Cosmography

1 ‘‘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.’’

3 So begins the seminal work and lasting legacy of R. Buckminster Fuller. The last complete work of one of this century’s great visionaries, Cosmography is aimed directly at the nonscientific reader, and gives us yet another glimpse into the mind of the man who invented the dymaxion car and the geodesic dome. It is also a work that should be the springboard for new scientific visions in the 1990s and beyond. Fuller always held that modern science was too encumbered by rigid ideas to solve the world’s great problems, and that the governing principles of nature—which the layman could intuit— would yield the essential creative solutions. For the first time Fuller links his revolutionary nature-based science, synergetics, with politics and history, to inspire the nonscientific thinkers he felt would be the builders of the future. As iconoclastic as always, Fuller offers explanations of his radical theories in an accessible, reader-friendly style.

12 ‘‘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.’’

14 So begins the seminal work and lasting legacy of R. Buckminster Fuller. The last complete work of one of this century’s great visionaries, Cosmography is aimed directly at the nonscientific reader, and gives us yet another glimpse into the mind of the man who invented the dymaxion car and the geodesic dome. It is also a work that should be the springboard for new scientific visions in the 1990s and beyond. Fuller always held that modern science was too encumbered by rigid ideas to solve the world’s great problems, and that the governing principles of nature—which the layman could intuit— would yield the essential creative solutions. For the first time Fuller links his revolutionary nature-based science, synergetics, with politics and history, to inspire the nonscientific thinkers he felt would be the builders of the future. As iconoclastic as always, Fuller offers explanations of his radical theories in an accessible, reader-friendly style.