No More Secondhand God and Other Writings – Buckminster Fuller

About the Work

No More Secondhand God and Other Writings is a collection of prose pieces and prose-poem essays by R. Buckminster Fuller, the inventor, designer, and theorist best known as the originator of the geodesic dome. The volume gathers writing that spans roughly two decades of Fuller’s thinking, from the title poem written in 1940 to material associated with the Fuller Research Foundation and essays on design science and epistemology. Fuller himself described these pieces as “mental mouthfuls and ventilated prose”—a phrase that captures both their density and their unusual form, which sits somewhere between argument, poetry, and manifesto.

“He is a man incapable of developing only one idea at a time.”

The book’s centerpiece, the title poem “No More Secondhand God,” proposes practical means for daily or hourly telephone voting as a way of making democracy more directly responsive. Fuller notes that this idea, first set down in 1940, has only recently reached the threshold of technical feasibility. Another prose-poem formulates his concept of “comprehensive anticipatory design science.” The cover description characterizes each piece as an adventure for the mind that “generates the sublimity of those poetical moments of man’s fleeting glimpses of the omniscient.” A quotation from Book Week observes the extraordinary momentum of Fuller’s thinking—his inability to develop only one idea at a time, and how his ideas stream in clusters as he talks for hours, some expressed in words of his own invention.

The edition in question is an Anchor Books printing from 1971; the collection was originally published by Southern Illinois University Press in 1963, with “Topological Hierarchies” carrying a 1959 copyright. The cover design is by Sydney Butchkes, with a cover photograph by Barry Sonnenfeld. The biographical note accompanying the volume identifies Fuller as a consultant to governmental and private agencies and an advisor to intellectual and political leaders, Research Professor at Southern Illinois University since 1959, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. His honors include the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, the 1968 Gold Medal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the American Institute of Architects’ 1970 Gold Medal. Among his other books are Education Automation, Ideas and Integrities, Nine Chains to the Moon, Utopia or Oblivion, Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization, and Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

Context

The writings collected here belong to a period of enormous upheaval—the late 1930s through the 1960s—and they are marked throughout by the pressures of that era. The title poem was written in 1940, as political dictatorships were consolidating power across Europe and the world was sliding toward war. Fuller explains that he wrote it to discipline his mind into developing communication tools that could render democracy more effective in the face of those dictatorships. The proposal for daily or hourly telephone voting, which he says evoluted into his invention of two-way locally beamed television, was his attempt to give ordinary citizens a direct, continuous voice in their own governance—a household could beam back to central computers “I like it or I don’t like it.”

The prose-poem that follows opens against the backdrop of the war itself, with a newspaper headline announcing “OSLO KEY BASES TAKEN BIG SEA AIR BATTLES ON.” The speaker reflects that the war is no longer “phoney,” and from there the writing ranges across the moral and political confusion of the moment: propaganda, totalitarianism, the failures of quasi-democracies, and the question of whether democracy can survive its own obsolescence. This is writing produced under the pressure of events, and it carries the urgency of a mind trying to think its way through a crisis in real time.

The later material—the design science essays, the methodology for research and development, the epistemological investigations—belongs to Fuller’s postwar and Cold War work. The Fuller Research Foundation, whose history and philosophy are described in the book, was founded in the years after the Second World War, and its undertakings are presented as responses to the accelerating problems of an industrial civilization. The footnote recounting that the Ford Motor Company came to the Foundation in an emergency for the geodesic doming-over of its Dearborn Rotunda, and that the government later came for DEW line radomes, Marine Corps air-deliverable shelters, and Department of Commerce Trade Fair domes, places the book’s concerns squarely within the institutional and technological landscape of mid-century America. The dedication of “A Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science” to Dr. Jonas Edward Salk situates the work in the same moment as the great public-health breakthroughs of the 1950s, and the whole volume reflects a period in which scientific and technological optimism coexisted with the constant threat of annihilation.

Structure of the Book

The volume is not a single continuous argument but a gathering of related pieces, and its structure reflects that variety. It opens with a preface in which Fuller sets out the philosophical assumptions underlying everything that follows—his belief in a universal pattern of orderliness counterbalancing entropy, his conception of man as the anti-entropic reordering function of the universe, and his account of how his unusual prose style came into being. This preface is both a statement of first principles and a kind of origin story, explaining how a technical report written for an industrial corporation in 1936 turned out to be poetry, and how Fuller learned to recombine phrases with dashes, commas, asterisks, and illustrations to make the “mouthfulling” palatable to a board of directors.

From there the book moves into the title poem, “No More Secondhand God,” and then into the long prose-poem that opens with the Oslo headline and develops into a meditation on war, propaganda, democracy, and the nature of God. This section is the most explicitly poetic and prophetic in the volume, moving between newspaper headlines, reflections on aviators and sailormen, and a vision of God as a verb rather than a noun. It culminates in a call for a world democracy that socializes plenty and taxes only inertia.

The middle of the book turns to more technical and programmatic material. “Machine Tools” examines the weakest link in industrial production—the machine-tool operator’s station—and argues that man’s evolution must be converted from a subjective to an objective process. This is followed by a teleological schedule of the universal requirements of a dwelling advantage, classified into four parts: exterior and interior variables, routine and subjective phenomena, random and objective phenomena, and the incisive and routine objective phenomena of design realization. The classification is presented as geometrically teleologic, omnidirectionally convergent-divergent, and irreversibly propagative.

The later sections lay out a phased methodology for research, design, and development, beginning with individual research and development and moving through collective design and development, public relations, and realization by design. This is followed by an account of the Fuller Research Foundation—its historical background, its philosophical dedication, and the negative reasons for its existence, including the argument that its projects tend to lack communicable meaning until years of persistent intrusion have made their trends familiar. The book then turns to epistemological questions in “Introduction to Omnidirectional Halo,” which introduces the concept of pattern generalization and the distinction between generalized conceptual principles and special-case sensorial conditions. The volume concludes with the “Scenario Principle,” the “Principle of Design Co-Variables,” and the beginning of “Omnidirectional Halo” itself, which opens with a definition of synergy and a discussion of the conceptual process as a self-disciplined deferment of irrelevant information traffic.

Inside the Book

Front Matter and the Anchor Books Edition

The Anchor Books edition of 1971 presents Buckminster Fuller as the world-famous inventor of the Geodesic dome, and frames the volume’s prose pieces and prose-poem essays as a record of how his thinking developed. Fuller himself calls these pieces “mental mouthfuls and ventilated prose.” The title poem, written in 1940, proposes practical means for daily or hourly telephone voting by democracy—an idea the cover notes has only recently reached the threshold of technical feasibility. Another prose-poem formulates his “comprehensive anticipatory design science.” Each piece is described as an adventure for the mind that “generates the sublimity of those poetical moments of man’s fleeting glimpses of the omniscient.” A quotation from Book Week describes the extraordinary momentum of Fuller’s thinking, his inability to develop only one idea at a time, and how his ideas stream in clusters as he talks for hours, some expressed in words of his own invention. The cover design is by Sydney Butchkes, the cover photograph by Barry Sonnenfeld.

The biographical note establishes Fuller’s standing: consultant to governmental and private agencies, advisor to intellectual and political leaders, Research Professor at Southern Illinois University since 1959, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and former Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. His honors include the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, the 1968 Gold Medal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the American Institute of Architects’ 1970 Gold Medal. He is the author of Education Automation, Ideas and Integrities, Nine Chains to the Moon, Utopia or Oblivion, Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization, and Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

The Preface: Man as the Anti-Entropic Function

Fuller opens his preface by stating the first assumption of his continuing philosophy: in dynamical counterbalance to the expanding universe of entropically increasing random disorderliness, there must exist a universal pattern of omnicontracting, convergent, progressive orderliness—and man is that anti-entropic reordering function of universe. His second assumption is that man is born with an extraordinary inventory of faculties within an extraordinary inventory of universal phenomena, most of it invisible, operating infra or ultra to sense apprehension. We were given these faculties, he assumes, to permit progressively greater apprehension and comprehension of universal phenomena, based on confrontation by a comprehensive intellect greater than our own or the sum of all human intellects—one which has anticipatorily conceived the fundamental principles interacting as universe.

That universal intellect, Fuller argues, intended us to employ our inventory of subconsciously co-ordinated faculties in evermore conscious degree, and man’s history demonstrates a progressively conscious participation in what was theretofore spontaneous universal evolution. He illustrates with the unconscious bodily functions: no man consciously pushes out his more than a million hairs, knows why he has hair, consciously inter-patterns brain atoms at 186,000 miles per second, co-ordinates heartbeats and breathing, extracts chemistries from digestion, or multiplies flesh cells. From this he concludes that man should employ discovered generalized principles in consciously designed pattern strategies to improve survival and enjoyment.

His philosophy requires converting his own and others’ experiences into statements of evolutionary trending, problem challenges, and responses; it requires attempting physical solution through consciously designed transformations of local physical environment patterning; and it requires solving problems by inanimate invention of comprehensive anticipatory design science rather than by exhorting others. Ideas come readily, he notes, but translation into effective physical design, then into operating structural and mechanical advantages, then into timely societal inhibitability, each requires escalating self-discipline and patience. He describes a pacing chain: the individual intellect paces the human individual; the individual paces science; science paces technology; technology paces industry; industry paces economics; economics paces the everyday evolution acceleration of man’s affairs, which poses accelerating problems. He defines wealth as happily realized augmentation of forward capability, and describes how new wealth accounting requirements emerge as aggregate “news” problems providing raw materials processed by politics, whose purpose is to digest problems and provide accounting and readjustments to changes in technical advantage patterns.

The Discovery of a Form: Poetry as Lucid Report

Fuller recounts that in 1936, while preparing a technical paper on forward research strategies for a major industrial corporation, he developed his form of expression fortuitously. His proposals required renouncing “things,” “solids,” “particles,” “basic building blocks,” “surfaces,” “impervious-continuums,” “straight lines,” and the like—an utter obsolescence of “nouns” and survival only of verbs. The corporation’s Director of Research declared his written presentation incomprehensible. Re-reading it aloud in spontaneously metered “doses,” watching the Director’s face, Fuller measured portions until comprehension registered. The Director asked why he didn’t write it that way; Fuller replied he was reading directly from his original text. The rewritten report was called “lucid, but it is poetry,” which the Director could not hand to the President for the Board of Directors. Two poets at dinner confirmed “it’s poetry.” Fuller recombined phrases with dashes, commas, asterisks, and illustrations to seemingly eliminate the poetical aspect without losing the “mouthfulling,” and in that form it was employed effectively.

The poem “No More Secondhand God” was written in 1940 to discipline his mind into developing communication tools to render democracy more effective amid increasing political dictatorships; it proposes daily or hourly telephone voting, which evoluted into his invention of two-way locally beamed television, now at the threshold of technical feasibility, allowing households to beam back to central computers “I like it or I don’t like it.” “Machine Tools” is self-explanatory.

Oslo, Paradox, and the Dials of God

The text opens with a newspaper headline, “OSLO KEY BASES TAKEN BIG SEA AIR BATTLES ON,” attributed to the World Telegram, 7th Sports, and the speaker reflects that the war is no longer “phoney” but claims not to dwell on Oslo. Instead he thinks of aviators and sailormen on both sides who remain in command of their faculties, contrasting ordinary experience of squalls on Long Island Sound or on an ocean liner with a nineteen-year-old’s reaction to the pitch-black, shrieking cold off Norway’s coast, at 15,000 feet up, fifty under, or on the smashing face of it. There he sees God: in instruments and mechanisms that work more reliably than the limited sensory departments of the human mechanism. He who is befuddled by self, habit, what others say, fear, or chaos of unbelief in God and God’s fundamental orderliness ticking on the dials will perish; he who unerringly interprets the dials will come through.

Exploring unerring interpretation, he arrives at paradox as his usual route to truth: sufficient light within a seemingly opaque black object converts it into a brilliant vari-colored lantern. As a philosophic corollary, multifaceted truth is discovered within the lantern of paradox, whose contrasting colors are angularly separated lines of the spectrum of light at differing wave lengths and frequencies. Truth is thus lensed in colloidals such as drama, music, religion, fun, anger, war, prejudice, and praise, as assumed personal virtues and relative proximity to God.

He asserts that all peoples divided against one another are equally inverted and self-deceived in their tampered-with standards; the degree of self-deception is proportional to the width of the angle of disagreement, and greater stress yields greater anger, which increases susceptibility to propaganda—a cancerous hate growth. All propaganda is false if merely by misemphasis, approaching diametric unbalance, which is chaotic; chaos is erosive, explosive, shattering, the antithesis of homo sapiens’ only potential survival means: harmonic integration of knowledge whose kinetic is uni-versal.

The Inverted Standards of Nations

He observes paradoxes: Germans and Russians preaching rule of the masses—National Socialism, atheism, paganism—are the sole demonstrators of individualism’s importance, employing its premise that a ship must have but one captain, believing in the survival superiority of mechanized man. The organized church, uncomprehending mechanical extension of man, calls such belief pagan; totalitarians accept the designation and behave as social outcasts, inventing ludicrous prevarications as ballistic instruments, lying as eagerly as making gunpowder and planes. Conversely the English and French, preaching Democracy, Individualism, and Christianity, are the greatest progenitors of collectivism and paganism, their corporate amorphous individualism a legal-entity individualism of limited personal liabilities, a shadowy industrial monopoly, a secondhand dictatorhood, soulless; its perfidies through omission or misemphasis are charged to impracticality, unwieldiness, vagaries of custom, sportsmanship, convenience, or mystical traditions. To them and their church the machine is an inanimate, garagey money pump. The preaching individual on either side naively believes in his own free will and benevolence, because the war itself cumulatively results from non-freedom of individual will to attain better living on earth. Children are not born slaves; slavehood is swiftly superimposed. Inanimate slaves are here to take over, but the animate slave complex remains virulent, particularly in managers’ subconscious and the traditions they manage. Total abolition apparently involves first burning down the old house, set afire as an unbelievable clown-act no one tries to put out.

In quasi-democracies the individual no longer exists as far as general scheming goes; mass production anticipates his selective functioning. Chain hotels mass-produce service suggestions on printed cards by a mass-publicized unseen “cordial host,” sometimes a thousand miles away, long dead, or nonexistent, “personally interested in you and your comfort” at 200 of your cents on “his” dollar. As citizen, man is expressed only as a party machine in the body politic; government expresses a mean low average statistic “man.” Social action lags weeks, months, years behind the individual’s thinking frontier; his split-second thinking is most nearly interpreted, but inadequately, by corporate cranium “Journalism,” industrialization’s limited-liability vocalizer. As capitalist, inventor, or worker in democracies he is no longer individual, no longer effective as such, only flavoringly effective as one of many merged riskers, researchers, believers, or laborers. No corporate expression expresses what he exactly means; therein lies the fate of Democracy.

Many believe Democracy obsolete; they are wrong. Obsolete is the one thing Democracy can never be—obstinate, obstreperous, observant, obscure. He will explain if it is Democracy you really wish to save, not some trick gotten away with behind its kindly broad young back. If you believe only in a world to come or gone by, your best chance of finding such another is walking out a very high window. If you believe in the world that is, wish to continue its development, and will truly pay your way, take a chance on Democracy; its highway is plunk beneath your feet, its sign posts modern: if you wish to prove Democracy a preferential method of living, don’t resort to Dictatorship to prove it. All the rest of the major nations allowed themselves to be bum’s-rushed into doing so by panicked international finances. Out of the method chosen in emergency emerges the new survival way of peacetime government. Democracy has potential within it the satisfaction of every individual’s need, but must be structurally modernized and mechanically.

God at Firsthand

The speaker reports being amazed and, despite inertia, impelled to write, acknowledging that many may have written the same thing earlier and better, but insisting that his own firsthand writing matters as “God at firsthand.” He asserts that never before has something “neutral” looked on with such unprejudiced willingness to evaluate, adjust, and comprehend, nor has neutral been so powerful, nor so keenly aware—through a myriad of instruments—of every little hamlet on the globe, intimately near yet “duck’s-backed” to broadcasting falsehood or half-truth, which are called innocuous in the magnificent mechanical extension.

He addresses the people of the United States, believing the vast majority are staked out to be fooled in a big, vitally and mortally dangerous way by warring or plotting factions foreign and domestic, and that precisely these remain unmoved. These “silent propagandees” unerringly appraise the pro- or anti-social values of each world event, each communique, and even each personal happening otherwise trivial, as these may shade the outcome of man’s transition from dominant self-deceit to preponderant self-mastery; from stomach rule to dictate of reason; from politicians tricking to scientific guidance; from fear to happy comprehension motivation. Because man is innately aware of these things, he evades past snares, steels himself against artful pathos, and welcomes the speedy destruction of former barriers to world happiness that were humanly insuperable without fracture by any individual member of the old order—from annihilist to deacon, from clerk to Prime Minister—no matter how distinguished by courage and integrity.

Now common man has implicit faith in common man; can safely negotiate a roadway with any unknown other man, even passing at one hundred and forty miles an hour in opposite directions; has only been prevented from intercommunicating that faith directly, but now is willing to wager all on mutual effective comprehension at the crucial moment; will not be shamed out of his faith by attempts to falsely identify him; has weighed his distress over concentrated frightfulness of an exquisite moment against unending elusive and unmitigated greater suffering.

The revolution has come, set on fire from the top; let it burn swiftly. Neither branches, trunk, nor roots will be endangered—only last year’s leaves and the parasite-bearded moss and orchids will not be there when next spring brings fresh growth and free-standing flowers. Man, now vastly instrumented and attendant upon universal laws in his “blind” flying through life, will give ever less heed to seat-of-the-pants opinions of personal-equation aces, knowing it was those detonations that formerly misguided him into betrayal by selfish scheming.

Here is true world democracy in swift making: a democracy that socializes all plenty as plenty is wrested from scarcity by world-widening cooperative industry; a democracy that, scientifically seeking categorical validity for all motivations, taxes only inertia and awards copiously its individuals who radiantly expand the commonwealth, awarding them out of newly integrated wealth captured from unseen fresh fruits of the limitless environment—not by the slightest impoverishment of commonwealth, either by mortgage or individual indebtedness.

Here is God’s purpose: God, to the speaker, seems a verb, not a noun, proper or improper; the articulation, not the art, objective or subjective; loving, not the abstraction “love” commanded or entreated; knowledge dynamic, not legislative code, not proclamation law, not academic dogma, nor ecclesiastic canon. God is a verb, the most active, connoting the vast harmonic reordering of the universe from unleashed chaos of energy.

A Phased Methodology for Research, Design, and Development

The book now turns to the practical machinery of invention, laying out a phased methodology for research, design, and development before grounding it in the history and philosophy of the Fuller Research Foundation. The process begins with a single individual, before any design or development action that would involve the full-time employment of others. This individual inaugurates a general work pattern that coincides with the best scientific procedure: keeping a diary and notebook, making photographic documentation, and holding tactical conferences. The phase includes comprehensive library study of accrued developments within the pertinent arts, past and contemporary — anthropological data; Energetic Geometry, meaning the philosophy of mensuration, transformation, and relative size; theories of structural, mechanical, and chemical exploration; energy as structure; the dwelling process understood as “energy exchange” and an “energy balance sheet”; theories of structural, service, and process complexes; structural and mechanical logistics; and complex resolution. The individual lists authorities for further information, whether by local personal contact or remote correspondence, calls at suggested local laboratories in universities and industry, and sets up informative tests in their own laboratory. The first phase of design assumption weighs the novel complex interaction unique to the project, the preferred apparatus from the competitive field, and designs appropriate flowsheets. These flowsheets are submitted to helpful competitive specialists and industrial producers of similar equipment, with informative tests to close the gaps supporting the assumed theory. Specifications and drawings are submitted for informative bids, followed by a second redesign of the flowsheet. A report is then prepared with the diary, photographic documentation, collected literature, and trial-balance conclusions of indicated economic advantage — which, if positive, inaugurates the second phase.

That second phase involves plural authorship and the specialization of full-time associates. It considers the prototype’s relationship to the industrial complex through constant review of the initially selected principles, and adopts assumptions for realizing the pertinent principles and latest technology in design. A comprehensive survey of operations follows, from the original undertaking to consumer synchronization, with realization strategy number one belonging to the individual and number two to the associates. The steps include physical tests, schematic general assembly drawings, small-scale models and full-size mockups, stress calculations, a trial balance of parts weights and direct manufacturing costs — roughly three times material costs, including labor, supervision, and inspection — a forecast of overall costs, and curve plotting at various production rates. The general assembly is then “frozen,” drawings for the first bill-size production prototype commence, budgets with tactical deadlines are set, parts drawing and full-size lofting begin, prototype parts production on “soft tools” commences, sub-assemblies replace mockup parts, and physical tests proceed with obvious corrections and necessary replacements — not “improvements” or “desirables,” which are deferred until a second prototype. What follows is an exhaustive sequence: photography, full assembly inspection, static load tests, operational tests, assembly and disassembly tests, packaging and shipping tests, estimates of savings from special powered field tools, opinion testing, the final production “clean-up” prototype, parts cost scheduling by class “A” tools, production tool layout, ordering production tools, setting production dates, lofting and offsets of full-size test masters and templates, fabrication of special jigs and fixtures, ordering production materials, tool-jig-fixture tune-up, parts and assembly testing, field operation scheduling, ordering field tools, distribution strategy, field tests with special tools, selecting a test target area, commencing production, first field assemblies with power tools, instituting maintenance service with complaint alleviation, analysis, and change orders, and plans for a “new” yearly model improvement. Additional considerations run from production and distribution velocity assumptions and progressive mass-production curves to tensioning and compressioning by crystalline, pneumatic, hydraulic, and magnetic means; manufacturer’s basic production forms; priority hierarchies of effort; time-and-energy-and-cost budgeting; industry responsibility for field practices; designing for specific longevity appropriate to progressive obsolescence; designing for efficient screening of component chemicals for recirculated employment; stating maxima and minima performance requirements per unit of invested energy and capital advantage; logistics assumptions such as nesting, packaging, compounded package weight, relationship to carriers, field delivery, field assembly, and field service and replacement; tool techniques; materials availability at design time and in terms of world economic trends and potential; materials ratio per total design; elimination of special operator technique loaning; elimination of novel special soft tool designing; numbers of types, repeat parts, sub-assemblies, and primary assemblies; numbers of forming operations; number of manufacturing tools by types; schedule of forming operations on parts drawings; decimal fraction man hours per operation; designed-in one-man-ability at every stage; schedule of design routines and disciplines; establishing a “parts” inventory of “active” and “obsolete” drawings from the beginning; establishing a “parts” budget of required designs for assemblies and molds; drawing dimension standards; a numbering system of controlled parts; and purchasing techniques, jig and fixture, and lofting techniques.

Public Relations and the Realization by Design

Public relations runs concurrently with all phases of collective design and development, governed by a single rule: never show half-finished work. It involves educating the public on the general magnitude of product, production, and distribution, but never on particulars that would compromise the latitude of scientific design and production philosophy. It publicizes the “facts” — the number of steps before “consumer realization” — understates all advantage, never seeks publicity, and has prepared releases for publisher requests when the “facts” are ripe. The text then presents a priori design realization assumptions: asking not why, whither, nor whence man-life, but assuming that accumulated experience evidences that biological phenomena in general, and man-life in particular, function in the universe as the anti-entropic, anti-random, simple and complex organic, systematically convergent phases of comprehensive omni energy transformations. Industrialization, therefore, constitutes the comprehensive transformative expansion of the man-life function in the universe.

Commercial Survival and the Fuller Research Foundation

The argument next describes commercial survival strategy as governing regenerative profit secretions, extractions, or reinvestments, managed by the wisdom, prerogative, and latitude of minority integrity and articulated by private corporations’ initiative, self-disciplining, good-will-pleasure, urge of responsibility, competence, and timeliness. It is manifested by inaugurating pilot-plant research in undertakings so new that, though scientifically classified as “probable,” they are commercially “untried” and therefore classified by business as “only possible”; though “clearly needed,” they do not come up for consideration in commercial-industrial-research categories until years after preliminary processing by the Fuller Research Foundation. F. R. F. undertakings are also unbudgetable businesswise, even as measures of “protective cover” for business’s routine processing of as-yet “scarce,” proprietary “probables,” even though those ventures are constantly hazarded by unpredicted velocities of accelerating-acceleration in the morphology “sports” generated by specialization’s expediency polevaulting with unexpected moment-to-moment increments of integrating technical advantages of competitive evolution. The passage then gives negative reasons: as business’s “routine probables” and government’s “approximate certainties” fail to materialize on schedule or are hazarded by unheralded complications arising from synergetic interactions, compounding by comprehensive nature beyond specialization’s self-limiting “practical intelligence frames,” the unexpected complications are frequently blamed by one party upon another as “ill attended and obvious” responsibilities within long-accepted, now obsolete categories of cause and effect. However, the dynamically responsible factors may be the cumulus of unheeded, transcendental integrating of utterly new patterns with which F. R. F. is professionally concerned, and regarding which it may furnish concepts, experimental data, and implications conducive to renewed understanding and basic industrial strategy advance. The meager one-in-one-million chance that F. R. F. may furnish this service to society appears to justify its existence. A footnote records that five years after the Foundation was founded, the Ford Motor Company came to it in an emergency for the geodesic doming-over of Ford’s Dearborn, Michigan, Rotunda building; and eight years after its establishment, government came to it in a series of hot, tepid, and cold war defense emergencies for all the Defense Early Warning systems’ DEW line geodesic radomes, the U.S. Marine Corps’s air-deliverable advance base geodesic dome shelters, and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s world-around Trade Fair geodesic domes.

The main text resumes: F. R. F. undertakings are governmentwise as yet invisible to public policy making because they lack the approximately “certain” quality and “acceptable significance” of common focus characterizing problems of public convenience — for instance, the “obvious” common concern with “weather,” temporary abundances here and shortages there, or public irritating momentums of regulations for emergency extended beyond emergency. Because F. R. F. projects must re-examine word tools employed in description of new and more comprehensive data, frequently imposing precise limits on some words and phrases and at other times generalizing previously limited designations, its undertakings tend to lack communicable meaning essential to everyday vocabulary classification and to idea packaging for popular discussion, debate, majority conviction, enactment, and subsequent administration. Communicable meaning becomes obvious only after years of “non-obvious,” yet persistent, intrusion of trends as “annoying problems” whose increasingly familiar phrasemaking is repetitiously resounded either in denouncements or in rejustification by legislators or civil servants for continuing public support: either of comprehensive subsidy, or of subsidy for complementary functions of industrial gestations obviously of commonweal benefit, yet inherently inaccessible to, or beyond the economic ability limits of, private means and maintenance — dredged and buoyed harbors for ships, built and maintained highways for vehicles, airways and airports for planes, or developed and policed clear channels for radio broadcasting systems; or in other government-relegated subsidy functions such as financially underwriting industrial senilities, where public necessity but profitless risk relooms in deteriorations and economic inadequacies, extensive as actuarially unexpected age increments, which being “unexpected” and seemingly uninterestingly profitless have been sorted improperly into nonpriority categories, rather than attended to as possibly embodying new and majorly important trends and fabulous surprise profits which, with increasing frequency, because improperly diagnosed, burst out of their routine service reframing within the pro-and-con cliches pulled out and dusted off from yesterday’s “precedented” or “enacted” frame storage.

A Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science

A section titled “A Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science” is dedicated to Dr. Jonas Edward Salk, expressing world-around thoughts embracing him in spontaneous gratitude for his full-scale realization on our behalf of one of the most magnificent potentials of the man-process patterning in universe: the demonstrably important competence of man as a consciously contributing participant in the constantly transforming evolutions of universe, even in the evolutionary transformations of men by man and of man by men. As men demonstrate competence and responsibility as initiators of comprehensive, anticipatory design science — as Doctor Salk has — they gear men’s conscious efforts into nature’s ceaseless evolutionary processes, thereby progressively converting those inevitable and heretofore misapprehended and oft-times vainly fought processes from painfully asynchronous to happily synchronous events. Thus nature and competently self-disciplined initiators such as Doctor Salk now transform man’s omniaspect.

Tactile Domination and the Precessional Principle

The argument continues that man’s “spontaneous” judgments and actions are oriented by his subconscious reflexing, itself based on a tactilely received and referenced brain-cataloging of primary information. Therefore man “sees” external conditions only as they have been discovered and verified by his touch faculties. For instance, man pictures other men’s hand-touchable limits as their tactile profiles, rather than by their aural or olfactoral profiles, or by the profiles-of-influence of their intellectual communications — which latter are said to be their only real profiles. Men are known as six feet tall because that is their tactile limit, not by how far they can be heard; only to dogs are men known by their gigantic olfactoral dimensions. Though Democritus’s intellectual profile reaches through two thousand years to permeate the intellect of anyone who uses the word “atom,” few atomic-age people are yet spontaneously dominated only by intellectually apprehended dimensional ramifications of experience. Because of tactile domination and the few-feet-per-minute velocities of tactile apprehension, the 186,000 miles-per-second velocity of optical spectrum-color-phenomena-apprehending is incredible, and so is spontaneously and erroneously interpreted by the tactilely enslaved individual as “instantaneous.” This erroneous concept of “instantaneity” causes man to discount the billionths of seconds required for light frequencies to bounce from external objects, travel to his optical-reception-relay-system, and be scanningly reassembled through interrupted carrier frequencies of the nervous system — erroneously recorded as apprehended at external points of reflected visible spectrum radiation rather than within his internal brain “TV.” This is compared to hypothetically conceivable future generations so accustomed to “lazing” before TV sets that they “see” TV-reported events as spontaneously occurring only at the studios or camera pick-up points, with the intervening relay submerged in subconscious co-ordinations.

Despite incomprehension of precessionally-operative frequency relays, the effective abstract reality of exquisite principles is such that, despite the local, uniquely directional limits of stone-plunged bobbing water molecules — motions exclusively inward and outward from earth’s center — there result progressively precessed synergetic wave patterns appearing as wave “hills” moving excentrally, in principle only around the earth and at right angles to the in-and-out bobbing directions of individual water molecules. These synergetic, truly abstract water “hills” provide circumferentially moving water slopes; down these outwardly moving slopes surf-boarders may coast, yielding to gravity slant-wise of the waves’ abstractly “rolling” fronts, at an angle such that their rate of coasting inwardly toward earth’s center is synchronizingly governed by their angular leaning to match the rates of only “outward” local motions of each individual water molecule. That matching translates co-operative radial motions into circumferential arc, a pattern transformation at ninety degrees to the lines of co-ordinated in-put action, known as precession. The precessional principle causes surf-boarders’ continual re-elevation outwardly from earth even as they spend gravitational advantage coasting circumferentially, despite water molecules not moving circumferentially except when low atmospheric pressure centers vacuum — not blow — wave tops into cresting curls moving side-wise at ninety degrees to the drafting atmosphere’s line of tensional force. Thus in synergetic precessional sequence, cresting-formed foam bubbles carpet the oceans with “spindrift.” Porpoises are the royal protagonists of these synergetic precessional surf-boarding realms, employing and enjoying these purely abstract, integratable principles as they coast in love-making couples around cresting wave slopes encompassing earth.

The Scenario Principle and the Geometry of Considerability

Fuller announces what he calls a general law of total synergetical structuring, naming it the Scenario Principle. Its claim is that the universe of total human experience cannot be simultaneously recollected and reconsidered. Instead it may be subdivided into a plurality of locally tuneable event foci, or points, of which a minimum of four positive and four negative are required to form a considerable set—a first finite subdivision of finite universe. This fourness coincides with basic quanta strategy. All experience is thus reduced to nonsimultaneously considerable sets, while experiences too large and infrequent, or too minuscule and frequent, are held irrelevant. A considerable set subdivides the remaining irrelevant experience into macro-cosmic and micro-cosmic sets lying immediately outside or within the considered foci. Two inherent twilight zones of tantalizingly almost-relevant recollections are fed back in contiguous frequency bands, the macro-twilight and the micro-twilight. A corollary follows: a considerable set is a locally definitive system of universe returning upon its considerability in all circumferential directions, possessing inherent withinness and withoutness, and subdividing all universe into the two unique extremes of macro and micro frequencies.

The Principle of Design Co-Variables then states that local structure is a set of frequency-associable, spontaneously tuneable, recollectable experience relationships, having a regenerative constellar patterning as the precessional resultants of concentrically shunted periodic self-interferences—coincidences of a systematic plurality of definitive vectorial frequency, wave length, and angle interrelationships. The precessionally regenerative concentricity of structure is antientropic and evolves toward optimally economic local compressibility and symmetry. Fuller refers to Robert Marks’s Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller for his law of omnioptimally-economic, omnitriangulated-point-system symmetry relationships. M, mass, means all the universe’s self-interfering complexes having concentrically self-precessing, local-focal-holding patterns that result in locally regenerative constellar associabilities as positive outside-in structures. C², radiation, means all the universe’s nonself-interfering complexes having eccentrically inter-precessing, omnidirectionally diffusing patterns that result in comprehensively degenerative negative limits of dissociabilities as negative, inside-out de-structures.

Energetic-Synergetic Geometry and the Doppler Effect

In the chapters on Energetic-Synergetic Geometry, Fuller identifies second powering with the point population of any radiant or gravitational wave system’s circumferential arrays of any given radius, stated in terms of frequency of modular subdivisions. Third powering corresponds to the total point population of all successive wave layers; fourth powering to interpointal domain volumes; and fifth and sixth powering to products of multiplication by frequency doublings and treblings. The Doppler effect is described as wave reception frequency-modulation caused by the motions of observer and observed, being concentric wave system fourth and fifth powering accelerations.

The Doppler effect is usually conceived as approximately linear. You stand beside a railway track; a swift train approaches with its whistle valve held open at constant pitch as heard by the engineer. The whistle sound comes at roughly 700 mph while the train speeds at 100 mph. The train’s motion reduces the intervals between successive wave emissions, decreasing wave length and giving higher pitch at your remote hearing position. After the train passes, it runs away from each successive wave emission, increasing the intervals between crests, lengthening waves, and apparently lowering pitch as you hear it—but not as others elsewhere may hear it. This is pure observational relativity. But the real picture is not linear; it is omnidirectional.

Fuller offers an omnidirectional explanation. You were flying in an air transport which exploded; because of a sudden pressure differential change at high altitude you personally have just been exploded into many separate parts receding from one another at high velocity. A series of secondary explosions follows from somewhere in the center of the galaxy of exploding debris, as one item after another of the airplane’s explosive cargo is reached by progressive local conflagration-heat concentrations. The sound waves of successive explosions speed after your receding parts, among which are your two ear diaphragms as yet stringily interconnected with your exploding brain cells, which hear the explosion’s sound waves first at low pitch. But as your parts explode from one another at a decelerating rate because of air friction, the waves of remote explosion sounds shorten and pitches go up. Considering many separate, nonsimultaneous secondary explosions of your various exploding parts, of varying intensities and remoteness, the decelerations and accelerations of Doppler effects render some reverberations infra and some ultra to your tuning range limits of hearing. The sum total of heard events thus provides a very different total conceptioning as heard from various points in the whole galaxy of exploding events, whose separate components would tend toward new grouping concentrations.

The Halo

The Halo discovered in the next chapter is that of an omnidirectional, complex, high-frequency, Doppler-effected hypothetical-zone experience within an omnidirectional universal maelstrom of nonsimultaneous near and far explosions and their interaccelerating and refractive wave frequency patternings. Several fundamental concepts are repeated several times in Halo, reintroduced in various complex associations, each providing unique discoveries. To generate spontaneous comprehension of Halo, the essay opens with a swiftly marshalled digest of the epistemological concepts of the introduction.

Omnidirectional Halo begins with synergy: the behavior of integral aggregate systems unpredicted by the behaviors of any of their components or subassemblies of components. Chrome-nickel-steel has higher tensile strength than the sum of the separate tensile strengths of its alloyed elements. Synergetic behaviors are commonplace throughout chemistry and biochemistry but unfamiliar to man’s visible experience.

Thinking as Tuning

The conceptual process is never static. Thinking is not the insertion of invented images into an empty vacuum-tube chamber called brain; it is the self-disciplined, preoccupied consideration of special-case sets of feed-back answers selected from high-frequency alternating trans-ceiver brain traffic. This traffic consists of omniexperience processed answers to present or past questions, formulated by the individual’s conscious or subconscious coordinating initiative or by the individual’s overlapping generation of group memory. Because past experiences are stored at varying depths, answers return swiftly or slowly, with unpredictable recollectability rates; the returning-answers traffic is heterogeneous, and many answers come to questions we have forgotten asking. Systematic tuning of questions and feed-back answers produces temporary, tuneably valved exclusion of other incoming signals. Discreet tuning admits only recollections clearly relevant to omnidirectionally rounding out comprehension of the special-case set of events intuitively selected for momentary focal consideration. Thinking is thus a self-disciplined deferment of any incoming information traffic other than what is lucidly relevant to the intuited quest for comprehension of the emergent pattern under immediate priority.

Thinking yields varying degrees of lucidity in the arrayed residue of focal event patterns, consequent to the disciplined deferment of irrelevancies. It is a putting-aside, not a putting-in discipline—like putting aside tall grasses to isolate a trail into viewability. Thinking is frequency modulation, tuning out irrelevancies through definitive resolution of the exclusively tuned-in feed-back messages’ pattern differentiatability. As an exploring navigator picks a channel between look-out-detected rocks, the intellect picks its way between irrelevancies of feed-back messages. Secondarily, the intellect discovers that all irrelevancies fall into two main classes: finitely furnished experience events too large and too infrequent to have considerable frequency significance in tuneability for the modular magnitude ranges under consideration, and events too minuscule of wave module and too high frequency to be significantly tuneable into the considered spectrum range. Each class has a twilight zone of almost relevancy which, if consideration rate were accelerated, might attain considerability within the tactical limits of assignable capital-life-time intuitively budgetable. Between the twilight zones of almost-too-large and almost-too-small lies a zone of lucidly tuneable relevancy of experienced event recollections.

Because humans wheel about—first in the womb, then in the baby carriage, then on foot, in auto, ship, and plane—around a spinning earth in a spinning solar system within an involuting-evoluting, spirally spinning galaxy, totally inventoried experiences are inherently omnidirectional as the sum of observational orientations. Universe, as all-experience, is inherently omnidirectional in its observational orientations; therefore the temporary putting-aside of the two classes of irrelevancies requires an omnidirectional putting aside. This differentiates as an outwardly dismissed macrocosmic disposition of the too-large and too-infrequent conceptual informations and an inwardly dismissed residue set of all the too-minuscule and too-frequent events. The lucidly tuned-in, residually considerable set of event-foci lies within a spherical zone between the thus separated twilight zones of almost-considerable minuscules and bigs. Consequently, the residual set of tuned-in experience event-foci are caught in a spherical zone trap of feed-back recollected considerability appropriate to systematic reviewing and possible definition.

Out of nonsimultaneously conceptual, yet finite, universe has emerged a definitively conceptual geometry—not invented by the conceiver but an a priori geometry discovered by the reconsiderer as a residual relevancy constellation. Systematic recollection and thought-out definition lie within a geometrically conformed zone which inherently subdivides the universe into distinctly separate microcosm and macrocosm, only meagerly isolated from one another by a local constellation of considerable relationships. No matter how meager the network of zonal relationships of the residually considered star set of holding-pattern relevancy, the latter shuntingly impedes in some degree the velocity of omnidirectional universal information traffic, forced by geometrical surroundment to pass through the zonal constellation. If a squadron of boats enters a river’s mouth, passes upstream, and anchors, their presence and the friction of their hulls will mildly retard or choke the river’s flow. Thus the constellation of considered events mildly chokes the otherwise unimpeded universal and geodesically inter-routed communication traffic which they have separated into the two realms of micro and macro. As Heisenberg shows in his principle of ultimate indeterminism, the physical act of measurement always alters the behavior of the measured phenomenon. In the same way, the thinking process inherently alters the fundamental patterning of universal thought-about interrelationships.

Thought and its tuneably differentiating local definitions constitute the first subdivisions of finite universe. Ergo finite universe is something greater than any definable local system’s zone of constellar, geometrical lucidity, which zone is itself secondarily definable by its disparity of concavity of withinness and convexity of withoutness. In a consideration, four is the minimum number of stars having an inherent arrangement of withinness and withoutness. Therefore the minimum conceptually considerable generalized-experiences-set, affording macro-micro separation of universe, is a set of four local event-foci. These four stars have an inherent sixness of interrelationships. This four-foci, six-relationship set is definable as the tetrahedron. This minimum fourness of relevant-frequency, ergo thinkable, stars coincides with quantum mathematics’ requirement of four unique quanta numbers per each uniquely considerable particle; quanta are inherently tetrahedronal. In the prime dichotomy of universe into a thinkable tetrahedronal zone between unconsiderable extremes, the argument arrives at its geometric foundation.

Tetrahedronal Mensuration and the Finite Calculus

The concluding chapter opens by denying that solid matter exists as a phenomenon; consequently there can be no solid sphere or solid surface sphere. All spheres are instead high-frequency constellations of event-points approximately equidistant from one central event-point. Interconnecting all surface points most economically subdivides the sphere’s surface into an omnitriangulated spherical web matrix. As triangular subdivision frequency approaches subvisibility, the difference between the sum of angles around all vertex points and the number of vertices multiplied by 360° remains constantly 720°, the sum of two times unity. The sum of a tetrahedron’s angles, regular or irregular, is always 720°, just as a planar triangle’s angles always sum to 180°. Two laws are stated: the sum of the surface angles of any polyhedron equals the number of vertices multiplied by 360° minus one tetrahedron; and the sum of the angles of any polyhedron, including a sphere, is always evenly divisible by one tetrahedron. Where unity equals 360°, 180° equals one-half unity and 720° equals two times unity; thus a triangle is identified as one-half unity and a tetrahedron as two unities.

Table 3, Tetrahedronal Mensuration applied to Spheres, presents three geodesic icosahedra: a Regular Geodesic Two-Frequency Icosahedron, with 42 vertices times 360° equalling 15,120° and 80 times 180° equalling 14,400°, a difference of 720°, one tetrahedron; a Regular Geodesic Four-Frequency Icosahedron, with 162 times 360° equalling 58,320° and 320 times 180° equalling 57,600°, again a difference of 720°; and a Regular Geodesic Nine-Frequency Icosahedron, with 812 times 360° equalling 292,320° and 1,620 times 180° equalling 291,600°, once more a difference of 720°.

The calculus assumes a plane is infinitesimally congruent with a sphere’s surface at tangency, and spherical trigonometry likewise assumes the sums of angles around any sphere point are always 360°. The demonstration shows the sums around all vertices of a sphere always total 720°, one tetrahedron less than vertices times 360°; therefore one basic assumption of the calculus is invalid.

The chapter concludes that the calculus’s infinity is inherently finite. Universe equals the aggregate of men’s consciously apprehended and communicated experiences—nonsimultaneous but finite, since all experiences begin and end. A local system divides universe into three finite parts: the outside portion, the inside portion, and the system itself. Local spherical systems are definite rather than infinite, contrary to the calculus’s erroneous 360-degree assumption. Nonsimultaneous universe is finite but conceptually undefinable; local systems are definable. The definite local system plus one tetrahedron, two unities, equals finite universe; the difference between universe and any local system is always one tetrahedron, and every local system may be subdivided into whole tetrahedra.

The Halo Conceptioning and the Topological Hierarchy

Combining Van’t Hoff’s discovery that organic chemical compounds are structurally cohered in terms of the tetrahedron’s four vertexes, Linus Pauling’s X-ray diffraction discovery that metallic elements combine in nonvertexially interlinked tetrahedronal structures, and the author’s own disclosures, the passage concludes it is reasonable to assume all definable structuring of universe is tetrahedronally co-ordinate in rational number increments of the tetrahedron. Finite minus definite means two tetrahedra minus one tetrahedron; finite universe equals four cyclic unities; each tetrahedron equals two; therefore finite, four, minus conceptual definite, two, equals two, one negative invisible tetrahedron.

Main Arguments

The book’s central argument is that man is the anti-entropic reordering function of the universe—that in dynamical counterbalance to the expanding universe of entropically increasing random disorderliness, there must be a universal pattern of omnicontracting, convergent, progressive orderliness, and that man is that pattern’s agent. Fuller assumes that man is born with an extraordinary inventory of faculties within an extraordinary inventory of universal phenomena, most of it invisible and operating infra or ultra to sense apprehension, and that these faculties were given to permit progressively greater apprehension and comprehension of universal phenomena. The universal intellect, he argues, intended that we progressively employ this inventory in evermore conscious degree, and man’s history demonstrates progressively conscious participation in theretofore spontaneous universal evolution.

From this follows the argument that man should employ discovered generalized principles in consciously designed pattern strategies to improve survival and enjoyment. Fuller illustrates the point with examples of unconscious bodily functions: no man consciously pushes out his million hairs, knows why he has hair, consciously inter-patterns brain atoms at 186,000 miles per second, co-ordinates heartbeats and breathing, extracts chemistries from digestion, or multiplies flesh cells. The implication is that we can now begin to do consciously what nature has done spontaneously—to design our environment rather than merely adapt to it.

A second major argument concerns the nature of democracy and its relation to technology. Fuller contends that democracy is not obsolete, and that the one thing democracy can never be is obsolete. But he also argues that in quasi-democracies the individual no longer exists as far as general scheming goes—mass production anticipates his selective functioning, chain hotels mass-produce service suggestions by a mass-publicized unseen “cordial host,” and the citizen is expressed only as a party machine in the body politic. Social action lags weeks, months, or years behind the individual’s thinking frontier, and no corporate expression expresses what he exactly means. The fate of democracy, Fuller suggests, lies in whether it can be structurally modernized and mechanically updated to give the individual effective expression.

A third argument concerns the nature of God and the proper response to divine order. Fuller insists that God is a verb, not a noun—the articulation, not the art; loving, not the abstraction “love”; knowledge dynamic, not legislative code. He argues that proselytizing paradoxically results in abandonment of the proselytizer’s direct pursuit of integrity, substituting progressively ritualized declarations of thought-numbing formulae. Individuals who receive direct validation of faith tend humbly to grateful silence, and the growth of faith is documented primarily by compounding accomplishments of silent individual dedications—either to eliminating man’s recurrent sufferings or to design solutions by physical instruments anticipating survival, process, and enfreshment needs.

A fourth argument concerns the methodology of design science. Fuller lays out a phased process beginning with individual research and development, moving through collective design and development, and culminating in realization by design. He argues that the individual intellect paces the human individual, the individual paces science, science paces technology, technology paces industry, industry paces economics, and economics paces everyday evolution acceleration of man’s affairs, which poses accelerating problems. Wealth is defined as happily realized augmentation of forward capability, and new wealth accounting requirements emerge as aggregate “news” problems providing raw materials processed by politics, whose purpose is to digest problems and provide accounting and readjustments to changes in technical advantage patterns.

A fifth argument concerns the nature of thinking itself. Fuller rejects the notion that thinking is the insertion of invented images into an empty “vacuum-tube chamber called brain.” Instead, thinking is the self-disciplined, preoccupied consideration of special-case sets of feed-back answers selected from high-frequency alternating trans-ceiver brain traffic. It is a putting-aside, not a putting-in discipline—like putting aside tall grasses to isolate a trail into viewability. Thinking is FM, tuning out irrelevancies through definitive resolution of the exclusively tuned-in feed-back messages’ pattern differentiatability.

Key Concepts

Several concepts recur throughout the book and give it its distinctive vocabulary. The most important is “comprehensive anticipatory design science,” which Fuller presents as the alternative to exhorting others or waiting for last-minute miracles. The phrase names a method of solving problems by inanimate invention—by designing physical solutions that anticipate future needs rather than reacting to emergencies after they arise. Fuller argues that this approach requires converting his own and others’ experiences into statements of evolutionary trending, problem challenges, and responses, and that it requires attempting physical solution through consciously designed transformations of local physical environment patterning.

“Synergy” is another central concept. Fuller defines it as the behavior of integral aggregate systems unpredicted by the behaviors of any of their components or subassemblies of their components. Chrome-nickel-steel has higher tensile strength than the sum of the separate tensile strengths of its alloyed elements. Synergetic behaviors are commonplace throughout chemistry and biochemistry but unfamiliar to man’s visible-spectrum-oriented common sense. The concept is developed through the example of surf-boarders coasting on wave “hills” that move circumferentially even though the individual water molecules move only inward and outward from the earth’s center—a pattern transformation at 90 degrees to the lines of co-ordinated input action, known as precession.

“Precession” is the principle that causes surf-boarders’ continual re-elevation outwardly from earth even as they spend gravitational advantage coasting circumferentially. It is the mechanism by which co-operative radial motions are translated into circumferential arc. Fuller uses the example of porpoises, “the royal protagonists of these synergetic precessional surf-boarding realms,” who employ and enjoy these purely abstract, integratable principles as they coast in love-making couples around cresting wave slopes encompassing earth. The precessional principle is also invoked in the discussion of chemical elements, which Fuller describes as precessionally regenerative physical principles of self-interferences resulting as inwardly shunted chordal patternings.

“Pattern generalization” is the epistemological concept that Fuller develops in “Introduction to Omnidirectional Halo.” He describes it through the image of a pack of one hundred file cards, each riddled with hundreds of different-sized small holes; when stacked with edges aligned, three holes in each card align vertically while all others are obscured. To such persistently emergent, uniquely mutual coincidence-patterning relationships we may apply the term “pattern generalization” in a mathematical sense, contradistinguished from literary “generalization.” When uniquely emergent generalized patternings become describable in mentally regenerative conceptual terms, divorced from specific sensorial conditions yet persistent in every special case, we may tentatively assume such content to be a generalized conceptual principle—for instance, tension as opposed to compression independent of textures, smells, colors, sound, or size.

The “Scenario Principle” is Fuller’s general law of total synergetical structuring. It holds that the “universe” of total man experience cannot be simultaneously recollected and reconsidered. Instead it may be subdivided into a plurality of locally tuneable event foci or “points,” of which a minimum of four positive and four negative points are required as a “considerable set”—a first finite subdivision of finite universe. This fourness coincides with basic quanta strategy. All experience is reduced to nonsimultaneously “considerable sets,” holding irrelevant those experiences too large and infrequent, or too minuscule and frequent, to be tuneably considerable. A considerable set subdivides the rest of irrelevant experience into macro-cosmic and micro-cosmic sets immediately outside or within the considered foci, with two inherent twilight zones of “tantalizingly almost-relevant recollections” fed back in contiguous frequency bands.

The “Principle of Design Co-Variables” states that local structure is a set of frequency-associable, spontaneously tuneable, recollectable experience relationships, having a regenerative constellar patterning as the precessional resultants of concentrically shunted periodic self-interferences. The precessionally regenerative concentricity of structure is antientropic and evolutes toward optimally economic local compressibility and symmetry. In this framework, M (mass) means all the universe’s self-interfering complexes having concentrically self-precessing, local-focal-holding patterns resulting in locally regenerative constellar associabilities as positive-outside-in structures, while C² (radiation) means all the universe’s nonself-interfering complexes having eccentrically inter-precessing, omnidirectionally diffusing patterns resulting in comprehensively degenerative negative limits of dissociabilities as negative (inside-out) de-structures.

The “Doppler effect” is treated not as a linear phenomenon but as an omnidirectional one. Fuller offers the example of a train whistle: as the train approaches, the motion reduces intervals between successive wave emissions, decreasing wave length and giving higher pitch; after the train passes, it runs away from each successive wave emission, increasing intervals between crests, lengthening waves, and apparently lowering pitch. But the real picture, he insists, is not linear; it is omnidirectional. He illustrates this with the hypothetical case of a person exploded into many separate parts receding from one another at high velocity, with a series of secondary explosions following from somewhere in the center of the galaxy of exploding debris. The sum total of heard events provides very different total conceptioning as heard from various points in the whole galaxy of exploding events.

Themes

The most pervasive theme in the book is the tension between entropy and order—between the expanding universe of random disorderliness and the omnicontracting, convergent, progressive orderliness that Fuller believes counterbalances it. This is not merely a cosmological speculation but a moral and practical framework. Man, as the anti-entropic reordering function of the universe, has a responsibility to participate consciously in the evolutionary process. The alternative is chaos, which Fuller describes as erosive, explosive, shattering—the antithesis of homo sapiens’ only potential survival means, which is the harmonic integration of knowledge whose kinetic is universal.

A second theme is the crisis of modernity and the failure of inherited institutions to keep pace with technological change. Fuller argues that in quasi-democracies the individual no longer exists as far as general scheming goes; mass production anticipates his selective functioning, and social action lags weeks, months, or years behind the individual’s thinking frontier. The organized church, uncomprehending the mechanical extension of man, calls the totalitarians’ belief in mechanized man pagan, while the English and French, preaching democracy and individualism, are the greatest progenitors of collectivism and paganism, their corporate amorphous individualism a legal-entity individualism of limited personal liabilities, a shadowy industrial monopoly, a secondhand dictatorhood, soulless. The war itself, Fuller suggests, cumulatively results from non-freedom of individual will to attain better living on earth.

A third theme is the nature of faith and the proper response to divine order. Fuller’s God is a verb, not a noun—the most active, connoting the vast harmonic reordering of the universe from unleashed chaos of energy. There is born unheralded a great natural peace, not out of exclusive pseudo-static security but out of including, refining, dynamic balancing. Naught is lost; only the false and nonexistent are dispelled. This is a vision of faith that is active rather than passive, dynamic rather than static, and it leads Fuller to reject proselytizing in favor of silent individual dedication to the elimination of suffering and the design of survival solutions.

A fourth theme is the relationship between the individual and the collective. Fuller insists that the individual intellect paces the human individual, and that the individual paces science, technology, industry, and economics. Yet he also recognizes that the individual is increasingly submerged in corporate and governmental structures that do not express what he exactly means. The revolution, he says, has come, set on fire from the top; let it burn swiftly. Neither branches, trunk, nor roots will be endangered—only last year’s leaves and the parasite-bearded moss and orchids will not be there when next spring brings fresh growth and free-standing flowers. This is a vision of transformation that is both destructive and regenerative, and it places the individual at the center of the process.

A fifth theme is the nature of thinking and the discipline required to think well. Fuller describes thinking as a self-disciplined deferment of any incoming information traffic other than what is lucidly relevant to the intuited quest for comprehension of the emergent pattern under immediate priority. It is a putting-aside, not a putting-in discipline. This is a theme that runs through the epistemological essays and connects them to the more practical design methodology: the same discipline that allows a thinker to isolate a pattern from the noise of experience is the discipline that allows a designer to anticipate future needs rather than react to present emergencies.

A sixth theme is the relationship between the abstract and the concrete. Fuller repeatedly insists that the most real things are abstract principles—that the knot is neither manila, cotton, nor nylon but only an utterly abstract “physical” principle, a precessionally regenerative physical principle of self-interferences. The chemical elements are not basic building blocks but fundamental nuclear “particles,” more accurately consisting in purely regenerative abstract principles. The specialist professor of mathematics, otherwise as confounded by tactilely referenced common sense as anyone else, finds these primary behaviors most reliably treatable through integrated mathematical process without “sensing” why, and therefore asserts mathematics has no relationship to the solid realities of everyday “common-sense” experience. Fuller’s whole project can be understood as an attempt to bridge this gap—to show that the abstract is the real, and that the concrete is a special case of the abstract.

The Author’s Conclusions

Fuller’s conclusions are both practical and visionary. On the practical side, he concludes that the individual must take responsibility for converting experience into statements of evolutionary trending, problem challenges, and responses; that physical solutions must be attempted through consciously designed transformations of local physical environment patterning; and that problems must be solved by inanimate invention of comprehensive anticipatory design science rather than by exhorting others. He notes that ideas come readily, but translation into effective physical design, then into operating structural and mechanical advantages, then into timely societal inhibitability, each requires escalating self-discipline and patience.

On the visionary side, Fuller concludes that man and his wisdom must be the master, and that the intellectually architectured house-of-tomorrow will be central as a component function of a new world-encompassing, predesigned service industry. When man becomes preoccupied with drawing off new potential to establish constant world-wide advancement of living standards—through systematic incorporation of scientific knowledge and technical advantage in an earth-embracing service industry of autonomous dwelling and intelligence facility and felicity—then subjective requirements, negative motivations, antipathetic surges, and concessions to survival-mandated compromise promulgating advancement by political initiative will subside. It will take many waves of threatened self-destruction to convince, instruct, and mobilize an effectively articulate majority of humanity toward an objective evolutionary volition inspired by faith in omniscient wisdom and benevolence instructing through intellect.

Fuller concludes that intellect wrote e = mc²; energy did not inscribe intellect e — me². Intellect may write every equation of physical behavior, but no equation will ever compass intellect or its self-starter secret. This is his ultimate statement of faith: that the universe is governed by an anticipatorially designing intellectual wisdom, comprehensive, permeating, exquisitely finite, and relative to man-mind limits, and that this wisdom is from time to time tune-inable by man in greater compass or finer degree, but only in unexpected moments when man is utterly preoccupied with self-dedication to experience-inspired faith in the omniexistent ever-presence of greater integrity implicit in multiplying clues of happenstance and disciplined experimental fill-ins.

The book’s final movement, in “Omnidirectional Halo,” opens with a definition of synergy and a discussion of the conceptual process as a self-disciplined deferment of irrelevant information traffic. The Halo discovered in the next chapter is that of an omnidirectional, complex, high-frequency, Doppler-effected hypothetical-zone experience in an omnidirectional universal maelstrom of nonsimultaneous near and far explosions and their interaccelerating and refractive wave frequency patternings. Several fundamental concepts are repeated several times in Halo, reintroduced in various complex associations each providing unique discoveries. The essay opens with a swiftly marshalled digest of the epistemological concepts of the introduction, and from there it proceeds to develop the implications of the scenario principle, the principle of design co-variables, and the energetic-synergetic geometry that Fuller has been building throughout the book. The volume ends not with a conclusion but with an opening—with the beginning of a new investigation, a new way of seeing, and a new set of tools for thinking about the universe and man’s place within it.

Significance

The significance of No More Secondhand God and Other Writings lies in several directions at once. For readers interested in Fuller himself, the book is an unusually direct window into the development of his thinking. The preface explains how his distinctive prose style came into being—how a technical report written for an industrial corporation in 1936 turned out to be poetry, and how he learned to recombine phrases with dashes, commas, asterisks, and illustrations to make the “mouthfulling” palatable to a board of directors. The title poem, written in 1940, shows him working out the idea of daily or hourly telephone voting that would later evolve into his invention of two-way locally beamed television. The design science essays show him developing the methodology that would inform his work on the geodesic dome and other inventions. The epistemological essays show him working out the philosophical foundations of his approach to design.

For readers interested in the history of ideas, the book is a document of mid-century American technological optimism and its discontents. Fuller’s faith in science and technology as instruments of human betterment coexists with a sharp critique of the institutions that had grown up around them—the corporations, the governments, the churches, the political parties. His argument that democracy must be structurally modernized and mechanically updated to survive is a precursor of later debates about participatory democracy and the role of technology in political life. His insistence that the individual must take responsibility for solving problems rather than exhorting others is a precursor of later movements in design, engineering, and social entrepreneurship.

For readers interested in design and architecture, the book is a foundational text. The phased methodology for research, design, and development—beginning with individual research and development, moving through collective design and development, and culminating in realization by design—anticipates many later developments in design thinking and project management. The teleological schedule of the universal requirements of a dwelling advantage, with its four-part classification of exterior and interior variables, routine and subjective phenomena, random and objective phenomena, and the incisive and routine objective phenomena of design realization, is an early attempt to systematize the design process. The concept of comprehensive anticipatory design science, with its emphasis on anticipating future needs rather than reacting to present emergencies, has become a central idea in contemporary discussions of sustainable design and resilience.

For readers interested in philosophy and epistemology, the book offers a distinctive and challenging account of the nature of thinking, the relationship between the abstract and the concrete, and the nature of faith.