Self Destruction
Chapter 24: Overcoming the final obstacle
Dear friends,
The last chapter is here. I will have one final “epilogue” to send and then User Zero will be complete, free for anyone to read online. Thank you for subscribing to my emails over the last six months.
This chapter is about egocide, the final mental obstacle. Stay creative.
Your friend,
Ade
“The minute you choose to do what you really want to do, it’s a different kind of life.” —Buckminster Fuller
A desperate man looked out over Lake Michigan, contemplating suicide. He had his reasons. His daughter had died in his arms. He was kicked out of the company he founded. His mistress stopped loving him. He was addicted to cigarettes and alcohol. All signs pointed to suicide as the answer.
This is the last chapter of User Zero. We can’t avoid it any longer, it is time to approach the very center of our being, to stand on the brink of our identity. We are going to hold a gun to the head of our ego and contemplate pulling the trigger. If you could end the parts of yourself that hold you back, would you do it?
Buckminster Fuller didn’t kill himself. As he weighed life against death, an alternative option presented itself. When Bucky told this story, he uses the word “egocide” to describe this moment. He decided to make his life an experiment to see what one person could achieve if they committed themselves entirely to others. He said,
“If I take oath never again to work for my own advantaging and to work only for all others for whom my experience-gained knowledge may be of benefit, I may be justified in not throwing myself away.”
Bucky gave himself a second chance, he volunteered to be a guinea pig in the laboratory of his mind. User zero. This is how one of history’s most creative scientists was reborn. Half a century later his ideas still capture our imaginations because Bucky didn’t let the technology of his time limit his ambition. His mind buzzed with concepts for flying cars, floating cities, and climate-controlled domes so large they could cover New York City. This wasn’t science fiction or the delusional dream of an industrialist. Bucky believed that design could save humanity.
You probably know Bucky for his geodesic domes. The dome homes of the 70’s and the iconic Spaceship Earth sphere at Epcot center are the most visible remnants of Bucky’s legacy. It is easy to overlook just how unqualified Bucky was to contribute to architecture. He wasn’t an architect, he was an outsider. And yet, he built the largest free-standing structures in history. How does the dome elude thousands of architects who have committed their entire life to building large structures? Why does it take a crackpot rebel to champion this idea?
A world-changing idea is born in the mind of an unqualified person. The idea is invisible to experts, hiding in plain sight. Once the ideas are revealed they are rejected while the inventor is vilified, criticized, and ostracized. We’ve seen this pattern repeat as we studied Nikola Tesla, Isaac Asimov, James Dyson, Dean Kamen, and now finally we see it in Buckminster Fuller. It is no coincidence that the geodesic dome was invented by a man who committed egocide.
Our ego is responsible for reality testing and identity creation. Egocide is the abandonment of the biases that hijack our identities and form false realities. Uncontrolled ego leads you to become a slave to satisfying the demands of the masses and the stakeholders. Unmanaged ego scares you away from your most audacious ideas. Unchecked ego corrupts your aim by tantalizing promises of fame and fortune. If we want to be original the ego must die.
Your best ideas will be spheres among cubes, alien structures that confuse onlookers. Your invention will attract outrage, it will be ridiculed by industry experts, it will face resistance. This is why this chapter was saved for last. It is hard to follow in the shoes of Nikola Tesla or Buckminster Fuller. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford are the heroes of history, while Nikola Tesla and Buckminster Fuller become the mad scientists and crackpots in our culture’s collective memory.
If the choice is between Henry Ford and Buckminster Fuller, it is our ego that selects the fame and fortune of Ford over Bucky’s flying car that never left the ground. Henry Ford is remembered for the innovation of the assembly line, the innovation that birthed mass-production of 15 million Model Ts and has culminated in today’s epitome of conformity, the crossover. If you count the prototypes, Bucky built exactly three cars.
In the 50 worst cars of all time, writing for Time, the Pulitzer Prize-winning automotive critic Dan Neil called Buckminster Fuller “one of the century’s great nutjobs.” The fate of Bucky’s automotive ambition was sealed in 1933 when a test drive carrying celebrity passengers ended in a fatal crash. Headlines blamed the car’s “freak design.” Bucky’s car, known as the Dymaxion, had three wheels and looked more like a zeppelin than an automobile.
It is easy to mock the Dymaxion car in hindsight. Like Dean Kamen’s segue, the weight of inventing a world-changing technology doomed the Dymaxion car before it left the garage. Hiding in the negative space of Bucky’s failed car were rich concepts that were never fully developed. The Dymaxion prototype got 30 miles per gallon, seated 11, had an incredible turning radius, and could reach speeds of 100 miles per hour. Bucky wasn’t chasing tradition, he was testing concepts that aimed to bypass a future of clogged roads. In an alternate universe we are driving Dymaxion cars and living in affordable, indestructible, eco-friendly homes. Instead we live in indistinguishable boxes and commute to work in identical vehicles.
Bucky pointed at a different future, one that we can still achieve if we can overcome our egos. As we consider egocide we must confront the beliefs and values at the core of our identity. These ideas are so connected to us that if we were to abandon them we would essentially become different people. To understand just how difficult egocide will be, let us consider the beliefs we hold most deeply. For most of us, this is our religious and political beliefs. These topics are taboo at work and cocktail parties for good reason. It is difficult to welcome conversations that might contradict our deepest held ideas.
First, let’s untangle our political views from our ego. Does it strike you as odd that every issue is split into right/left factions? If you are a member of a political party your beliefs are delivered to you wholesale, no upfront thinking required. If we were free, we would theoretically approach each issue with an open mind. For every issue you should have a 50% chance of aligning with either party. Is it strange that nearly every Republican has the same stance on guns, taxes, and abortion? Do you find it odd that nearly every Democrat has the same stance on immigration, healthcare, and climate change? Sure you get the odd person who breaks from their party, but they do so at great risk. Or they hold up one pet issue as proof that they are willing to cross the aisle. If you are passionate about owning a gun, why can’t you also believe in climate change? If you are passionate about women’s rights, why can’t you also support small government?
If you aren’t a Republican or a Democrat what are you? Most would answer that you are an independent. The assumption is that independence falls somewhere in the middle of the conservative/liberal spectrum. In the opinion of partisans, an independent voter is simply somebody with tepid views that has the potential to be swayed right or left through proper propaganda.
But to be truly independent your beliefs can’t exist sandwiched between the extremes of other people’s dogma, no, it requires a position off the map of politics altogether. To be truly independent your only option is to be apolitical. This is the invisible fourth option hiding in the negative space of politics.
If your political beliefs lack independent thought, you are not a patriot. You are a pawn, an instrument that can be programmed, activated, and weaponized. User zero must be apolitical. There is no other way. When Bucky committed egocide, he realized he was exiting the political game board. He said,
“I was convinced in 1927 that humanity’s most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.”
Your innovation doesn’t belong in the middle of an endless tug of war. Your goal is change, which means your ideas must exist outside the system, so extreme that neither the right or left can use you as a pawn in their game. Party affiliation is a crutch for lazy thinking, anchors that stifle original thought.
If I can convince you to abandon your party, you will be amazed by the sense of freedom and relief that comes from releasing the strangle hold that your political party has on you. You will gain a sense of ownership over your ideas. The hatred that you felt for your rivals will disappear as you give yourself permission to think about problems through a lens of “all options are on the table.” Victory won’t come from bullying your way from a 49% minority to a 51% majority. No, true change will only come from changing the system, reframing problems in a way that new ideas can be universally accepted, genuinely beneficial to all, and unambiguously free from politics as usual.
Next let’s evaluate the how religion gets entangled with our ego. It should come as no surprise that the same corruption that dooms political parties to stasis can also render religions impotent. Anyone who has experienced religion at any level deeper than sitting in the pew on Sunday morning knows that the politics of church affairs are as toxic as the halls of Congress. Just as politics seeks to activate the so-called independents, religion requires conversion of non-believers to serve their purpose.
Everyone who takes their spiritual quest seriously must grapple with the limited toolset we bring to the journey. One option is to lean in to the writings of other equally blind travelers who have come before us, whether they are well-intentioned believers who did their best to translate the voice of God they heard, or the hustlers who grasped the power inherent in controlling the words of God. The other option is to voyage into the unknown with the uncertain goal of stumbling across something divine, a simple truth, a glimpse of clarity, a clue in the divine mystery. Bucky referred to this as “secondhand God.” He wrote,
“All religions we have known have been sustained by the arbitrarily adopted or inculcated credit (credo–belief) of individuals who have not themselves made direct discovery.”
If God could be contained in candles or cathedrals, if His secrets could be contained in the pages of books, well, he wouldn’t be much of a God. So instead we must seek him outside these containers. And that is a scary thought. Because it admits that we will have to be content with never knowing the fullness of His presence. We must be satisfied with the minuscule view we can deduce from peripheral experience. Bucky’s egocide predicted this as well, he wrote,
“I see God in the instruments and the mechanisms that work reliably, more reliably than the limited sensory departments of the human mechanism.”
Admission of our limited understanding of God is typically discouraged, especially if the doubts are raised by our religious leaders. Admit you have doubts too loudly and you can disqualify yourself from admittance in congregations that demand faith above all else. This requirement may have more to do with the failings of humans than with God, but it nevertheless results in a population of people who are deeply spiritual and yet struggle to find peace within spiritual communities. I was raised in the Lutheran church, a label I still maintain with recognition of the structures these beliefs add to my mental models. Like many Christians, I experience the highlights of my spiritual life in places other than the pews on Sunday. What little I know about God is that he is bigger than cathedrals and the believers who wear crosses. Or as Bucky says,
“Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.”
The inadequacy of institutional church to contain God doesn’t mean that user zero has no room for God, however. Just as it is possible to participate in a political world while being apolitical, it is possible to have a spiritual core without the burden of hypocrisy that believers can’t escape. Bucky said,
“My task was not to preach about God, but to serve God in silence about God. Because such commitment to faith is inherently a ‘flying blind’ commitment, I have often weakened in my confidence in myself to comprehend what it might be that I was being taught or told to do.”
Leave room in your belief system for something God-shaped. Perhaps you will find traces of it in the quality of a well-made object. You don’t have to name it, ritualistically worship it, or preach about it, but don’t discount the possibility of a divine power. Watch for it in nature, the structure within the grand chaos. Wonder if it hides behind the kindness of strangers, the rare humans of strong character. Listen for it in the silence as well as the booming echoes. There is room for God in the infinite negative space of the unknown.
Before we can own our ideas, our political views, and our search for God, our ego must be sacrificed. User zero is born through an act of self destruction. This is the only way to avoid the errors and manipulation that occur from secondhand transfer. We want to experience these things directly, to be connected to them not through association, but because we put the work into the search. And we understand that the picture we hold in our mind at any moment is but a sliver of the big picture. We are forever seeking to expand our view. The more you look, the more you see.
By abstaining from politics you are free to use the best ideas, regardless of the baggage. By leaving room for God you allow for the possibility that your work can transcend your human limitations.
Instead of being pre-programmed to recite party talking points and memorized creeds you can ask questions. You can evaluate ideas on their own merit, you can spot the hoaxes, you can separate blind ideology from transcendence. Dogma and doctrine will give way to principles that bend and strengthen as you grow. You can make connections that would be impossible for partisans and congregants. You take the reins of your control panel with the freedom to adapt, refine, and abandon your beliefs as your system improves.
We have come to the end, the moment of egocide. The self-destruct sequence has been initiated. You can stop the timer now, walk away and pretend none of this ever happened. Or you can let the countdown commence. It is time to decide.
3
You are standing on a wrench extended over an endless void. You jump on the lever with all your weight wondering if the bolt in your mind will turn.
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You feel the tiniest sense of loosening. You wonder, “What is on the other side of this egoless me?” As the bolt turns you feel a shift, like the unsticking of snow before an avalanche.
1
For a moment you hang there, weightless, you look past the glass of your former self, try to touch the edges of that retreating reality one last time. Self destruction has begun...
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Systems coming back online...
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Hello, user zero. What will you build today?