Buckminster Fuller the Playboy interview February 1972 a cesc publication Buckminster Fuller - the 1972 Playboy Interview ©1972 Playboy cesc publications, P.O. Box 232, Totnes, Devon TQ9 9DD England Page 2 of 19 Buckminster Fuller - the 1972 Playboy Interview ©1972 Playboy a candid conversation with the visionary architect/inventor/philosopher R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER PLAYBOY: Is there a single statement you could make than the others and that makes him a challenge to the that would express the spirit of your philosophy? speediest and most powerful, and there’s a fight between the two and the one wins disseminates the FULLER: I always try to point one thing out: if we do species. The others can just go hump.’ more with less, our resources are adequate to take care of everybody. All political systems are founded Imagine how this happened with man - man in great on the premise that the opposite is true. We’ve been ignorance, born with hunger, born with the need to assuming all along that failure was certain, that our regenerate, not knowing whether or not he’ll survive. universe was running down and it was strictly you or He begins by observing that the people who eat roots me, kill or be killed as long as it lasted. But now, in and berries very often get poisoned by them, and he our century, we’ve discovered that man can be a sees that the animals that don’t eat those things don’t success on his planet, and this is the great change that get poisoned. So he kills those animals and finds their has come over our thinking. flesh safe and it gives him a lot of energy in a hurry. So the most powerful men start grouping together to PLAYBOY: If that kind of awareness has really come control the meat. And that’s been the tradition. There over us, why isn’t there more rejoicing? wasn’t enough to go around and somebody had to go FULLER: The changes taking place are still unfamiliar down. to everybody, even to those who expect change. If PLAYBOY: But that isn’t the case any longer? you start plotting the changes that are occurring, the most difficult to plot is the change of attitude, the FULLER: No. I’m absolutely convinced of it. It’s only change of awareness. But I’ve been at it long enough ignorance that makes it continue to appear so. Even to really see these changes, and I tell you the when I was a kid, we had comprehensive illiteracy. acceleration is terrific. I can see this world of man Man was still very ignorant, and his ignorance led to coming on very rapidly. fear for his own skin. You have to remember that, early in the history of man, life was so bad that they PLAYBOY: Meanwhile, though, the world still seems couldn’t even think of anything good about it. pretty hostile. Therefore, they said the whole thing was just a trial FULLER: That’s the conditioned reflex. The utter for another kind of life in some other place. And the helplessness of the child requires a parent. And people had such awful feelings of inadequacy that parents look out for a number of children, so the they went for the idea that the afterlife was for the children assume there is a big man to watch over Pharaoh only. Then they began to have a little more them. That gets to be a conditioned reflex. We find success; they began to understand a few principles ourselves in trouble and look for a bigger and tougher that made life a tiny bit easier, and they began to say guy, someone who’ll say, “All right, follow me and that the afterlife was for the Pharaoh and the nobles; we’re going out to eat. There are some people that came in the second set of dynasties. Then there who’ve got some stuff over there and we’re going to got to be a little more discovery of this and that, and knock them on the head and take it away from them.” finally they said, well, we can take care of the afterlife of all citizens, by which they meant the If you go back to the earliest days of humans on our middle class: that’s our Greek and Roman history. planet, you’ll note that, among the advanced Then there got to be so much knowledge by the time mammals, nature seems to have chosen fighting as a of the beginnings of Buddhism, Christianity and way of determining which of the males would Islam that they found they could look out for the dominate the group. We see a stallion born among afterlife of everybody. And that’s been our history for many stallions, and he’s a little bigger and tougher cesc publications, P.O. Box 232, Totnes, Devon TQ9 9DD England Page 3 of 19 Buckminster Fuller - the 1972 Playboy Interview ©1972 Playboy 1900 years - the woman in her black shawl inside the the behavior of the parts does not predict the behavior great cathedral, experiencing the ecstasy of knowing of the whole. Ask the scientist, “What is mass that in her afterlife she’ll be able to join all the people attraction?” He doesn’t have the slightest idea. He she loves. only knows it does it. It’s a relationship, not a thing. The why of it is an absolute mystery. Man can But all this time, there’s man having experience in discover these relationships and behaviors, but he is producing tools and figuring out the engineering of utterly unaware of the a priori mystery. those great cathedrals and pyramids, gradually developing such a great tool capability that he said. All our experiences have beginnings and endings. All “Now we can take care of the afterlife of everybody are finite packages. That’s the way we think. We and also the living life of the king.” This was a brand- have this extraordinary mind that can make contact new idea for humanity. This was the moment of the with those eternals and employ those principles; but divine right of kings, a major change for mankind. we can only put them to specialized uses. So And then, in the time of the Magna Carta, the same everything we experience physically is always a idea was extended to the king and the nobles. And special case and always terminal. then they decided that they had the capability to care PLAYBOY: This limits man’s potential, doesn’t it, as for the afterlife of everybody and the living life of the to his ability to identify his function in a universe of entire middle class, and that was the great mystery? breakthrough of the Victorian period that took us right up to yesterday. All the urbanism and social FULLER: I’d call the hydrogen atom very successful, ideas and notions of property we have are built on and I see no reason man shouldn’t be as well those ideas. Now we find that they, too, are wearing designed to fulfill his potential. It could be, however, thin - because we can do more. Suddenly man is able that evolution is intent on bringing about a different to increase the life span and improve the life style of kind of existence for man. For instance, consider the everybody and have a very large number living far coral reef. It’s quite different from the individual better than any 19th Century king. Just in this century, walking man. In the coral reef, the individual little we’ve doubled the life span for 40 percent of coral animal doesn’t even know the coral animals humanity. next to him. They keep building reefs, which are occupied by millions of individuals who have no At any rate, I think we may be coming into a phase knowledge of one another. It’s like the Queen now where there is only one universe, only one Elizabeth going down the harbor when the lights are lifetime. I see a regenerative awareness coming on on at night, and it happens that a child is born on where, in the next age, we’ll be looking out for the board about that moment, and in the next moment an afterlife and the living life not only of everybody old man dies on board. You don’t see that in those alive but also of everybody to come. We won’t be lights, because the Queen Elizabeth is like a floating burning up our fossil fuels and saying to the next coral reef where new life is coming in and old life is generation, “How are you going to get on?” We’re going out. In New York City, as you get up on high coming into a phase of man’s being successful on and see all the lights of the skyline, there are houses board his planet, performing his function in a bigger where people are dying and there are houses where way. Maybe we’ll be able to leave this planet and get people are being born. It’s a great coral reef too. on to others and fix them up as each one gets ready to become a star. There’s also a sort of continuity in the way each of our cells is dying and new ones are coming in. We PLAYBOY: What are the signs of this new phase? are, in effect, walking coral reefs; the latest FULLER: Man is beginning to think in terms of one information discloses that 98 percent of the atoms of world.