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We live at the end of a 1000 year binge on the philosophical position known as materialism
in its many guises and the basic message of materialism is that the world is what it appears
to be, a thing composed of matter and pretty much confined to its surface. For approximately
500 years the great era for the triumph of modern science materialism has had the field
all to itself, and its argument for its preeminence was the beautiful toys that it could create,
aircraft, railways, television, spacecraft; but that is a fools argument. And now at the
end of 500 years of the process of rational quote unquote scientific culture we are literally
at the end of our rope, reason and science and the practice of unbridled capitalism have
not delivered us into an angelic realm, quite thew contrary they have delivered about 3%
of us into an angelic realm completely overshadowed by guilt about the other 97% of the population
who are eating it. It's not pretty picture modern civilization, most people in the world
are quite miserable actually.
It's as though nature is saying we are willing to place the entire planetary ecology in danger
for approximately 50,000 years in order for the opportunity to be explored of language
using technology expressing intelligence carrying all of life to the next level. And it's a
terrifying enterprise, because apparently to carry life to the next level tremendous
intellectual sophistication is required about the release and control of energy. The problem
is that energy can be used to destroy as well as build. So as the human enterprise has moved
toward greater and greater power and ability to manipulate the environment the stakes in
the cosmic game have risen, and now what we have have is approximately 100 billion dollars
sitting in the centre of the crap table and one roll of the dice more and we are either
going to win it or loose everything.
What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing
on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.
And yet, you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the
power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce
a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us - the least intelligent,
the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight
back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.
This is something, culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people's convenience
and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes,
what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses
you. None of us are well treated by culture.
Yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual, the rights of the individual.
We understand the felt-presence of experience is what is most important. But the culture
is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms
of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions
and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving
like machines - meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue and Hollywood
All primates have dominance hierarchies, that simply means that the hard bodies long fanged
young male kick everyone else around, they control the females, the children, homosexuals,
the elderly everybody is taking orders from this dominance hierarchy, and this is true
way back into squirrel monkeys, its a generalized feature of primate behaviour, and it's an
aspect of our behaviour as we sit here It's a general-
ized feature of primate behavior. And it's an aspect of our behavior, as we
sit here. Women -- the feminine -- is not honored, the elderly are marginalized, homosexuals,
that whole issue. Many of our social and political ills stem from this
attitude. Well, but you see I believe that when we left the trees and admitted psilocybin
into our diet that it has the effect of dissolving boundaries and making this maintenance
of a dominance hierarchy very very difficult.
First of all, the key on one level to maintaining the dominance hierarchy is
monogamous pair-bonding. That's where it begins. In a society taking a lot of
psilocybin monogamous pair-bonding breaks down because of CNS activation
and *** arousal. So in a psilocybin-using culture there will be a tendency to
orgiastic *** behavior rather than monogamous pair-bonding. What that does
is, it causes an incredible social cohesion because in an orgiastic society men
cannot trace lines of male paternity. So men's attitude toward children is, 'These
children are all ours. We the group'. It's a glue that we, in our paranoid social
style with everybody having the deed to their property and their 11-foot-high
fence can hardly imagine. But psilocybin was artificially suppressing this domina-
tor behavior style in the primate, the evolving proto hominid, now hominid, now
human being. When psilocybin was taken out of the diet
the old, old primate program was still there. It had not been bred out. The genes
were always there. It's just that for 50,000 or 100,000 years, we medicated ourselves
-- literally, religiously -- we religiously medicated ourselves every new
and full moon, perhaps oftener. These *** were happening, creating social cohesion,
propagating everybody forward. The problem was, when the psilocybin was taken
away we had been under its influence for perhaps half a million years.
We had evolved language, rudimentary abstract philosophy, a sense of religion.
We had invented technology in the form of using fire and chipping flint and all that.
The psilocybin goes away and suddenly these skills, these tools, these
technologies, are in the hands of maraud- ing apes -- not any more cohesive caring human
social groups -- but marauding territorial apes driven by the desire to control
all weaker members of the social group.
And that's our circumstance. We have, you know, the tools that would allow us to
sculpt paradise but we have the reflexes and value systems of anthropoid apes of
some sort. So the split between our conscious hopes, our best foot and the bottom
of the human scale is appalling. I mean, look at the spread. It's a spread from,
well, from Mother Teresa to serial killers. I mean, you don't get serial killers in
the chipmunk population, or the grasshopper population. I mean, these animals
are not so set at variance with their basic nature that these kinds of pathologies
can erupt. We, on the other hand, are half angel, half
pack-hunting killer ape. I mean, we are an object-fetish society. I mean, our
entire psychology is characterized by a profound discontent. That's what we're about.
It doesn't matter -- no matter what's going on, after a little while we get
restless and move on. Other animal species are embedded in a kind of world of
endless genetic cycling. No fox grows bored with hunting, you know? And yet our
thing is a profound dis-ease
. And I believe it's because -- and slowly you've
forced me to do this whole rap, which I swore I wouldn't do -- I believe it's
because the psilocybin led us halfway toward a kind of godhead. But then it disappeared
and we are left in this very peculiar situation. This is the myth of the
Fall. You know, we are half angel, half beast. And these two natures are united in
every one of us. And when you take psilocybin you feel generally a great sense
of community, an ascent to a higher level. If you completely restrict your intake
of intoxicants of any sort then you get the teetotaler type personality, which is characterized
by incredible smugness, limited intellectual horizons, and an unbearable
aura of self-congratulation that makes it pretty hard for the rest of us to put up with.