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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 218 (Jun 8, 2025) — Egocide, Trimtabs, Comprehensivists, & More
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🧠 Specialists vs ‘Comprehensivists’
I finally explored the wisdom of polymath Buckminster Fuller (top quotes). In fact, there’s so much of it that I’m dedicating this entire newsletter to him (I’ve only done this once before with Joseph Campbell in Sloww Sunday #205). Enjoy!
Bucky Fuller on education:
- “New life always manifests comprehensive propensities … I would like to know why it is that we have disregarded all children’s significantly spontaneous and comprehensive curiosity and in our formal education have deliberately instituted processes leading only to narrow specialization.”
- “The little child demonstrates time and again an interest in the whole universe … A little child will ask the most beautiful questions about total universe, continually embarrassing the grownups who have become very specialized and can’t answer great comprehensive questions. We find the child then, with its propensity to comprehend totally, ready to be synergetic. Humans have the proclivity to be synergetic, and yet, our education is to say, ‘Never mind, darling, about that universe, come in here and I’m going to give you an A and B and a C, and then if you learn that well I’ll give you a D and an E and an F.'”
- “All universities have been progressively organized for ever finer specialization. Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable, and desirable. Yet in observing a little child, we find it is interested in everything and spontaneously apprehends, comprehends, and co-ordinates an ever expanding inventory of experiences … Nothing seems to be more prominent about human life than its wanting to understand all and put everything together. One of humanity’s prime drives is to understand and be understood. All other living creatures are designed for highly specialized tasks. Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender … If the total scheme of nature required man to be a specialist she would have made him so by having him born with one eye and a microscope attached to it.”
Bucky Fuller on specialization:
- “Our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.”
- “Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the ‘expert’ is fooled into accepting his slavery by making him feel that in return he is in a socially and culturally preferred, ergo, highly secure, lifelong position … Society consisted then, as now, almost entirely of specialized slaves.”
- “This is typical of the way in which extinction occurs—through over-specialization.”
Bucky Fuller on ‘comprehensivity’:
- “I have now the capability to say certain things because I became a comprehensive student.”
- “Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate ‘comprehensivity’ … Deliberately specializing man was led back unwittingly once more to reemploy his innately comprehensive capabilities … As we attempt competent thinking we immediately begin to reemploy our innate drive for comprehensive understanding.”
- “The more we really learn about big patterns then the more comprehensive we are, and the more we learn how these patterns operate, the more we can really anticipate how we could take advantage of the principles that are operative, to bring them to the advantage of humanity … Becoming deliberately expansive instead of contractive, we ask, ‘How do we think in terms of wholes?’ If it is true that the bigger the thinking becomes the more lastingly effective it is, we must ask, ‘How big can we think?’“
Bonus: If you’re ready to fight back against over-specialization and follow your comprehensive curiosity to become a synergetic student, learn more about the Synthesizer course.
0️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
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⛵️ Being a little ‘trimtab’ on big society
This is Buckminster Fuller’s tombstone:
So, what the heck is a trim tab? Fuller says:
- “Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing on the edge of the rudder called a trim-tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving that little trim-tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim-tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, ‘Call me Trimtab.’“
- “The truth is that you get the low pressure to do things, rather than getting on the other side and trying to push the bow of the ship around. And you build that low pressure by getting rid of a little nonsense, getting rid of things that don’t work and aren’t true until you start to get that trim-tab motion. It works every time. That’s the grand strategy you’re going for. So I’m positive that what you do with yourself, just the little things you do yourself, these are the things that count. To be a real trim tab, you’ve got to start with yourself, and soon you’ll feel that low pressure, and suddenly things begin to work in a beautiful way. Of course, they happen only when you’re dealing with really great integrity: You must be helping evolution.”
Read the post: “Call me Trim Tab”: Buckminster Fuller & The Impact of an Individual on Society
1️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
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🧭 ‘Egocide’ & Commitment to Humanity
I had no idea that Bucky Fuller contemplated suicide in his early 30s (he ultimately lived to almost 88). He talks about this in his short book Guinea Pig B: The 56 Year Experiment (Book Summary)—which I actually thought was a better read than his more popular book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.
On ‘egocide’ instead of suicide:
- “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 … The only validation of my not doing away with myself would be to turn all my experience entirely over to others and not ever again work for me … 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.”
His commitment moving forward:
- “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 … 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 also said in 1927 … ‘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.”
Four questions he asked himself:
- “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?”
- “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?”
- “Can you trust yourself to remember that you qualified for this functioning only because you were an out-and-out throwaway?”
- “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?”
Read the summary: The 56-Year Experiment: “Guinea Pig B” by Buckminster Fuller (Book Summary)
2️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
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🌎 Humanity’s ‘Final Exam’
I watched a bunch of Bucky Fuller videos, but this ‘lost interview’ was my favorite:
In the interview, Fuller talks about humanity’s ‘final exam’:
- “Humanity is now in what I call a ‘final exam’ as to whether we qualify to stay here … 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.”
- “The present evolutionary crisis of humans on planet Earth is that of a final examination for their continuance in universe. It’s not an examination of political, economic, or religious systems, but of the integrity of each and all individual humans … 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.”
- “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 we’re not in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative universe by using our faculties to gain local-universe information to solve local-universe problems, then we’re going to fail our exams.”
Read more: 50+ Buckminster Fuller Quotes on Nature, Mind, God, & More
3️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
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🌌 Bucky on God
You wouldn’t necessarily expect a design science polymath like Buckminster Fuller to be into God, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Fuller speaks of “God” as:
- “the eternal cosmic intelligence“
- “the great intellectual integrity governing all the great designing”
- “the eternal, comprehensive, intellectual integrity usually referred to as ‘nature’ or as ‘evolution'”
He elaborates:
- “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.”
- “From that time, 56 years ago (when Bucky committed ‘egocide’), I have had absolute faith in God. My task was not to preach about God, but to serve God in silence about God … I 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.'”
- “Without God, the little individual human could do nothing. However, in addition to brains, God gave humans mind. Human mind alone has been given access to some of the eternal laws governing physical and metaphysical universe … It is clearly evidence that God must have included humans in the design of universe for very important reasons else we would not have been given exclusive objective use access to some of the eternal laws governing the physical and metaphysical universe.”
Read more: 50+ Buckminster Fuller Quotes on Nature, Mind, God, & More
4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
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