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Everything I Know, Section 1
gist
R. Buckminster Fuller treats naked, helpless, ignorant birth as humanity's designed starting condition, with built-in hungers forcing trial-and-error. The twentieth-century explosion of chemical knowledge and planetary travel was an unplanned evolutionary emergence, not a program anyone foresaw. Brain only coordinates special-case senses; mind alone discovers relationships between those cases, which he names synergy. Universe, physical and metaphysical, is the finite aggregate of humanity's consciously apprehended experience, so useful strategy starts from that whole rather than from isolated parts.
ideas
- Humans start designedly ignorant. Every person is born naked, helpless, and without a rulebook; designed-in hunger, thirst, and urge force experiment.
- The knowledge burst was unplanned. Chemical inventories and worldwide travel multiplied inside one lifetime; no earlier generation prophesied the shift.
- Brain is special-case; mind finds between. Brain synchronizes senses into images; mind alone discovers relations no isolated part contains.
- Synergy names the overlooked whole. Whole-system behaviors are unpredicted by parts considered separately; society stays specialized because it lacks that word.
- Universe is an aggregate of experience. Fuller extends Einstein's non-simultaneous energy events to all communicated physical and metaphysical experience.
quotes
“all humanity has always been born naked, absolutely helpless, for months”
“brain is always and only as each of those senses are, dealing in each special case experience.”
“behaviors of whole systems unpredicted by behavior of any of the parts of the system”
“the aggregate of all humanity’s consciously apprehended and communicated experiences”