“The Dark Ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear. This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation. Caught up in a plethora of conditioned reflexes and driven by the human ego, both warden and prisoner attempt meagerly to compete with God. All are intractably skeptical of what they do not understand. We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.”
– R. Buckminster Fuller,
“Cosmography: A Posthumous Scenario For The Future Of Humanity” (Macmillan, 1992)
When I read those words in 1992, I realized that Bucky knew that the core challenge humanity was up against... the largest barrier to humanity choosing "utopia" over "oblivion" (the title of another of his books) wasn't that some new invention or group of inventions had yet to be invented. No - despite Bucky's fame for having invented the geodesic dome and despite all the other amazing things he had invented - I realized that Bucky knew that how humanity thinks (and how obsolete and self-imprisoning our thinking is) was and still is our greatest challenge.
So, that's what this project aims to do something about. As an entry in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, A World Beyond War In Our Lifetime is designed on the shoulders of this seminal insight communicated to us through "Cosmography" nine years after Bucky's death.
I will update this new site soon. At that time, I will offer you a video of Bucky... followed by one of a man Bucky never met but would have enjoyed meeting if he had. Dr. W. Edwards Deming saw the world in much the same way as Bucky did... and in the second video you will hear him warn his students of the same "mental prison" Bucky warned us about.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
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