R. Buckminster Fuller (#videoarchive)

Pirated transcription of interview by Raindance Corporation*

. . . and so we find what man’s real function is, is sorting out his experience, developing what we call the normale, and being useful . . . we hear people talk about technology as something very threatening, but we are technology, the universe is technology. . . it’s simply a matter of our understanding these things . . . that nature has these beautiful exchanges . . . and what’s happened was this shortdesigned — really scared — fear of man about whether he’s going to survive . . he’s been told there’s nowhere nearly enough to go around . . . therefore you’ve got to go out and look out for your side, look out for your family — he’s got to hold this thing and make the short move. . .

. . . so when our young world, like that young girl talking so superbly on earth day, eight year old kid, pure wisdom pouring out, her eyes could see as clear, when she said we ought not to throw away, we ought to reuse, and things like that. . . that little girl was seeing that . . . and so the net from all of our extraordinary earth day is that we have all of humanity catching on to things that need to be attended to when they were assuming yesterday someone else was attending to . . . the fact that they were in such poverty . . . they had so little time. . . they had to work 12 hours or 14 hours a day. . . my first job I really was working 18 hours a day. . . you can’t get anything done, you go home, I really didn’t hardly have enough left to eat my supper before I fell down on the bed to sleep. . . so I find man didn’t even have time to think, nor did he have the vocabulary . . . he didn’t have the literacy . . . the literacy did not come as much out of school as out of radio. . . the people who had the radio jobs had good diction, good vocabulary necessary for it, so the kid could listen to a good vocabulary that papa didn’t have. . . and so we really proliferated the capability to communicate . . and now that we know how to communicate, we know there are many nuances of information. . . that little child, impressive beyond her wisdom was the beautiful resource of words that she had which came so spontaneously to her. . . when I was a little kid all that kids would say was “I don’t like it” or “wow” . . . just make a noise because they didn’t have the resources to express it. . . the same wisdom. . .

. . . I think the great beautiful thing that’s happening in evolution here is that quite clearly we have gone through a great historical sequence of events . . . from man as so ignorant and his hunger so great, his needs so great, he doesn’t know how to satisfy them so he goes through starvation and he goes through pain and disease . . . go back to the earliest pharaoh time . . . life was so bad that nobody thought of life as worthwhile in its own right . . . therefore the only way you could explain your having such experience was getting yourself ready for afterlife . . . so everybody thought about afterlife but the fact is part of the experience with so little to go around is that you could only think of the pharaoh having an afterlife . . . so the great economic drive, all the great ingenuity of the man who could see anything-artist, conceiver-was patronized by the afterlife of the pharaoh . . . then in getting ready for the afterlife of the pharaoh you incidentally discover the levers . . . (in order to take care of the pharaohs what are you going to do? . . . you know there are thieves everywhere and he’s going to need tools after his life so you’ve got to get all of these fine things under a great stone mountain so it couldn’t be stolen and that’s why you’ve got your pyramids . . . ) so the Leonardo type, good-thinker, realizes the lever . . . he gets an army of prisoners and they use their levers to move those stones around and build that mountain . . . however, after the pharoah dies, the leonardo type dies, the people still remember about the lever . . . they still remember that the leonardo type saw these people falling at the road . . .

they needed food, quite clearly, connected food, so there’s the nile that would bring water into those side layers . . . and we have fertilization . . . when the pharoah dies and that thinker dies, the ditches are still there and the levers are still there, and the people remember there’s an accumulation of technical capability so when another man comes along he adds to the inventory of tools . . . what we may call the scaffolding to make ready for afterlife . . . finally there’s such accumulation of tools and capability and a little more know-how everywhere-advancement . . . well, we may be able to take care of the afterlife of the nobles as well as the pharoahs . . . then the tools increase some more, as they did then, and we say, well, we can take care of the afterlife of the middleclass . . . and that is exactly where you come into roman and greek history-the individual family mausoleums . . . finally there’s got to be so much tooling around that we’ve a buddha and a christ and a Muhammad coming around saying, you know, I think we can take care of the afterlife of everybody . . . and so really the great christian era of 1500 is getting ready for the afterlife of everybody . . . the great cathedrals, fantastic things, and you should see the real pathos of that little human being going in there . . . the great joy that they’re going to have afterlife . . . suddenly there’s so much tools accumulated here and the know-how keeps accumulating, and man knows a little bit more about nature and what it can do, and so he says, you know, we can take care of the afterlife of the king, as well as his living life, and still take care of everybody’s afterlife . . . that is what we call the beginning of the divine right of kings . . . then the tools accumulate some more, and so now we can take care of the nobles in their present life, as well as the afterlife for everybody-the magna charta . . . then we have so much more proliferation of tools that we know we can take care of the afterlife of everybody, and the king, and the nobles, and the middle class . . . that’s the great Victorian era right up to all the brownstones in New York here . . . then suddenly the tools accumulated so much that Henry Ford said, you know, we can take care of the afterlife of everybody and we can take care of the living fife of everybody . . . that’s the beginning of the new era, but at this point the Leonardo artist-type says, up to now we were using our own hands to make end-products for the patron . . . so in the Victorian era you’ll find the beautiful cabinet maker, and you’ll find the beautiful shoemaker and tailor . . . fantastic craftsmen everywhere . . . but now he says, i can’t make end-products for everybody . . . there aren’t enough artists to make end-products for everybody . . . therefore, we’ll have to have an entirely new kind of thing which is our industrial tools, our mass production . . . and that’s what is really come to all of humanity . . .

. . so what we’ve got to really come to now is developing awareness in that little child . . . we’ve got to proliferate the right kind of information . . . industrialization and technology is not something new . . . you and i are technology, so superior to any we’ve ever devised . . . that camera looks pretty crude alongside of my eye, and my eye has always had its own light meter-it’s got the whole works . . . and so i simply say, if you had that camera so it could also rebuild itself and keep itself going and improving itself for the next 70 years then you have something approximating the technology you and i really consist of . . , technology’s not new . . . we’ve just been a little too crude at it . . . our society’s got to be sure not to let somebody mislead us . . . not let our own ignorance mislead us into making the wrong moves . . . .

. . . in your picture of earth day, if the young people go out with a broom and start collecting, and if they went further than picking out the paper from it and the metal and said we’re going to find out how to get those recirculated, then we’re really getting somewhere . . . each one of us is process . . . we’re not things . . . and so it’s fantastic-there’s no scientist been asked to look at the plumbing . . . the best flushing toilet you have is so inefficient that we use 65 volumes of water to get rid of one volume of human waste-but it is waste, and it’s very, very valuable chemistry . . . at the university of Illinois way back in 1929 we found that the human excrement in one farm family has in it enough energy to run all the farm machinery . . . so these are the things-I hope your young world first is getting aware, and then getting to be critical and picking out things . . . and now we’re really beginning to understand this need of a greater understanding of nature . . .

. . . it’s very important for me to tell you that the word failure is invented by man just like the word pollution . . . it’s a word of ignorance because nature can’t fail . . . nature knows exactly what she’s doing . . . but when man doesn’t understand nature and thinks that this is the way nature behaves, and he tries to make it do this and that’s not in her program then it frustrates him and he calls it a failure . . . but nature doesn’t intend to have anything go on for very long . . . she’s always transforming so she has a way of terminating, and when man wants her to go on beyond that termination point then he calls it failure, but it’s not so . . . nature is intent on trying to make man a success despite himself, and despite his long, long history of his great ignorance where I’m trying to give you the way the breakthrough is occurring . . . we’re still assuming fallaciously there’s not enough to go around . . . you have to prove your right leave ; you have to earn a living . . . was the old statement . . . the young world really feels now that’s wrong . . . that the information we can get to the moon and do all this is very important because I think it tells man he can do anything he needs to do and he can make man work . . .

. . . he’s got to learn that the space program is not something-(never mind that space stuff, let’s get back on earth, legs be practical, let’s be blaise about the moon shoot . . . ) the fact is our earth is a little spaceship . . . unless we catch on to the fact we are a space program ourselves and that we have just so much supply and we’ve got to learn how to run that big spaceship which we are onboard . . . to send off little spaceships to find out exactly what we need to be able to keep human beings doing . . . this is the only way we will ever find out about ecology . . .

. . . on earth day I spoke at 4 universities . . . I asked each one of the audiences of kids if they could tell me how much of the earth was necessary to support each life . . . when you talk ecology that is a pattern of the science of the total process in life . . . what’s necessary to regenerate it . . . each species is a relationship to the environment . . . we’re not really qualified to use the word ecology until we get into that . . . but I’ll tell you the way we’ll find out is to send a man off into space . . . get him outside where there’s no air to be breathed ; no water available ; no foods . . . what do we have to have on board to keep him out there for a year? . . . we’ve literally found now that it is possible-there are two space program researches where we have teams of six men each, sealed up in cylinders (completely different operations, really quite remote from one another, the Russians are doing one and the same thing too) . . . those men are sealed for a year, and we give them preliminary equipment which you did learn by having scientists who are good ecologists and good chemists . . . putting everything in there necessary, they hope to keep the men going . . . they’re connected by telephone (really very easy to talk in now-you have a window) . . , but they are now operating six men for one year on 350 pounds of apparatus and the whole apparatus being able to put in an airplane suitcase . . . that we could get everything you need to regenerate life . . . there is entropy so the system in the end has to have something added but you’re able to have it sufficiently so you only have to add but once a year . . . this is really getting somewhere . . . so we come back on earth-we have 350 pounds suitcase size ; even at the most expensive mass production for $2 a pound ; that’s $700 and you do away with sewers, all the water supply lines ; all you need is a milk bottle or so a year to add into the system . . . on a rental basis per six men for $700 you’re down to $200 a year capital cost; maybe $1 a year you’ve got the equipment, and you go on any mountain top and really start living the highest standard . . . and this equipment when it gets first used by those men off in space due to the television relay system around the world you’ll have possibly a billion people watching those six men all year round and you’ll have every kid really catching on to this . . . here would be the great educational system about what the chemistry changes really are . . .

. . at any rate i simply say we must be very careful . . , and we must not cut off things simply because the wrong people, with short and selfish and non-thinking motives have used tools . . . a pencil is a beautiful thing but you could literally jab it into a man’s heart and it would kill him . . . so don’t say that a pencil is lethal . . . we must not blame the universe . . . it would be like saying the universe is used in the wrong way, therefore it’s better we not have any universe . . . if we accept universe at all, if we accept life, and really would like to have something best for it, then we’ve simply got to learn how to use our universe in the best way . . . and the universe is technology, and it’s always evoluting, it’s always complex, it’s not repeating, so we have to be catching on to our new technology and realize we really do have a machinery of mutual regeneration around the world which has been for the moment-it’s so powerful, so confident-very highly exploitable by the ignorant man who happens to get to monopolize it . . . but in itself it’s getting out from under him . . . because he has sovereign claims-well, look, you can’t stop the radio waves from going out of the sovereign limits . .

Richard Buckminster Fuller is an architect, mathematician, philosophers, engineers, and visionary who describe himself as a “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist”.

*The article is syndicated from Radical Software Magazine (Edition 1), 1970, “Software” section, p.5.