Buckminster Fuller on Philosophy

"We must progress to the stage of doing all the right things for all the right reasons instead of doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons."

"You may very appropriately want to ask me how we are going to resolve the ever-acceleratingly dangerous impasse of world-opposed politicians and ideological dogmas. I answer, it will be resolved by the computer."

"War is obsolete. It could never have been done before. Only ten years ago... technology reached the point where it could be done. Since then the invisible technological-capability revolution has made it ever easier so to do."

"Integrity of the individual is what we're being judged for and if we are not passing that examination, we don't really have the guts, we'll blow ourselves up. It will be all over. I think it's all the difference in the world."

"Critical proximity occurs where there is angular transition from "falling back in" at 180-degree to 90-degree orbiting—which is precession. The quantity of energy that ceased to "fall in" is the system's entropy. Critical proximity is when it starts either "falling in" or going into orbit, which is the point where either entropy or antientropy begins. An aggregate of "falling ins" is a body. What we call an object or an entity is always an aggregate of interattracted entities; it is never a solid. And the critical proximity transition from being an aggregate entity to being a plurality of separate entities is precession, which is a "peeling off" into orbit rather than falling back in to the original entity aggregate. This explains entropy intimately."

"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." Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us."

"Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system's separate parts or any subassembly of the system's parts. There is nothing in the chemistry of a toenail that predicts the existence of a human being."

"I do not look upon human beings as good or bad. I don't think of my feet as a right foot and a wrong foot. ... I am a student of the effectiveness of the technological evolution in its all unexpected alterations of the preoccupations of humanity and in its all unexpected alterings of human behaviors and prospects."

"There are progressive degrees of synergy, called synergy-of-synergies, which are complexes of behavior aggregates holistically unpredicted by the separate behaviors of any of their subcomplex components. Any subcomplex aggregate is only a component aggregation of an even greater event aggregation whose comprehensive behaviors are never predicted by the component aggregates alone. There is a synergetic progression in Universe—a hierarchy of total complex behaviors entirely unpredicted by their successive subcomplexes' behaviors. It is manifest that Universe is the maximum synergy-of-synergies, being utterly unpredicted by any of its parts."