For Fuller, it was an exciting moment, presaging an era when all the passengers of Spaceship Earth would be linked in a network of virtually instantaneous communication.
25 Not long after Fuller’s return from his second European voyage, Anne gave birth to a daughter, whom they named Alexandra. The child soon became very ill. The condition was diagnosed as spinal meningitis. The child later contracted polio. Physicians ordered round-the-clock nursing care, holding out little hope for the infant’s life. Bucky was heartbroken.
26 Then came a second blow. The Navy told the young officer he must prepare to ship out for the Far East. Bucky tried to win reassignment to an East Coast port, because Anne needed to be near her family and the young father did not want to leave his wife and daughter during the height of their crisis. But the service proved unrelenting, and with deep reluctance Bucky resigned his commission.
27 His obvious intelligence and military administrative experience won him a position with the Armour meat-packing company as chief of their importing section. An offer from another firm followed quickly, with the promise of higher pay. The promise of more money to meet the family’s mounting medical bills led Fuller to jump at the offer. But disaster struck when his new employer went bankrupt soon after Fuller came aboard, leaving the young family worse off than before.
28 And then Alexandra died.
29 Bucky was devastated, for two reasons. First, because he had come to dearly love the little child; second, because he had been away at a football game at the time she died, on her fourth birthday. His absence laid a burden of guilt on his shoulders so profound that his voice still choked with emotion as he recounted those events six decades later.
30 Somehow he managed to continue. He found himself a new position, this time as the president of his own company. Anne’s father had invented a new system of building with bricks, involving a radically new technology of brickmaking, coupled with a system Bucky helped perfect for laying the improved bricks that would save both time and money. A corporation was formed, with Bucky at the helm. The Fullers moved to Chicago to be near the brickmaking factory, then under construction. For a time, the future seemed bright; but in 1927 Anne’s father died, and internal corporate problems, coupled with government regulations and resistance from unions and established builders, blocked successful adoption of the new building system. Anne gave birth to their second daughter, Allegra, just as the company collapsed. Bucky was again without a job.
31 For the thirty-two-year-old Fuller, life held nothing but despair. He was hopeless, a failure. The only time he had ever felt satisfied with his work was in the Navy, which personal disaster had forced him to leave. He had struggled in the following years, but to no avail. He had nothing to offer the world. And there was the numbing, gnawing guilt he felt for his absence at the time of Alexandra’s death.
32 As his thoughts gathered momentum on their downward spiral, Fuller realized that his own mother and Anne’s mother would be able to care for his wife and child should anything happen to him. And his own record of apparent failures convinced him that he could bring nothing but more suffering and pain to those who loved him. He was left with the conviction that his best course of action would be to ‘‘get himself out of the way.’’ To commit suicide.
33 It was this confusion and pain that brought him to the shore of Lake Michigan that night in 1927. But as he stared across the wind-tossed surface of the waters, something happened, something that would eventually touch millions of lives and provide other desperate souls with a sense of new possibilities, of a world free from want and deprivation.
34 And it all started with a single thought: ‘‘This is the last time you’ll ever have to use your mind, so you’d better use it. You’d better do your own thinking---see what you really think.’’
35 It was an infinitely precious moment, a timeless epiphany in which a single current of thought poured in with overwhelming lucidity, sweeping every other thought and feeling before it with an irresistible rush of clarity. In that soul-transfixing moment, Bucky suddenly realized that much of his pain had come from his sincere efforts to believe what others had told him to believe, regardless of his own contrary feelings and intuitions.
36 ‘‘I’d been brought up by an older generation absolutely certain that the mental processes of the young were unreliable. I’d been brought up continually hearing the expression ‘Never mind what you think, this is what we’re teaching you.’ I’d been taught to play a game.
37 ‘‘And I saw that the people who were telling me to do that---to do what they were telling me---apparently loved me. I knew my mother did, and I felt that most of the others did too. So I had decided that I would do my best not to do my own thinking, to play by the rules as children learn to do. Everyone had been telling me to ‘get over my sensitivity,’ to ‘realize that life is a hard battle.’
38 ‘‘Yet I had also observed that many, many times what I had been thinking turned out to be true, and what society was telling me to believe turned out not to be true.’’
39 So there it was. The thought. See what you really think. Think for yourself.
40 Another thought came.
41 Much of the pain had also arisen from selfish acts, when he had placed his own ‘‘needs’’ over those of others, when he had approached life with the attitude of ‘‘What’s in it for me?’’ From some deep, intuitive wellspring came the realization that selfishness was the source of anguish. Therefore, why not change your thinking, he reasoned with himself.
42 ‘‘What if I look at life differently? Suppose I commit my life from now on never to me anymore, but instead use my life and experience only for others?
43 ‘‘I thought, Who are we? What is life?
44 ‘‘And then I realized that each of us is an incredible inventory of experiences, and that I might be able to use some of my experiences so that others would not be hurt the same way I was hurt, so that I could help others from coming to the same pains I had come to.’’
45 A vast reformation was taking place in the young man’s consciousness. Time seemed to have ceased, and he was aware only of the momentum of his own thoughts, coursing deeper and deeper toward some still-unseen but life-renewing center.
46 Another thought came. If pain had come from acting on erroneous beliefs others had instilled, what was he now to believe? Or was he to believe anything at all? And if not to believe, then what?
47 Bucky resolved to take his lead from the sciences, where a rigorous methodology was prescribed for arriving at truth. He would implement the scientific method in his own life. He would function no more on unsubstantiated beliefs. A ‘‘belief’’ was unscientific, a hand-me-down superstition which could only cloud and obscure the face of reality. In those areas of experience where he had no conclusive proofs, he would be an honest, meticulous scientist, evaluating the evidence of experience and formulating hypotheses which he would then set out to prove in the crucible of his life. Nothing would go unquestioned, and where he had no answers of his own he would tolerate ambiguity until scientifically perceived experience wrought an answer.
48 Now his thought was approaching the one question he knew was central.
49 ‘‘One of those things you’ve been taught to believe is about God. If you’re going to think for yourself, then what experimental evidence do you have to assume that a Greater Intellect than that of humans is operating in Universe?’’
50 With his scientific training, Bucky had come to see that the universe of human experience is governed by laws---laws that are weightless and invisible in themselves, yet operating everywhere we look, in every experience, with complete and absolute power. These are the laws that hold the colossal suns and planets in exquisite balance, the laws that govern the intricate, invisible realm of the atom.
51 ‘‘And I saw that these laws could only be expressed mathematically. So I said to myself, ‘Mathematics is intellectual, mental, and these laws are expressions of intellectual principles that predated humanity’s discovery of them.’ And I saw that it was quite apparent that there is a Greater Intellect than that of humans operating in Universe,’’ the Intellect that expresses itself through the laws governing all experience.
52 And then there was the ultimate realization, that of the ever-presence of love. Here, in love, Bucky saw, was further evidence of a power operating beyond the reaches of human understanding. ‘‘I thought a great deal about love at that moment, about how incredible the phenomenon we call love really is. Stones don’t love stones, yet humans take love for granted. And I thought about children, and how as children we all feel it so much. It’s absolutely weightless, and it’s an incredible phenomenon.
53 ‘‘I knew then that there’s something operating here that’s way beyond our understanding.’’
54 (Bucky’s eyes lost their focus as the memory of that transcendent moment overwhelmed him. He brought his hands together, as if in prayer. His eyelids closed, and the flow of words ceased. The power of that decades-old vision retained its hold on his imagination.)
55 Suddenly, on the shore of Lake Michigan, Bucky realized that nothing had been lost. There was nothing in his life, no experience at all, that could not be transformed into something that would benefit others. His years as a machinist had taught him about a realm of invisible yet incredibly powerful forces ready to serve the needs of humanity. His years in the Navy had taught him to see the world as an unfragmented whole, as Spaceship Earth with all humanity as passengers sharing a common destiny. His apparent failures in the business world had taught him the limitations of thought governing both the commercial and governmental spheres.
56 At that moment, Buckminster Fuller’s life ceased to be a collection of good and bad memories; in its place was a wealth of experiences, some pleasurable, some painful, and each usable to the benefit of his fellow passengers on Spaceship Earth.
57 ‘‘I said to myself that I have to realize that I don’t know why I’m here, and that it’s not really for me to say that this particular inventory of experiences should be removed from the availability of others. I realized that we are born to help others, and that each of us is related to all humanity. I saw that if I really looked at myself as some part of the grand design, I might represent in my experience some links that might be useful for humanity, and that might be lost if I were to throw myself away.’’
58 Bucky’s unique ‘‘inventory of experiences’’ had equipped him as a thinker and designer. He knew about tools, metals, machines, technology. In the Navy, he had seen this knowledge turned toward destructive ends, employed to annihilate fellow humans and their life-supporting (as well as war-making) technology. Bucky resolved at that moment to turn the technology of weaponry toward a new aim---livingry, the solving of humanity’s life problems. He would help others by turning his skills to the development of solutions to such basic human problems as housing and transportation. And he would not confine his interests and explorations to a single, narrow speciality. Life and Universe1 itself would be his subject. He would become a comprehensivist, always endeavoring to see the broadest possible picture. There would be no area of experience outside his interest.
60 There was one last element needed to complete his transformation, one final thought.
61 Looking back at his own experience and at the collective portrait of human experience called history, Bucky realized that most of humanity’s worst actions were motivated by fear, specifically by the belief that the world contains limited resources, that ‘‘there’s not enough to go around.’’ Deep within virtually all the earth’s established systems of belief lurked the ‘‘law of the jungle.’’ A man or woman had no inherent right to exist, to live. This was the basic credo of human fear. You had to earn a living, either as the producer of material goods or as the supplier of services to a producer---(be it as employee or spouse). Some would win; others were destined to failure---and death. This same sense of ‘‘lethal inadequacy of life support,’’ a phrase Fuller later coined, was at the core of the prevailing strains of political, religious, and social thought. In the modern world it reared its head as the ‘‘class struggle’’ of Marxism, the ‘‘survival of the fittest’’ of Darwinism (social and biological), and in myriad other forms.
62 Yet Bucky saw that humanity had also harnessed principles enabling the performance of ever-greater works with ever-smaller amounts of matter and energy. This process of doing more with less he labeled ‘‘ephemeralization.’’ Man had progressed from track-bound trains to trackless trucks and automobiles and on to the airplane. The speed of travel had greatly increased, while the amount of matter and energy needed to perform the act of travel had diminished in almost equal measure. And so, too, had humanity moved from ground-dependent to wire-dependent communications. Fuller himself had witnessed the birth of wireless voice communications from ground to air and from continent to continent. Now, in 1927, it was becoming possible to communicate with anyone, anywhere on earth, at the speed of light.
63 And one single technological innovation, the electric light, had revolutionized the world, freeing humankind from the tyranny of darkness and night.
64 Thousands of inventions had sprung from humanity’s mastery of the scientifically discovered principles of physical Universe, and many more discoveries lay in the future. Fuller realized, to paraphrase another great thinker of his era, J. B. S. Haldane,2 that man’s technological potential is not only greater than we imagine, but greater than we can imagine.
66 Fuller also knew that the earth held more than enough raw materials and resources to provide for humanity’s basic needs so long as the resources were well managed. Shortages were illusory, the products of outmoded systems of thought and politics inadequate to the realities of the new world picture. There was no longer any need for anyone to struggle to ‘‘earn a living.’’ Life was a gift, on a world blessed with an abundance of supplies. There was no longer any reason to fear, provided humanity would only accept the realization of this new truth.
67 Bucky’s thought went one step further that cold Chicago evening.
68 ‘‘I had to make a working assumption. I saw that the hydrogen atom didn’t have to earn a living. In fact, humans were the only ones with this game of‘You have to earn a living.’ So I thought that it could be that if I was doing what nature wanted done, that I might find myself being taken care of by nature, just as the flowers got taken care of by the honeybee.
69 ‘‘And that would be my test, my experimental evidence, of my having absolute faith that there was a Greater Intellect---that if I were doing what the Greater Intellect wanted me to do, I would find myself being supported without me having to take any thought about it. There’d be nobody to grade my paper, nobody to tell me to do it. I’d just have to launch into it. So I had to make an experiment whether this can be done. I thought to myself, If you’re doing what the Universe wants done---and let’s call it God, because it’s certainly not a man---if you’re doing what the Greater Intellectual Integrity wants done, you’ll be getting on. And if you’re not getting on, then you’re not doing the right things.’’
70 The last element was in place. The old Fuller was gone. In his place was a new man, a man who considered himself nothing more than an average human who had simply decided to see just what an average human could do if he laid aside his own sense of fear and limitations and devoted his life to serving others.
71 In the years that followed, Fuller was to become one of the most original and brilliant of the thinkers, poets, designers, inventors, philosophers, and visionaries the world has yet seen. It is no wonder that he has often been compared to Leonardo da Vinci, that great Renaissance man of all passions.3
73 Fuller said he had abandoned all thought of What’s in it for me, and his life bore testament to his words. He adopted one single purpose: to employ all the means within his experience for the betterment of others. The light of his example continues to inspire countless thousands around the globe. He circled the world fifty times, advising presidents and prime ministers, consulting with corporate boards, addressing small gatherings of artists and young people. And his life proved a living testimonial to his grand experiment. Universe did support his endeavors. However haltingly at first, he discovered that his own needs and those of his family were progressively met as he held in mind his purpose to work only for the good of all.
74 Fuller’s world was incredibly busy, but invariably joyous. Smiles and laughter came easily. He often adopted the role of clown and outrageous bard to cheer friends and fellow workers.
75 He invented an amazing array of technological contrivances, ranging from the geodesic dome (which encloses more space more efficiently than any structure previously designed by humanity), to his cars, houses, chairs, roofing trusses, rowing machines ... the list is awe-inspiring. He wrote books, eighteen of them, edited magazines, authored poetry, taught. His drawings are works of art in themselves, sketches employing the elegant simplicity, the synergy, that was at the core of his vision.
76 But it is as an exemplar that Fuller may be best remembered in ages to come (for his life will surely stand before the ages, if humanity transcends the impending crisis he saw so clearly). Fuller demonstrated something of the grandeur and beauty of what it can mean to be human. He confronted the fear and apathy of an age and emerged triumphant, gloriously so.
77 Fuller did not believe that everyone must reach the same cumulative pain and misery that overwhelmed him that night on the shore of Lake Michigan. Bucky was convinced that the transformation that overwhelmed him that day led him to a condition that is the normal and natural state of all humanity, a birthright. Fuller often said that his ‘‘patron,’’ the impetus of all his creative efforts, was the children of tomorrow. For it was his most profound conviction that if a child is simply provided with accurate information in an atmosphere free of frustration that he or she would never need to suffer as he did.
78 That is the reason for this book.
79 Through the pages that follow you will accompany Bucky and three young friends as they explore the world of his thought. The journey is a friendly one, opening up new vistas and experiences and laying benign siege to much of what passes for ‘‘knowledge’’ in today’s schools. You may find much to question; remember only that these concepts worked for Bucky, enabling him to revolutionize our understanding of Spaceship Earth and the great Universe of which it is part.