Thirty Minutes With…; R. B. Fuller

You You People from Washington across the nation and abroad, people of consequence are questioned on the issues of our time by Elizabeth Drew on 30 minutes with tonight our Buckminster Fuller. Mr. Fuller, you are an architect and philosopher, recipient of some 50 awards, author of countless books and articles, you're known for your thinking to be global and original, filled with radical ideas about how we ought to live and think about this earth.

We Americans have spent most of this year thinking about current events, but they're really like the white caps on the ocean. I'd like to talk with you about the deeper currents, the longer view. If you had to say now, where you think the world is moving, where you think it might be in 25 years, what would be your answer? This place I have to recognize them, the world, I mean, you really usually mean our earth. Let's just hold it to earth for a moment. We're making 60,000 miles an hour around the sun, I have to remember that. People say, hearing that I travel around the world several times a year, they say, don't say how you can stand that travel. I say, you obviously don't know what you're doing. And I find this is really very essence of anything I really say to you about the way I find myself coming more and more aware of the universe and what seems to be going on in large evolutionary ways. And the extraordinary preoccupation man really has, with very local day-to-day, misconception really that the whole universe is some kind of a amusement decoration of those stars

out there to everything, it's just egocentric. And he's still very powerful that way. And I'm quite confident that the sun is not saying to the next nearest star. I don't think we can afford to let Earth have any more of the energy to keep life going down. They haven't paid their bill. I don't think the universe is operating on me, so it's nonsense as that. The universe, quite clearly, is manifesting eternal regeneration. This has no pollution, all the 92 regenerative chemicals are essential to the regeneration, the eternal regeneration of the universe. When you are unfamiliar with those things on Earth, when those chemical elements, you may find you can get a lot of money so somebody lets you get some kind of a credit for taking this thing out from that. Then you present this one, but you don't know what the other one is, so you call it pollution

and then they go out of the stack. I find this kind of nonsense going on here now. I think it's all extraordinarily reasonable in order to be able to do any good thing. You first place think you have to eliminate any idea of good and bad and you really try to find out what is happening. And you start off number one by recognizing that man is born absolutely naked, absolutely helpless, stays helpless for months, can't move locomotives at all, and it has beautiful equipment. It has no variance, therefore, it's absolute ignorance. We're born, ignorant, helpless, and naked. Now we've had to find a way and we have a universe so superbly organized, and we're operating such beautiful principles that is attended to regenerative and all kinds of unique behaviors, and one by one through trial and error, having started absolutely making so forth. We apparently are supposed to be gradually learning that our muscle, which is quite important when you're first hungry, and you find there's not, you're so ignorant, you don't know

more than one or two things to convene, and you see that you're a bigger guy and now the other guy, you can push the other guy out of the way if you get what's going to be eaten. So we have muscle. Muscle has been used by man, and it's still being used by man, what we call armism, they've eaten all the warm, big power machines, are exactly that. The grassy man is learning that his great power is his mind and not his muscle, all the muscle of all human beings, all known time, if we take this cumulative capability, doesn't amount to one minute of one hurricane. Is that right? No, it's just nothing. But mind of man, which is unique amongst all the creatures, all the creatures have many, many creatures have brains, and the creatures with brains, we find all that brain ever does is to store these special case experiences that we're using in the newspaper items that seem so interesting and so forth.

Everybody's brain is storing each special case experience, and the mind and mind alone can survey all those special case experiences, and from time to time discover a principle, such as the principle of gravity, and the leverage of the principle, and mass attraction, and discover a refraction and so forth. And by virtue of the generalized principles, a completely abstract, not to be a principle, it has to be a tunnel. And some totally, if we weren't so specialized, we would be more aware of the fact that there was a great complex of generalized principles. Now one of them contradicts another, they all enter accommodated, and being all enter accommodated, some of them enter accommodated, but to call exponential rates of inter-augmentation. Now when we call complex principles, all inter-commodated, inter-commodation means design. They are intellectually apprehendable only. We are then managed, granted discovering, and our priory, eternal, great design. And that's what I would kind of think, that's what I would say, I'm really trying to look

for and try to understand why we're here. Because I always did, excuse me, all of the supplies to one small portion, as you would put it within the universe, to earth, that you believe that we're going through a revolution or perhaps have even gone through one of learning to live on the earth. And that gives you a very, as I read you, optimistic picture of where we're going in the next 25 years or in the future. Is that correct? I'm not trying, I know that man is just trying to find out how to live, and I don't think that the universe is here just to a muse man or to be somebody very satisfactory to people living out in the suburb. I think this universe is quite clearly, we would not have man if we were not part of an essential function of the great eternal regeneration, and I find that I'm looking for what is real capability, which is in mind. Yes, now how does he take this mind and use it to proliferate? The brain is giving us all these reflex conditions of what people want to go out and have this and say, they need somebody to tell them what to do, and they're big fathers.

Yes, but now how do you see man taking this mind? You've used two words, as I've read you, that we've used our minds a lot for what you call killingery and competition for resources, and that you see that man can use his mind for livingery, that we can move to a concept of a kind of lessening of competition between man, between nations. How do you see that happening? The brain brain should be reflexive. If you start to hit me, my brain reflexes, I'm going to protect myself and hit back. So the weaponry is simply then picking up another stone or something else reflexively. And so I guess the brain is then learned to be very cunning and to employ some of these principles, which man has discovered somebody else with beautiful mind, discovered a principle, and then he makes a level and then it's man in anger, so I want to get that. So I don't see weaponry as anything to do with mind. Mind and mind alone, I said, discovered the principle and discovered the University of

Italy regenerative and that there are ways of solving problems where you do so much more with so much less. That's what I want to get at now. You can then, instead of putting all of our production capability into weaponry, can't turn it towards living. As for instance, this last year, which is fairly typical of, we have then all the great bureaucracies of all the great nations, all committed to their respective ideologies. Ideologists all assume that there's a basic scarcity and they run their economies on their scarcity. And they get the prices up and they're told things by making deliberate scarcity, then right. They all go on the basis, not enough for you or me. We can't guarantee that you will eat on our side, but we think we have to fail our clever way of carrying on. As a consequence, we have then enormous group committed to always, but they're biased. That's why they are political because they say, this is the one I'm going to go for all because it's a very difficult situation, absolutely fatal.

Therefore, we have United States, Russia, China, NATO, annually, about $200 billion on how to kill on the basis of your coming down, we get them, so you don't see which one is going to be. How do we get moved towards a world where people think less in terms of their own nations and competition? I gather that's where you think we are moving and we'll move, but how do we begin to get there and change our thinking so that we don't think in terms of competitive nations or blocks? Well, evolution manifests too down that human beings who are continually are exploring principles and, gradually, the total complex of the principles now available, the knowledge regarding them, the resources that are then available by which we are knowledge of this is a resource and not just a pollution. Yes. All of this now makes it possible to me to say to you that the knowledge now available

to man and the resources now available, known to be, is highly feasible to take care of all of humanity at a higher standard living than any man has ever known. How can we begin to do that? But just think what I'm saying. This means then that the whole raison d'etre for war, which was the not going to be enough, is invalid. I find then the momentum of the bureaucracy and of the non-thinking. The big problem I'm trying to really bring down to you is now that people may say their thinking, but they're not, they're reflecting in fear. Fear brings about that non-thinking. Thinking comes when it's not fearful and you really do try to find out what is going on, quite independent of the condition reflexes. So that I see evolution is trying very hard to make man a success despite himself and does have him continually discovering more principles and is working with him all the time. Unfortunately, they are less corruptible than they used to be because man is. Nope.

The available resources, 99.9 percent of everything that's going on is going to affect our future. It's been conducted in the rounds of electromagnetic spectrum, completely invisible to man by virtue of which you and I are, right now, communicating with people all very great distances and what you and I are thinking and carrying on about is going right through wars, paying no attention to wars at all and doing so completely invisibly. Now this is the, in a sense, an incorruptible fundamental capability, but so much of it is going on actually just at figures level where nobody would know even how to corrupt the figures that are known with the significance of figures are. And so I say nature is evolutionarily then building up a very, very powerful advance for man. The fact that I can really say to you and demonstrate to anybody who wants to take the time to go into it with me, that we now know how to do so much more with so much less. As for instance, one communication satellite weighing one quarter of a ton is outperforming the Trans-Ocean communication capability of 175,000 tons of copper cable.

So these are the more as with the less thing that make me, as I studied the whole matter, make it perfectly clear that we can now take care of all people so that the fundamental raise on date for all the political interaction today of the newspaper is actually obsolete yet man. The condition reflects a man just carrying on horrendously in it. But if we want to come to terms with this and learn to live more with less and to overlook national boundaries, if we can't do it through politics and if also if we want to get the bureaucracies to think instead of not think, how can we do it? Well I see evolution. Evolution. So powerfully it worked that she continually has the new children born in the presence of very much less misinformation than the older people and the president of radio more reliable information. And every little child of age completely aware of everybody around the earth, when I was born there was no radio television or even automobile and I didn't know what was

going on beyond my town. And the point is that evolution is then bringing in the new, better informed and they're continually taking initiative. So we got a whole young world today completely peeling off from the older world, recognizing the older world didn't love them and it's tried very hard to look out from the, realizing the older world is really completely conditioned, reflects to look at things so locally and so short side of the, as to make the young world realize that utterly skeptical is capability to carry on. They don't know yet what to do. They really are forming, I'm getting letters from eight and ten year olds, so brilliantly they state the total big pictures and the responsibility. So brilliant. I'm absolutely sure evolution is coming through with a new young cable built it. And the invisible business I talked about where man is still publishing everything in the visible, but invisible is really carrying on. We've just come through and completed Francisco World War III. I want to know that.

I want to know that. I want to know that. I want to know. And the invisible world is carried on a psychological warfare and so forth. And as a consequence, Francisco's United States, the young world is so well informed. If we can go to the moon, man, intuitively feels the end of this young man that he can do anything he needs to do. Therefore it's pretty sure we could make the world work. He doesn't know just exactly how yet, but he's encouraged me because I can really show him ways in which it can be done. Now I meet with him, those young people, and not so many say to you, it would be impossible. World War III was launched by the United States. It was really the first time a very important major loss. What happened? And what happened is that the United States lost the capability to really make war again. The United States could not mobilize the young people today, again, ever going into war. Do you think that's true? They might possibly try to conscript a little bit. They could not get the United States per se as a social body to have any interests at talk.

Because the young world has said, we're now world people, we're not against anybody. It seems now. It seems now. They do not feel it belonged to a nation up to yesterday that thought they did. Now for the first time, they know and feel very strong that there is enough to go around, that as long as you were convinced that there was not enough to go around, somebody's going to die, you're going to die of starvation or they could die in war. Then if you were looking out because your family are going to die of starvation, if you don't go to war, then you really were a hero and heroism, no question about the heroism yesterday. The kids now say, it's much better that we know absolutely cleanly, feel strongly that it's quite possible to make the world a world you don't have to go to war, therefore the war becomes better. So you're saying this is not a reaction to war? It's not a heroism whatsoever. This is not a reaction just to one war or to recent events. It's a long-range trend that has to do with another way of viewing the world. It's not just based on recent events. That's right. Now, a lot of people feel, since they don't think in the long range and wide range that you do, that well in fact that cities are getting more crowded, our lives are more crowded,

the atmosphere is dirtier, the water is dirtier and that it's all, that's really the trend and that's the way we are going to live in these increasingly crowded, noisy, dirty conditions. What is the way out of that that you see? Well, I'd like to point out that I've had man born naked and helpless and so forth. Nice, we'll point out to you an experience we have, for instance, with the check-in in the egg, the little embryo, absolutely helpless and so forth, does get formed inside that egg and it's given all the nutriment for its development up to a certain point. And then when the check-in is actually formed there and there's still some nutriment inside the egg shell that's keeping looking for us, it's just inside the rhyme, that's the only rhyme that I've ever knew, but finding pretty empties gets pecking at the walls and end of it and breaks the shell open and suddenly it has a new relationship to the universe. I see all of humanity really up to now, within a permitted ignorance, I've been born ignorant and given all that nutriment and enormous resources with which by trial and

make fantastic number of mistakes, to get the point where we could have the kind of conversation we're having. This becomes really a popular kind of conversation, we're not really, we're not all friends so it's really coming about, this is the kind of conversation we're having on the air. And I find this kind of conversation going on all around our world. We've just come and broken our chicken egg, so the chicken eggs, egg shells all around there, that's more or less the way things are looking to people than that because we do have those cities which were designed for something else yesterday. What has happened in order to keep life going on our planet, we have to keep it going regenerated by radiation. And the radiation is coming to get our nutriment from the sun by radio and the vegetation picks it up by photosynthesis and the algae in the sea pick it up and then because you and I can't take through our skin. And so all the mammals depend on all the vegetation to impound that radiation. Now in order to do that the radiation would have dehydrate the vegetation if it weren't water cooled so the trees and vegetation have roots and by our supposed to take enormous

amounts of moisture then and that's why I say the vegetation has to have water in the environment. So it'd be water cooled and it then sends it up in the atmosphere so it'd come tumbling down as rain again, let it run. Then right because it has to be rooted and in a very few places where life really could be supported, yesterday the three quads it was covered in water, another very large amount covered rock and snow and ice, very little place and where then roots occurred. Men in order to be able to live had to be near that vegetation impound in the radiation. So he thought himself really was having roots and he guarded those roots. But now we know how to really foster the vegetation much better than having a lot of people around just doing it by hand, the muscle, we have machines who do that, we now know how to dramatically seal and refrigerate, you had to be near the food you say you've died. Now you don't have to be near where the roots are taught because they're going to be shipped to you and kept for years and refrigeration would have been. So we have humanity suddenly freed from that just being holding the roots and finding battles about who's going to protect those roots and saying I'm rooted and that's really

where all your cell vendors and nationalities come from. Now his son is, I've got legs and I can go anywhere so he's literally has left the farm when I was young, 90% of America was on the farm all around the world. All that's the farms everywhere, they're on root to something else. They've gone into yesterday's city and men and all kinds of economic game playing, it builds more buildings and more gets money and because continue there's more wealth. So temporarily there's a people in those cities but that's just the first springboard and to find all the young those people are going to be world people. I meet them around the world and they're just really young, don't... And this is the way more people are going to live in the future, rootless not in the cities, not even of any particular nation. I don't think there were rootless as years because it's a death yesterday, the gypsy irresponsibility. It simply means very much as I now found it. When I was young I had gone on my feet and said, but the house then went down the driveway and the path and that was the end of the road that turned around and there was a street and it went off here and it went around the bend.

You were always coming to bend as you couldn't see around. So we lived in tubes of trees and houses and the very linear kind of like a mouse feel mouse running through the grass. Then I began, came to day when I... So places were always something magic that you couldn't see from where you are and everybody saw a dreamt about other places and talk about that way still they where do you come from. But then I became a flyer at the time of World War I and I said goodbye to my family at home and the owner of beer went through the tube out of the airport and then took off. There's my home again, I haven't left home at all. So I went down a different wing and I got a more altitude and there was the next town and the next town, all the town I said, you know I'm not leaving town, my backyard is getting bigger and that's exactly what's happened today. I literally travel around the world just incidentally make at least three circuits a year and well pretty close to 150,000, 200,000 miles a year and I find that I now realize I am on a little planet and because I come from Northern Southern Hemisphere very, very

great deal. There's no winter in summer. I have dozens of windows in summer's year, frankly to stop talking that kind of nonsense. I don't talk and I'm not allowed by experience to think that way. So I find that as I go around the world, here are my students that I had here and there and I found students at every one of the years that were invested, we've got 15, 20% of what they call far and student. We have a world human being coming up here and he's just never gone tomorrow, be interested in defending the local roots of us, we now learn how we can really impound that sun radiation possibly in floating devices, food factories in the middle of the ocean. In the meantime what is going to happen to people who are now in these cities who don't have this world view or don't even have the opportunity to live that way and are concerned about the conditions in the atmosphere in which they're living? I was simply saying that evolution is not even, some people are favored for a moment and some others, but mainly I find in the fundamental working assumption of basic scarcity,

the ability of friends to get men to go to war of yesterday, they can't say right now your boys come and fight with me, they're going to go off and take the food from those other people and you're going to eat boys, you haven't been eating regularly, food eating was pretty much regularly one of the great payoffs of joining them and this is then one of the great things where the leader, if he's just physical, don't let two big men come at me, I can handle the one at a time what he called divide and conquer and he developed then a complete divide and conquer, the strong power man who said the muscle I spoke about earlier is always then dividing and conquering and he turns all the intellectuals into specialists and you know you just attend the chemistry and you just send, and I know no one tends ever to be exactly, that's what we call in the central intelligence, that the leader has the intelligence, the other people have to let's be automathons and therefore they're really terribly lost today and we also then have him saying you're not going to eat unless I give you a job, the whole session about employment and jobs has to do then with political

leadership, exploiting, as somebody said to you today, we said little child is born real, say you better get back in the womb that down, you're a little relief, how you're going to pay for this and say no you look pretty good, we're going to give you a chance to your great beautiful new life, so we're going to have to say very generally to everybody all around the world stop this nonsense about you're going to have a job and say use this beautiful mind you have, look around as we all do, look at the information what needs to be done, what do I know about it or what do I need to know and all to do it, I'm going to be sure that I'm going to because there is enough to go around, like any kid in any family that's assumed to get on and we will see that you eat, you see everything you want and jobs will not be something in order to prove the right to live, if I was really an honest and somebody else tells you where could be the greatest privilege in the world, we're going to completely sever the concept of jobs and what needs to be done and how do you live?

We have only a couple more minutes Mr. Fuller, I'd like to sum up and ask you in summary if because you told me this evolution will be is and will be uneven, we do have these weapons in our arsenal, other nations have them too, we do have these crowded conditions, we've not yet learned to think about the resources the way you say they are and that we will learn to. So are we in a race and time against one way of thinking, your way of thinking and yet current conditions which aren't all that pleasant and in which there are all these weapons of destruction still in people's hands and maybe as you say some don't want to use them but we can't be sure. Now the hydrogen atom knows exactly how to get on and the crab gets on in his own way evolutionarily but the function of man quite clearly having mine and the other creatures don't is that he has function is to be a problem solver, we will always have problems down but I see that the evolution of the problems which we are confronting is one of the increasingly more intelligent questions and I see the whole process of whether man happens to make

good on this little planet because nature would not, the universe would depend on this little particular group here for this particular metaphysical capability but had billions and billions of elsewhere, this little growth nature hopes will go and it's giving all the opportunity to do so, if we do make good it's going to be because we really do learn that our mind is everything, our muscle is nothing and that nothing counts but the truth and that is such extraordinary thing going in each of us which is faith and the thing love that you really do trust and love. So I find a young world growing up with that beautiful in the innate condition of truth and love my whole confidence we're going to make it is manifest in the young world not make a shame to be compassionate to be tender that there is an infuse and love and youth a great hope for man the knowledge is there. But the the world that if even if that's true the world that's just a little bit older has not learned that yet doesn't that where are you? I'm luckily at 77 I've seen a fantastic transition from almost complete illiteracy of man

in ability to communicate man with a hundred word vocabularies we're all around the world everybody's got beautiful vocabulary everybody's aware of each other the education is now one where used to be a pharaoh with the only one in form and so forth then could be just the nobles in form then could be great powerful metal class suddenly it's everybody's informed and now we have extraordinary new moment of all of humanity is in and all of us going to have to do what needs to be done because we can see logically our mind tells us that's what needs to be done not going to some big father says that's your got to do. Thank you Mr. Fuller Red of Time I know you have a great deal more to say. I hope you'll come back and talk with me again sometime thank you for coming 30 minutes with our Buckminster Fuller an unrehearsed interview with Elizabeth Drew. This has been a production of Enpacked the National Public Affairs Center for Television