Grunch of Giants

by R. Buckminster Fuller

Book Overview

Here Buckminster Fuller takes on the gigantic corporate megaliths that exert increasing control over every aspect of daily life. In the form of a modern allegory, he traces the evolution of these multinational giants from the post-World War II military-industrial complex to the current army of abstract legal entities known as the corporate world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312351941
• ISBN13: 9780312351946
• Release Date: April 1984
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Buckminster Fuller more pertinent than ever to the World Financial Crisis

The following quote from the book speaks volumes about Fuller's remarkable insight into what ails the world today. Read the quote and decide for yourself if the book has anything to offer in regard to understanding how we find ourselves in financial crisis. Fuller had a very unique style of writing which you will also witness in this quote. It may take a couple or more readings to fully understand this paragraph, but if you can appreciate his message, then you will find the book very insightful. Personally, I believe it to be a handbook for moving the world out of this financial crisis and towards a new era of prosperity. "Never before in all history have the inequities and the momentums of unthinking money-power been more glaringly evident to so vastly large a number of now literate, competent, and constructively thinking all-around-the-world humans. There's a soon-to-occur critical-mass moment when the intuition of the responsibly inspired majority of humanity, in contradistinction to the angered Luddites and avenging Robin Hoods, faced with comprehensive functional discontinuity of nationally contained techno-economic system, will call for and accomplish a world-around reorientation of our planetary affairs. At this critical moment will occur a realization by the responsibly inspired majority that the adequate capacity of the invisible technology to sustainingly support all humanity depends on all the resources, physical and metaphysical, being always and only employed for all of world-around humanity as a completely integrated techno-economic system operating entirely on its daily income principally of Sun-emanating energy."

Still timely, twenty plus years later

People got impatient with Fuller because he kept throwing out a timeline which went something like this: if we work like crazy for the next 10 years, we might solve some of the major problems we've always put up with, e.g. death by starvation to take a big one. Then another decade goes by, and a lot more people starve, and people shake their heads thinking "Bucky, Bucky... he just didn't have a clue, did he?" Well, I say he most certainly did. Not his problem or fault that we never staged his "design science decade" with such concerted effort and focus. And the potential to improve our collective lot aboard Spaceship Earth is still real. What's fun about 'Grunch of Giants' is it marks the end of a long trajectory, where the 'real Bucky' finally hits the water, after the decades-long arc of a canon ball. He makes a big splash, and sets up a lot of ripple effects, many of which we're feeling to this day. The main thing is he reawakens threads around the issue of corporate personhood, questioning how LLCs got to be "persons" in the eyes of the law. Decades later, Thom Hartmann starts to uncover some answers in 'Unequal Protection' which deserves to show up as a kind of sequel to 'GofG' on many levels. Countering a soulless march to oblivion, an automatic pilot response to a desperate situation, were heroics, integrity, and the more agile networks. Readers may spontaneously think of the Internet (still in its infancy when this book came out -- no web to speak of), but I also think of networks like CBS, a corporation to be sure, but with a lot of life in it (not soulless). Bucky was aware of his image through the years, how people saw him. He started out as a kind of benign Buck Rogers, one of those mad inventors coming up with wacky futuristic designs, and making comforting noises about utopian possibilities. But in the meantime the Cold War had gotten going in earnest, followed by a backlash in the 1960s and 1970s, with a new generation finding that Sword of Damocles (the ongoing prospect of immanent nuclear holocaust) entirely unacceptable. The USA became radicalized, as Colby confronted Congress with crazy-making testimony regarding Vietnam, as John Kerry squared off against the Westmoreland types, as colleges projected 'Hearts and Minds' to shocked audiences (1974). Fuller kept going, incorporating all these developments, and coming back with 'Critical Path'. Plus he floated World Game. Increasingly, he had to be taken seriously, less as a harmless crackpot entertainer (like the guy in the 'Six Flags' ad campaign), and more as a serious revolutionary thinker, with difficult-to-sort-out ties to the CIA (E.J. Applewhite, his lead collaborator on 'Synergetics' was an associate of Helms, another Yale grad, and former Deputy Inspector General of the agency -- as the back of the paperback edition of 'Synergetics' made sure we knew). Indeed, the CIA figures prominently in GofG, which is part of what sets it apart as more "realisti

Bucky expounds

If you've never read Buckminster Fuller's writings, you've missed out on one of the most remarkable minds of the 20th century. Yes, he invented the geodesic dome and laid out the principles for some kinds of tensile structures. He was also a tireless inventor. He did not necessarily create something fundamentally new each time, but always sought out more value for the dollar and pound of resources, and always measured that value in quality of human life. Except for the dome, his developments are often paraded and quixotic oddities, stripped of Fuller's real intent. This brief book lays out his philosophy for human welfare in terms of national and trans-national economics. His thinking is clear and gentle - human happiness always comes first. It comes across in a whirwind of ideas, racing across the page faster than words can keep up. It's not rare to see a sentence start with economics and finish with stellar thermodynamics. You'll also sentences wildly stretched to hold just one of his ideas in complete form. Two consecutive sentences stretch from page 8 to 12! Even English words are too small to hold the atoms his ideas, so he creates the most startling hypenated word-collages. For example, in discussing how tools grew out of and extend the body, he writes: "Nests and eggs are indeed tools, as is the womb - an only-once-in-a-while, carried-within-mammalian, new-life-production tool." Social criticism, economics based in the physical world, tempered technological optimism, and a wonderful heart - they're all here, wrapped in a unique package of words. Whether or not you agree with his "economics of wealth", as opposed to "economics of scarcity," it's a remarkable view of human society. //wiredweird