This is a book summary of Guinea Pig B: The 56 Year Experiment by Buckminster Fuller (Amazon):
Quick Housekeeping:
- All content in “quotation marks” is from the author (otherwise it’s minimally paraphrased).
- All content is organized into my own themes (not the author’s chapters).
- Emphasis has been added in bold for readability/skimmability.
Book Summary Contents:
The 56-Year Experiment: Guinea Pig B by Buckminster Fuller (Book Summary)
About the Book & Buckminster Fuller
“I hope this book will prove to be an encouraging example of what the little, average human being can do if you have absolute faith in the eternal cosmic intelligence we call God.”
- “I was born in 1895. The life insurance companies’ actuarial life-expectancy for me was 42 years. I was already 32 when I started the project. I have been amazed that things have worked out to the extent that they have, that I am as yet vigorously active, and that I have been able to find so many relevant things that a little individual can do that a great nation and capital enterprise can’t do.”
- “I am now close to 88 and I am confident that the only thing important about me is that I am an average healthy human. I am also a living case history of a thoroughly documented, half-century, search-and-research project designed to discover what, if anything, an unknown, moneyless individual, with a dependent wife and newborn child, might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that could not be accomplished by great nations, great religions or private enterprise, no matter how rich or powerfully armed.”
- “I am always operating in proximity to bankruptcy but never going bankrupt. While I owe all the humans of all history an unrepayable debt of only-by-experience-winnable knowledge, I don’t owe anybody any money and have never consciously and deliberately gained at the expense of others.”
- “If I am going to discard all my taught-to-believe reflexings, I must do all my own thinking. I must go entirely on my own direct experiential evidence.”
Egocide & Commitment
“If I had not in 1927 committed ‘egocide,’ I would probably have yielded long ago to convention and therewith suicide of my ‘only-for-all-others’ initiative … From that time, 56 years ago, I have had absolute faith in God. My task was not to preach about God, but to serve God in silence about God. Because such commitment to faith is inherently a ‘flying blind’ commitment, I have often weakened in my confidence in myself to comprehend what it might be that I was being taught or told to do.”
- “My impulse to commit suicide was a consequence of my being expressly overconcerned with ‘me’ and ‘my pains,’ and that doing so would mean that I would be making the supremely selfish mistake of possibly losing forever some evolutionary information link essential to the ultimate realization of the as-yet-to-be-known human function in Universe. I then realized that I could commit an exclusively ego suicide—a personal-ego ‘throwaway’—if I swore, to the best of my ability, never again to recognize and yield to the voice of wants only of ‘me’ but instead commit my physical organism and nervous system to enduring whatever pain might lie ahead while possibly thereby coming to mentally comprehend how a ‘me-less’ individual might redress the humiliations, expenses, and financial losses I had selfishly and carelessly imposed on all the in-any-way-involved others, while keeping actively alive in toto only the possibly-of-essential-use-for-others inventory of my experience. I saw that there was a true possibility that I could do just that if I remained alive and committed myself to a never-again-for-self-use employment of my omni-experience-gained inventory of knowledge. My thinking began to clear.”
- “I saw in 1927 that there was nothing to stop me from trying to think about how and why humans are here as passengers aboard this spherical spaceship we call Earth. Return to this initial question has always produced for me the most relevant and incisive of insights. Therefore I hope all humanity will begin to ask itself this question in increasingly attentive earnestness. I also saw that there was nothing to stop me from thinking about the total physical resources we have now discovered aboard our ship and about how to use the total cumulative know-how to make this ship work for everybody paying absolutely no attention to the survival problems of any separate nations or any other individual groupings of humans, and assuming only one goal: the omni-physically successful, spontaneous self-integration of all humanity into what I called in 1927 ‘a one-town world.'”
- “I then found myself saying, ‘I am going to commit myself completely to the wisdom of God and to realization only of the advantages for all humanity potentially existent in what life has already taught and may as yet teach me.’ I found myself saying, ‘I am going to commit myself completely to God and to realization of God’s apparent intent to assign semi-divine functioning to an as-yet-to-qualify-for-such-functioning humanity.'”
- “At the outset of my 1927 commitment to exploring for that which only the individual could do effectively for all humanity, while depending entirely on the unpromised-to-him backing of his enterprise only by God, it became immediately evident that if indeed the undertaking became affirmatively supported by God, it would entail many extraordinary physical and metaphysical insights regarding both human and cosmic affairs. I asked myself, ‘(1) Can you trust yourself never to turn to your own exclusive advantage the insights entrusted to you only for the realization of benefits for all humanity and Universe itself? (2) Can you also be sure that you will never exploit your insight by publicly declaring yourself to be a special ‘son of God’ or a divinely ordained mystic leader? (3) Can you trust yourself to remember that you qualified for this functioning only because you were an out-and-out throwaway? (4) Can you trust yourself to reliably report these facts to others when they applaud you for the success of the experiment with which you were entrusted?'”
- “I also said in 1927, ‘Here I am launching a half-century-magnitude program with nobody telling me to do so, or suggesting how to do it.’ I had absolutely no money and my darling wife (who has now been married to me for 66 years) was willing to go along with my thinking and commitments. I said to myself, ‘If I, in confining my activity to inventing, proving and improving, and physically producing artifacts suggested to me by physical challenges of the a priori environment, which inventions alter the environment consistently with evolution’s trending, whereby I am doing that which is compatible with what universal evolution seems intent upon doing – which is to say, if I am doing what God wants done, i.e., employing my mind to help other humans’ minds to render all humanity a physically self-regenerative and comprehensively intellectual integrity success so that humans can effectively give their priority of attention to the ongoing local Universe information-gathering and local problem-solving, primarily with design-science artifact solutions which will altogether result in comprehensive environmental transformation leading to conditions so favorable to humans’ physical wellbeing and metaphysical equanimity as to permit humans to become permanently engaged with only the by-mind-conceived challenges of local Universe – then I do not have to worry about not being commissioned to do so by any Earthians and I don’t have to worry how we are going to acquire the money, tools, and services necessary to produce the successively evoluting special-case physical artifacts that will most effectively increase humanity’s technological functioning advantage to an omnisuccess-producing degree.’ This became an overwhelming realization, for it was to be with these artifacts alone that I was committing myself to comprehensively solve all humanity’s physio-economic problems.”
- “I must commit myself to reforming the environment and not man; being absolutely confident that if you give man the right environment he will behave favorably.”
- “Friends would say, ‘You are being treacherous to your wife and child, not going out to earn a living for them. Come over here and we will give you a very good job.’ When, persuaded by their obvious generosity and concern, I did yield, everything went wrong; and every time I went ‘off the deep end’ again, working only for everybody without salary, everything went right again.”
Humanity’s Final Exam
“We are living in a new evolutionary moment in which the human is being individually educated to do the free-standing human’s own thinking, and each is thereby separately becoming extraordinarily well informed. We have reached a threshold moment where the individual human beings are in what I consider to be a ‘final examination’ as to whether they, individually, as a cosmic invention, are to graduate successfully into their mature cosmic functioning or, failing, are to be classified as ‘imperfects’ and ‘discontinued items’ on this planet and anywhere else in Universe.”
- “We are at a human examination point at which it is critically necessary for each of us individually to have some self-discovered, logically reasonable, experience-engendered idea of how and why we are here on this little planet in this star system and galaxy, amongst the billions of approximately equally star-populated galaxies of Universe. I assume it is because human minds were designed with the capability to discover from time to time the only-mathematically-stateable principles governing the eternal interrelationships existing between various extraordinary phenomena – a capability possessed by no known phenomenon other than humans.”
- “Our ‘final examination’ is entirely a matter of each of all the individual human beings, all of whom have been given this extraordinary, truly divine capability of the mind, individually qualifying in their own right to continue in Universe as an extraordinary thinking faculty. If all of humanity as a cosmic invention is to successfully pass this final examination, it would seem to be logically probable that a large majority of all Earthian individuals make and do the passing for themselves and for the remaining numbers.”
- “From what I have learned I can say—at this most critical moment in all the history of humanity—that whether we are going to stay here or not depends entirely on each and all of our individually attained and maintained integrities of reasoning and acting and not on any politically or religiously accepted or power-imposed socioeconomic-credo-system or financial reforms.”
- “The integrity of individually thinking human beings – as mind vs. brain-reflexing automatons is being tested.”
- “We are coming to a very extraordinary moment in the history of humanity, when only such a spontaneous, competent, and ultimately cooperative design-science initiative-taking, on the part of a large majority of human individuals, can ensure humanity’s safe crossing of the cosmically critical threshold into its prime and possibly eternal functioning in the macro-micro cosmic scheme.”
- “Twelve years ago I had learned enough to be able to state publicly that humanity had now passed through an evolutionary inflection point whereafter, for the first time in history, it is irrefutably demonstrable that a ten-year design revolution that employs all the physical resources of humanity (now majorly invested in killingry technology) and transforms weaponry scrap into livingry technology, can, within ten design-science-revolution years, have all humanity enjoying a higher standard of living – interminably sustainable – than any humans have ever experienced.”
- “How do we find out how to use our minds and experience to the highest advantage of others in the shortest possible time? That was the challenge.”
Divine Design
“All humans have always been born naked, completely helpless for months, beautifully equipped but with no experience, therefore absolutely ignorant. This is a very important design fact. I do not look at such a human start as constituting a careless or chance oversight in the cosmic conceptioning of the intellectual integrity governing the Universe. The initial ignorance of humans was by deliberate cosmic (divine) design.”
- “The fact that we are designed to be born naked, helpless, and ignorant is, I feel, a very important matter. We must pay attention to that. We are also designed to be very hungry and to be continually rehungered and rethirsted and multiplyingly curious. Therefore we are quite clearly designed to be inexorably driven to learn only by trial and error how to get on in life. As a consequence of the design, we have had to make an incredible number of mistakes, that being the only way we can find out ‘what’s what’ and a little bit about ‘why,’ and an even more meager bit regarding ‘how’ we can take advantage of what we have learned from our mistakes.”
- “We human beings have been given access to at least some of the design laws of the Universe. We don’t know of any other phenomenon that has such a faculty and such an access permit, wherefore we may assume that we humans must be cosmically present for some very, very important reason.”
- “My own working assumption of why we are here is that we are here as local-Universe information-gatherers and that we are given access to the divine design principles so that we can therefrom objectively invent instruments and tools – e.g., the microscope and the telescope – with which to extend all sensorial inquiring regarding the rest of the to-the-naked-eye-invisible, micro-macro Universe, because human beings, tiny though we are, are here for all the local-Universe information-harvesting and cosmic-principle-discovering, objective tool-inventing, and local-environment-controlling as local Universe problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe.”
- “In our immediate need to discover more about ourselves we also note that what is common to all human beings in all history is their ceaseless confrontation by problems, problems, problems. We humans are manifestly here for problem-solving and, if we are any good at problem-solving, we don’t come to Utopia, we come to more difficult problems to solve: That apparently is what we are here for, so I therefore conclude that we humans are here for local information-gathering and local problem-solving with our minds having access to the design principles of the Universe and – I repeat – thereby finally discover that we are most probably here for local information-gathering and local-Universe problem-solving in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe.”
- “Obviously, we are magnificently successful products of design in a Universe the complexity and intricacy of whose design integrity utterly transcends human comprehension, let alone popularly acceptable descriptions of ‘divine design’ … The design of all humans, like all else in Universe, transcends human comprehension of ‘how come’ their mysterious, a priori, complexedly designed existence.”
- “I am overwhelmed by the evidence of an eternally existent and operative, omnicompetent, greater intellect than that of human beings.”
God
“Universal laws can be expressed only mathematically. Mathematics, we note, is purely intellectual. Altogether these laws manifest the eternal intellectual integrity of Universe that I speak of as ‘God.'”
- “I see the hydrogen atom doesn’t have to earn a living before behaving like a hydrogen atom. In fact, as best I can see, only human beings operate on the basis of ‘having to earn a living’. The concept is one introduced into social conventions only by the temporal power structure’s dictums of the ages. If I am doing what God’s evolutionary strategy needs to have accomplished, I need spend no further time worrying about such matters.”
- “This attending only to what needs to be done for all humanity in turn would allow humanity the time to effectively attend to the Universe-functioning task for the spontaneous performance of which God – the eternal, comprehensive, intellectual integrity usually referred to as ‘nature’ or as ‘evolution’ – had included humans in the grand design of eternally regenerative Universe.”
- “I am quite confident there is nothing that I have undertaken to do that others couldn’t do equally well or better under the same economic circumstances. I was supported only by my faith in God and my vigorously pursued working assumption that it is God’s intent to make humans an economic success so that they can and may in due course fulfill an essential—and only mind-renderable—functioning in Universe.”
- “It was clear to me that if my scientifically reasoned working assumptions were correct and if I did my part in successfully initiating, and following-through on realizing, the previously recited potential chain-reactive events, I would be supported by God in realistic, natural, but almost always utterly surprising-to-me ways. I therefore committed myself to such initiations, realizations, and followings-through.”
- “Humans who think they are better designers than God are the most to be pitied of liars—the liars who are believingly convinced by their own only-self-conveniencing fabrications.”
- “One can begin to comprehend what God is planning to do with the humans’ cosmic functioning.”
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