Daily Inspiration Quote by R. Buckminster Fuller

Authority runs less on omniscience than on selective ignorance. Fuller’s line reads like a piece of shop-floor wisdom smuggled into a fortune cookie: if you’re in charge, don’t see everything; if you’re subordinate, don’t hear everything. It’s not a plea for dishonesty so much as a survival manual for hierarchies that would otherwise choke on their own friction.

“Be sometimes blind” grants the master a strategic squint. Leaders who notice every minor error, every small act of resistance, every imperfect method become managers of resentment, not outcomes. Fuller implies that power has to absorb messiness to keep the system moving; discretion is a form of engineering. “Sometimes” matters: he’s not endorsing negligence, he’s prescribing tolerance as a tool.

“Be sometimes deaf” is the mirror instruction for the servant: don’t internalize every complaint, every insult, every passing evaluation. In any organization, information isn’t just data; it’s heat. The subordinate who hears everything becomes reactive, bitter, or paralyzed. Deafness here is boundary-setting before the language existed.

Coming from an inventor and systems thinker, the quote carries Fuller’s bias toward design over moralizing. He’s less interested in who’s right than in what keeps structures from failing. The subtext is blunt: hierarchies are imperfect machines populated by imperfect humans, and the lubricant is selective attention. The irony is that wisdom, in this model, looks like a carefully chosen ignorance - not to avoid responsibility, but to prevent constant conflict from masquerading as accountability.