[music]
 Well, you have to somehow exercise that invisible muscle that tolerates strangeness.
 My brother had the notion of what he called "extra-environmentalism."
 He said, "The reason we are fascinated by the alien is because we want to become the alien."
 And the alien, this is the thing I keep coming back to, about the need to graduate from culture.
 I mean, I'm really into this. It's not about recovering your Irish, Jewish, Slavic roots.
 We're beyond that. It's about discovering and acting from your uniqueness
 and not defining yourself as a member of a class or a category.
 That's a print-created mental error. Things like racism, sexism, all these forms of averaging and leveling
 are sloppy forms of thought.
 Have you ever noticed that race, for example, is a quality that adheres only to large groups of people?
 To speak of a race, you have to have a bunch of people.
 It's not a quality that adheres to an individual any more than an individual water molecule is wet.
 Wetness is something that only emerges when you have millions of water molecules.
 And yet, and I think this is a print-created phenomenon, this overuse of simple categories
 is a kind of genuflection to the simplification of the world that takes place through print.
 So, for instance, we analyze social problems through the use of the category class.
 We say, well, the ruling class is screwing the lower class, or the working class isn't getting its fair deal.
 This kind of gross oversimplification makes the solution to problems almost intractable
 because the objects that your model seeks to manipulate, classes, is an illusion in the first place.
 And we see, I think, in the 20th century the bankruptcy of this kind of thinking about human problems.
 A friend of mine says of mushrooms that every time he takes them, the goal is to stand more.
 And what is meant by that is, A, it ain't easy to go the limit,
 and that the thing is constantly able to challenge your categorical maps,
 no matter how advanced your categorical maps are.
 It can always raise the stakes painfully higher.
 And so the goal is to stand more.
 And the more you stand, the more your own place of intellectual origins,
 your own cultural ven, recedes into quaintness.
 This is what you were talking about, about getting beyond culture.
 Culture is a simplification and a lie.
 It's the currency by which fools navigate the world.
 Smart people get beyond it, and you can choose when to do that.
 I don't think for myself it happened until my middle 40s.
 And then suddenly, because experience and maturation somehow found each other and carried me forward,
 I began to think like this.
 Before, I was in a sense a true believer.
 For all the psychedelic experiences and political activism and so forth and so on,
 I hadn't yet understood that culture was a vehicle that could only be ridden so far.
 And then beyond that lies the great and to be defined unknown of one's own individuality.
 And many people never get beyond the imposed neoteny of cultural conventionalism.
 As I said, it's insidious that in middle life, circumstances tend to deliver us money.
 Either our parents die or our professional activities finally pay off.
 And that money is usually the final nail in the coffin of ever evolving beyond cultural convention.
 Why should we? At last we've achieved the fruits of our labors, the good life,
 the comfortable dream. But it's the dream of anesthesia.
 That feeling you feel is the gurney that's rolling you toward the tissue disposal oven.
 Anyway.
 Yeah, Mike?
 [INAUDIBLE]
 Yeah, it does. I mean, you're right that cool, then if you aren't cool,
 you go to incredible lengths to achieve it by ersatz means,
 by buying $3,500 sunglasses and getting tattooed.
 But it can't really be faked.
 But the whole engine of marketing is designed to make you think that it can be faked.
 I don't know if I'm cool or not, but I am incredibly resistant to any effort to make me think I'm uncool.
 In other words, because the answer always lies in commodification.
 You know, I'm not using the right body cologne. I'm not wearing the right Italian designer clothes.
 I don't slump with a half sneer on my face.
 All of these things which are marketed as the accoutrements of cool.
 So you get a clueless culture aping cool. And of course, real cool can't be commodified.
 That's what makes it so cool and so maddeningly distant from the uncool.
 As long as we're on this kind of tack, this morning I talked about the imagination and its friends.
 And you recall the list and I won't refresh it.
 But I thought it would also be useful to talk about the enemies of the imagination.
 We've talked about culture as the enemy of imagination.
 And I think we've done enough of that.
 The other thing that I think is the enemy of the imagination, and this may seem paradoxical,
 and it may raise hackles and it may bring controversy, but it has to be said,
 there's always been a strain of this in my thinking, in what I'm about to say.
 But my son pointed out to me that I needed to hammer this particular key harder.
 My son is sort of my surrogate in the culture.
 He goes out to the highways and byways and listens to the murmurings of the people
 and then tells me what's going on.
 And this brings us to the subject of relativism.
 I'd never quite heard it put this way until he put it to me this way.
 What is relativism?
 Relativism is the idea that your ideas are as good as anybody else's ideas
 and all ideas are equal in worth because nobody can tell what's going on anyway.
 It's the live and let live, laid back approach to doing intellectual heavy lifting.
 I'm a nihilist, you're a Nazi, you're a Christian, you're something else.
 Hey, no big deal. Let's just hoist a beer and party on.
 Well, I have to defer.
 It's a problem, especially in California where this thing has gone from being a pathology
 to the defining mode of normalcy.
 But it allows stuff like Heaven's Gate.
 It allows Jonestown.
 Nobody ever said to those people, "You're full of shit.
 Don't think like this. This will lead to catastrophe."
 Instead people said, "Hey, cool. See you in the sky."
 And people say, "Well, but now this sounds like you're advocating acrimonious
 and emotionally painful judgment making that will leave some of us disenfranchised
 from the belief in the space people or the presence of great Atlantis
 or something else that's very cherished."
 Yes. Yes.
 We have loosened our girdings sufficiently, folks.
 We are now open-minded enough.
 You don't want to become so open-minded that the wind can whistle between your ears.
 And there are logical razors and rules of evidence that can be brought to bear on any situation.
 So, for instance, our culture is awash in claims of all sorts, religious claims,
 the thousand various religious offerings on the market.
 Then it moves over into medical claims, dietary claims, claims of superior sources of knowledge.
 "I can read the Dead Sea Scrolls. You can't.
 She's talking to the space people. You can't.
 This guy is accessing past lives. You can't."
 There are all these whisperings and intimations of special connection and uniqueness.
 If you are passive in the face of this, I think your intellectual arteries will just fill up with mental cholesterol
 and eventually you'll have the equivalent of a coronary thrombosis at the intellectual level.
 It's very important to hone intuition and logical razors so that reasonable questions can be asked.
 And it may break the mirrored surface of "we're all in it together,"
 the illusion of community maintained by nobody ever criticizing anybody else.
 But this nobody ever criticizing anybody else brings the intellectual enterprise
 and the refinement of human knowledge to a screeching halt.
 The way in which the intellectual enterprise moves forward is by being critiqued,
 criminalized, subjected to tests.
 You've all heard me knock science, and I have many bad things to say about science.
 It has to answer for some of its sins.
 But the great thing about science and the thing which makes it unique in the history of human intellectual endeavors
 is it is a human intellectual enterprise in which you get lots of credit for proving that you're wrong.
 Scientists really respect each other for proving that they are wrong.
 If you have a theory that you've defended for 15 years and then you publish a paper saying,
 "I've been over it again, I've looked at the data again, and you know what, fellow colleagues? I botched it. I was wrong,"
 they promote you for this.
 They say, "This is the essence of intellectual honesty.
 We know you do good work because we see how you trashed your early accomplishments."
 Religion doesn't work like this.
 In the religious domain, you never admit you're wrong.
 You further elaborate the story to save whatever preposterous notion has been exposed,
 and you never deny. You never recant. You never go back.
 And so what you get is error based on error, based on delusion, based on illusion, based on lie,
 based on half-truth, based on supposition, based on somebody thought it would be nice if.
 And it's no wonder that there's not a great deal of spiritual juice in that.
 So I think there are many things to be said about science,
 that it has relied on probability to a great extent and so forth and so on.
 These are technical issues.
 But in our personal lives, it's a wonderful thing to take as a model.
 Always seek, A, the simplest explanation.
 This is called the principle of parsimony, otherwise known as Occam's razor.
 Sounds very fancy.
 All it means is always prefer the simplest explanation.
 Try the simplest explanation first. If it fails,
 complicate it as little as you have to to go to the next level.
 But we live in a culture where the simplest explanation is never accepted.
 Somebody sees a light in the sky.
 Immediately, it's a UFO invasion.
 The possibility that it was a meteorite, a piece of aircraft in trouble,
 something like this, is not entertained.
 And so consequently, people's intellectual lives become incredibly baroque,
 but unanchored in the world of observation and reasonable discourse.
 And God knows the world is so tricky,
 that without rules and razors, you are as lambs led to the slaughter.
 And I'm speaking of the world as we have always found it.
 Add on to that the world based on techniques of mass psychology,
 advertising, political propaganda, image manipulation.
 There are many forces that seek to victimize us.
 And the only way through this is rational analysis of what is being presented.
 It amazes me that this is considered a radical position.
 I mean, this is what used to be called a good liberal education.
 And then somewhere after the 60s,
 when the government decided that universal public education only created
 mobs milling in the streets calling for human rights,
 education ceased to serve the goal of producing an informed citizenry.
 And instead, we took an authoritarian model.
 The purpose of education is to produce unquestioning consumers
 with an alcoholic obsession for work. And so it is.
 But as people who may have had one foot in this system at one point,
 another foot in it at another, I think it behooves us to be alarmed
 and to attempt to recapture our soul, essentially, from the nets of propaganda,
 market management, commodity obsession, money fetishism,
 these various extremely infected means that are spread everywhere.
 [INAUDIBLE]
 Yeah, a birthright to be left alone.
 This is why it was interesting, you know, the debate that went on in the first Clinton administration.
 There is no right to privacy in the Constitution.
 It's something we all talk about and assume.
 In fact, you can't find a strong legal basis for this.
 It needs to be articulated.
 We need a dimension that is free from the potential incursions of those who would manipulate us.
 The Constitution enshrines the right of a person, I believe, to be secure in one's home and possession.
 That's not a strong enough statement to nail down the right of privacy.
 This may be the single greatest right which everyone is being denied.
 Many other people are oppressed in other ways.
 But we are all denied the right of privacy.
 Interestingly, years ago, when I got divorced, at some point in these proceedings,
 you have to file some kind of a court document.
 I guess it's an intent or a declaration to divorce or something.
 Within five days, my mailbox was crowded with invitations to join singles groups.
 And it was very clear to me that people were going over these court records
 and getting the names of guys between ages 30 and 50 who were filing for divorce
 and hitting them before they got home from the courthouse with invitations.
 And it's insidious that we are accessible to this kind of manipulation and seen as victims.
 I mean, here's a tremendously private personal tragedy.
 But for a whole segment of society, it's not a private personal tragedy.
 It's a marketing opportunity.
 You have pain, we have answers.
 Yeah, somebody over here.
 Well, yes, I mean, for example, before drugs were an issue,
 if we take a subset of the population like white college students,
 this was without contest one of the most law-abiding subsets of the population.
 White college students are more law-abiding than white stockbrokers
 or almost any other segment of the population you can name.
 But if you turn cannabis into a Schedule 1 drug, a felony,
 suddenly all of these people who never felt inspired to dissent,
 never felt the heavy hand of the government, are automatically members of a criminal class.
 And what this does is both radicalize the people so persecuted
 and in a feedback loop of paranoia, drive the government then into a frenzy
 of trying to penetrate, understand, and control this minority group.
 The idea that states of mind are matters for legal manipulation,
 it's amazing that that discussion is even taking place in the democracy founded by Thomas Jefferson.
 How does it happen that American conservatism,
 which used to stand for the free market economy and a laissez-faire attitude toward life,
 becomes instead the purveyor of the most draconian and invasive approach to social management ever conceived of?
 And what I'm talking about is the PISS test.
 The idea that any civilization would tolerate that level of invasion into the lives of its citizens,
 and that those who would advocate it would dare to call themselves conservatives.
 In the whole Marxist episode, nobody ever was asked to piss in a cup in the Soviet Union or Mao's China
 to establish their loyalty to the government or the corporation.
 And yet that went down here with barely a murmur.
 Yeah?
 [Audience member] Parents.
 Yes.
 [Audience member] Parents on their kids.
 Yeah, for parents.
 Well, this is a society based on paranoia.
 I can remember in the 50s when we were being dinned with the evils of communism,
 they would tell you, finally they would reach for the most outlandish bummer they could imagine.
 And they said, "You know, in Russia, children are encouraged to report on their parents if they criticize the government."
 Well, my God, now in America, if children report on their parents and the parents are dragged away to prison,
 the mainstream straight people stand up and applaud.
 What a wonderful example of the nuclear family functioning at its maximum best.
 [Audience member] What is the program that's being --
 Oh, no, there are numerous examples of this.
 I don't know what to say about this.
 I despair of right-wing, left-wing political solutions.
 I think everybody is so corrupted by the agenda of capitalism that it's amazing that we have any rights at all left.
 And, you know, thank God for Jefferson and thank God for the Constitution.
 Every time I go to England, it just gives me the absolute willies.
 I mean, these people have no Constitution.
 If you get into some kind of complicated wrangle in England, the old boys club, guys in powdered wigs in locked rooms, decide what happens to you and your fate.
 And, you know, England is not exactly Tajikistan.
 We tend to think of it as a source of democratic ideals.
 But, in fact, in the absence of a written Constitution, it's just what the establishment says the law is, what the establishment says it is.
 Yeah.
 [Audience member] What are you going to do about it?
 I mean, to convince the Heaven's Gate people that what they believe is --
 Well, first of all, let me say I'm a member in good standing of the ACLU.
 And they saved my ass in Los Angeles.
 I don't really see the contradiction.
 We cannot abandon culture completely.
 One could.
 In other words, it's perfectly clear to me that because of psychedelics, if I started eating mushrooms and didn't stop, I would in a day or two have to move up onto the ridge.
 And I would begin to browse on the local flora.
 And in a week or so, discard my clothes.
 And in a year or two, my eyebrows would grow down along my face.
 And I would be like the monk on Cold Mountain.
 I could do that.
 You could do that.
 Once you find psychedelics, there's nothing that stands between you and a complete checkout from your cultural heritage.
 The only cost to you is the complete abandonment of everything you've ever known and loved.
 And if you can give that up, these monkish people, these fuzzy people, these people who hang out with dragons in the clouds, you could become one of them.
 Most spiritual seekers drive whatever spiritual vehicle they've rented with their foot on the gas pedal.
 Once you get to psychedelics, you begin asking where is the break?
 Because you have now the power to transform yourself.
 If the search was for power, you found it.
 Now, but you see, searching for answers is the position of a non-Xin Nu.
 It's the journey of the fool.
 What I assume all of you people have to grapple with in different degrees is the fact that by chance or design or good fortune, you have found the answer.
 Seeking is over with in this room.
 But what you have to do now is a much more demanding and grown up thing.
 You have to face the answer and you have to take the measure of yourself against the answer.
 You said you wanted to ascend into the dragon realms.
 You said you wanted these spiritual realities to become vivid for you.
 But now there's nothing between you and it except the decision to make it happen.
 And where do you come down on that?
 So when I push things like extra environmentalism and critique of culture and all that, I mean it in a very wussed out sort of way.
 If I really meant it, I wouldn't be here saying it.
 I'd just let you all figure it out yourself and I would go off and be a legend and you could follow me into it if you wanted.
 I love things about the culture, and I define this loving of things about the culture as a kind of weakness.
 I'm not proud of the fact that the highest I can get is to teach at Esalen.
 I'm not at all proud of the fact that that seems to be where I top out.
 Had I greater courage, I would go further.
 But I don't.
 So I'm hoping that you people, my graduate students as it were, will sacrifice yourselves on the pyre of going further and report back.
 The thing is a paradox.
 And you either live with the paradox, I think, and that contains a certain amount of hypocrisy.
 And hypocrisy was a word we used earlier.
 Or you become so individuated that from the point of view of everybody else, you're mad.
 And I've been that too.
 And it's very hard to do it and remain in society.
 I don't think I could have done it.
 My episodes of madness occurred, thank God, 700 miles up a jungle river in Baboon, Asholia.
 But had it happened in Manhattan or something like that, it would have quickly set up ripples that would have inexorably complicated and made my life much more difficult.
 What do you think -- I read a quote once from Oscar Wilde saying that your first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.
 And sometimes I deal with this paradox.
 I always go back to that quote.
 I don't know what that means.
 I know.
 It's an interesting quote.
 It meant something to him completely different than what it must mean to us.
 And I always kind of refer to that whenever I feel like I'm a hypocrite.
 Well, I'll tell you a little boring little secret about how I got to be who I am.
 I grew up in a town in western Colorado where if you read Time magazine, you were suspect of being some kind of left-wing intellectual.
 I mean, this was -- this was podunk.
 And as I grew up there, I became aware of all these extremely strongly expressed cultural values.
 And most of them were hostile to something.
 Either Jews were bad or black people are bad or people who didn't work were bad or people who made messy paintings were bad.
 All of these things were bad.
 And one day it occurred to me, I will take the position that all these things are good.
 These things are good.
 Abstract expressionism, Jews, black people, science, good, good, good, good.
 And everybody said, there's something wrong with this kid.
 And I didn't understand my own position.
 I mean, I would look at a Pollock and think, you know, it is messy.
 It may be horseshit, but we must never admit that.
 We must defend that.
 We must defend the genius of Pollock unto death because we don't understand it.
 And by taking that position, slowly I actually did understand some of these things and make them my own.
 And I discovered that that was the path to wisdom, a total rejection of my own -- of the culture I came up with.
 Well, now, I don't know how that would work if you were born of Jewish parents in New York who were members of the Communist Party
 and always took you to wonderful art exhibitions and made sure you got to Carnegie.
 If you rejected all that, you'd become a jerk like the people around me in that small Colorado town.
 So this is not a fail-safe prescription.
 But in my case, by an embracing of everything artificial and antithetical and opposed by and sneered at by the people around me,
 I made my way to, you know, real depth, real worth, real culture.
 Things not that I assimilated these things, but at least I came to live in the light of them.
 It's a great puzzle. I mean, all of you who have children, and I have two, know that we are alienated intellectuals.
 I mean, broadly speaking, this is what we are. We are alienated intellectuals.
 And so we bitch about the government and we critique the monetary system and so forth and so on.
 Well, then you see your children on the brink of reason and you say, you know, "Geez, my alienation has brought me alienation."
 But I can't let the kids grow up to be Marx, to be pawns of the market economy and the propaganda machine,
 people scratching their heads trying to figure out whether they're Republicans or Democrats.
 I can't put that on my children. And so then you say, "Well, okay, then they must join in the alienation.
 They must be taken out of the culture as we were taken out of the culture."
 And this is a momentous decision because this act of separating from the culture is unambiguously alienating.
 And yet it seems to be the only way to find the self. Otherwise, you never contact the self.
 You contact a commodified cartoon of the self that finds meaning in outboard motors and basketball and, you know, all this other crap that's peddled as reality.
 So our relationship to our culture, I think, is a very uncomfortable one.
 And of course, psychedelics exacerbate this. And you know, I think, if you have children, that it's one thing to talk alienation.
 But once they get to the place where they're asking to take LSD or to take psilocybin, then, you know, Kafka said a wonderful thing.
 I think it's in The Penal Colony. He said, "You can choose to be free, but it's the last choice you'll ever make."
 And, you know, that's sort of the dilemma in which we find ourselves.
 Wouldn't it fulfill all of our personal mythologies if I could now detail a long history of persecution nobly born by me?
 But the truth is, they don't give a shit.
 They are so confident of their control that I think when, if I appear on their screen at all, they just say, "This is some egghead, some spouting character who talks to a bunch of rich people in small rooms, and we don't care."
 I have a feeling there's something which I call the 5% rule, which is, as long as any school of dissent remains below 5% of the population, no money is budgeted to destroy it.
 It's just, they have learned about noise in the social circuitry, and they just say, "Yeah, these people, they gripe."
 We are held up as an example of what a free society this is.
 You say, "You think we have a controlled society? You think we tell people what to say?"
 Go down to Esalen and hear what Terence McKenna is saying.
 "We tolerate this. What clearer proof do you need that we are magnanimous, generous, open-hearted, and liberal? We tolerate this kind of thing."
 I think, of course, that they do not understand the nature of the game, but it's a good thing, because if the game is played on their terms, we lose.
 What they don't understand is the power of memes, and the fact that psychedelics are a touchstone of creativity, and creativity can always provide breakouts from any situation, no matter how confined.
 Also, they have a horrifying fascination with us, because they, as the managers of society, probably know more about its internal contradictions, and its failings, and its shortcomings than we do.
 The information we have available to us is the declassified, downloaded, cleaned-up stuff.
 Recently, I was in London, and the conference was at the ICA, which is down near Buckingham Palace, and so the hotel was on Vincent Square.
 It was about a 20-minute walk from Vincent Square down to the ICA, and it's right through Whitehall.
 It's where all the intelligence agencies and the Ministry of Defense and all this.
 And we would stay late at the ICA, and walking back at 2 in the morning, the lights in Whitehall are burning at 2 in the morning.
 The lights at the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Economic Planning are on at 2 in the morning.
 Why? Because people are sweating blood in those buildings.
 They are working around the clock to keep the entire system.
 Look at these rainforest clearing statistics. Look at this oil slick. Look at this. This is costing us money, gentlemen.
 What about this? And the answer is, you can manage some of the future, some of the time.
 And you can manage all of the future, some of the time. But you can't manage all of the future, all of the time.
 It keeps breaking loose in the most unexpected fashion.
 The Internet is a perfect example. Here was a privileged instrument of the intelligence community and the scientific elite that served it.
 Ultra-high security, totally out of the reach of the common man.
 And meanwhile, over at Raytheon, they're trying to, this was years ago, they were trying to develop a chip to guide a heat-seeking missile for the Navy.
 And they had certain design specifications which had to be met.
 And the project had ground on for a couple of years, and they couldn't make this chip meet the specifications.
 Finally the project was cancelled. The chip is thrown in the trash.
 And then some engineer digs it out, and he says, "You know what we could do with this?
 We can't hit a plane in flight with a missile with this thing, but you know what we can do with it?
 We could make a little desktop computer with this."
 And these guys said, "Why in the hell would we want to do that?
 We have enormous computers. We have computers the size of a city block.
 Why would we want to do that?"
 They say, "No, no, you don't understand. Not for us. We have the god-like technology.
 It's a commercial thing. We can sell it to the Marx, and they can word process with it or something."
 And so it came to be. But then they didn't understand that these things, it's a pretty harmless thing,
 a computer sitting on a desktop with Word running on it.
 But you sell 20 million of them, and before you realize, my God, they can all be connected together.
 And then people just plug them in, and an entirely new beast springs into being,
 a technology so powerful that the head of the CIA 10 years ago didn't have that kind of access to information,
 that kind of access to real-time imaging, that kind of access to econometric data, and that sort of thing.
 And so it escaped.
 And so while they were watching various, while they were keeping us from building nuclear weapons,
 they seemed to do that rather well. No terrorist has ever set off a thermonuclear device so far as we know.
 So they were watching from the ramparts for that, because it was something they could understand.
 This thing came rushing in the back door, and now the cat is out of the bag.
 Yeah, Scott?
 I'm sure that that's true. I'm sure that that's true.
 You know, the fact that the IRS is running on 20-year-old computers, I mean, the government is just being left behind.
 And the world corporate state doesn't care. It finds governments a huge and boring nuisance.
 You know, in the same way that after the Thirty Years' War, basically there was an enormous social shift in Europe,
 before the Thirty Years' War, Europe was ruled by popes and kings.
 After the Thirty Years' War, it was ruled by parliaments and peoples. I mean, that's a generalization, but true.
 Well, now the nation state is being put out to pasture.
 It's being told, as the church was told in the 17th century, "You care for the poor.
 You take care of the highways. You bury the dead, and you educate the children.
 But all the stuff which makes money, we, the new streamlined form of social organization,
 will take care of the money-making enterprise, and your job is to keep the roads cleared and the dead out of sight."
 And so this is happening.
 When I understood this, it was like a bolt of lightning.
 When Jesse Helms stood up on the floor of the U.S. Senate and called for the assassination of the American president,
 I realized this has become a circus. These people are yahoos.
 When was the last time a governor of the World Bank threatened the life of an American president?
 When was the last time that someone who sits on the board of directors of the IMF felt the need to physically threaten the life of a president?
 No, it doesn't happen. Real power doesn't act that way.
 Only pseudo-power, yahoo power, thug power acts that way.
 And so government has become largely irrelevant.
 And I don't know whether this is good or bad. It certainly is complex.
 War was an instrument of national policy for governments.
 War is not an instrument of policy for corporations. They hate war.
 But governments kept cultures in a deep freeze.
 We spend a lot of time lamenting the destruction of Aboriginal cultures, this rainforest tribe, that Central Mexican language group, so forth and so on.
 But while we're lamenting the loss of these exotic cultures, notice that your culture is being erased.
 If you were raised in a close-knit Jewish family, if you were raised in a small town in the Midwest, those cultures are gone.
 For most people. We have all been given mall culture and commodification of values.
 It isn't only happening to the Huítótó and the Huíchól. It's happening everywhere.
 And this uniformitarianism of culture is entirely for the convenience of market economy.
 If you can get everyone drinking the same brand of vodka, it's much easier to sell and market vodka than if you have to appeal to ethnicity and local tastes and so forth and so on.
 So everyone, everything is being leveled, dumbed down, and subjected to a hideous homogenization process.
 No, I think people, I mean, this leads to the brink of the question about paranoia and conspiracy theory.
 I am very puzzled by the popularity of conspiracy theory. It seems to me it must just indicate a paranoid tendency in the population.
 Because what I see is the more you aspire to control, the more frustrated and maddened you must be by the situation.
 So, you know, an example would be the Communist Party of the USSR.
 Infinite power to penetrate the lives of people, to manipulate media images.
 You have total control of the newspapers, total control of TV, total control, total control, and then the top guy dumps the whole thing.
 So I think that no one is in charge and that this is a very good thing because it allows the internal dynamic of the situation to express itself.
 Everybody who wants to control the situation is fighting a losing battle.
 And if you bank with chaos, your stock just keeps growing exponentially.
 Chaos is spreading. It's the place to put your bets.
 All efforts to ideologically or economically or any other way channel the global process seems to meet with incredible frustration.
 Nobody is in charge.
 The so-called great successful conspiracies of history are so successful they don't even think of themselves as conspiracies.
 If you've been running a given piece of turf for five or six hundred years, you don't run around in conspiratorial mode.
 You stride boldly across the landscape. It's yours. You own it. You think. You suppose.
 Oh, you mean if only Hitler were alive in Argentina calling the shots, it would all make so much more sense.
 That would explain things in the absence of an overarching demon like that.
 It's a little hard to explain things. I don't know. I don't feel this need for intellectual closure.
 I don't see why things should make sense. They never have.
 And they're always in process of formation.
 And as soon as any given goal or benchmark is achieved, it's abandoned and redefined in favor of something else.
 No, I think conspiracy theory is a very disempowering thing.
 Because what it says is you can't control the world or it's more difficult to control the world than you think it is.
 Not so. I've had a very different experience.
 My experience with the corridors of power, if you want to put it that way, is that there are an immense number of clueless people.
 It's almost like McKenna's law. It's that as you advance in social hierarchy, the percentage of smart people does not increase.
 So, you know, we could now let's move to a cabinet meeting of the Clinton administration.
 There are as many stupid people, truly moronic people sitting in that room as there are sitting in this room.
 It doesn't seem to make any difference because people don't find their seats according to intellectual or social merit.
 Every human situation is bedeviled by morons.
 No matter how high you rise, you're surrounded by fools.
 And you're lucky if you're not one of them. I mean, that's the basic thing to try and guard against.
 And the other thing is at the at the top, it's remarkably empty.
 You know, you think if you've never been there, that toward the top of the control pyramid,
 there must be many people standing in line, eager to take the helm, eager to make big decisions and establish their reputations and do whatever they do.
 Instead, what you find is fear as you go up the hierarchy.
 My God, if I make this decision and it goes wrong, I will lose my chairmanship or I will lose my something or other.
 So as you approach these enormously powerful levers for manipulating society, everybody's holding their hands behind their back.
 They don't want their fingerprints on the lever because they know, you know, there could be war crimes trials if you stumble and get it wrong.
 You may have thought you were on a golden crusade.
 Suddenly you're looking at 12 guys in powdered wigs who think you're a jerk and they're going to hang you for the stunt you pulled.
 So it's like that. I used to think it was not true that all spiritual work began with one self.
 You know, I felt like that was a way of disempowering people and saying, you know, if you wait until you're an avatar,
 you'll never join the people rioting in the street.
 And I used to say, you know, if you see people rioting, you have a moral obligation to join.
 You don't even have to know what it's about.
 The people rioting is a sufficient imperative to political action to be there.
 Well, I'm not 25 anymore.
 That provided a lot of fun.
 But I now think, you know, you do not make a a unflawed contribution unless you have first gotten your ducks somewhat in order.
 I'm not saying you have to be able to walk on water, but you have to have at least considered your own life and your values and that sort of thing.
 You know, it's pretty simple, the ethical life.
 It's just demanding. Many of you have heard me say this.
 This is this is my this is father McKenna talking.
 The moral life does not consist of wheatgrass diet or affirmation or any of that.
 The moral life is, unless you're at Esalen, you should clothe the naked.
 You should feed the hungry.
 Comfort the afflicted.
 Bury the dead.
 And there are a couple others obvious things to be done.
 It's not about how many prostrations you do or what lineage you've associated yourself with or how much cholesterol is in your diet.
 And somehow we have confused the ethical and moral dimension with the dimension of physical practices.
 Probably because we have been too infected by the means of tired Asian religions that long ago gave up moral philosophy in favor of rotational activity because the social problems of Asia are overwhelming.
 That's a response to an overwhelming human tragedy. The quietism of Asian religion, I think.
 Yeah.
 I mean, I'm exaggerating. There's still movement from that to this.
 Well, and it's flawed is what you're saying.
 Yeah, I agree.
 I mean, the person helped by that person is still advanced, but the whole system is not served by misguided do-gooderism or the large noblesse oblige is an insulting attitude to take.
 Because, you know, the real nature of the human condition is that we're all in it together.
 This is one of the reasons why I am so hostile to all forms of spiritual hierarchy.
 I have never seen a truly superior person.
 I don't believe. And if I have, they were so humble and self-effacing that they never would have claimed that superiority is their own.
 If somebody tells you they're a superior person, my God, they're automatically to be taken off the active list.
 That alone screws the pooch right there.
 And, you know, and it's tremendously disempowering.
 The mushroom said to me once, and I said it to many of you many times, it said, for one human being to seek enlightenment from another is like a grain of sand on the beach seeking enlightenment from another.
 Don't you get it? It's the same flesh.
 It's the same flesh.
 Nobody knows anything you don't know. And even if they do, it's not your knowledge.
 So what good is it doing you?
 The idea that it's OK for you not to understand mathematics or not to play the violin because somebody else does it very well is a complete cop out.
 You will be held responsible for what you know and what you can do.
 And using the excuse that you lived in the same world with Yasha Heifetz is not going to get you off the hook of not knowing how to play the violin.
 I say this as someone who does not play the violin.
 It's fun to take responsibility.
 It's fun to test the waters.
 The hardest thing to put across to oneself and to other people is that the universe is a more friendly place than we have been told.
 Paranoia, culture is institutionalized paranoia.
 And it's very hard to decondition oneself from this.
 No matter how deconditioned you may think you are, there is more and more work to be done.
 And I think the essence of Taoism and why its roots in nature are so powerful is because what Taoism is saying is if you will quiet your mind and if you will pay attention,
 you will discover that you are supported and cared for by the dynamic of the universe.
 This should be obvious by virtue of the fact that you're even alive.
 I mean, how unlikely is your existence?
 I put it to you, pretty unlikely.
 And yet, here you are.
 Well, do you just think it was the greatest series of well-rolled dice in history?
 That's silly.
 That's ridiculous.
 Probability would never have delivered us to this room this afternoon.
 Probability sculpted by loving intent has delivered us to this room.
 This afternoon.
 Once you can sense that living intent and make it an object of familiarity, you probably -- that is the antidote to cultural paranoia and to the acceptance of your identity through imposed definitions by other people.
 And of course, psychedelics figure in here because they dissolve more dramatically and more effectively than anything else the cultural and linguistic and habitual assumptions that are masking that presence of Tao.
 You know, it really is true.
 As the Bible says, you must become as a little child.
 That means you must become pre-culture.
 You must recover who you were before the engines of culture went to work on you and abused you and made you afraid and dumbed you down and distorted your values and so forth and so on.
 Yeah.
 See, I think what's happened is that the top of the culture, it's profoundly intellectually bankrupt.
 There is no plan except to keep peddling stuff basically until the forests are gone and the oceans polluted.
 And this is not malevolent.
 It's not malevolent.
 It's simply they are clueless.
 They have run out of steam.
 And so the answer is to try and keep the game going as long as possible with daytime TV, with casino gambling, with lotteries, with endless distractions, with pop culture fads, with cults of celebrity, with spectacular trials and gory mass murders and endless circuses.
 While the people at the top are saying, you know, sooner or later, the shit is going to hit the fan.
 Sooner or later, the dam will burst.
 And they say, well, let's make sure it's later, not sooner, because I've got two kids at the Sorbonne.
 I'm paying off a Mercedes and I need to get this taken care of before it all falls apart.
 So in the absence of any cultural plan imposed from the top, this strange dynamic is happening.
 This has happened before in cultural history, where some huge enterprise like Christianity or patriarchy or something like that, after playing, running its games for millennia, it just runs out of steam.
 And often there's nothing to rush in and fill the vacuum, nothing that is consciously engineered to do that.
 And so then in those situations, an actual creative bifurcation can take place, because what is about to happen is not in the hands of human managers.
 It lies deeper in the dynamics of the whole system.
 And we all feel, I think, this sense of excitement and the approach of the unimaginably new.
 And we don't know whether it's the aliens coming to pull our chestnuts out of the fire or virtual reality or a new drug or a new style of sexual behaving or star flight.
 We don't know what it is, but we can feel that it will transcend the categories of our managers.
 And they and we will then have to make sense of whatever this new reality is.
 And it terrifies some people, it liberates others. It's the same reality.
 You know, Stephen Vincent Bonnet says something about at the end of John Brown's body, he says,
 "When the prophets of strange religions ball out their bizarre despair, do not join them on the mountain. Say only then, 'It is here.'
 It is here, because it is here."
 I mean, that was 1927 when he wrote that.
 And he spoke then of technology as our humble servant, already half a god.
 And that was in 1927. You can imagine then what that technology is today.
 Yeah, Mike?
 [inaudible]
 A manager class. I'd rather talk about a point in history where there is no more commodities.
 Yes, I don't think there will be a manager class. A manager class, you manage toward ideology.
 If we could transcend ideology, the way to manage society, I think, would be self-evident.
 The problem is trying to force it into the service of some kind of ideological vision.
 And then, of course, it becomes intractable, because no ideological vision we've ever had has been true to our human.
 You know, the Christian version of what human beings are, the Nazi version, the Marxist version, the secular market-oriented version,
 these all somehow insult various parts of our humanness.
 And so when an attempt is made to push us into these things, it doesn't work.
 And you get instead war anxiety and Q forces swamp the social system.
 I think the managing of society would be fairly simple in the absence of ideology.
 But we are addicted to ideology, because somewhere along the line we've gotten the idea that you can't understand the world without an ideology,
 when in fact ideologies are incredible impediments.
 No more bosses.
 Well, I suppose as long as we are disparate entities, there will be hierarchies of control.
 That seems obvious.
 But it seems as though we are playing with the idea that we may not be disparate entities,
 or that we may be only provisionally disparate entities.
 You know, we are a peculiar creature, somewhat, and we human beings, as a mass phenomenon, we're somewhat like a slime mold.
 We have a life cycle where part of our life cycle we appear to be completely separate individuals.
 But apparently, if you view our development over the past few centuries,
 we're entering into some aggregation phase, triggered by pheromones spread through technology.
 And we are beginning to create some kind of a superorganism.
 And the fear of some people is that once inside this superorganism,
 we will be forced into a permanent status as a sublevel of the hierarchy.
 In other words, you will have to give up your individuality,
 and you will just become a kind of liver cell or brain cell or something in this organism.
 But I don't think this is the case.
 I think we have the unique ability to combine these two modes of existence.
 This is why we have this notion of society and the private reality of the individual.
 And probably, in the domain of society, there will always be forms of, I don't want to say control,
 but management of the distribution of commodity.
 But the idea, I think, is to empower this other dimension,
 to spend as much time as possible in the individual free-swimming, free-agent mode.
 In other words, not to see membership in society as a goal and value to be conserved,
 but to see it as a necessary evil.
 We need social organization, but in minimal doses.
 And when we go on a bender of addiction to social normative behaviors,
 then you get a psychic epidemic like National Socialism,
 where people voluntarily abandon their individuality to act in concert with some kind of mass impulse.
 This is extremely evolutionarily retrograde.
 It's not what we want to do.
 So I guess what I'm pleading for is an enlightened form of alienation,
 and not simply an emotionally driven alienation, but a strategically driven alienation.
 See, alienation can be used not to create neurosis, but to attain freedom.
 Creative alienation.
 Alienation that embraces itself as the source of inspiration.
 Nobody ever said it was going to be comfortable to be a human being
 and to ride one of these bipedal bodies from the cradle to the grave.
 I mean, it's an uncomfortable, but I maintain manageable, situation.
 But you have to have the lights on.
 You have to have your emotional responses in order, your intellectual responses in order.
 You have to have garnered some sense of how we got to this situation,
 and you have to have some sense of the tools available to transform it.
 Yeah.
 [inaudible]
 Well, it's certainly true that the human classroom is the most untransformed portion of society over the past 200 years.
 I mean, we basically still pass on our cultural values to our children the way it was done 200 or 300 years ago.
 This may be changing.
 Again, I don't mean to make the Internet the panacea of all problems,
 but it seems to me here is a problem that the Internet can address,
 and you don't have to be a technocrat to see how it has enormous power,
 because education is a process on one level of putting correct information in front of people.
 And in the present form of education, the great choke point is the limitations of human teachers,
 who, while as finely and nobly motivated as they are,
 inevitably they pass on their own limitations to their students.
 In the presence of the Internet, this is somewhat mitigated,
 and there's a great leveling going on in the educational process.
 The quality of information available to all of us, if we learn how to make our way to it,
 is orders of magnitude more dependable than it was a generation ago.
 I mean, we have basically traded in cultural illusions for hard facts.
 Did you want to say something else?
 Well, would you discuss the...
 Well, McLuhan talked about this.
 He talked about what he called electronic feudalism,
 and he said that the rise of electronic media would bring a retribalization of culture
 and that the nation-state would completely disappear.
 And I think this is happening.
 It won't disappear completely, but in the metaphor I made a few minutes ago,
 it will sort of take on the role of the church.
 It's largely irrelevant.
 Corporations now call the shots.
 The print, you see, has what are called hidden biases,
 and it allows and in fact makes inevitable certain kinds of ideas
 that once you get outside the domain of print conditioning,
 these ideas appear, if not absurd, then at least simply provisional.
 And what I'm thinking of is ideas such as the idea that all men--apologies to women--
 but all men are created equal.
 This is a face of print-created society.
 There's absolutely no evidence that this is true.
 In fact, there's considerable evidence to the contrary.
 But the argument against not believing it is that if we don't believe this,
 we can't have social justice.
 So we must embrace an obviously preposterous idea in order to achieve social justice.
 Why is this preposterous idea so attractive?
 Well, it's because print is linear and uniform.
 Every lowercase e looks like every other lowercase e.
 Therefore, if the world of print is made out of these interchangeable
 and equally weighted entities, so must be the society that practices print culture.
 So we get the idea of one man, one vote.
 Another example, a different example, is assembly of objects out of interchangeable parts.
 Before print, if someone made an object, it was a unique object.
 The idea of an object, let's say a water wheel or something like that,
 where if it broke down, you got in touch with the company and they sent the part,
 and you then took out the bad part, put in the good part, and the pump merrily proceeds.
 That's a print-created idea, interchangeable parts.
 And so we begin to see that the conventions of the printer's shop
 become the conventions of an entire society,
 and how it does its politics and how it assembles its commodities
 are all dictated by the invisible assumptions of a form of media
 where nobody really looked at its potential effects before it was put in place.
 McLuhan saw that this kind of rational, linear, compartmentalized, uniformitarian culture
 would be completely broken up by electronics, and so it has come to pass.
 The great forms of print media are what are called one-to-many.
 A publisher publishes a book, and many people read it.
 These one-to-many or top-down forms of media are perfect for controlling large numbers of people.
 You have the idea of the ministry of truth,
 where truth is something dispensed by governments and received with grateful, upturned faces
 by bewildered citizenry that would otherwise apparently have no access to truth.
 This is madness talking.
 The new electronic media are what's called any-to-any.
 If I want to speak to you or I want to send email to you, that can be done.
 If you and I want to send email to 500 people, that can be done.
 Any-to-any communication is anti-hierarchical.
 There's no assumption of expertise or power or anything else
 as you ascend the pyramid of information transfer and dispersal.
 And so it's almost like the Wizard of Oz effect.
 Suddenly people say, "You know, you're not all powerful.
 You're not the wizard.
 You're a fat man in a stained overcoat pulling levers behind the scenes."
 And then the whole illusion drops away,
 the illusion of leaders, of privileged ideologies, of special forms of understanding.
 This is resisted by some people, usually control freaks,
 because they say, "Well, in the absence of these illusions, you would have chaos."
 Yes, indeed. Indeed.
 The mother of all progress, the source of all innovation and creativity,
 the wind that blows the ship of paradigm shift, chaos.
 And the idea somehow that the human mind should interpose itself between society
 and this expression of chaos is just an illusion of control freaks.
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