The Crackpot Mentor
Chapter 2: The search for a role model
Dear friends,
In this week’s chapter I introduce one of my heroes, a character who is kind of the “Yoda” of User Zero. I am surprised how invisible he is to most people. It’s almost like he existed in an alternate reality. If you’ve never fallen down the Bucky Fuller rabbit hole I think you are in for a treat.
The illustration accompanying this chapter is my drawing of a child hanging from playground equipment. There was a dome like this at the park where I grew up. It was removed for safety concerns. I have a distinct memory of a lonely bike ride to this park. I carefully climbed to the top and contemplated my brief years on the planet. I wondered if I could survive a fall from that height. So I lowered myself and hung there, trying to summon the courage to let go.
Can you relate to this precarious moment? There is a small window of time before you lose the strength to pull yourself back up. Do you climb to comfortable safety, or let go?
Last week’s chapter was your call to adventure and this week we meet a mentor. You might recognize this pattern as the first parts Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. Our heroes connect with us when we see ourselves in their situation. If this book works it’s because you are the protagonist. You are answering the call to adventure. It’s time to stop hanging in uncertainty. Let get started by meeting our mentor.
Stay creative. Your friend,
Ade
“We are powerfully imprisoned by the terms in which we have been conducted to think.”
There was once a version of Earth where crowds of thirsty students gathered to have their ambition quenched by a rambling prophet who preached for hours about how humans could shape the future. Back then, humans invested themselves in topics like environmentalism, religion, transportation, housing, energy, poverty, sustainability, equality, and science without the polarizing political overtones that pull today’s audiences to the edge of riots. Sure, there were still politicians looking for opportunities to co-opt utopian ideals to fill their campaign’s war chest, but back then the idealists filling the halls to hear our mentor’s words were weighing his ideas on merit.
This is the point in the book where you might be nervous, wondering if you are reading the manifesto of a political zealot. When the coin flips, will my political agenda align with your tribe? Am I your ally or enemy? Let me put you at ease. User Zero has no political agenda other than to find and generate the best ideas. You don’t have to switch tribes, although by the end of this book you might hold your beliefs a bit looser. Perhaps our fists can relax a bit, allowing our polarized climate to look a bit more like the previous era when a noble cause could be pursued without labels, before every idea was a political wedge. Can we support ideas on their own merits, not because they are clubs to bludgeon our political foes, but because they are tools that transcend politics?
It is time to meet our mentor. He is a relic from another time, a man who has become a hermit in the memory of modern culture. He spoke of flying cars, floating urban cities, energy efficient utopias, technology that liberated every human, unlocking their maximum potential. It has been said that...
“He’s a dwarf, with a worker's hands, all callouses and squared fingers. He carries an ear trumpet, of green plastic, with WORLD SERIES 1965 printed on it. His smile is golden and frequent; the man's temperament is angelic, and his energy is just a touch more than that of Robert Gallway (champeen runner, footballeur, and swimmer). One leg is shorter than the other, and the prescription shoe worn to correct the imbalance comes from a country doctor deep in the wilderness of Maine. Blue blazer, Khrushchev trousers, and a briefcase full of Japanese-made wonderments...” - Guy Davenport
Where do we find this prophet? His cave is a dome on the outskirts of polite society. You approach, knock, wonder what this forgotten hero can teach us. The door opens and you meet the ghost of R. Buckminster Fuller. He invites you in, tells you to call him Bucky, leads you down a curved hall adorned with artifacts from an alternate universe—fractured world maps, geometric shapes, paper globes, alien architecture, blueprints, and photos of Eden enclosed in glass.
The timeline of Bucky’s life plays out on the walls as he leads you to his studio. There is a photo of a young Bucky in his Navy uniform from 1917, a picture of his boat, the Wego that he donated to the Navy in exchange for admittance into a military system that should have excluded him from their ranks because of his poor eyesight. There is a sketch of his first invention, the crane that lifted flipped planes from the ocean, saving the lives of pilots, the seconds-saving mechanism that could only come from the mind of a cross-eyed misfit, an audacious outsider.
There is a framed copy of the first of his 25 patents. Shelves line the walls, packed with books whose margins are annotated with hand-written notes that informed Bucky’s 30 published books.
Deeper into the cave, you pass a drawing of a zeppelin delivering a multi-level building that spins on a central mast. You step around stacks of Shelter magazine, architectural models, and a stunning aerodynamic model of a three-wheeled car carved from gypsum by Isamu Noguchi.
Everything is covered in notes, scribbles of thought, layers of ideas on ideas upon ideas. As you walk, Bucky describes a 45 ton vault of information, a complete accounting of every detail of his 87 years on Earth that resides in the Stanford Library.
Photos of military-installed grain-bin shelters transition into geodesic domes of ever-increasing size. An aerial photo of Manhattan is overlayed with a half-sphere representing the final aim of maximally-efficient mega-structures. The beauty of the domes is undeniable, but their graceful design is mixed with a vague sense of loss. Like the Montreal Expo Biosphere consumed in flames, Bucky’s legacy seems to end tragically on the brink of changing the world. After Bucky died, spaceship Earth took a turn. If he were alive today what would he say? Where is the ghost of Bucky leading us?
You arrive at Bucky’s studio, sit at a simple table cluttered with well-worn tools, drawings, and geometric shapes held together with rubber bands. Bucky’s mirage breaks the silence with a question. “Why have you come here?”
You describe your world, the progress and problems that have arisen in the four decades since his death. You mention the burning desire in your chest, the feeling of stifled potential, how you know you were meant to be more than a clone trapped in a cubicle. You explain that you have sought him out because, for some reason, it seemed like he would know what to do. Bucky pauses, adjusts his glasses, considers your situation, then speaks.
When I was in my 30’s I felt exactly like you. In the 1920’s I was lost and confused, struggling to believe that I mattered. My daughter died from polio. Harvard had expelled me for the second time. I was an alcoholic. I considered leaving my wife for a woman I was having an affair with. I was ousted from the company I founded after it failed to make a profit.
I wanted to kill myself.
As I considered suicide I wondered what I would do differently if given a second chance. It occurred to me that my life was a failed experiment. In the laboratory, experiments fail all the time. That’s not the end. You learn what you can, grab the second guinea pig and try again. So that’s what I did.
I was reborn as a disciple of design. My life became an experiment and I set out to find out what one person can achieve.
I wanted to understand the lessons of nature, to unlock the principles that humanity was missing. I imagined utopia, a world where everyone had housing, food, water, transportation, education, and space to pursue their ideas.
I stepped out of the reality where I was a victim and invented another life. I entered a shadow world that was flexible, fixable, and vulnerable to change through the power of design.
The world kept spinning, the same obstacles existed, but I was a different person, somebody who saw Earth’s rudder. Once I saw it, I began pushing on it with all my strength.
Don’t kill yourself, kill your ego. Abandon tradition. Learn everything firsthand. Refuse to be constrained by dogma. Bypass the traps of wealth, fame, and institutional knowledge. The answers hide outside of these things.
Don’t be fooled by the obvious. Beneath even the most basic object is a universe of complexity. Look hard. The more you look, the more you see. Eventually the secrets will present themselves.
How does one tiny speck of skin make a difference? If you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out and change the direction of the whole big ship.
History is still debating my legacy. Some say I made a difference. Others call me a crackpot, a crazy dreamer. It doesn’t matter, I am gone but you are here.
Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren’t any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this Earth, you wouldn’t be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life’s challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person.
Bucky’s ghost flickers, looks at his watch, stands up and says he must go. The vision fades, the globed walls dissolve, and once again you find yourself alone. There is uncertainty, but we also have direction. Our mission begins.
I am breaking from tradition by burying a second dedication of this book so deep, but User Zero owes a debt to Bucky Fuller that I want to acknowledge. My introduction to Bucky came from a paperback copy of Spaceship Earth that I stole from my parent’s bookshelf. I continue to be inspired by his words and the ideas he left behind. Buckminster Fuller is a hero to me because of the range of his imagination and his independence from politics, institutions, and silos of specialization. My hope is that my words contain a hint of those qualities. At times when I have been stuck on this book, I have tried to imagine what Bucky would have said or how he would approach a concept. A piece of advice from Bucky that I have tried to apply came from this quote:
“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”
This book isn’t a history lesson. It isn’t a retro on what could have been different had better design decisions been made. This isn’t a lecture, it isn’t a lesson based on scientific stasis. My goal is not to educate you, it isn’t to provide a textbook. If this book has legs it will be because it gives you a tool. The value held in the following pages is not what is printed, but in the new ways of thinking that emerge from you, the user zero moment when the words cease to be my ideas and they become your own.
As our journey continues, words from our mentor, Buckminster Fuller, will begin each chapter. These quotes are echoes from the past, an attempt to anchor my ideas on an alternate universe, one that looks more like the future Bucky imagined.
Thanks for reading. I am releasing User Zero one chapter at a time on Substack for free to all subscribers. Physical copies are available from Amazon. Stay creative.