Guinea Pig B

I am now close to 88 and I am confident that the only thing important about me is that I am an average healthy human. I am also a living case history of a thoroughly documented, half-century, search-and-research project designed to discover what, if anything, an unknown, moneyless individual, with a dependent wife and newborn child, might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that could not be accomplished by great nations, great religions, or private enterprise, no matter how rich or powerfully armed.

Core structure

• Guinea Pig B
• Patents
• Appreciation

Main ideas

• Fuller casts his own life as a documented half-century experiment to discover what one ordinary individual can do for all humanity.
• The guiding challenge: "How do we find out how to use our minds and experience to the highest advantage of others in the shortest possible time?"
• Critical Path Publishing exists in part to keep Fuller's work in print.
• A family appreciation reflects on Fuller's honest self-appraisal as an "average" man who built a strategy to use his full capabilities.

Why it matters

The book is Fuller's clearest statement of his life-as-experiment premise, the conviction that drove his entire career. His daughter's appreciation underscores the discipline behind it: it took him roughly thirty-two years to sort out his priorities and understand himself well enough to pursue, with full integrity, the course of action that defined the rest of his life — listening to himself, challenging himself, and staying deeply aware of all that surrounded him.

See Also

• Critical Path — the larger work whose publishing project (CPP) frames this autobiography
• Fuller's 1927 Crisis — the pivotal 1927 event that launched the Guinea Pig B experiment
• Fuller's Self-Disciplines — the 22 disciplines governing the experiment
• Fuller's Death and Final Days — the end of the 56-year experiment

Sources

• guinea_pig_b/ — book project directory (repo-local source tree)
• guinea_pig_b/index.md — synthesis index for the source project
• guinea_pig_b/guinea_pig_b.md — full book text