{"id":2106,"date":"2022-11-03T10:54:51","date_gmt":"2022-11-03T14:54:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=2106"},"modified":"2022-11-03T10:55:37","modified_gmt":"2022-11-03T14:55:37","slug":"whats-wrong-with-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2022\/11\/03\/whats-wrong-with-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s Wrong with the World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, <\/em>click here<\/a>.
 
On a cold winter night in Chicago in 1927, Buckminster Fuller calculated how long it would take for him to die of hypothermia in the frigid waters of Lake Michigan.
 
He stood, despondent, on a deserted stretch of shoreline north of the city.  At age 32 he had no job prospects, no savings, and no way to provide for the little girl his wife had recently brought into the world.
 
So he would kill himself by swimming out into the lake until he could swim no more. 
 
Before he took the plunge, however, he sensed that he was surrounded by light.  An inner voice seemed to rebuke him: \u201cYou do not have the right to eliminate yourself.  You do not belong to you.  You belong to the universe.\u201d  Suddenly he was overcome by the conviction that his life had a solemn purpose.  He was called to share his first-rate mind with the rest of the world. 
 
Fuller returned home and explained to his wife that he didn\u2019t need a job.  All their needs would be met.  He simply needed to think.  He resolved not to utter a word until his thoughts had taken final form.  Fuller\u2019s season of silence lasted two years, during which time he filled 5,000 pages with notes.  As Jonathon Keats writes in his biography of Fuller, You Belong to the Universe<\/em>, \u201cHis jottings and sketches revealed the secret to making the whole human race successful for all eternity.\u201d
 
Fuller went on to become a world-renowned architect, futurist, systems theorist, and philosopher \u2013 a \u201ccomprehensive anticipatory design scientist,\u201d as he liked to call himself.
 
That\u2019s an amazing story.  Rags to riches.  Despair to triumph.  Buckminster Fuller loved to tell it, over and over again, throughout his long life.  
 
But as Keats points out, he also loved to change the details.  Fuller\u2019s life story was a personally crafted myth designed to prove that he was the one person brilliant enough to solve the world\u2019s problems.  Historians have never found evidence that he contemplated suicide that wintry night on the shores of Lake Michigan.  Nor was he unemployed for more than a few weeks.  He sold asbestos flooring after 1927, a job which no doubt required that he speak on a regular basis to his clients and supervisors. 
 
Nevertheless, Fuller\u2019s audacious claims and out-of-the-box ideas helped him become a kind of global cult figure.  
 
His central purpose was to ensure that humanity would achieve \u201ceternal\u201d success.  He continually asked, \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with the world, and what are we going to do about it?\u201d Then he would propose solutions \u2013 ideas which he believed were in fact the<\/em> one-and-only solutions to our planet\u2019s crises. 
 
Humanity needed better housing.  So he invented the Dymaxion house, a mushroom-shaped single-family dwelling that could be picked up and moved from place to place.  \u201cDymaxion,\u201d incidentally, was a term cobbled together from three of Fuller\u2019s favorite words: dy<\/strong>namic, max<\/strong>imum, and tension<\/strong>.  Humanity needed cheaper, more reliable transportation.  So he crafted the Dymaxion car, a futuristic, jelly-bean shaped automobile that looked like something right out of The Jetsons<\/em>. 
 
Humanity needed better architecture and safer, cleaner cities.  So he popularized the geodesic dome.  Think of Spaceship Earth (another term coined by Fuller), the spectacular dome that greets visitors to Epcot Center in Florida\u2019s Disney World.  Fuller proposed covering large parts of Manhattan with geodesic domes in order to regulate pollution, crime, and other urban struggles.
 
The world\u2019s problems could be solved, he insisted, if only people embraced his beliefs.  Fuller, certain that he was right about everything, dismissed alternative perspectives as the detritus of lesser minds.
 
Almost 40 years after his death, Buckminster Fuller is remembered as a hopeful, optimistic, egocentric dreamer. 
 
People have never stopped asking his primary question:  What\u2019s wrong with the world, and what are we going to do about it? 
 
That question, in fact, was proposed by The<\/em> London Times<\/em> around the time of the First World War.  The editor sent out an inquiry to a number of famous authors:  \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with the world today?\u201d  The most memorable response came from a Christian novelist and social critic.  It was just seven words long: \u201cDear Sir, I am.  Yours, G.K. Chesterton.\u201d
 
The world\u2019s most intractable problems aren\u2019t \u201cout there\u201d somewhere. 
 
They fester within stubborn, rebellious, fearful human hearts.  And no amount of creative engineering is ever going to set things right.
 
But God has done something about the world\u2019s greatest problems. 
 
\u201cThis is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn\u2019t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again\u201d (John 3:16-17).
 
Innovation, social justice, and public service will always be good gifts to the world.  But lasting change must inevitably include the transformation of human hearts. 
 
And we don\u2019t need a Dymaxion Bible to know that can happen only by the grace of God.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. On a cold winter night in Chicago in 1927, Buckminster Fuller calculated how long it would take for him to die of hypothermia in the frigid waters of Lake Michigan. He stood, despondent, on a deserted stretch of shoreline north of the city.  At age 32 he had no job prospects, no savings,… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2107,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[451,236],"class_list":["post-2106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-future","tag-transformation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2106"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2109,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106\/revisions\/2109"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}