Photograph by Fred Blocher for Kansas City Star, 1978
Self-Disciplines, excerpt from the 1972 Playboy Interview
1. Use myself as an experiment to see what, if
anything, a healthy, young male human of average size, experience, and
capability with an economically dependent wife and new born child, starting
without capital or any kind of wealth, cash savings, credit or university
degree could effectively do that could not be done by great nations or great
private enterprise to lastingly improve the physical protection and support of
all human lives.
2. Commit all of my productivity toward dealing only
with the whole planet Earth and all its resources and cumulative know-how.
Observation of my life to date shows that the larger the number for whom I
work, the more positively effective I become. Thus, it is obvious that if I
work always and only for all humanity, I will be optimally effective.
3. Seek to do my own thinking, confining it to only
experientially gained information.
4. Seek to accomplish whatever is to be attained in
such a manner that the advantage attained would never be secured at the cost of
another or others.
5. Seek to cope with all humanly unfavourable
conditions by searching for the family of relevant physical principles
involved.
6. Reduce my inventions to physically working models
and must never talk about the inventions until physically proved or disproved.
7. Seek to reform the environment, not the humans. I
am determined never to try to persuade humanity to alter its customs and
viewpoints.
8. Never promote or sell either my ideas or artefacts
or pay others to do so. All support must be spontaneously engendered by
evolution’s integrating of my inventions with the total evolution of human
affairs.
9. Assume that nature has its own gestation rates, not
only for the birth of each new biological component, but also for each
inanimate technological artefact.
10. Seek to develop my artefacts with ample
anticipatory time margins so that they will be ready for use by society when
society discovers - through evolutionary emergencies - a need for them.
11. Seek to learn the most from my mistakes.
12. Seek to decrease time wasted in worried
procrastination and to increase time invested in discovery of technological
effectiveness.
13. Seek to document my development in the official
records of humanity by applying for and being granted government patents.
14. Above all, seek to comprehend the principles of
eternally regenerative universe and discover how humans function in these
principles.
15. Seek to comprehend the full gamut of production
tool capabilities, energy resources, and all relevant geological,
meteorological, demographic, and economic data.
16. Seek to operate only on a do-it-yourself basis and
only on the basis of intuition.
17. Plan for my design science strategies to advantage
the new life to be born on Earth, life born unencumbered with the conditioned
reflexes so prevalent today.
18. Commit whole-heartedly to the above and pay no attention to "earning a living" in humanity’s established economic system, yet find that my family’s and my needs are provided for by seemingly pure happenstance and always only in the nick of time.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Specialized in generality via the Buckminster Fuller Institute
