Notes by Bill Paton, Solutioneer
The reasons for his hold upon the young are quite simple. They believe in him because he believes in them, believes that their uncluttered, tradition-spurning minds will lead humankind out of the wilderness of fallacious reasoning and outworn concepts into a glorious era of new enlightenment when, by intelligent use of never-diminished energy and by ephemeralization- doing ever more with less - all men will enjoy a standard of living as high or higher than the most fortunate 5 percent of now-living people...he alone gives them hope and a reason for being and striving.
He believes that the great discoveries of general principles by which the mind of mankind has suddenly leaped forward are not entirely due to the laborious piling up of data upon data until a general principle becomes clear, but are sudden flashes of intuition that come as some exceptionally gifted mind meshes briefly with a Greater Intelligence to obtain a revelation of Truth, later to be proved by conventional pragmatic experimentation.
"Mind relates to the generalized principles, and mind alone can discover them. The mind makes contact with the eternal in these moments of discovery" -RBF
He does not think of himself as an inventor, but rather a discoverer of general principles. For all of his remarkable contributions to technology are simply fallout from these principles. He is a philosopher, some of whose revelations happen to have a practical application.
"Athletics; which greatly heightened what I call the intuitive dynamic sense, a fundamental I am convinced, of competent anticipatory design formation"-RBF
"I don't care if I am not understood as long as I am not misunderstood". -RBF
"If I am to believe in myself and the validity of my own ideas, I must stop thinking as other people told me to and rely on my own experience."
He proposed to reform the environment, not man.
Progress meant mobility. "Trees have roots; men have legs." so they should not be rooted in one place.
Conceived or gestating in his mind during the great silence were such revolutionary ideas as his energetic-synergetic geometry; his theory of the origin of homo sapiens in the western Pacific, thereafter spreading around the globe by the sea routes following favourable winds and currents, which proved that there were no different races of men, but only one human race; his principle of the tetrahedron as the basic unit of Universe; the dictum that "nature never fails; it always complies with its own laws. Nature is infallible"; apparent failure is due to man's knowledge being inadequate; life as a pattern in integrity; man as an essential function in Universe and the probability of the ultimate success of man as such; the concept of real wealth as the application of intellect to energy, which can never diminish but must always and forever increase; and the necessity for design science planning on a cosmic scale - that is not through specialization, because nature is never compartmented, but is one indivisible, exquisitely coordinated system.
RBF considered fear responsible for most of the evils of the world.
Best way to study the thoughts of whatever scientist he was reading was to explain this to Allegra, his daughter. ...the terribly important part intuition plays in design. Everything in me, my subconscious experience, said that if you got a revelation of that sort you just grabbed it. The intuitive dynamic sense has to do with things like pole vaulting or the way a man throws a baseball. When you design something you coordinate instinctively as an athlete does. You get a personal feeling as to how, if it's a boat, it will behave in the water. "
"Never show people both work. Don't ever demonstrate a principle in inadequate materials. If you get up an old beer can that has your principle embodied in it but is hammered out of tin, people will call it a jalopy".-Starling Burgess
"If you don't do it right, you have no right to do it at all"- Starling Burgess
"Every time a man uses his know-how, his experience increases and his intellectual advantage automatically increases. Energy cannot decrease. Know-how can only increase. Wealth which combines energy and intellect can only increase with use...the faster the more!"-RBF
"I found that my drinking was interfering with the design revolution; because when you are drinking, even if it doesn't distort the sense of what you are saying, people think it does. They think you are just babbling. I realized that you cannot drink and be taken seriously as a prophet of the future. So I stopped." -RBF
The mind is one thing on earth which, once enlarged, never again quite retracts.
"What really counts is what we have done for humanity. That is the payoff and it is incalculable."-RBF
In 1946, Bucky had chartered the Fuller Research Institute dedicated to implement: "Commonwealth pertinent, individually conceived, intuitively urged and spontaneously joined search, research and enterprise in the borderline realm of 'just not impossible', where transcendentally in altocumulous thought- cloud, orderly trending concepts accrue, differentiate and integrate...."
Development is programmable; discovery is not. -RBF
"Development is programmable; discovery is not. It is not something a computer or the human brain can make through calculation or ratiocination, for "knowledge is of the brain and wisdom is of the mind; discovery comes to the weightless, metaphysical mind as a flash of transcendental light. It is synergy, a sudden comprehension of the behavior of a whole system, totally unpredictable by the behavior of any of its components or subsystems, and therefore cannot be sought by empirical methods - since the brain cannot know what it is looking for
But only apprehended it as a revelation by -'exquisitively prescient minds'. "-RBF
"Nature employs discontinuous compression and continuous tension; for this reason compression is plural, tension singular."
Anything that is exquisitely well designed of any period harmonizes with things that are equally well designed no matter when they were crafted.-RBF
His recurrent theme [is] that the mistake of modern education is the production of specialists when what the world needs is men who see things whole.
It is the customs and traditions that seem so fine and valuable that may bring about bloody revolutions because nobody wants to change them. Yet they stand in the way of progress.
Bucky always starts with Universe. This is his definition of it: "Universe is the aggregate of all humanity's all time consciously apprehended and communicated experiences."
The human is not an accidental onlooker "who happened in on the 'Play of Life,' but an essential syntropic function of Universe."
"Focus on new life. Since children are the hope of the future and 98% of the environment's positive or negative effects upon new life are wrought by age thirteen, it is obvious that effective work in advantaging life through environment can mainly be realized within the first thirteen years."
Teleology by Bucky's definition means "the intuitive conversion by brain and mind of special case, subjective experiences into generalized principles...which permit the individual to reform the environment...so as to provide ultimately higher advantages for men" and to inspire others to do likewise.
Bucky's philosophy and strategy confine design initiative to reforming only the environment and never to emulate the almost universal attempts of humans to reform and restrain other humans by political actions, laws, and codes.
Using the generalized principles he has discovered, Bucky says "I always start all problem-solving with Universe, and thereafter subdivide progressively to identify a special local problem within the total of problems." He thus attacks it comprehensively and anticipatorily.
"Industrialization consists of tools". It involves "all experiences of all men everywhere in history." Bucky sees it as inherently comprehensive and omni-interrelated in respect to all humanity. And he believes that, though subsystems of it are run shortsightedly by selfishly motivated people, the whole works inadvertently towards ultimately providing all men with higher standards of living....Because energy plus know-how is wealth, "the integrating world industrial networks mean ultimate access of all humanity to the total operative commonwealth of Earth."
Design Science is concerned "with the scheduling of the complex interaction of the general systems events of industrialization." The rapid advance of technology in one field- air transportation, for example - must be "comprehensively integrated with all other vastly accelerating environment relationship transformations."
"Humanity is gradually trending towards becoming Worldians." Therefore, the static appurtenances of life - houses, automobiles, even typewriters - will all be rented like telephones because of man's increasing mobility. Amplifying this thought in another article, Bucky foresees man's ability to deploy at will all over the earth and the solar system by means of autonomous structures made livable by our astronauts life-support 'black box'. And he adds, "Quite clearly, man, free to enjoy all of his planets...will also be swiftly outward bound to occupy even greater ranges of the universe."
"The acceleration of doing more with less...will complete the task of providing enough for all humanity within another thirty-four years...despite political systems that deliberately divide society and set one group against another." Bucky believes that without the interference of political systems it could be done in twenty years.
Bucky believes that it is essential for the individual, invention-developing pioneer to maintain his economic initiative and not get tied up with the massive capital-cum-bureaucracy of large corporations, despite the leverage of their wealth.
Instead of the obligation to make a living, Bucky substitutes the higher obligation of the individual's syntropic responsibility in Universe.
Comprehensivity instead of specialization is Bucky's key to successful design competence. His foremost self-discipline is never to try to sell one of his ideas to others. He will just design and test it, and wait for others, who need it, to come to him. He only goes where he is asked to speak because, if you force your ideas on people they listen unwillingly, but if they ask you to speak to them - especially if they pay a high fee -"they are very receptive."
Bucky incessantly engages in trying to make all his previous inventions obsolete by designing better ones.
Bucky believes that Chapter Three of World History is just beginning, in which world man will realize his potential for success as a function of Universe through his accelerating mastery of "vast inanimate, inexhaustible energy sources combined with doing more with less."
Bucky believe in his Global Energy Network as a stop-gap method until better forms of power could come out. He believed Wind power was the hope for the future, as well as Hydrogen fuel cells.
"We are moving from the Industrial Age into the Age of Cybernetics. This is the most difficult transition in history because it has to be accomplished consciously, whereas the other transformations through which mankind has passed have been accomplished inadvertently."-RBF
Sees future education coming by television and with electronic call-up which can access documentary information about the great thinkers on various topics. The documentaries will be there and accessed in ways that now students use encyclopedias.
RBF lives on the cresting wave of knowledge.
He believes in love as the most important principle of Universe, more important even than intuition.
"I really love human beings, but I do need time to do some thinking, and do some forward work. I live on the frontier of science and design; and you've got to put in, in order to put out."