Spheres & Attraction (1981-2005) by Petr Kotik
For 2 voices, string quartet and percussion
Text by R. Buckmister Fuller
From his 1981 Commencement Speech at SUNY Buffalo
Used by permission

I am sure any one of you can appreciate how honored and moved I feel. But I also feel it very essential to introduce you to me a little bit more intimately and realistically. I am now very close to 85 and I’m absolutely confident that the only thing important about me is that I am an average healthy human being and a very good experiment in seeing what a little human being who is unknown and penniless might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that great nations and great private enterprise could never do, inherently. I started out 53 years ago at the age of 32 to make that experiment.

I saw that there was nothing to stop me as a little individual—who by good luck had been a regular United States Naval officer who had commanded ships—and I said there is nothing to stop me thinking about our total planet Earth and trying to think about it realistically as the actual spaceship. There is nothing to stop me from trying to think about how and why humans are passengers aboard this spherical spaceship. Nothing to stop me from thinking about the total physical resources we have now discovered aboard our ship, the total cumulative know-how and how we would use the total resources and the total cumulative know-how to make this ship work for everybody paying absolutely no attention to any separate nations assuming an omni-integration of what I then called in 1927 “a one-town world.” I knew at the outset that this was to be a very long distance kind of an experiment, at least one-half a century, with no capital backing.

All humans were always born naked, absolutely helpless for months, beautifully equipped but with no experience, therefore absolutely ignorant. This is a very important design fact. I look at such a human start as not just a chance operation. The way it happened is absolutely by design. We knew that before being born naked on planet Earth human beings are chromesomically (DNA-RNA) designed in incredibly successful regeneration detail. If we study our organism, for instance, our optical system and its intimacy with our nervous system, we realize what an incredibly successful anticipatory-design-science phenomenon we are. I scratch myself when I am three and nature goes instantly to work and repairs it and I don’t know even now at 85 how you repair your own cell-structured tissue and I certainly didn’t know how at three years of age. None of us really understands very much.

When I was young we were extremely ignorant about other people. I was told that people even in the next town were very dangerous. They “drank whiskey and had knives.” “You had better not go over there.” I was seven years old when the first automobile came in. I was eight when the Wright brothers first flew. I was twelve when we had the first public wireless telegraphy. I was born in a walking world, a Victorian world, where we knew nothing about strangers. The assumption was that all strangers were inherently very unreliable people.

Since through at least three millions of years people did not understand languages well. They were relatively ignorant; their group survival required leaders. Thus we came historically to have great leaders. Sometimes as physical, sometimes as spiritual, sometimes as individuals. Statesmen steered great religions, organizations, or great government organizations that led humanity.

Now we have come to a completely new moment in the history where everybody is “in” on speech and everybody is “in” on information. Humanity has been coming out of a group-womb-of-permitted-ignorance made possible only by the existence of an enormous cushion of natural physical resources with which to learn only by trial and error and to be somewhat educated about how and why humans happen to be here on our planet.

I assume it is because human minds were designed with the capability to discover from time to time only mathematically stateable eternal relationships, existing between various extraordinary phenomena. As an instance of the human mind’s capability we have the illustration of the works of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo informing and inspiring Isaac Newton into discovering that the interattractiveness of any two celestial bodies varies inversely as the second power of the arithmetical distance intervening. If you double the arithmetical distance intervening you will reduce the interattractiveness to one-fourth what it had been. Astronomers applied this hypothesis of Newton to their celestial observations and discovered that this law explained the interbehaviors of all the celestial bodies.

The human mind has the capability from time to time to discover these extraordinary laws governing the design of the Universe which can only be expressed mathematically, and mathematics is purely intellectual. Human intellect (mind) is gradually discovering a number of these extraordinary, generalized eternal principles. We human beings have been given access to some of the design laws of the Universe. We don’t know of any other phenomenon that has such a faculty so we have to assume that we humans must be here for some very, very important reason. But as far as I know we humans haven’t thought or talked very much about how and why we are here as a desirable or necessary function of the Universe. All we have talked a great deal about was the great mystery of being here. My own working assumption of why we are here is that we are here as local-Universe information-gatherers and that we are given access to the design principles so that we can invent instruments—e.g. the microscope and the telescope—with which to extend all sensorial inquiring regarding the rest of the micro-macro-Universe because human beings, tiny though we are, are here for local-region Universe problem-solving in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. We needed the telescope and microscope having discovered that most of the Universe is invisible.

I was three years old when the electron was discovered. That’s a new era. When I was born reality was everything you could see, smell, touch, and hear. That’s all there was about it, but suddenly we extended our everyday doings and thinkings, not linearly but omnidirectionally, into the vast ranges of the invisible world. We began to discover all kinds of new chemical, biological, and electromagnetic behaviors of the invisible realm so that today 99.99 percent of everything that is going to affect our lives tomorrow is being conducted in the realm of reality nondirectly contactable by the human senses. It takes a really educated human to be able to cope with the great expanses of reality. So here we are as human beings, educated and individually endowed with capabilities of getting on within the invisible world.

Exploring with the spectroscope, photo-telescope and radiotelescope, humans have traveled informationally to discover about two billion galaxies with an average of 100 billion stars each, all existing within the present-astronomy’s 11 and half billion light year’s radial reach in all directions around us. Taking all the light from all those galaxies we have been able to discover spectroscopically and have inventoried here on planet Earth the relative interabundance of each of the unique categories of all the chemical elements present within that 11 and half billion light years realm around us.

That little Earthian humans can accomplish that scale of scientific inventorying makes it possible to realize what the human mind can really do. What is common to all human beings in all history is problems, problems, problems. We are here for problem-solving and, and if you are any good at problem-solving, you don’t come to utopia, you come to more difficult problems to solve. That apparently is what we’re here for, so I therefore conclude that we humans are here for local information-gathering and local problem-solving with our minds having access to the design principles of the Universe. We are here for local information gathering and local-Universe problem-solving in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. That is a very extraordinary and important kind of a function we have.

When I started the experiment in 1927 to discover what a little individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of everyone, I said to myself you are going to have to do all your own thinking. I had been brought up in an era in which all the older people said to all the young people, “Never mind what you think. Listen to what we are trying to teach!” However, as time and experience multiplied, I learned time and again that the way things turned out as evidenced, that the way I had been thinking was more accurate and more informative on ways of looking at things, so I said if I am going to discard all my taught-to-believe reflexings, I must do all my own thinking. I must go entirely on experiential evidence.

It has been an impressive part of my experience that most human beings have a powerful feeling that there is some greater and benign authority operating in the Universe than that of human beings—a phenomenon they call “God.” There are many ways of thinking this and I saw that most children are brought up to believe this and that, concerning the subject. By the word belief I mean “accepting explanations of physical phenomenon without any experimental evidence.” I said to myself, “If you are going to give up all beliefs and are going to have to go only on your own experiential evidence,, you are going to have to ask yourself if you have any experience which would cause you to have to say to yourself: there is quite clearly a greater intellect operating in the Universe than that of human beings. Luckily I had had a good scientific training and the discovery of those great eternal scientific principles which could only be expressed mathematically which mathematics is purely intellectual made me conclude that - overwhelmed with the manifests of a greater intellect operating in Universe than that of humans - because these generalized principles to qualify as generalized principle must have no exceptions and anything that has no exceptions must be eternal. I then said brain is always dealing in the temporal and mind in the eternal principles so I am really convinced that there is an eternal intellect operating with the generalized principles which are eternal and that all the eternal principles are all always concurrently operative and that none of the principles has ever been found to contradict another. Almost all of the principles are interaugmentative. When you and I speak of design we spontaneously think of it as an intellectual conceptualizing in which intellect first sorts out then interarranges a plurality of elements in a preferred way. Ergo, the eternal intellect governs the great design of the Universe and all of its special-case, temporal realizations. So I said, “I am overwhelmed by the evidence of the eternally competent greater intellect than that of human beings. So, in 1927, I said here I am launching a half-century-size program which nobody tells me to do and how to do it. I had absolutely no money and my darling wife was willing to go along with me. I said to myself if I am doing what the Universe wants done, which is to say, if I am doing what God wants done, I don’t have to worry about not being commissioned by anybody and I don’t have to worry about how we are going to acquire the money, tools, and services necessary to produce the artifacts. I see the hydrogen atom doesn’t have to earn a living before behaving like a hydrogen atom. In fact, as best I can see, only human beings operate on a basis of having to earn a living. If I am doing what evolution wants done, I need spend no time worrying about such matters.
I happen to have been born into the moment in history in which for the first time there was enough information to carry on in a different way and not because I am something different but 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 errors produced enough knowledge to be able to think in this particular kind of way. So I said I am going to commit myself completely to God. From that time on I have had absolute faith in God. Because I am a human, many times I’ve done the wrong things and learned what was needed to be done thereby. When friends would say you are being very treacherous to your wife and child not going out there to earn a living for them and said come over here and we will give you a very good job, when I did that everything went wrong, and every time I went off the deep end again everything went right. Quite clearly I had just to work on how to find ways of giving human beings more energy-effective environment control while doing more environment controlling with ever less pounds of materials, ergs of energy and minutes of time. Every time I recommitted myself everything went well again.

So we have lived for 53 years in a series of miracles which occur just when I need anything, but not until the absolute last second. I can’t budget anything for I didn’t know in all those years what I have to budget with. I simply have to have faith and just when I need something there it is.

When I stood up to speak to you I said I hope I am going to be able to communicate to you in such a manner that will prove to be an encouraging example of what the little, average human being can do if you have absolute faith in God.