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A
"WE THE PEOPLE"
interview with
Paolo Soleri
and
Jerry Brown |
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The following transcript is of a two
day interview of Paolo Soleri broadcast on Jerry Brown's nationally
syndicated talkshow, "We the People." The program aired on
12/9/95 and 12/11/95. An open and closed parenthesis,(), indicates
a loss of information in the process of transcribing the interview.
DAY 1 : Part |
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2 | 3 |
4 |
DAY 2 : Part |
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2 | 3 |
4 | |
DAY 1 : PART 3
JB: Your here with
"We the People." I'm Jerry Brown. And by the way, those of
you who would like to get information and join and support
"We the People," here's the number: 800-426-1112. I'm speaking
with Paolo Soleri, who is in Arizona at this moment, and just
before the break, Paolo, you were talking about interiorization.
PS: Yes.
JB: Now that's a word that a lot of people
probably aren't familiar with.
PS: Well, in more plain words is that whenever
we are in the presence of life, whatever the level of life
is from the bacterial up to the human, we are in the presence
of a phenomenon of a process that is interiorizing matter
and making it into life, and then eventually into consciousness,
and then subconsciousness. So this is what...any biological
system is driven by its own interior motivation, while any
technological system of physical system has to be ruled and
regulated by outer drives, so that's what they call statistical
lives to rather this inner motivating stress that makes for
the behavior of the organism.
JB: So life has...I don't want to use the
word genetic...but it has some sort of inner principle that
is pushing it in a certain direction or in certain directions,
and the technologies have to be pushed by our conscious purposes,
our plans.
PS: That's right. Once life enters into the
human domain, it's this interior drive, which as you were
saying is genetic knowledge and so on, or you might call it
instinctual. With the appearance of the human mind, it becomes
also cultural, which means this inner motivation is driven
by the biological aspect of the human system and also by the
cultural aspect of the human system, but it is always coming
from the mentally, from a decision from inside the organism.
It's not coming from outside.
JB: Okay, so if it's coming...what's driving
us is coming from within...
PS: Basically.
JB: ...then what is without shouldn't be
able to carry the day.
PS: Well, what is without evidently is the
reality in which we are immersed, so we cannot ignore it,
but at this point we might be able to guide it, and the best
guidance is not to say, well, I'm going to gulp more and more
of you matter in order to find my own fulfillment. What now
we are in for is that I'm going to look at you outside, and
I'm going to transform you in manners which are going to make
for more fulfillment in terms of my inner drives.
JB: Okay, if we took
as our project the transformation of the city based on our
inner drives...
PS: Yes.
JB: ...what would that begin to look like?
PS: Well, number one, we should be coherent
with this factor we are trying to discuss about the limitations
of the planet and the danger of becoming oriented toward materialism,
so the city, which is the habitat, which is the shelter, should
be a container which encourages this movement toward the values
which are generating from inside instead of being geared toward
what the outer makes available to us in terms of technology
and in terms of the magic of technology. So, given the situation
today, we have to abandon the notion that suburbian sprawl
is going to be the answer, but yet to return to the notion
that city and the town is where we can develop our future.
JB: It's almost as though this suburban materialistic
expansion is almost akin to a paganism of the ancient world
that had to be overthrown or was overthrown by this new interior
religion called Christianity. At least as an analogy.
PS: Yes...
JB: But the paganism here is so predominant
that even religious groups are caught up in it and transform
their churches into the very paganism that they think they
are overcoming, but the war between the materialism what is
and the inner spirit which is pushing against it is even greater
than the Roman/Christian conflict of 2000 years ago.
PS: Oh, yeah, and it's becoming more critical
because now, as you were saying, we can arm ourselves with
weapons which are really catastrophic. Our power to impose
our wills is becoming more and more, greater and greater,
and that which was before despotic ability of the despot to
impose upon society, now is transferred to everybody. So we
are all in a way despots and want to impose what we feel is
our right, ignore that the right should always come with the
power, or duty, responsibility. So by generating these condition
where we say we are free agents and we do what we please,
we are transforming the singularity of a despot which was
a very tiny minority in a majority which says, yes, I was
conceived, I was born and now I do what I like to do. Period.
JB: That sounds like something Ortega Gassett
wrote in "The Revolt of the Masses."
PS: I'm in good company.
JB: Your in good company. But I want to ask
you, do you think the custodians of today's paganism, today's
materialism will treat those who oppose them any more kindly
than the Romans treated the Christians in the Coliseum?
PS: Well, when things get very tight and
very, very...the options are becoming very limited, then the
inner violence that we are carrying within ourselves is going
to explode. I do not believe in the goodness of reality, in
a benevolent cosmos, I have to try to gear my action to the
notion that harshness, and cruelty, and suffering are very,
very pleasant and they are ready to take over anytime. That
is why I think that the future could be very bleak, because
once the resources are limited, once our mental and moral
resources are becoming shallower and shallower, that's when
something might be triggered, that might be horrendous.
JB: I was struck when I had a show a month
or so ago with Gar Oprovitz and he was talking about the dropping
of the bomb on China. And I thought...someone made the point
like he did, that if democracies can drop a bomb with such
insensitivity, and even fifty years later, can't even acknowledge
the inhumanity of the act, what would the bad people, so called,
what would the tyrants do? What would the barbarians...how
would they feel? How would they behave if the democracies
behaved in the way America did and even can't own up to it
even now, it's almost too horrible to conceive what people
don't even have...maybe I am overstating what we have, but
you get the point I'm trying to make.
PS: Yeah, well, I
think it might help to try to understand where we come from.
And I don't mean that in terms of just your own experience,
but the living experience. We come from three and a half billions
of years of exercising what the life drive is, and this exercise
up to the human and on and on, has been opportunistic. Any
kind of species works at being able to survive and to multiple,
and in order to do that the driving force, a portion is, to
find the most opportune ways of doing that. So, the food chain
is opportunistic...we come about and we have opportunity,
but used to be in opportunistic in terms of population and
species, so that the end works for the goodness of the nest,
so on and on. We transfer a portion from the population or
the species to the individual, so now we are the opportunistic
person, and we are all opportunistic. It's in our blood and
in our bones what we are to do and what we have been inventing.
It's a glorious invention, it's low compassion, general city,
and so on. So we have to try to blend, to make a combination
of the opportunistic drive, the ego center mode which we are
all played on, combine that with this new invention, which
is the loving, the generous, the compassion, and if we are
not able to find a happy combination of those two things,
we are in for terrible troubles.
JB: So your saying that the problem is not
economic, it's spiritual, it's fundamentally human at the
deepest level.
PS: At the bottom, yes. Because, evidently,
if we were angels, we would not have to cope with the ghettos,
with the tragedies we are presented now in every country.
Real tragedies, but we are not angels, we are humans, we are
driven by very powerful drives, including the opportunistic
drive, but we have been also able to come out with this incredible,
astonishing thing, which is again love and compassion. So
we must try to keep in our doing the present, the living and
the acting present, opportunity, which is still a very important
drive, and this the other side, which is the loving side.
And I am afraid that some kind of the social Darwinism seems
to impregnate what we call the pure capitalistic drive. So
capitalism is a wonderful machine for profitivity and other
things, but it needs to be injected with a compassion imperative.
JB: Yeah, and there you have the problem
that the structures of capitalism, corporations by name, have
as their sole objective the maximizing of only one value,
and that is, return on investment.
PS: That's right.
JB: So human beings aren't in charge anymore,
because by virtue of their membership inside the corporate
structure they are denied the human complexity of both being
opportunistic, and compassionate, and loving, and fearful,
and friendly, which all of us are in varying degrees, and
absolutely reduced to that one variable called "return on
investment to the maximum degree."
PS: That's right. At the same time I am more
optimistic than you seem to be in this. I really believe that
we are beginning to realize that this pure drive that says
that I'm the most intelligent, the cunning, the most able
to do things, so I'm going to predomi- nate. I'm going to
dominate, I'm going to generate a new kind of despotese, this
drive is now being seen as for what it is, which is in need
of one added dimension. The other dimension is the loving
dimension.
JB: Well, certainly the insights of modern
thinkers where even notions of truth have now been deconstructed
and exposed as really covers for power and domination and
injustice, and that I would say is a big step forward.
PS: We have to recognize that greed is ingrained
again, it's part of our make-up, and that's because of this
opportunistic drive that we are part of. So if we cannot re-orient
our greed, make it into a greed which relates to the family
of man, and the family of all life, then our greed is going
to be very myopic and is not going to do us very much of anything,
but a disaster.
JB: You say that the greed or the desire
for more has to be collectivized, has to be communalized.
PS: That's right.
JB: And that should really be the work of
the places where we live bringing out that drive is innate,
but it's inclusive of everyone and other species, as opposed
to this factious individualism that, for the moment anyway,
is in the driver's seat.
PS: Yeah, and we have to transcend that.
Life is a transcending process, so we went from the bacterial
into the human.
JB: Let's hold it right there, Paolo, we'll
be back in thirty seconds. This is "We the People."
Next
DAY 1 : Part |
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2 | 3 |
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DAY 2 : Part |
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2 | 3 |
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