This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately.
It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Behavior | Fear | God | Hope | Man | Punishment | Reward | Science | Will | God |
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
So long as mathematicians can impose up-and-down semantics upon students while trafficking personally in the non-up-and-down advantages of their concise statements, they can impose upon the ignorance of man a monopoly of access to accurate processing of information and can fool even themselves by thought habits governing the becoming behavior of professional specialists, by disclaiming the necessity of, or responsibility for, comprehensive adjustment of the a priori thought to total reality of universal principles. The everywhere-relative velocities and momentums of interactions, of energetic phenomena of universe, are central to the preoccupations and realizations of the comprehensive designer. The concept of relativity involves high frequency of re-established awareness, and progressively integrating consideration of the respective, and also integrated dynamic complexities of the moving and transforming frame of reference and of the integrated dynamic complexities of the observed, as well as of the series of integrated sub-dynamic complexities, in respect to each of the major categories of the relatively moving frames of reference, of the observer and the observed. It also involves constant reference of all the reciprocating sub-sets to the comprehensive totality of non-simultaneous universe, from which naught may be lost.
Behavior | Consideration | Dynamic | Ignorance | Man | Necessity | Phenomena | Reality | Respect | Responsibility | Thought | Respect | Thought |
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
There are no solids. There are no things. There are only interfering and noninterfering patterns operative in pure principle, and principles are eternal. Principles never contradict principles. . . . The synergetic integral of the totality of principles is God, whose sum-total behavior in pure principle is beyond our comprehension and is utterly mysterious to us, because as humans — in pure principle — we do not and never will know all the principles.
Behavior | Principles | Will |
R. D. Laing, fully Ronald David Laing
Schizophrenic behavior is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
R. D. Laing, fully Ronald David Laing
The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
Behavior | Experience | Order |
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
The inevitable hypocrisy, which is associated with the all the collective activities of the human race, springs chiefly from this source: that individuals have a moral code which makes the actions of collective man an outrage to their conscience. They therefore invent romantic and moral interpretations of the real facts, preferring to obscure rather than reveal the true character of their collective behavior. Sometimes they are as anxious to offer moral justifications for the brutalities from which they suffer as for those which they commit. The fact that the hypocrisy of man's group behavior... expresses itself not only in terms of self-justification but in terms of moral justification of human behavior in general, symbolizes one of the tragedies of the human spirit: its inability to conform its collective life to its individual ideals. As individuals, men believe they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command.
Behavior | Character | Hypocrisy | Individual | Inevitable | Justice | Justification | Life | Life | Love | Man | Men | Power |
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.
Behavior | Individual |
But the dominance hierarchy itself is not something that natural selection favors or disfavors. What natural selection favors or disfavors is the individual behavior of which the dominance hierarchy is a manifestation. I would put war and overpopulation in that category.
Behavior | Individual | War |
We concluded that the behavior of a complicated thing should be explained in terms of interactions between its component parts, considered as successive layers of an orderly hierarchy
Behavior |
Even the largest and most prestigious banks engaged in what can only be termed criminal behavior on a massive scale. As revealed in sworn Congressional testimony, firms including Goldman Sachs deliberately created flawed securities and sold tens of billions of dollars
Behavior |
Richard Tarnas, fully Richard Theodore Tarnas
Autonomous primordial forms in the psyche that structure and impel human behavior and experience and that are expressions of a collective unconscious shared by all human beings [Archetypes].
Behavior | Experience |
The change behavior is demanded by new market realities, global opportunities, shifts in social trends, developing technologies and more. Yet organizational change which is imposed rarely meets its intended objectives. The Birkman Method enables responsive change to grow from within, fuelled by individual motivation and desire. It creates an integral process that can continue for an organizational lifetime – regardless of external environments.
Behavior | Change | Global | Individual | Method |
Robert Sternberg, fully Robert Jeffrey Sternberg
More realistically, educators need to stop assuming that ethical behavior is the normal course of action for a well-educated individual, and that cheating and other forms of unethical behavior are not the norm. Rather, they have to assume that behaving ethically is often challenging, as any fired whistle-blower can tell you. Schools need to teach students the steps involved in ethical behavior and the challenges of executing them. And they need to do so with real-life case studies relevant to the students' lives. The steps toward ethical behavior are not ones that students can internalize by memorization, but only through active experiential learning with personally relevant examples.
Robert Sternberg, fully Robert Jeffrey Sternberg
We have come, in large part, to use standardized-test scores and other objective measurements to provide opportunities to students who score well—opportunities that are much scarcer for others. But is it enough to look for such narrowly defined academic skills? Is it not time to search for and develop the wisdom and positive ethical skills that we need in order to steer this country up the slippery slope rather than down? Once started on that slide, it is hard to stop before the crash at the bottom. Just ask any disgraced politician, executive, clergyman, or educator. While unethical behavior may start in schools with plagiarism or stolen exams, we know all too sadly, and all too well, that it doesn't end there.
Behavior | Enough | Need | Order | Plagiarism | Search | Time | Wisdom |
It may be that we should stop putting so much emphasis in our own minds on the monetary value of a college education and put more emphasis on the intangible social and cultural values to be derived from learning. The time may be coming when we will have to start accepting the idea that education is life, not merely a preparation for it.
Ability | Abstract | Behavior | Delay | Important | Plan | System | Unique | Think |
While the stress is severe, we seem especially willing to grant extraordinary power and give away our freedom. In a historical study of thirty-five dictatorships, all of them emerged during times of social distress.
In contrast, Martin Luther King Jr. externalized the civil rights conflict. His strategy did not prevent his assassination, but during his life it kept the public’s attention where it belonged. King repeatedly reinforced the message that the conflict was not between white Americans and him, nor even between black and white Americans. It was a conflict between American values and American reality.
Russell Schweikart, fully Russell Louis "Rusty" Schweickart aka Schweikart
We'll go many years with basically no additional information on where it's headed.
Behavior |