How Buckminster Fuller’s Principle of Precession Can Change Your Life
Today I am going to talk about a simple yet profound and powerful concept that is surprisingly not very well known.
The concept is all pervasive, and once you understand it, you will see it everywhere. Paying attention to it will really improve your understanding of our world and will help you find various seemingly mundane phenomena suddenly meaningful. It might even help you make decisions and enrich your life over time.
I know, that’s a rather tall claim, so without wasting more of your time, let us get down to it.
R. Buckminster Fuller
R. Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. Basically a modern renaissance man.
He authored many books, including some of my favorites, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Critical Path, and Grunch of Giants. All books are well worth reading, even today.
He invented or perfected some very futuristic concepts, including the Geodesic Dome, the Dymaxion House, Dymaxion Car, and Dymaxion Map of the earth. They are great examples of outside the box thinking, directed towards the benefit of the entire world.
He also developed the World Game, a collaborative simulation game where the objective is to “make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone”.
He is famous for coining or popularizing such terms as Spaceship Earth, Ephemeralization, Synergetics, Dymaxion, and Tensegrity.
Inexplicably, as stated earlier, one of the most insightful and powerful concepts that is attributed to him is not as widely known. That concept is the Principle of Precession.
Before going into its definition and explanation, let us look at an example.
The Business of Bees Knees
A honey bee spends all its time flying from flower to flower gathering honey. It has a single goal: to feed itself.
But, it has hair on its legs and knees. (See what I did there? 😊). Pollen from the flowers gets stuck in them.
As the bee sits on flower after flower, it spreads the pollen around, resulting in cross pollination.
The ultimate outcome of this seemingly inadvertent accidental activity is that the bee contributes enormously to life on earth.
In the end, we get a healthy garden. And millions (billions?) of bees doing this all over the world is what gives us a worldwide healthy ecosystem.
One can say that while the goal of the honey bee is to collect honey, its “purpose” is to pollinate the garden and create a healthy ecosystem.
The idea here is that the bee’s goal and purpose aren’t aligned. They are at 90 degrees to each other. Buckminster Fuller called this phenomenon of goal-purpose orthogonality as Precession.
Defining Precession
The term Precession comes from physics. In physics, Precession is action that occurs at ninety degrees to bodies in motion.
For example, when you spin a top, you may notice it wobbling around its main spinning axis. That is precession as defined in physics.
Now, the concept of precession as defined by Buckminster Fuller here is only loosely related to the physics concept, but repurposing the term in this way does help to illustrate the point.
As defined here, for a body in motion, Precession is any action or movement that occurs at 90 degrees to its main direction of motion.
Buckminster Fuller goes a bit beyond that to suggest that in many cases, these actions or movements at 90 degrees are more meaningful for the overall health of an ecosystem than the main action.
Another way to put it is that an entity may be moving in a direction towards its goal, but at 90 degrees to it, something else is happening that may be very beneficial to the overall ecosystem that the entity is in. This precessional action may actually be of such critical importance to the health of the ecosystem, that one can think of it as the entity’s “purpose”.
A concise way to state that is that the entity’s goal and purpose are at 90 degrees to each other.
Also note that, since the entity itself is a part of that ecosystem, and depends upon that ecosystem for its own survival, the precessional action automatically becomes equally important to the entity.
It is almost like the wise ecosystem dangled the goal in front of the entity to direct its action and used that action to inadvertently make it fulfil its purpose!
Precession is Everywhere!
Once you understand the concept of precession, you will start to see it everywhere. Here are some more examples to illustrate the point further.
- Since we started with bees, it would be natural to talk about birds next. Birds eat fruits containing seeds in them and unknowingly spread the seeds to distant lands. This has allowed many fruit-bearing trees to spread all over the globe. Once again, the birds are simply feeding themselves, completely unaware of their “purpose” as far as the entire ecosystem is concerned.
- Water has a natural tendency to flow downwards. When a drop of water falls on a mountain peak, it’s “goal” is to reach the lowest level it can find on earth. As it seeks this goal single mindedly, it dissolves and carries a bunch of minerals, soil, biomass etc. with it. This makes the soil along the banks of rivers fertile. It allows fish to travel back and forth along the streams and rivers. It allows people to travel along its path and also settle along its banks. All of these phenomena are precessionary from the original goal of the water.
- As an example of a human activity that demonstrates the same principle, let us take a look at how the courier shipping business got started. A few entrepreneurs noticed that some time critical documents had to be sent from Honolulu to LA quickly. So they got regular travelers, who were traveling from Honolulu to LA for their own reasons (or goals) to carry these documents along, as extra baggage. The service was very much appreciated by the people who needed these documents and it was only matter of time that the idea spread and became a huge global business.
- Every goal directed activity you do in society, such as talking to people or going somewhere or buying something, and so on has ripple effects. They may cause other people to learn new things or earn money or cause goods to move from one place to another and so on. The aggregation of a huge number of such activities is what we call an economy. Each person in the economy is typically simply acting towards their own goals, but the ripple effects of those actions is what the economy needs to sustain itself, which, in turn, provides sustenance to each person.
Negative Externalities
It is worth noting that these precessional effects aren’t necessarily always positive. Sometimes, some actions can have negative consequences.
In economics, there is a somewhat analogous concept called Externalities.
For example, the reason why we are seeing serious environmental degradation in many parts of the world today and why we are potentially rushing towards major climate change in the future is exactly because we haven’t been paying sufficient attention to these negative externalities.
Fuller doesn’t mention externalities explicitly. But it should be understood that, in order for a precessionary effect to be called your “purpose”, the effect has to be beneficial to the overall ecosystem somehow.
So one should think of precession as either a positive externality or an externality that has somehow been mitigated so it ultimately leads to the overall sustainability and enrichment of the ecosystem. That is the real lesson behind the bee story.
If you take a look at how mother nature works, you will notice that it does not leave any externality unmitigated. Every waste product of every activity gets recycled and turned into brand new things. It is as if mother nature is ensuring that every creature has a purpose, even if they don’t know what it is.
Ultimately this is what needs to happen with all human activity also.
Using Precession to Make Decisions
This concept isn’t just something to read about in books or blog posts. It has serious practical implications.
Once you internalize it and start to see it in your own activities, you will start to notice and appreciate all these precessionary side effects of your actions.
This might even help you make better decisions. For example, a certain goal may not be very appealing to you, but its precessionary effect may be profound and useful and as a result you could choose that goal and feel happier about the decision.
On the other hand, the opposite may also happen. Realizing that some goal that is extremely attractive to you has serious negative side effects may convince you not to go for it.
Eventually, thinking like this may help you take a much more global perspective of your actions. Instead of focusing narrowly on your own personal and obvious benefits, you may start to take a broader and more nuanced approach to your decision making.
In the end, the local ecosystem or even the entire world may benefit as a result of your decisions! Every little bee spreading a few pollen around is what it takes to turn the whole planet into a healthy and beautiful garden.
Making Precessional Effects the Main Driver of Your Actions
Buckminster Fuller actually went one step further than this.
Once he had internalized this concept fully, he felt that he does not need to follow the normal human goal of earning a living like everyone else. He could instead focus all his energy on doing something positive for all of humanity, and, at 90 degrees to that, he would automatically be able to earn a living.
What’s wonderful is that he succeeded in doing so. He spent the latter part of his entire life working on things that would help humanity as a whole, some of which I mentioned earlier. He was able to get many of those ideas and experiments funded and he was able to sustain himself well through them.
Today we see more examples of this, not just in environment-related activities, but in many others.
This has almost become a cliché by now, but many businesses have also learned that, instead of directly focusing on the bottom line, focusing on making a great product or providing great customer service is the real driver of success. The revenue follows as a side effect.
Many companies, including Medium itself, even provide their primary service for free. They make their money through ads or subscriptions, which is a precessional effect of their primary service.
Even many bloggers, (yours truly included), do the same thing. They share their thoughts for free and hope to benefit from some serendipitous precessional event down the road! And even if that doesn’t happen, if their writing has been beneficial to people, then the effort will have already paid off.
Using Precession to Make Your Own Life Richer
Ever since I became aware of this concept, I feel that it has enriched my life. I now pay a lot of attention to the side effects of my actions, and sometimes get pleasure out of realizing that the effects are positive. And of course, when the side effects are negative, I try to adjust my behavior.
Thinking in this manner and taking a broader perspective is a special characteristic that only human beings are capable of demonstrating. Unlike other living creatures, we can think way beyond what our instincts dictate.
And I would argue that, as human beings, who are at the apex of evolution on earth, it is our duty and even privilege to do that. Why become a human being otherwise? If you were only going to behave like every other animal, there is no point in you becoming a human!
Something to think about.
Steps to Use the Principle of Precession to Enrich Your Own Life
To Summarize, here are the steps you can follow to enrich your own life using the principle of Precession:
- Firstly, realize that there is no precession without action. So action is critical. Always have goals, always keep in motion towards them, doing stuff.
- As human beings, we are uniquely capable of being mindful of our actions. Start by paying attention to the side effects of your goal-directed actions. Some effects may be good for the health of the overall ecosystem (either locally or even globally). Some may not be.
- Going further, as a human beings, we can make decisions based on our thinking, not just our instinct. Try to make decisions based on your mindful observations of your actions and their precessional effects. Are your goals more important than the effects they are having? Alternatively, are the effects far more attractive even if the goal isn’t?
- Beyond this, see if you can turn your externalities into something that is ultimately beneficial for the ecosystem. Examples include composting or recycling or turning garbage into energy and so on. But there are probably a lot more innovative ideas yet to be discovered in this space.
- The boss level, i.e., Buckminster Fuller’s level, will be unlocked when, at some point, when you make your positive precessionary effects the main direction of your activity. And you can expect that your personal goals will be achieved as a side effect.
Anyway, so that’s a quick introduction to the concept of Precession.
Signing off now, wondering about what precessionary effects my own goal of writing weekly blog posts might be causing! Learning concepts like this are what makes life as a human being interesting.