Playboy: But do you feel lonely?

Carlin: I feel an aloneness, and I relish that. As much as I love my family, I enjoy it when the house is empty, because then I know I’m truly alone, as we all are on the planet, after all. You know, every atom in us is originally from a star. And during my moments of aloneness, I’m most mindful of that; that I’m just another group of matter randomly but wonderfully arranged. That’s when I feel my immortality.

Playboy: Your immortality, as in afterlife?

Carlin: Not in the Christian sense, but I do believe in the survivability of the human spirit. We were all part of a giant explosion once, and we’ve come a long way. The incredible distances of past and future time, the history of this whole fucking, vibrating, resonating mother mass—that’s what I read and think about more than anything else.

Playboy: Do you see much of a future for us?

Carlin: I don’t see much of a future for this planet. I think it’s a cursed planet. The boundaries we’ve drawn between nations and the profit motive—those two factors—have, in my opinion, brought us to the point where almost nothing can stop the utter destruction of the environment and all our earthly life-support systems. Perhaps after a holocaust, the survivors can rebuild on a more spiritual level. Perhaps civilizations rose and failed many times on this planet before man arrived.

Playboy: Your opinion of mankind is not exactly reverential.

Carlin: Man in his finest state is a curious and investigative creature capable of the magic of creativity. In a book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes argues that man didn’t even reach what we call consciousness—that is, the ability to self-inspect—until about 1000 years before Christ; that The Iliad and The Odyssey were written by unconscious humans who had auditory hallucinations from the right side of their brains. Now, if we can come from a state of unconsciousness to consciousness in only 3000 years, imagine what other states we might reach given the time and the freedom to evolve.

Playboy: Maybe we will get that freedom. American cultural influence pervades half the globe, and this is the home of the free.

Carlin: The folks who settled the United States and migrated to it afterward have mostly been narrow-minded religious people, exploiters and frontier-justice types who shot first and asked questions later. We’re not a freedom-loving people in the beautiful, spiritual sense. We have an inspiring Constitution, but we’re a hardhearted people.

Playboy: We’ve had a checkered past, at best, including slavery and the exploitation of immigrants and women. But we’ve made improvements on those fronts. Doesn’t that give you hope?

Carlin: No. When I see blacks and women wanting to gain their freedom so they can become corporation executives, I realize that the situation is hopeless. What’s the good of having freedom if you then willingly go off and become a slave to an amoral institution? It’s especially depressing to see blacks wanting to dive into the mainstream of American commercial life. They come from a magnificent African culture based on aesthetics, and now they all want to become fort builders like the vicious people who originally enslaved them.

Playboy: You may despise the American corporate structure, which is unabashedly based on greed, but you’re now despising it from a beautiful home in a beautiful neighborhood. Earlier today, you were despising it from inside a $35,000 BMW.

Carlin: My money buys me the freedom not to be a member of the corporate structure. And I certainly don’t feel guilty or hypocritical about that. The way our economy is set up, if you don’t want to be a corporate moron and you don’t want to be enfeebled in the streets, you must earn enough to know that you’ll never have to go to them for money. And I’ve been able to do that without selling anything that injures the earth. I sell thoughts, laughs and ideas.

Playboy: You never do commercials. Are you willing to condemn other performers who do?

Carlin: It seems to me like a perversion of talent for an artist of any kind to further the corporate structure of America or the personal interests of the morons and thieves who run it.

Playboy: Given your tough views about America, how do you feel about Soviet society?

Carlin: I despise bullies in any guise. Russia offers very little freedom. Its economy is unsuccessful. It can’t even get a harvest together. It appears to do its war machine well enough to get its geopolitical ends met, but I don’t know how it’d fare if it actually had to fight a war. It would probably fuck that up, too. Russia just looks like a total failure to me.

Playboy: Earlier, you referred to the U. S. Constitution as “inspiring.” Do you endorse all of it—even the right to bear arms?

Carlin: I have mixed feelings about that. I plan to get a gun if crime gets any worse. I believe my first duty is to survive. And I’m not just talking about criminals coming into my home. I once seriously considered getting a gun to protect myself from the police. If I need a weapon to continue living, I’ll get one. And I’ll use it.

Playboy: But if violence in our society—

Carlin: Look, I’m going to interrupt you: There are two ways to think about this existence we have. One of them is that it’s Wednesday and it’s three fifteen and we’re talking here in my home, and at four o’clock I have to leave for another meeting. Now, that’s a reality. But there’s another reality. We’re in the solar system of a second-rate star, three quarters of the way out on a spiral arm of an average galaxy in a thing called the Local Group. And ours is only one of billions of galaxies, each of which has billions of stars. Some star systems are binary, and there could be a planet that revolves around a center of gravity between two binary stars. So you’d have two sunrises and two sunsets every day. One could be a red giant, the other a white dwarf; two different-sized, -shaped and -colored suns in the sky. And there might be other planets and comets. In other words, fuck Wednesday, fuck three fifteen, fuck four o’clock, fuck the United States, fuck the earth. It’s all temporal bullshit. I like thinking about being out there and not thinking about the corporate structure, not worrying about freedom and not worrying about guns. I chose a life of ideas. That entertains me. That nourishes me. And that’s why I run from this conversation.

Playboy: Returning for a moment to the planet Earth, what have you done with all the money you’ve earned in your career?

Carlin: A lot of it went up my nose. As for the rest, well, I won’t invest in the stock market, so I’ve had various business managers—all of them now fired—who’ve gotten me into limited partnerships in real estate. I don’t know how fair or unfair our rent policies are, because, again, I’m a limited partner. Really limited; limited not only by the definition of the agreement but also in terms of my own appreciation of business. I’m a limited partner. That’s why they wanted me. They said, “This guy’s limited. Let’s get him into our fucking partnership.”

Playboy: Because those business managers are gone, may we presume that in the future you’ll be doing other things with your money?

Carlin: Land still seems relatively harmless, though it would be really nice if there were no ownership. One philosopher has rightly said that property is theft. But I’d like to use my future ownership of property to give something back. You’ve got to give back some of what you take out—especially when you take wealth out at an unnatural level, as entertainers do. So I think it would be fair and right to use some of my land and wealth for a drug-rehab center or an Indian school.

Playboy: Is there anything you’ve said anywhere in this interview that you wish you could change?

Carlin: No, but something I said will, I think, change me.

Playboy: What’s that?

Carlin: I was thinking of that conversation we had about my outside interests and it occurred to me that I don’t define myself by much more than my career. When I’m not actually doing my work, I’m planning it or thinking about it or reading things that on some level are transformed into performance fantasies. I have no active interests. I never go anywhere or do anything that transports me outside the boundaries of my mind. But because of this interview and the questions this interview has spawned among myselves—now, there’s a frightening slip, “among myselves”—well, now I’ve begun thinking about getting into some extracareer activities.

Playboy: Do you know what they’ll be?

Carlin: I think I’ll join a softball team. Drinking beer on the bench with the guys. Shagging flies. Sliding headfirst into third base.… Wow, man, sounds great. I can’t wait to sign up!

Playboy: When will you do it?

Carlin: In a year or two. I need to develop my reality picture first. Psycho-cybernetics. Dream something strong enough and it’ll happen.… Ahhh, softball. I can taste the dust from the base line already…someday.…