Program Notes
Guest speaker: Dale Pendell
In his 2006 Palenque Norte lecture at Burning Man, Dale Pendell introduced the concept of Horizon Anarchism, and we are fortunate to be able to present this talk in its entirity in this edition of the Psychedelic Salon. If you think you know everyting there is to know about anarchism, you owe it to yourself to hear Dale’s talk about this interesting new approach. One of my favorite soundbites is “Isolation is one of the keys of state power. So it is very important for us to get together and have fun.”
Photo (at right) taken at Burning Man 2006 by Lorenzo
Dale Pendell’s new book, Inspired Madness: The Gifts of Burning Man is now available in your local bookstore and in Lorenzo’s Amazon store.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
Well, I hope you haven’t given up on me getting these podcasts out more frequently.
00:00:28 ►
I can assure you that it isn’t because I don’t have the best of intentions.
00:00:33 ►
Last Wednesday, when I got back from a trip to the Seattle area,
00:00:37 ►
I was even more charged up than when I returned home from Burning Man this year.
00:00:41 ►
But by Thursday morning, I was sick in bed with a cold that I
00:00:45 ►
must have picked up on the plane ride home. And to be honest, I should probably still be in bed
00:00:50 ►
right now. But I think if I don’t get this out today, I’ll probably get even sicker just worrying
00:00:56 ►
about it. And one of the reasons I say that is a week ago Saturday night at the Oracle Gathering
00:01:02 ►
in Seattle, several people came up to me and asked why I’ve taken so long to get Dale Pendle’s Burning Man Talk podcast.
00:01:10 ►
So I promised them I’d get it out as soon as I returned home,
00:01:13 ►
and I don’t want them to think that I didn’t mean it when I said I’d podcast it right away.
00:01:19 ►
For those of you who don’t yet know Dale Pendle,
00:01:22 ►
I’m not sure where to start because he is truly a renaissance man.
00:01:27 ►
Among other things, Dale is a poet, a software engineer, and a long-time student of entheobotany.
00:01:33 ►
And for those of you who have been around the tribe for a while, you most likely know him from some of the books he’s written about entheogens.
00:01:41 ►
That’s psychedelic medicines for those of you who aren’t yet familiar with the word.
00:01:46 ►
And right now, by the way, you can pre-order a new book that Dale has coming out about Burning Man.
00:01:52 ►
It’s titled Inspired Madness, The Gifts of Burning Man.
00:01:56 ►
And I believe it comes out in about four weeks.
00:02:00 ►
Already it’s climbing up the Amazon charts, so you might want to get your order in soon
00:02:05 ►
just to be sure that you get a first edition of what I expect is going to eventually become
00:02:10 ►
a Burning Man classic.
00:02:12 ►
Now, I know that many of you are completely turned off by any talk that even smacks a
00:02:18 ►
little bit about politics, and I completely understand.
00:02:21 ►
While I don’t mean in any way to diminish the hard work that some of you more politically inclined salonners are doing,
00:02:29 ►
I have to admit that in a way it seems like we’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
00:02:35 ►
After all, it’s the culture that has to change.
00:02:38 ►
Then the system will change with it.
00:02:40 ►
But I do believe that it’s important work you’re doing,
00:02:42 ►
if for no other reason than to be fighting a rearguard action
00:02:46 ►
to keep the fascists off our backs while we evolve this new psychedelic culture.
00:02:51 ►
That said, just because the title of Dale’s talk is Horizon Anarchism,
00:02:56 ►
it doesn’t mean that this podcast is about politics.
00:03:00 ►
In fact, it seems to me that anarchism is sort of the anti-gravity of politics.
00:03:06 ►
And Dale’s concept of horizon anarchism is, at least for me, a refreshing new way to look at the subject.
00:03:13 ►
After all, two of my favorite things, the Internet and Burning Man, are very close to functioning anarchies themselves.
00:03:22 ►
So, even if you’re normally turned off by talk about the sad state of affairs
00:03:27 ►
in a world run by gigantic corporations, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by some of the
00:03:33 ►
cool ideas that Dale Pendle has to offer in his 2006 Blanque Norte lecture at Burning Man.
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Due to the fact that I failed to turn on my trusty tape recorder before I began
00:03:46 ►
my introduction of Dale, we’re going to pick up after he’d begun speaking for about 30
00:03:51 ►
seconds or so. Sorry about that. So now, here is Dale Pendle presenting his ideas about
00:03:57 ►
Horizon Anarchism in the Big Tent at Entheon Village at the 2006 Burning Man Festival.
00:04:04 ►
Big Tent at Entheon Village at the 2006 Burning Man Festival.
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It comes into my book-inspired madness through festivals and the potlatch.
00:04:25 ►
One of the problems with political action, I think that developed as we saw in the last
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30 years or so,
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is that it hasn’t been much fun.
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And Barbara Ehrenreich
00:04:40 ►
in a
00:04:41 ►
wonderful essay called
00:04:43 ►
Transcendence, I think, Madness and the Festival,
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talks about how festivals in medieval Europe happened all year long.
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In some cases, with all the saints’ days,
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a third of the days of the year were holidays, were festivals.
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Festivals were often centers of political rebellion,
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which is why they were often repressed.
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they were often repressed
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what finally closed them down
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was
00:05:31 ►
the rising power of the state
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protestantism
00:05:39 ►
and the
00:05:42 ►
enlightenment
00:05:42 ►
reason
00:05:44 ►
whereas a festival and the enlightenment, reason.
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Whereas a festival coming out to such a God-forsaken place in the middle of nowhere,
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with great difficulty to this paradise of dust,
00:06:03 ►
and exuberant wasteful expenditure is surely madness. This is not reason. And
00:06:13 ►
the Marxists didn’t like festivals either. Lenin even wrote that he was grateful to the capitalists for having disciplined the working class.
00:06:36 ►
One of the philosophers that I turn to in Inspired Madness is the late Norman O. Brown.
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In 1990,
00:06:50 ►
the year that Burning Man moved out here to the Playa,
00:06:56 ►
Brown
00:06:56 ►
in a prophetic tone
00:07:02 ►
wrote in a prophetic tone, wrote,
00:07:07 ►
That strengthening of the forces of Eros, for which Freud prayed,
00:07:17 ►
might create new institutions of individual generosity and public joy,
00:07:22 ►
such as the world has not seen since
00:07:26 ►
Mont Saint-Michel
00:07:27 ►
and Chartres.
00:07:29 ►
Gift-giving, a primary
00:07:32 ►
manifestation of Dionysian
00:07:34 ►
exuberance, might
00:07:36 ►
be able to revel in its
00:07:38 ►
own intrinsic, self-
00:07:40 ►
sacrificial nature.
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Instead of being inhibited
00:07:44 ►
and distorted
00:07:45 ►
in bondage to primary social
00:07:48 ►
institutions of self-assertion
00:07:50 ►
and public joy
00:07:52 ►
might manifest itself
00:07:53 ►
in carnival-esque extravaganzas
00:07:56 ►
uninhibited
00:07:58 ►
by the resentment
00:07:59 ►
of the exploited
00:08:01 ►
the excluded
00:08:03 ►
the deprived
00:08:04 ►
we have some way of the exploited, the excluded, the deprived.
00:08:12 ►
We have some way to go yet to reach that.
00:08:14 ►
But it’s a great pointer.
00:08:21 ►
And just the fact that this many people come together,
00:08:37 ►
not under the corporate logos, helping each other, doing what we do, and having kind of backwards fool’s gaze of breaking the rules, breaking the taboos, standing out, walking
00:08:49 ►
backwards, mocking all that is holy and sacred, speaking the unspeakable, saying, fuck, fuck
00:08:59 ►
him, fuck you, fuck you hippie, hey, you, redneck. Hey, have a beer, okay?
00:09:09 ►
It gives me hope.
00:09:24 ►
So, what is anarchism?
00:09:28 ►
anarchism is often
00:09:30 ►
brought up
00:09:32 ►
in the burning man context
00:09:34 ►
as
00:09:35 ►
a theoretical foundation
00:09:38 ►
often through the situationist
00:09:40 ►
and mostly it’s misunderstood.
00:09:49 ►
And here’s a story.
00:09:52 ►
A few years ago I was at my polling place.
00:09:58 ►
The primary election.
00:10:01 ►
And a tall guy walked in.
00:10:07 ►
Looked like a working man,
00:10:09 ►
and said in a loud voice,
00:10:12 ►
Can I vote in the Democratic primary?
00:10:16 ►
I’m a registered Republican and proud of it.
00:10:20 ►
And where I live, from all around the room, there were God bless you’s.
00:10:24 ►
the room there were god bless you and what I what I thought was and I’m a
00:10:37 ►
registered democrat and ashamed of it. What is that about? It’s about because I’m really an anarchist.
00:10:55 ►
Most people, when they hear anarchism, they either think of the Haymarket bombers, you marked with bombers. You know, it’s that round bomb that’s black
00:11:05 ►
with a little fuse.
00:11:07 ►
And certain
00:11:12 ►
journals,
00:11:14 ►
Anarchy, a journal of
00:11:15 ►
desire armed,
00:11:18 ►
like that part.
00:11:22 ►
Or they think that anarchy means no rules,
00:11:28 ►
which has never really been a part of anarchist theory as a political practice.
00:11:35 ►
Anarchism really means no ruler, which means no state,
00:11:53 ►
which means a way to live without an armed police force and standing armies in our midst.
00:11:57 ►
We’re kind of an occupied country. And Hanna Arndt said that the one prerequisite for all police states are concentration camps.
00:12:13 ►
Now, she wrote that in the 40s.
00:12:17 ►
So the image of Hitler and Stalin were foremost.
00:12:23 ►
These things morph into different forms.
00:12:27 ►
The United States now has more people in prison
00:12:31 ►
than any other country in the world.
00:12:34 ►
We have the highest incarceration rate
00:12:38 ►
of any country in the world.
00:12:42 ►
What am I missing?
00:12:44 ►
Police state. So we must resist how we can and come up with a theory of where we want to go. And so I’m calling that Horizon Anarchism. Anarchism has to do with cooperation,
00:13:14 ►
cooperative living, that through most of our existence, 40,000 years, we have lived as anarchists cooperatively. Kropotkin’s insight was that
00:13:33 ►
that was kind of the mark of our species. That’s our particular thing, is that we help ancient Paleolithic burials
00:13:45 ►
show
00:13:48 ►
arthritic
00:13:51 ►
skeletons
00:13:51 ►
these people had to be cared for
00:13:54 ►
carried even
00:13:55 ►
fed for years and years
00:13:58 ►
that takes
00:14:00 ►
brains
00:14:01 ►
that’s why we evolved large brains
00:14:04 ►
because we’re the people who take care of each other That takes brains. That’s why we evolved large brains.
00:14:08 ►
Because we’re the people who take care of each other.
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No other… The emotion is a mammalian invention.
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We’re the huddling class.
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You know, we stack in mush piles
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under the great freezing cosmos.
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And
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all mammals do that to some extent,
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but
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our species has really
00:14:42 ►
perfected
00:14:43 ►
this aspect of compassion and care.
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Care for the unfit.
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We want to bring everybody along with us.
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That’s what takes brains.
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There’s lots of solutions to survival of the fittest.
00:15:00 ►
You can be fast.
00:15:01 ►
You can be strong.
00:15:02 ►
You can be invisible.
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You can be fast, you can be strong, you can be invisible.
00:15:16 ►
The anarchists are kind of all over the map on a lot of particulars about how to implement things.
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Historically, a lot of anarchists have worked through unions. In Spain,
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the unions,
00:15:28 ►
the anarchist
00:15:29 ►
unions took control
00:15:32 ►
through an election.
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Duh.
00:15:37 ►
And they made the trains run on time.
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And enlisted men could question
00:15:44 ►
the orders of their officers.
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And that’s not why they lost.
00:15:52 ►
We see that the state, on balance, has created much more damage, much more pain, much more suffering, and a
00:16:13 ►
general tendency to infantilize the population. You don’t have to look very far back in history
00:16:26 ►
to see that the greatest crimes
00:16:28 ►
have all been committed by the state.
00:16:32 ►
That’s not to say, left to our own devices,
00:16:37 ►
without a police force,
00:16:39 ►
that we wouldn’t have trouble.
00:16:42 ►
But it’s one thing to have
00:16:43 ►
a bully in the camp, or maybe a bully
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with a gun, which might require a bunch of us to get together to figure out what to do
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about it. There’s a big difference between that and 100,000 or 500,000 such armed bullies marching in step.
00:17:10 ►
So the greatest weapon of mass destruction is the state,
00:17:18 ►
with its armies, its prisons, its spy networks.
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That’s the great danger.
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Yet, as I often think, we sort of live in an insane asylum.
00:17:40 ►
It is not wise to leave weapons of mass destruction lying around.
00:17:49 ►
We can say, yes, but we need the state.
00:17:52 ►
What about the wackos?
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It is because wackos always come along,
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and particularly because they are attracted to power,
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always come along, and particularly because they are attracted to power, that the state is such a dangerous organization. Inevitably, one of them will end up controlling it, and some anarchists
00:18:28 ►
don’t want to take part in any
00:18:31 ►
governmental forms at all
00:18:33 ►
but what I’m trying to look at
00:18:35 ►
in what I call horizon anarchism
00:18:38 ►
is a long term view
00:18:40 ►
which means that reformist
00:18:43 ►
measures are okay that good anarchist Noam Chomsky
00:18:49 ►
believes that we need the state right now to hold down the corporations, that it’s our
00:18:56 ►
only form against them. Actually, none of the corporations could exist without the state backing them up. The state primarily is about protecting private property.
00:19:10 ►
By private property, we do not mean your personal possessions.
00:19:15 ►
We don’t mean your house, your car, even your store.
00:19:20 ►
We mean global capital that can claim to own all of it,
00:19:26 ►
whose very existence is created to try to own all of it.
00:19:34 ►
In Buddhism, there’s an entity called the hungry ghost, the preta.
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And at every meal, Buddhists make a little offering
00:19:45 ►
to the hungry ghosts, the hungry spirits.
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The hungry spirits have huge stomachs,
00:19:52 ►
swollen bellies,
00:19:53 ►
these giant appetites,
00:19:55 ►
but necks no wider than a strand of thread,
00:20:00 ►
so they can never be satisfied.
00:20:04 ►
They’re always hungry. They’re locked into craving.
00:20:10 ►
What is the corporation but the embodiment of disembodied craving? Its whole creation is to make more. And we have chosen to build our society
00:20:28 ►
around them. We’ve given them the rights of citizens. The 14th Amendment, I think that’s
00:20:35 ►
the one, meant to guarantee freedom to the ex-slaves. 90% of the time it has come to the Supreme Court,
00:20:46 ►
it’s been used to defend corporations, like they were people, like they were citizens,
00:20:51 ►
like they had families, like they worked, like they had neighbors.
00:20:56 ►
They don’t. They’re ghosts.
00:21:07 ►
Details of implementations of what to do about these things
00:21:09 ►
have to be decided at the time
00:21:12 ►
by the people involved
00:21:13 ►
we can’t come up with any general theory about this
00:21:18 ►
but note
00:21:19 ►
when people get together for direct action
00:21:23 ►
maybe a corporation that owns houses, apartment houses in Oakland someplace,
00:21:30 ►
has decided if they throw everybody out,
00:21:33 ►
they can make a little more on their bottom line
00:21:37 ►
by selling them to people who can’t afford to move to Marin.
00:21:43 ►
selling them to people who can’t afford to move to Marin.
00:21:51 ►
And the people finally get so fed up, are so oppressed, are hurt so much,
00:21:54 ►
being pushed out onto the street with everything that they own,
00:21:56 ►
that they band together.
00:21:59 ►
They manage to organize and stand up to do something about it.
00:22:03 ►
It is the state police that come out to protect property.
00:22:10 ►
None of that, none of the corporate wealth could exist without the state backing it up.
00:22:14 ►
Chomsky is afraid they will soon have their own armies,
00:22:16 ►
and we seem to be working in that direction. But I don’t think mercenary armies would have the popular support.
00:22:30 ►
It just, I don’t know, I think we’d win. What to do about it? The first thing that I see is that we want a vision of where we want to go. I would like to go.
00:22:47 ►
I would like to live in a society where people help each other and take care of themselves,
00:22:53 ►
where there’s no standing army,
00:22:57 ►
there’s no prisons,
00:22:59 ►
there’s not a police force,
00:23:01 ►
and there are always going to be problems.
00:23:07 ►
And we’ll, I don’t know, deal with them, right?
00:23:35 ►
Deal with them. Many people will say, that’s against, who in The Republic, which is what all the aristocratic youth used to have to read in school,
00:23:42 ►
said that people should be ruled by the wise.
00:23:46 ►
And people can’t really take care of themselves.
00:23:48 ►
They’re too dumb to make the right decisions.
00:23:53 ►
So in order to keep them happy, to keep them pacified,
00:23:56 ►
we, the wise, must lie to them.
00:24:00 ►
But this is a holy lie,
00:24:03 ►
because it is done for the good of the state, which means our estate, basically.
00:24:09 ►
Historically, the excesses of oligarchies have been far beyond anything that happens at a local level. I.F. Stone thinks the reason that
00:24:26 ►
Socrates was condemned to death
00:24:30 ►
was because he supported the
00:24:31 ►
oligarchs,
00:24:36 ►
all of his pupils did,
00:24:41 ►
who allied themselves with Sparta
00:24:43 ►
and overthrew the democracy in Athens
00:24:47 ►
and instituted the rule of the, I don’t know,
00:24:50 ►
27 families or something
00:24:53 ►
and executed thousands in Athens
00:24:57 ►
to secure their position.
00:24:59 ►
It took a generation to kick them out.
00:25:03 ►
Great suffering.
00:25:13 ►
generation to kick them out. Great suffering. Another intellectual foundation for those who would rule with coercion is the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, supporting the monarchy,
00:25:33 ►
Hobbes, supporting the monarchy, said that human beings by nature, if just left to their own devices, are cannibalistic murderers.
00:25:49 ►
And if we didn’t have a police force watching over us, we would attack each other and eat each other. Gary Snyder
00:25:50 ►
in 1967, 1968
00:25:55 ►
in his book Earth Household
00:25:58 ►
wrote, to those who say it’s against human nature
00:26:02 ►
we must patiently explain
00:26:08 ►
that you have
00:26:10 ►
to know your own
00:26:11 ►
essential nature before you can say that.
00:26:15 ►
And that
00:26:16 ►
those who have gone into this deeply
00:26:18 ►
for
00:26:19 ►
some thousands of years now,
00:26:22 ►
their reports have come back
00:26:24 ►
that we have nothing to fear.
00:26:27 ►
That with
00:26:27 ►
some
00:26:30 ►
training, develop
00:26:32 ►
some inner discipline,
00:26:36 ►
the way is clear.
00:26:39 ►
We can live together.
00:26:45 ►
Brown, working off of Finnegan’s way, said in the era of Here Comes Everybody, H.C.E.,
00:27:14 ►
That is the fall of high art, which is something you will hear from intellectuals on the right sometimes. But we must defend high culture.
00:27:30 ►
I mean, looking at the wasteland of television, it’s hard to be a Democrat.
00:27:34 ►
Sometimes it’s hard to believe in the people.
00:27:41 ►
It’s just that the alternatives are so clearly nasty that if you’ve got to throw your hat
00:27:48 ►
someplace
00:27:49 ►
let’s all throw it in
00:27:52 ►
together and
00:27:53 ►
try to find
00:27:57 ►
another way to do things
00:28:00 ►
Brown said the grand
00:28:04 ►
inquisitor is betting that
00:28:07 ►
circuses that is passive entertainment will satisfy the masses the Dionysian
00:28:17 ►
bets that the Inquisitor is wrong And that is the great hope of something like this,
00:28:26 ►
like Burning Man,
00:28:28 ►
with just the fact of people getting together
00:28:32 ►
in great numbers.
00:28:33 ►
It’s a huge threat to the state.
00:28:37 ►
That is why every year
00:28:40 ►
the feds try and add more strictures.
00:28:44 ►
They try to squeeze it out economically.
00:28:47 ►
They said, we want more police there.
00:28:49 ►
You have to pay for them, even though, yes, it’s true,
00:28:52 ►
there are very few arrests and we don’t find any crime.
00:28:57 ►
But they would like to stamp it out.
00:29:03 ►
or they would like to stamp it out.
00:29:12 ►
Corporate interest will attempt to come and offer compromises as
00:29:20 ►
forced compromises.
00:29:28 ►
And that could happen.
00:29:31 ►
But, as that good philosopher Hakem Bey says,
00:29:40 ►
some of these things have a temporary nature at one place.
00:29:44 ►
Some of these things have a temporary nature at one place.
00:29:52 ►
And when they are discovered and squashed out someplace, they appear someplace else.
00:29:57 ►
But the importance of getting together to avoid this isolation.
00:30:02 ►
The isolation, isolation is one of the keys of state power.
00:30:08 ►
So it’s very important for us to get together and have fun.
00:30:11 ►
It is a political act.
00:30:14 ►
It is an act of what anarchy is based upon. If this can be true, given time, we have an alternative.
00:30:33 ►
given time, we have an alternative. I want to see the President, when it comes time to sign a bill, even if such may be necessary, to recognize, instead of being proud of every piece of legislation that’s passed,
00:30:46 ►
to recognize that it represents
00:30:47 ►
a failure of our
00:30:50 ►
collective social nature.
00:30:54 ►
And instead of giving
00:30:55 ►
away all these pens with fanfare,
00:30:58 ►
we should light a stick of
00:30:59 ►
incense and say,
00:31:01 ►
my fellow Americans,
00:31:04 ►
it is with deep regret that I must announce to you
00:31:08 ►
we have had, because we could not solve this problem on our own, we have had to enact another
00:31:15 ►
piece of legislation. Let us pray we can recover our senses
00:31:25 ►
and repeal it as soon as possible.
00:31:33 ►
Perhaps in horizon anarchism,
00:31:36 ►
which just means we want it on the horizon,
00:31:38 ►
knowing where we want to go is half of it.
00:31:43 ►
Let’s just, if we can stop things
00:31:45 ►
from getting worse,
00:31:47 ►
that’s really enough.
00:31:53 ►
Because there are those
00:31:55 ►
who acquired
00:31:57 ►
great wealth
00:31:58 ►
owning
00:32:01 ►
basically
00:32:03 ►
countries.
00:32:08 ►
Just because they acquired their wealth,
00:32:10 ►
essentially through theft,
00:32:12 ►
that does not necessarily give us the right to steal it back.
00:32:17 ►
In anarchism, the basic principle is that
00:32:19 ►
the ends do not support the means.
00:32:22 ►
It is our practice, it is what we do,
00:32:24 ►
should be embodying the ends where
00:32:26 ►
we want to go let me keep it they won’t live that long I mean you might have been a state
00:32:40 ►
tax or something that they should get back their fair share to what supported them and
00:32:49 ►
made possible this great accumulation of wealth, sick as that is, in the first place.
00:32:59 ►
Corporations are supported not only by the bailouts which we read about
00:33:05 ►
which
00:33:06 ►
exceed
00:33:09 ►
everything spent on social
00:33:11 ►
welfare by more
00:33:14 ►
than an order of magnitude
00:33:15 ►
but that’s just the tip of the ice
00:33:18 ►
there
00:33:18 ►
their whole operation
00:33:21 ►
is subsidized by us
00:33:24 ►
everybody pays taxes.
00:33:27 ►
It’s all supported by the people.
00:33:30 ►
The research is supported.
00:33:32 ►
The armies are supported.
00:33:34 ►
Maybe there’s a problem in some part of the world.
00:33:37 ►
The workers, having had too fucking much,
00:33:42 ►
band together.
00:33:44 ►
So we send in an army
00:33:45 ►
to protect private property.
00:33:50 ►
Maybe
00:33:50 ►
we set up an assassination.
00:33:56 ►
We keep the lines open.
00:33:59 ►
It’s all subsidized
00:34:00 ►
by us.
00:34:03 ►
There’s no reason
00:34:04 ►
they shouldn’t pay their share. At Burning Man, a lot of what’s
00:34:13 ►
called anarchism or anarchist discussion is actually what I would call libertarianism.
00:34:20 ►
Libertarianism.
00:34:32 ►
Libertarianism is, along with the whole neoconservative movement, the neocons, they like to say this, we’re against the state, down with government, get government off our backs.
00:34:37 ►
What they’re really talking about, they’re not talking about dismantling the forces protecting their property or their rights.
00:34:46 ►
They want to dismantle
00:34:48 ►
the watchdog agencies
00:34:50 ►
that are trying to give
00:34:52 ►
some protection to consumers
00:34:54 ►
and to workers and to
00:34:56 ►
the earth.
00:34:58 ►
They don’t want anybody telling them
00:35:00 ►
that they can’t
00:35:09 ►
strip mine, pollute, do anything they want with what they so-called own.
00:35:18 ►
They’re actually for a stronger form of government.
00:35:23 ►
a stronger form of government.
00:35:28 ►
Now this business of do we still need government at this time is a sticky point for anybody thinking about
00:35:32 ►
eventually getting to a condition without the state.
00:35:37 ►
Some say, and they may be right,
00:35:40 ►
you can’t work through the state to get beyond the state.
00:35:42 ►
They may be right.
00:35:45 ►
Chomsky thinks that’s not so.
00:35:49 ►
And as I mentioned, in Spain, the anarchists came in through a popular electoral movement.
00:35:58 ►
There’s no reason we can’t do that.
00:36:00 ►
All we have to do is stop supporting the forces in every way we can.
00:36:07 ►
And they can’t sustain.
00:36:13 ►
A hundred year wait would be a miracle.
00:36:23 ►
had a thousand years,
00:36:25 ►
if it took a thousand years to gradually dismantle
00:36:28 ►
the armed forces
00:36:33 ►
watching over us
00:36:36 ►
and the mechanisms of the state,
00:36:39 ►
that would be a bargain.
00:36:42 ►
That’s fine.
00:36:44 ►
That’s no problem.
00:36:49 ►
And that’s Horizon Anarchism.
00:36:53 ►
I’ve got a little time.
00:36:55 ►
I’ll take a question.
00:36:57 ►
Yeah.
00:36:57 ►
You’re focusing on the issue of the state
00:37:00 ►
and the way the Senate will
00:37:02 ►
secure the state’s program.
00:37:04 ►
I completely agree.
00:37:06 ►
He said, if I can paraphrase and restate that,
00:37:11 ►
the gentleman spoke of the liberation of the imagination.
00:37:17 ►
I completely agree.
00:37:18 ►
That’s where it has to start.
00:37:20 ►
That’s absolutely a good place to ask.
00:37:22 ►
It’s the easiest.
00:37:23 ►
It’s kind of the lightest thing around, you know, I mean some of this stuff
00:37:26 ►
is kind of heavy to lift
00:37:27 ►
but the lightest
00:37:30 ►
and the easiest thing to move
00:37:32 ►
is the imagination
00:37:33 ►
and I completely
00:37:36 ►
agree with you, breaking out of
00:37:38 ►
experimenting with
00:37:40 ►
new forms
00:37:42 ►
that’s where
00:37:44 ►
the violence should be.
00:37:46 ►
Blake said, I will not cease from mental fight.
00:37:51 ►
The alternative is corporeal war.
00:37:59 ►
That’s what Blake saw.
00:38:01 ►
And here we have,
00:38:03 ►
and here we have there’s an invocation of the young god
00:38:10 ►
Dionysus
00:38:13 ►
who is very important to my teacher
00:38:18 ►
and O’Brown
00:38:19 ►
and trouble follows Dionysus
00:38:23 ►
it’s not like this is all going to be peace and love.
00:38:28 ►
Trouble always follows, and his appearance was often dreaded.
00:38:32 ►
But the alternative, the repression of Dionysus, according to the ancients, is much worse.
00:38:40 ►
That leads to the sacrifice of children.
00:38:46 ►
worse that leads to the sacrifice of children then I mentioned in my book that there some have occasionally here mistaken themselves for the God and
00:38:56 ►
walked naked into the fire that happened. I say that
00:39:05 ►
stamps the ceremony as genuine.
00:39:09 ►
And
00:39:10 ►
Euripides would have left that
00:39:12 ►
park in.
00:39:16 ►
As the greater system
00:39:17 ►
comes under stress, do I see that as
00:39:19 ►
energizing social transformation?
00:39:22 ►
You know, well,
00:39:26 ►
things can get very brutish in stress.
00:39:34 ►
So I think those who want to,
00:39:37 ►
in the old Marxist terminology,
00:39:41 ►
raise the dialectic,
00:39:42 ►
that is, let’s let things get worse
00:39:44 ►
so the revolution will come sooner.
00:39:47 ►
No.
00:39:49 ►
No, things are plenty bad enough.
00:39:53 ►
And poverty,
00:39:58 ►
great inequality and wealth,
00:40:01 ►
repression,
00:40:02 ►
it separates people,
00:40:04 ►
it fragments the society, and it can take generations
00:40:07 ►
for familial relationships, for relationships between parents and children, violence within
00:40:15 ►
families. All of these things result from these great social stresses. Our society is so schizophrenic now, so skilled, that to be
00:40:27 ►
well adjusted at this point is really a mark of ill health.
00:40:34 ►
But
00:40:34 ►
Okay, we’ve got about two minutes.
00:40:47 ►
Two questions.
00:40:48 ►
Two questions.
00:40:51 ►
Yo.
00:40:56 ►
That’s a deep question.
00:40:58 ►
He asked about the Federal Reserve System.
00:41:03 ►
There’s an interesting book by Jerry
00:41:06 ►
Martien
00:41:08 ►
called
00:41:11 ►
Shell Game
00:41:12 ►
about the history of money.
00:41:15 ►
It goes into a
00:41:16 ►
deeper level.
00:41:19 ►
The Federal Reserve
00:41:20 ►
or Jackson getting rid of the bank
00:41:22 ►
or the Hamiltonian Bank.
00:41:24 ►
It’s a very complicated
00:41:25 ►
thing. I’ve seen a big book on that, and I’m not qualified to speak on it, but it’s part
00:41:35 ►
of a larger problem. The issue with money is, yeah, that’s a tough nut to crack. And
00:41:43 ►
one of the fantastic things here on the fly is just what difference it can make.
00:41:48 ►
Just the lack of currency going around.
00:41:51 ►
I mean, except we have to pay for our real drug, you know, down at Center Camp.
00:41:57 ►
But… I have written about the connection between
00:42:11 ►
stimulant drugs and industrial
00:42:14 ►
capitalism
00:42:17 ►
through the enlightenment and mercantilism
00:42:19 ►
and what does it mean that that’s the one thing
00:42:23 ►
that they sell here, it just shows
00:42:25 ►
that’s how, that is our true
00:42:28 ►
that is the ally of our culture, that’s our true plant ally
00:42:32 ►
and the real plant ally is the one that’s so close
00:42:35 ►
and so all around you all the time that you don’t even see it
00:42:38 ►
you just take it for granted
00:42:40 ►
but yeah, there are lots of contradictions
00:42:44 ►
in Burning Man, and I try
00:42:48 ►
and address some of those
00:42:49 ►
in Inspired
00:42:51 ►
Madness.
00:42:55 ►
The idea, so I just want to
00:42:57 ►
close with one idea,
00:43:00 ►
which is this idea of wasteful consumption.
00:43:03 ►
And if you look
00:43:03 ►
at the Belgian cake, the Belgian waffle,
00:43:11 ►
what can this mean, all of that lumber,
00:43:16 ►
all those sweet Canadian two-by-threes,
00:43:21 ►
which we will burn?
00:43:24 ►
That wasteful consumption,
00:43:26 ►
which is anathema to
00:43:29 ►
conservationalists of the old school,
00:43:32 ►
to, I don’t know,
00:43:36 ►
to Protestants generally,
00:43:40 ►
to Catholics,
00:43:41 ►
we’ll say everybody,
00:43:42 ►
it’s madness,
00:43:44 ►
that our greatest
00:43:46 ►
blessings,
00:43:48 ►
Socrates said,
00:43:49 ►
come to us through madness
00:43:51 ►
if it is divine madness
00:43:53 ►
inspired by the God.
00:43:55 ►
So we grace this wasteful consumption
00:43:57 ►
with the name of a God.
00:43:59 ►
We will call him the God of the potlatch.
00:44:02 ►
And
00:44:03 ►
that in burning this surplus, we can look on it as a magical sacrifice.
00:44:11 ►
The alternative worship is war.
00:44:20 ►
Thank you so much, Gail.
00:44:22 ►
Thank you so much, Dale.
00:44:31 ►
I know that we can keep Dale here all afternoon as we can with most of our speakers.
00:44:34 ►
We’re trying to give you a potpourri of some of these speakers.
00:44:37 ►
Dale, can they pre-order your book on Amazon yet?
00:44:39 ►
Yes?
00:44:40 ►
Okay.
00:44:42 ►
I’m going to check it. And on our site at matrixmasters.com, we’ll have some information and links.
00:44:47 ►
And I would urge you to go to Amazon and pre-order the book.
00:44:51 ►
I think the publishers love that, and we’ll be promoting it on matrixmasters.com.
00:44:58 ►
So, Jack, it’ll be in bookstores.
00:45:02 ►
Yeah, go to your bookstores and do it as well.
00:45:04 ►
Correct.
00:45:04 ►
I’m sorry.
00:45:05 ►
I’m just kind of a net guy.
00:45:09 ►
Don’t you just love Dale’s closing remark about the conflagrations of Burning Man
00:45:14 ►
where he called it a magical sacrifice where the alternative worship is war?
00:45:20 ►
What really blew me away with that comment is that it came as an ad-lib answer to a question from the audience.
00:45:26 ►
And I can tell you that not only is Dale a great writer and poet, but he is also a really nice person,
00:45:32 ►
somebody you’d like to spend some time with.
00:45:34 ►
We were definitely lucky to have him as one of our speakers at this year’s Palenque Norte lectures.
00:45:40 ►
As I was listening to him just now, the thoughts of both Burning Man and the recent Oracle gathering I attended are still very fresh in my mind.
00:45:49 ►
And so when Dale said, isolation is one of the keys of state power, so it is very important for us to get together and have fun,
00:45:59 ►
well, his words really struck home, especially the have fun part.
00:46:06 ►
really struck home, especially the have fun part. And I’m here to tell you that one place on the planet where people have figured out for sure what fun is, is in the Pacific Northwest
00:46:12 ►
of the States. I’m not quite sure what you Canadians call the Vancouver, Seattle, Portland
00:46:17 ►
area, but you know where I’m talking about. For a guy who is basically an early to bed,
00:46:23 ►
early to rise kind of person, Seattle sure turned me upside down.
00:46:27 ►
While I was there, I found myself going to bed at around the time I normally get up.
00:46:32 ►
And what I couldn’t believe is that I was more or less able to keep up with the pace of their fun up there.
00:46:38 ►
At least for a few days.
00:46:40 ►
Maybe that’s why I’m still dragging around with such a low energy level right now.
00:46:44 ►
But hey, we can catch up on our sleep when we die, right?
00:46:48 ►
Anyway, it was really worth it, and I’ll tell you more about that in my next podcast.
00:46:54 ►
But for those of you who can’t wait for the next couple of podcasts to hear the talks that Daniel Pinchbeck and I gave at the Oracle Gathering up there,
00:47:01 ►
you can listen to the raw cuts of our presentations on a new website that has just come online
00:47:07 ►
under the name DataChurch.
00:47:09 ►
That’s D-A-T-A-C-H-U-R-C-H dot com.
00:47:13 ►
I’m going to try to get these talks podcast
00:47:16 ►
before the end of this week if possible,
00:47:18 ►
but the only difference in what I podcast
00:47:20 ►
and the DataChurch versions
00:47:21 ►
will be that I’ll cut the dead air out
00:47:23 ►
when people are asking questions.
00:47:26 ►
Right now, however, my main focus is to prepare for a trip my wife and I are taking at the end of the week
00:47:32 ►
to go up to the high desert and spend a little time with Myron and Jean Stolaroff,
00:47:37 ►
where we’ll be starting a little oral history project with them, which will eventually be podcast, of course.
00:47:43 ►
with them, which will eventually be podcast, of course.
00:47:48 ►
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Myron, you might want to pick up a copy of a book John Markoff wrote last year titled What the Dormouse Said.
00:47:53 ►
Its subtitle is How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.
00:47:59 ►
And by the way, I really appreciate those of you who are now buying your books and other
00:48:03 ►
stuff from Amazon through our store at matrixmasters.com.
00:48:07 ►
As you know, we get a small percentage of each sale made through our online Amazon store,
00:48:13 ►
and that’s what keeps our website and these podcasts going.
00:48:17 ►
That and the Google ad click-throughs, of course.
00:48:20 ►
So thanks for supporting us in that way.
00:48:23 ►
Even though it’s only a few cents per book that we get,
00:48:25 ►
it does add up enough to pay for our hosting expenses.
00:48:29 ►
Getting back to Markoff’s book, while it’s really a good book,
00:48:33 ►
I was surprised to learn that he never even bothered to interview Myron for it,
00:48:37 ►
which is pretty amazing since he credited Myron with being one of the three most important people
00:48:43 ►
who kick-started both the 60s and the PC revolutions.
00:48:47 ►
In case you don’t know it, Myron was one of the first dozen or so people in all of North America to take LSD.
00:48:54 ►
His lineage with acid goes all the way back to the Huxley days.
00:48:58 ►
And since big-time authors like Markoff are writing about those days,
00:49:02 ►
but not getting their stories directly from the people who lived them,
00:49:05 ►
I thought it would be important to get as many of these personal accounts recorded as possible.
00:49:11 ►
And you, my dear fellow Saloners, are going to be the first to hear them.
00:49:16 ►
Well, that’s about all the energy I’ve got right now,
00:49:19 ►
so I’m going to sign off and let you think about what a glorious future we can have on this planet with some sort of a form or another of psychedelic anarchy on the horizon.
00:49:31 ►
Doesn’t that thought just make you tingle?
00:49:34 ►
Well, my thanks to Dale Pendle for his excellent presentation
00:49:37 ►
and to Darren, Mark, Michael, Brian, and the rest of the Entheon Village crew and their supporters,
00:49:44 ►
without whom the Blinky Norte lectures could not have taken place this year.
00:49:48 ►
And my many thanks also to Jacques Cordell and Wells,
00:49:51 ►
otherwise known as Chateau Hayouk,
00:49:54 ►
for the use of your music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:49:57 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:50:02 ►
Be well well my friends