"If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem. Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences. Only our minds are able to discover the generalized principles operating without exception in each and every special-experience case which if detected and mastered will give knowledgeable advantage in all instances.
Because our spontaneous initiative has been frustrated, too often inadvertently, in earliest childhood we do not tend, customarily, to dare to think competently regarding our potentials. We find it socially easier to go on with our narrow, shortsighted specialization’s and leave it to others primarily to the politicians to find some way of resolving our common dilemmas." -R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.
"[He] had a different relationship with the idea of incarceration than most. He thought that when a person found themselves unable to act, that their actions were arrested. The physical means to this "incarceration" would have been cultural. In this way, people are prisoners of their own thoughts, but the bars are invisible, the bars are what they understand or hold to be true, the assumptions of their cosmographies." -Ben Mack, Poker Without Cards: A Consciousness Thriller.
