OmniBus 2012 - Who Are We

Well, but when a social movement is only the sum total of individual attitudes,

for example, the 60s in the U.S.,

what made that so crazy was the government wanted to fight a war

which the people didn't want.

So it was a moment where the government really wanted the people

to pull together and follow it down this certain path.

And instead, the children of the war planners were manufacturing LSD

and giving it out at college.

And they said, and that just enraged them

because it eroded this consensus that they were trying to build.

A democratic consensus for war is as ugly as a Nazi consensus for war.

I mean, you get people in stadiums chanting death

to the Indians.

That's an ugly sight, no matter who the enemy is

and no matter who the people doing the chanting are.

And for that kind of mass-mindedness where people are actually ready to die

for some bullshit trip they can't even understand,

you have to have a kind of mass hysteria.

And psychedelics cause people to die.

And that's what caused people to die.

I mean, like, take Vietnam, for example.

The assault wave put soldiers...

Vietnam.

You want to go kill some brown people

and then die in a ditch with your brain shot out

and you're 24 years old?

Does that sound like fun?

While attacking a huge Viet Cong installation.

No, but if you listen to enough political demagoguery,

it sounds like you'll be a man

and you'll, you know, it's insane.

This is the force of 20th century man.

There are all kinds of situations

in which the goals of society do not serve the individual.

This is something we talked about on the first day

and it's a funny message to give anywhere in the world now

and maybe even slightly odder in South Africa

because there's so much stress here on cultural identity

and everybody wants to be a man.

Everybody wants to think they're a tribe.

The Afrikaners, everybody.

But culture is not your friend.

Culture is...

It's like a Masonic order lurking around

that wants to induct you into a bunch of weird ceremonies

that you may not really be comfortable with.

You know, I think when you get to be approximately my age

and maybe some people get there sooner than I did,

you begin...

You begin to realize all this.

That so much of social existence is an inconvenient con

and an intrusion on your identity and your freedom

and then you just say,

well, I'm not going to do it anymore.

I may not even work as hard as you want me to

and I'm certainly not going to fight your wars

and I'm not going to design your war machine

and I'm not going to joyfully pay your taxes.

And I'm not going to affirm your community values.

Piss on it, you know.

Con 20-year-olds.

But I've been through it.

I've had it.

I've been around the block too many times

to once again be led into the alley

by the government and the church to be beat up on.

I've been lenient.

And the great thing about the youth culture

is I think they're figuring this out

without putting in 30 years in the corporation.

The army, the university and all that other bunkum.

It's baloney.

And, you know, we are very uncomfortable.

I mean, yes, we have Mercedes and we have jacuzzis

and we have this, but is it worth it?

Does it make you feel, you know,

can you face yourself in the mirror?

So, you know, they want your life

and they pay.

In garbage.

They have no other medium of exchange to pay in.

All they can give you is stuff.

All they can do is appeal to your object fetishism.

And, of course, it is completely unsatisfying.

The number of suicides, divorces, so forth and so on

are testament to the fact

that that cultural style is completely bankrupt.

One thing we need to do,

is by strongly rejecting it,

you know, I was thinking,

I don't know if I said this to you,

I can't remember what I think in my room

and what I say to you guys,

but I was thinking this thing recently somewhere

about how the smarter you are,

the funnier it seems.

That, you know,

it's almost an index of intelligence.

Intelligence.

The level of hilarity you perceive in the situation.

People who have the right idea

can hardly keep from giggling aloud

as they walk around doing their daily business.

And I think if you correctly assimilate the time wave,

you will laugh aloud.

You know, you will laugh aloud.

Just as Oscar Wilde said,

any person with...

Oscar Wilde said you'd have to have a heart of stone

to not have laughed aloud

when you heard of the death of Little Nell.

Little Nell was a character in a Dickens novel

and was being followed very avidly in America.

It was being serialized in newspapers.

And Dickens gave Little Nell pneumonia

and then she hovered at the brink of death

for weeks and weeks.

And when the packet ships would arrive in Boston

with the next installment,

people would come down onto the docks

to get the news on Little Nell.

It was sort of the first daytime TV show type phenomena.

And then Oscar...

And then she died.

And Oscar Wilde said you would have to have a heart of stone

to not have laughed aloud

when told of the death of Little Nell.

It's a kind of...

It's a very profound...

Not joke, but pun of some sort.

And we are very profound puns.

I mean, we are puns in matter.

The condition of being alive

is somehow to be...

the Word made flesh.

I mean, we are the Word made flesh

and hence under the control of syntax, presumably,

and hence subject to being puns

and to carrying...

different levels of meaning in all situations.

And the only proper response to that

is a small smile.

You know, people who take life seriously, I think,

are going to find it slipping through their fingers

in a very maddening fashion.

It's a joke, right?

Right.

You see, people say, well,

but the world is in a terrible...

situation.

Well, it is and it isn't.

I mean, and in the first place,

what can you do about it?

One thing that really impresses me

is how...

immune to noticing change people are.

There has been enormous change

in this world in the last ten years.

The whole Soviet Union thing,

which basically was the threat of...

thermonuclear war on every man, woman, and child

on the planet.

I grew up with it.

We thought we would live with it to eternity.

It disappeared,

and nobody basically even gave a shit

or could bother to write an article

analyzing what happened.

You people have an amazing capacity

for being sanguine.

I mean, the number of people who have told me,

well, you know, nothing's really changed.

It's all been sort of...

Really?

Great!

If you can pull this kind of stuff off

and walk around telling yourself

nothing has really changed,

that's pretty good protection

against panic and hysteria, I would think.

But if every society could change

as much as you have in the past ten years

and walk around telling visitors,

well, you know, it's really business as usual.

They just sort of twiddle the players.

An astonishing assertion.

And I have Russian friends who come and visit me

and I want to know about Yeltsin and Zhirinovsky

and this and that.

And they say, well, you know,

it's just really hasn't changed much.

Same old, same old.

Amazing.

I saw graffiti once on a wall in Colombia

and it said it had a picture of the mushroom

and it said,

in Spanish,

without this, you are not yourself.

You know, accepting that idea

would change our relationship

to the whole question of drugs

because we're told, you know,

un-intoxicated, un-stoned,

as you stand here,

you are somehow the beloved of the almighty.

Loaded, you are somehow the scourge of the earth.

Well, this would play with those categories.

And give us a different relationship

to what we call intoxication.

We're, over time, it's fascinating.

On the other hand,

we have days of this ahead of us.

And I'm usually available in the bar

in the evenings and the mornings.

Thank you for your attention to all of this.

Thank you.

So just keep telling yourself,

same old, same old,

as the internet rises,

borders are erased,

philosophies disappear,

whole new races of people are empowered,

and on and on and on.

And everybody sing.