Do Your Own Thinking

Below is a lecture hosted on b.f. Institute website

(The following was taken from one of Fuller’s talks. The blanks are indecipherable words.)

Number one, you have to do your own thinking. Everything that has happened to you, it really relates very much to your accessing other people’s thinking, trying to play games that you didn’t have your heart really in, so that this is going to be a very new kind of discipline. If you’re going to do your own thinking, it means having to give up all beliefs, and I’d been taught to believe various things_________I’m going to have to give up all those things and start absolutely from experience, experiential base.

Then, I said, I’m going to assume that, in doing my own thinking, I am going to try to understand whether I am really______Great Intellect_________for me to carry on. What would be the requirements of the comprehensive integrity of Universe? Keep looking out for all humanity, looking out for all Universe. Why do we have these generalize principles, what is Universe itself trying to do? I said I am going to have to learn to ask myself some very big questions and I’m going to have to answer them myself from experience.

And it was not easy to carry on with nobody to tell you what to do, nobody to mark your paper. You had to really_________how to solve problems by artifacts, and ________that needs to be done(?). Luckily there’s been that navy experience, there’s been doing more with less in the sea, there’s been that even more with less in the sky, and we’re getting into this building world where things are going absolutely opposite -- bigger and heavier iron, and more secure. That’s the way the people are thinking and so incredible ignorance was done in that world.

The artifacts that have to be produced will be, how do you then give man such high performance, and I have particularly said I’m going to _______commit myself primarily to the young life, to the newborn with no conditioned reflexes. I’d arrange environment controls that would make it possible for that young life to be well protected, must be able to get all the information it really needs, to be able to carry on in a very logical way______coordinate these feelings of reception, information reception.

So you can begin to see how the grand strategy began to shape up. Certainly, I said, I’ve heard people always trying to tell other people_____I must never from now on, I have so little time, if I ask people to listen to me they’re not going to listen. Your life will be gone. You must not talk to anybody unless they ask you to talk to them._____principle, and you must not talk about your artifact that you think will work until you’ve literally designed it, actually made it, tested it, and found out whether it works. Then if it works, then people will say `what is that?’ then I have an obligation to tell them what it is, and when people ask me, I must give them my best. I must not ever give them just a short moment.

Now I want to jump from that to thinking about something I spoke of earlier -- humanity then is committed to the concept of nowhere nearly enough to go around. This is non-thinking, bureaucracies, great governments, great bureaucracies, and great corporations, great bureaucracies, they struggle in there with what we call company politics, bureaucracy politics - who’s going to get the job? whose family is going to eat? whose family is going to be safe? You know this is the rules, you know what the boss thinks about that. You don’t do your thinking, you just think, how do I play it safe? So an enormous number of humanity are in bureaucracy and not thinking.

This thinking capability we have, it is nothing being generally employed, except by little children. Little children spontaneously ask the most beautiful questions, and they get called down(?), `Never mind, you better not do that, it’s going to get the family in trouble, etc. etc.’ And they get negative until each child is a little less put upon than his parents because the information that is coming in is absolutely contradictory to the traditional way of looking at things that the older world just can’t explain it with conviction anymore.(You are wrong?)

So the child is beginning to think freely. That really is typical of the younger generation of the world - you are really doing your own. You’re not endowed with something that generations before didn’t have. . . Generations before I was brought up, my mother and father, when I was very young, my mother said, `Darlingradio?---father.’ ---Never mind what you think, pay attention---thinking---a lot of trouble.’ I was continually being told, `Never mind what you think. Pay attention.’ And I was being sent to school before---they show me. So I continually found when I was thinking---I assumed that I was a freak. I had to get on with myself as a freak. ---I’ve got to live with a freak. You’re just not being told anymore, `Never mind what you think.’ And you have the thinking capability and it’s always there, and that’s not being discouraged so much.

My biggest hope that we’re going to make it here is that this thinking is being manifested and really employed by the young world. Will they be going fast enough to overcome the initiatives of the bureaucracies and the fears operative in those bureaucracies? It’s a very touch and go question. Even though I now know that we have the option to make it -- I really know how, I know what we all have to do design-wise to get there. If we’ll do it, I haven’t the slightest idea, but I am deeply moved when I begin to see one more manifest of a little more out-force of the newer freedoms in that young world.(?) Each child being born is being born in the presence of less mis-information. Each child is being born in the presence of a lot more reliable information, and they’re paying attention! So they’re thinking with very good inputs of data. The operating conditions are very, very much improved all the time.

I hope you’ll begin to share with me the concept of the function of human beings. Whether I’m right or wrong, I don’t have the slightest idea. Of course I don’t know. But I don’t find any argument against it. And I find a great many good arguments for it, so that for the moment I feel I can hypothesize it is feasible that we are here then as problem- solvers, and particularly metaphysical problems -- to solve in principle. Therefore, we’re going to have to get more and more courage to really go along with the principles, and have less and less fear of upsetting the tradition and the game, and be less and less afraid of those who are afraid.

Related: Buckminister Fuller/Lectures | Buckminister Fuller