Buckminster Fuller's personal myth is a central aspect of understanding his life, philosophy, and public persona. It describes a transformative event in his life and served multiple purposes, from unifying his complex ideas to inspiring a global audience. ### The Core of Fuller's Personal Myth: The 1927 Epiphany The foundational narrative of Buckminster Fuller's personal myth revolves around a near-suicide experience in the winter of 1927. According to his repeated retellings, at 32 years old, facing unemployment, no savings, and with a newborn daughter, Fuller walked to Lake Michigan intending to end his life. As he prepared to jump, he reportedly felt a strange resistance, as if being lifted, and heard a stern voice declare: "You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe". The voice also conveyed that his life had a purpose – to share his mind with the world – and that his family would be provided for if he committed to this calling. Following this profound experience, Fuller claimed he went home and told his wife he no longer needed a job. He then purportedly spent two years in silence, filling approximately five thousand pages with notes, as if in a trance. These notes, he asserted, contained the "secret to making the whole human race successful for all eternity," which he then spent the rest of his life openly sharing. ### Factual Inaccuracies and Fuller's Approach to Truth Despite Fuller's dramatic recounting of this event and his insistence on his candor and objectivity, scrutinizing his vast 45-ton archive, the "Dymaxion Chronofile," reveals significant factual inaccuracies. Scholars have found no evidence of a suicide attempt or even a change in diet. While he did lose his job around the time his daughter was born, he found new employment as an asbestos flooring salesman within months, a profession hardly conducive to two years of silence. Nevertheless, his notes from the late 1920s do show him developing the core philosophy and technology that would later define his career as a "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist". Fuller was known to adjust details of his story, such as the timing of his daughter's birth relative to the epiphany, the exact duration of his silence, or the number of pages written. He would embellish the tale, sometimes claiming to have slept only two hours a night or moved his family into a slum. Even so, he presented himself as a "human guinea pig," framing his life as "an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity". This self-description aimed to convey that anyone could achieve what he had, if they embraced his beliefs and felt they "belonged to the universe". Fuller's philosophy included the idea that "form is a verb" in industry, contrasting with architecture where "form is a noun". This reflects his dynamic view of life and ideas, where he himself "called himself a verb" to emphasize what he _did_ over who he _was_. This "Dymaxion inconsistency," as one source terms it, allowed him to be both corporate and anti-establishment, prioritizing "making the world work" over resolving his own internal contradictions. His commitment to "total autobiographical objectivity" through the Chronofile ironically revealed how little of his life story conformed to fact. ### Purpose and Impact of the Myth Fuller's myth served several crucial functions: 1. **Unifying his Worldview:** His life story helped unify his disparate fields of knowledge—architecture, cartography, biology, economics, cosmology—for his audience, making his comprehensive anticipatory design science intelligible. He saw all knowledge as interconnected, and his autobiography epitomized this comprehensivism. 2. **Self-Formulation and Intellectual Flexibility:** Recounting his myth allowed Fuller to reformulate his vision, combining ideas differently with each telling. This "self-mythologizing" was his way of thinking, and "autobiographical fraudulence afforded intellectual flexibility". 3. **Inspiration and Motivation:** The myth made his ideas "palpable" and his principles seem "as simply" emulable as Washington's honesty or Newton's apple. His lectures, which he called "thinking-out-loud sessions" characterized by "rich nonlinear endless improvisation," further leveraged this myth to motivate audiences and elevate him to cult status as a teacher and sage. He showed by example that comprehensive thinking required nothing more than a curious mind. 4. **Symbolic Power:** The myth became "his truest intellectual biography" because its pliability allowed his insights and innovations to be "endlessly recombined and reimagined as global circumstances change". Hugh Kenner, a literary critic and Fuller devotee, noted that Fuller's story "concentrated truth" similar to mythological statements about figures like Washington or Newton, making his concepts as real as Newton's apple. ### Myth in a Broader Context The sources offer various perspectives on the nature and function of myths, which contextualize Fuller's personal myth: - **Definition of Myth:** A myth is not necessarily "untrue" but rather "an image we use to make sense of the world". It's a "public dream" for a society, contrasting with a "private dream". Myths are stories of humanity's search for truth, meaning, and significance, helping individuals understand their journey and cope with life's passages. They function as "the final terms of wisdom—that is the wisdom of the deep mysteries of life". - **Functions of Myth:** Joseph Campbell identifies four functions: 1. **Mystical/Metaphysical:** Realizing the wonder and mystery of the universe and oneself, connecting to the transcendent. 2. **Cosmological:** Explaining the shape and nature of the universe. 3. **Sociological/Ethical:** Integrating the individual into society, providing ethical laws, and linking them to their specific culture and its values. 4. **Pedagogical/Psychological:** Teaching how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances, providing archetypes of behavior, and revealing universal human structures. Campbell emphasizes that "true myth" demands a change in one's life, whereas "fake myth" vanishes upon scrutiny. - **Myth vs. History/Truth:** Myths are not historical facts but imaginative constructs that convey deeper truths, often reflecting universal human experiences and enduring archetypes beyond cultural and racial differences. They are not subject to scientific verification in the same way as factual propositions. - **Demystification and its Paradox:** While Fuller's myth helped convey his ideas, "demystification is liberating" as it disentangles his concepts from his personality cult and allows for a more critical assessment of his achievements and limitations. However, the act of demystifying a myth doesn't always eliminate it; paradoxically, it can give it "greater freedom" or lead to new forms of second-order meaning. As Roland Barthes noted, exposure to manipulation doesn't necessarily destroy the mythical efficacy but can make the manipulated object more desirable. In essence, Fuller's personal myth, despite its factual embellishments, served as a powerful narrative tool. It allowed him to articulate his comprehensive worldview, inspire audiences to think globally, and present himself as an accessible, "average man" capable of extraordinary achievements. His myth, like others, functioned to convey deep insights and motivate action by tapping into universal human experiences and aspirations, even as its literal truth was debatable. The ongoing relevance of Fuller's ideas, even after his death, owes much to the compelling narrative he meticulously crafted and continuously refined throughout his life.