This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

by Alan Lew

R. Buckminster Fuller’s students once asked him to name the most important figure of the twentieth century. Sigmund Freud, he said without a moment’s hesitation. They were shocked. Why Freud? Why not Einstein, about whom Fuller had written extensively, or some other figure from the world of science or economics or architecture, to which he had devoted his considerable energy? So Fuller explained himself. Sigmund Freud, he said, was the one who had introduced the single great idea upon which all the significant developments of the twentieth century had rested: the invisible is more important than the visible. You would never have had Einstein if Freud hadn’t convinced the world of this first. You would never have had nuclear physics.