permaculture

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network <lakinroe@silcom.com>]

Buckminster Fuller’s Manifesto for the Genius of Generalists
“Only mind can discover how to do so much with so little as forever to be 
able to sustain and physically satisfy all humanity.”
BY MARIA POPOVA

https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/03/08/buckminster-fuller-synergetics/ 
<https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/03/08/buckminster-fuller-synergetics/>

Writer Alvin Toffler once described architect, theorist, designer, and 
futurist Buckminster Fuller (July 12, 1895–July 1, 1983) as “one of the 
most-powerful myth-makers and myth-exposers of our time … a controversial, 
constructive, endlessly energetic metaphor-maker who sees things differently 
from the rest of us, and thereby makes us see ourselves afresh” — perhaps the 
richest and most accurate account of a mind to whom we owe more than we 
realize.

Today, the concept of synergy permeates everything from boardrooms to 
artspeak to hipster dinner party chatter — but it was Fuller who coined it as 
cultural currency in pioneering the study of synergentics, which concerns 
itself with the “behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of 
their parts taken separately.” In “The Wellspring of Reality,” the 
introductory essay to his seminal 1975 volume Synergetics: Explorations in 
the Geometry of Thinking (public library), Fuller decries specialization as 
the enemy of synergy and proposes a reframing of culture that could “get all 
of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social 
behaviors that will avoid extinction.” At its epicenter he places the value 
of wide curiosity and generalist knowledge.

We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be 
logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly 
responsible communication to be crisply brief. Advancing science has now 
discovered that all the known cases of biological extinction have been caused 
by overspecialization, whose concentration of only selected genes sacrifices 
general adaptability. Thus the specialist’s brief for pinpointing brevity is 
dubious. In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive 
understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and 
confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving 
responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization 
breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological 
discord, which in turn leads to war.

He makes an eloquent contribution to history’s greatest definitions of 
science:

Science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience.

While contemporary neuroscientists might scoff at the distinction between 
brain and mind, claiming that “trying to suggest one causes the other is like 
saying wetness causes water” — a contention biologically correct in some ways 
and spiritually impoverished in others, worrisomely neuro-deterministic and 
negating the reality of the malleable self — Fuller does make a noteworthy 
distinction, reminiscent of Arthur Conan Doyle’s concept of the “brain attic” 
and modern-day conceptions of how creativity works:

The human brain is a physical mechanism for storing, retrieving, and 
re-storing again, each special-case experience. The experience is often a 
packaged concept.



Mind is the weightless and uniquely human faculty that surveys the ever 
larger inventory of special-case experiences stored in the brain bank and, 
seeking to identify their intercomplementary significance, from time to time 
discovers one of the rare scientifically generalizable principles running 
consistently through all the relevant experience set. The thoughts that 
discover these principles are weightless and tentative and may also be 
eternal. … It seems also to follow that the more experiences we have, the 
more chances there are that the mind may discover, on the one hand, 
additional generalized principles or, on the other hand, exceptions that 
disqualify one or another of the already catalogued principles that, having 
heretofore held ‘true’ without contradiction for a long time, had been 
tentatively conceded to be demonstrating eternal persistence of behavior. 
Mind’s relentless reviewing of the comprehensive brain bank’s storage of all 
our special-case experiences tends both to progressive enlargement and 
definitive refinement of the catalogue of generalized principles that 
interaccommodatively govern all transactions of Universe.

In a sentiment that the late Aaron Swartz seemed to echo in his memorable 
wisdom on curiosity, Fuller cautions:

Specialization tends to shut off the wide-band tuning searches and thus to 
preclude further discovery.

(Indeed, we see such “wide-band tuning” as central to the expansive genius of 
celebrated “specialists,” as evidenced by the reading lists of Carl Sagan and 
Alan Turing.)

Fuller then moves on to the vital distinction between money-work and purpose, 
debunking the myth of the zero-sum game of prosperity:

It is also mistakenly assumed that employment is the only means by which 
humans can earn the right to live, for politicians have yet to discover how 
much wealth is available for distribution. All this is rationalized on the 
now scientifically discredited premise that there can never be enough life 
support for all. Thus humanity’s specialization leads only toward warring and 
such devastating tools, both, visible and invisible, as ultimately to destroy 
all Earthians.

[…]

It is eminently feasible not only to provide full life support for all humans 
but also to permit all humans’ individual enjoyment of all the Earth without 
anyone profiting at the expense of another and without any individuals 
interfering with others.

Indeed, I wholeheartedly subscribe to this notion of symbiotic prosperity, 
something my favorite graphic designer, Milton Glaser, articulates 
beautifully in Debbie Millman’s indispensable How to Think Like a Great 
Graphic Designer, in words I quoted in this hand-drawn slide from a recent 
talk:




Fuller points to the usefulness of useless knowledge as a critical element in 
this collective abundance and the salvation of our species:

Only a comprehensive switch from the narrowing specialization and toward an 
ever more inclusive and reining comprehension by all humanity — regarding all 
the factors covering omnicontinuing life aboard our spaceship Earth — can 
bring about reorientation from the self-extinction-bound human trending, and 
do so with the critical time remaining before we have passed the point of 
chemical process irretrievability.

[…]

Specialization’s preoccupation with parts deliberately forfeits the 
opportunity to apprehend and comprehend what is provided exclusively by 
synergy.

Amidst the obstacles to such synergetic success, he counts the bias of the 
news media — a point all the more prescient in the age of the “Gladwell 
Effect”, as editors would deliberately inflate information to make headlines 
more clickable. Fuller laments:

Today’s news consists of aggregates of fragments. Anyone who has taken part 
in any event that has subsequently appeared in the news is aware of the gross 
disparity between the actual and the reported events. … We also learn 
frequently of prefabricated and prevaricated events of a complex nature 
purportedly undertaken for the purposes either of suppressing or rigging the 
news, which in turn perverts humanity’s tactical information resources. All 
history becomes suspect. Probably our most polluted resource is the tactical 
information to which humanity spontaneously reflexes.

Bewailing scientific reductionism in a passage that falls squarely between 
Einstein and Tagore, Fuller — true to his reputation as a fringe-thinker — 
makes a case for the metaphysical as inextricably intertwined with the 
physical:

Science’s self-assumed responsibility has been self-limited to disclosure to 
society only of the separate, supposedly physical (because separately 
weighable) atomic component isolations data. Synergetic integrity would 
require the scientists to announce that in reality what had been identified 
heretofore as physical is entirely metaphysical — because synergetically 
weightless. Metaphysical has been science’s designation for all weightless 
phenomena such as thought. But science has made no experimental finding of 
any phenomena that can be described as a solid, or as continuous, or as a 
straight surface plane, or as a straight line, or as infinite anything. We 
are now synergetically forced to conclude that all phenomena are 
metaphysical; wherefore, as many have long suspected — like it or not — life 
is but a dream.

To be sure, Fuller is far from negating science. To the contrary, he — like 
Bertrand Russell — sees it as essential to democracy and social good:

Unguided by science, society is allowed to go right on filling its children’s 
brain banks with large inventories of competence-devastating misinformation.

Presaging the ethos of the Occupy movement, Fuller observes:

The youth of humanity all around our planet are intuitively revolting from 
all sovereignties and political ideologies. The youth of Earth are moving 
intuitively toward an utterly classless, raceless, omnicooperative, omniworld 
humanity.

Fuller portends contemporary grievances about our flawed education system and 
concludes with a hopeful vision for tomorrow:

Children freed of the ignorantly founded educational traditions and exposed 
only to their spontaneously summoned, computer-stored and -distributed 
outflow of reliable-opinion-purged, experimentally verified data, shall 
indeed lead society to its happy egress from all misinformedly conceived, 
fearfully and legally imposed, and physically enforced customs of yesterday. 
They can lead all humanity into omnisuccessful survival as well as entrance 
into an utterly new era of human experience in an as-yet and ever-will-be 
fundamentally mysterious Universe.

And whence will come the wealth with which we may undertake to lead world man 
into his new and validly hopeful life? From the wealth of the minds of world 
man — whence comes all wealth. Only mind can discover how to do so much with 
so little as forever to be able to sustain and physically satisfy all 
humanity.

Synergetics, a hefty tome of nearly 1,000 pages, is fascinating and 
mind-bending in its entirety. Complement it with Benjamin Betts’s Geometrical 
Psychology from nearly a century earlier and Bertrand Russell’s Education and 
the Good Life.

Public domain photographs courtesy State Archives of North Carolina