What he was trying to do
In 1959 Bucky Fuller was asked by the Marquis Publishing Company to state "in one unpunctuated sentence" exactly what he was trying to do in life. He responded with a 100-word sentence. That comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Bucky - especially those who were fortunate enough to see and hear him in person. Over the years, Bucky refined and rewrote his sentence. His final 3,000-word version was published in 1976 in his book "And It Came To Pass Not To Stay". Following is a 200 word iteration that appeared in an issue of Saturday Review in 1962 in response to a request by Norman Cousins. (GW)
R. Buckminster Fuller (1962)
What I Am Trying To Do
R. Buckminster Fuller (1962)
"Acutely aware of our beings’
limitations and acknowledging the infinite mystery of the a priori Universe
into which we are born but nevertheless searching for a conscious means of
hopefully competent participation by humanity in its own evolutionary trending
while employing only the unique advantages inhering exclusively to those
individuals who take and maintain the economic initiative in the face of the
formidable physical capital and credit advantages of the massive corporations
and political states and deliberately avoiding political ties and tactics while
endeavoring by experiments and explorations to excite individuals’ awareness
and realization of humanity’s higher potentials I seek through comprehensive anticipatory
design science and its reductions to physical practices to reform the
environment instead of trying to reform humans, being intent thereby to
accomplish prototyped capabilities of doing more with less whereby in turn the
wealth augmenting prospects of such design science regenerations will induce
their spontaneous and economically successful industrial proliferation by world
around services’ managements all of which chain reaction provoking events will
both permit and induce humanity to realize full lasting economic and physical
success plus enjoyment of all the Earth without one individual interfering with
or being advantaged at the expense of another."