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When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That's a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.

Buckminster Fuller#86

Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

EducationIndividualityLeadershipLiteracy

About this quote

What does it mean?
As literacy rises, individual integrity becomes more important than following political or religious leaders.
In plain terms
Literate people rely on themselves more than leaders.
What can you take from it?
Literacy empowers individual integrity over leadership.

Where it applies

  • modern society
  • education
  • democracy

Putting it to work

  • promote literacy
  • trust individual judgment

Questions to consider

  • How does literacy change leadership?
  • What happens when people can read for themselves?

Another view

Literate populations may still be swayed by misinformation.

More from Buckminster Fuller

  1. Integrity of the individual is what we're being judged for and if we are not passing that examination, we don't really have the guts, we'll blow ourselves up. …

    Permalink to quote #85
  2. In spite of all humans' innate interest in the interrelatedness of all experience, long ago these world-power-structure builders learned to shunt all the brigh…

    Permalink to quote #87
  3. I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communi…

    Permalink to quote #84

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