The Artist-Scientist-Inventor

From Buckminster Fuller:

“Really great artists are scientists, and the really great scientists are artists and both are inventors. I call them artist-scientist-inventors. I think that all humans are born artist-scientist-inventors but that life progressively squelches the individual’s drives and capabilities. As a consequence, by the time most humans mature they have lost one, two or all three of those fundamental self-starters. When I speak of an artist or an inventor, I speak of circumstance-pruned specialization. Most of the universally born artist-scientist-inventors have one, two or all three of their innate capability values shut off in childhood. The original artist-scientist-inventor may retain his artist’s or his scientist’s critical faculties, or only his inventiveness.

World science has come to concede during the last decade that it is now feasible, within the scope of known technology, to support all of humanity at ever higher standards of living than any humans have ever known. In view of that scientific information, I intuit that artist-scientist-inventors who have reached maturity without critical impairment of their original faculties will now become responsible for initiating and industrializing the remainder of technology advancing inventions, for realizing the comprehensive physical and economic success of world man, and that with universal abundance, the warring, official and unofficial, will subside to innocuous magnitude. With that artist-scientist- inventor’s accomplishment, humanity may, for the first time in history, come to know the meaning of peace.”