Buckminster Fuller

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Guinea Pig B
I happen to have been born at the special moment in history in which for the first time there exists enough experience-won and experiment verified information current in humanity's spontaneous conceptioning and reasoning for all humanity to carry on in a far more intelligent way than ever before.

I am not being messianically motivated in undertaking this experiment, nor do I think I am someone very special and different from other humans. The design of all humans, like all else in Universe, transcends human comprehension of 'how come' their mysterious, a priori, complexedly designed existence.

I am doing what I am doing only because at this critical moment I happen to be a human being who, by virtue of a vast number of errors and recognitions of such, has discovered that he would always be a failure as judged by society's ages-long conditioned reflexings and therefore a 'disgrace' to those related to him (me) in the misassuredly eternally-to-exist 'not-enough-for-all', comprehensive, economic struggle of humanity to attain only special, selfish, personal, family, corporate, or national advantage-gaining, wherefore I had decided to commit suicide. I also thereby qualified as a 'throwaway' individual who had acquired enough knowledge regarding relevantly essential human evolution matters to be able to think in this particular kind of way. In committing suicide I seemingly would never again have to feel the pain and mortification of my failures and errors, but the only-by-experience-winnable inventory of knowledge that I had accrued would also be forever lostùan inventory of information that, if I did not commit suicide, might prove to be of critical advantage to others, possibly to all others, possibly to Universe. The realization that such a concept could have even a one-in-an-million chance of being true was a powerful reconsideration provoker and ultimate grand-strategy reorienter.

The thought then came that 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 ultimately 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 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 my self to a never-again-for-self-use employment of my omni-experience-gained inventory of knowledge. My thinking began to clear.

This text is excerpted from Guinea Pig B, an essay by R. Buckminster Fuller, recently published in paperback by Critical Path Publishing. You can purchase the book from our online store by visiting www.bfi.org or by calling us at (707) 824-2242.