144 - The Ultimate Revolution

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley

(This program marks our third anniversary
of podcasting from the Psychedelic Salon!)
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Aldous Huxley.]

“Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows.”

“We are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy, who have always existed and presumably will always exist, to get people to love their servitude. This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions.”

“Given the fact that there are these 20% of highly suggestible people, it becomes quite clear that this is a matter of enormous political importance, for example, any demagogue who is able to get hold of a large number of these 20% of suggestible people and to organize them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any country.”

“If there are 20% of the people who really can be suggested into believing almost anything, then we have to take extremely careful steps into prevent the rise of demagogues who will drive them on into extreme positions then organize them into very, very dangerous armies, private armies which may overthrow the government.”

“The really interesting thing about the new chemical substances, the new mind-changing drugs is this, if you looking back into history it’s clear that man has always had a hankering after mind changing chemicals, he has always desired to take holidays from himself, but this is the most extraordinary effect of all that every natural occurring narcotic stimulant, sedative, or hallucinogen, was discovered before the dawn of history, I don’t think there is one single one of these naturally occurring ones which modern science has discovered.”

“Man was apparently a dope-bag addict before he was a farmer, which is a very curious comment on human nature.”

“You can have an enormous revolution, for example, with LSD-25 or with the newly synthesized drug psilocybin, which is the active principal of the Mexican sacred mushroom. You can have this enormous mental revolution with no more physiological revolution than you would get from drinking two cocktails. And this is a really most extraordinary effect.”

“And then again, in the case of these very strange substances like psilocybin and lysergic acid, I think there is a great deal to be said for doing what William James talked about, which was getting people to realize that their ordinary, sort of common sense view of the world is not the only view. The universe they inhabit is not the only possible universe.”

NOTE FROM LORENZO: A few minutes after I posted this podcast on the Net, I checked my email and discovered that fellow saloner John H. sent me a link to the following video. After you listen to the talk by Aldous Huxley you may find it rewarding to view the following video and then do a little thinking about what is really going on in the U.S. today while you re-read “Brave New World”.

Link mentioned in this podcast:

The Center for Cognitive Liberty

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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And today is June 10, 2008, which, had she lived this long, would be my mother’s 93rd birthday.

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In addition, today marks the third anniversary of these podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon.

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from the Psychedelic Salon.

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So, actually, I guess we’ve now completed three years of podcasting,

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and today technically marks the beginning of our fourth year.

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And all of these podcasts wouldn’t have been possible without the help of many of our fellow saloners

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who have made donations to help offset the expenses

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associated with delivering these podcasts

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to literally tens of thousands of people in over 100 countries.

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And a couple of days ago, we received donations from the Jason Bennett Actors Workshop and from Sarah I.

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That together was almost precisely the amount we needed to complete our third consecutive break-even year.

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So a big thank you to Sarah and to the Jason Bennett Actors Workshop and to all

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of our other generous donors over the past three years. I quite literally couldn’t have done it

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without you, all of you. So thank you again. Now, as I was looking through my files to see who we

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would feature as a guest lecturer today, I almost immediately was drawn to a lecture that was sent to me by several salonners,

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and one that I believe is also available at the Internet Archive.

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It’s a talk given by Aldous Huxley in March of 1962,

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and so I think it may be the oldest lecture I’ve played here in the salon.

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I realize that most of our fellow salonners know who Aldous Huxley was

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through some of his more famous books like Brave New World

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and what he considered his finest work, Island.

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But it was The Doors of Perception for which the psychedelic community best remembers him.

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In fact, that was the first psychedelic book I ever read.

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When it was first published

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in 1954, it may have been the first openly positive book written about our sacred medicines

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since early in the century. And, at least in my humble opinion, the publication of that

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slim little volume is what actually kicked off the modern psychedelic movement.

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As one of the West’s leading intellectuals, Huxley’s opinions were respected by just about everybody.

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He was a pillar of society, and the fact that he was one of the first celebrity supporters of psychedelics certainly qualifies him as one of the founding fathers of our community.

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as one of the founding fathers of our community.

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So in my ongoing attempt to get us all up to speed on the early history of our movement,

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I’m going to play this lecture that Aldous Huxley gave at the University of California at Berkeley,

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where I believe he was a visiting professor at the time.

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And since over half of our fellow salonners weren’t even born back then, I should probably remind you that when this talk was given,

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Timothy Leary and Ram Dass were still at Harvard,

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the Beatles had not yet played in America,

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John Kennedy was the president,

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and for what it’s worth, I was just completing my second year of college.

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And things were still pretty buttoned down back then.

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Rock and roll was finally beginning to take hold of our consciousness and shake us out of the 50s doldrums,

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and eventually lead us to Woodstock, the anti-war movement, and the civil rights campaigns.

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But my guess is that none of those future events were even expected or anticipated on that Tuesday afternoon in Berkeley when Aldous gave this talk, nor

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did anyone expect that a year and a half later, Kennedy would be murdered on the same day

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that Aldous Huxley died.

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And so Huxley passed without much notice in the press, but for many of us, at least in

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retrospect, it now seems that our greatest loss that day was the passing of the father of the modern psychedelic movement.

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If you remember in last week’s podcast, I think it was Terrence McKenna who stated the obvious fact

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that the primary moving force of what we now call the 60s was the widespread use of LSD and other psychoactive substances

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that effectively broke down our mind barriers

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and allowed us to think for ourselves and question authority, all authority.

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It was a much different world back then, as you will be able to tell right now when we

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listen to one of my heroes, Aldous Huxley.

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Aldous Huxley.

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Guest, Mr. Aldous Huxley, renowned essayist and novelist who, during the spring semester,

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is residing at the university in his capacity as a Ford Research Professor.

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Mr. Huxley has recently returned from a conference at the Institute for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, where the discussion focused on the development of new techniques

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by which to control and direct human behavior.

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Traditionally, it has been possible to suppress individual freedom through the application

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of physical coercion, through the appeal of ideologies, through the manipulation of man’s

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physical and social environment, and more recently through the techniques, the cruder

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techniques of psychological conditioning. and social environment, and more recently through the techniques, the cruder techniques

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of psychological conditioning.

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The ultimate revolution about which Mr. Huxley will speak today concerns itself with the

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development of new behavioral controls which operate directly upon the psychophysiological

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organisms of man, that is, the capacity to replace external constraint by internal compulsions.

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As those of us who are familiar with Mr. Huxley’s works well know,

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this is a subject with which he has been concerned for quite a period of time.

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Mr. Huxley will make a presentation of approximately half an hour,

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followed by some brief discussions and questions by the two panelists sitting to my left,

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Ms. Lillian Rivlin and Mr. John Post.

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Mr. Huxley.

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Thank you.

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First of all, I’d like to say that the conference at Santa Barbara

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was not directly concerned with the control of the mind.

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That was a conference, there have been two of them now at the University of California Medical

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Center in San Francisco, one this year which I didn’t attend and one two years ago where

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there was a considerable discussion on this subject. At Santa Barbara we were talking

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about technology in general and the effects it’s likely to have on society

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and the problems related to technological transplanting of technology into underdeveloped countries.

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Well, now, in regard to this problem of the ultimate revolution,

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this has been very well summed up by the moderator.

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In the past, we can say that all revolutions have essentially aimed at changing the environment

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in order to change the individual. I mean, there’s been the political revolution, the economic revolution, in the time of the Reformation, the religious

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revolution, all these aimed, as I say, not directly at the human being, but at his surroundings,

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so that by modifying the surroundings you did achieve, at one remove, an effect upon the human being.

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Today, we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution,

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the final revolution, where a man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows.

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man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows.

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Well, needless to say, some kind of direct action on human mind-bodies has been going on since the beginning of time.

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But this has generally been of a violent nature.

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The techniques of terrorism have been known from time immemorial,

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and people have employed them with more or less ingenuity,

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sometimes with the utmost crudity, sometimes with a good deal of skill acquired by a process of trial and error,

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finding out what the best ways of using torture, imprisonment, constraints of various kinds.

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But as, I think it was Metternich said many years ago,

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you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them.

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That if you are going to control any population for any length of time,

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you must have some measure

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of consent. It’s exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely.

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It can function for a fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring

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in an element of persuasion, an element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them.

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Well, it seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now

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faced is precisely this, that we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques

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which will enable the controlling oligarchy, who have always existed and presumably always will exist,

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to get people actually to love their servitude.

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This seems to me the ultimate in malevolent revolution, shall we say.

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And this is a problem which

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has interested me for many years

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and about which I wrote

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30 years ago a fable

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The Brave New World which

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is essentially the

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account of a society

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making use of

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all the devices

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at that time available

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and some of the devices which I imagined to be possible,

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making use of them in order to, first of all, to standardize the population,

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to iron out inconvenient human differences, to create, so to say, mass-produced models of human beings

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arranged in some kind of a scientific caste system.

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And since then I have continued to be extremely interested in this problem, and I have noticed, with increasing dismay,

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that a number of the predictions which were purely fantastic when I made them 30 years

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ago have come true, or seem in process of coming true, that a number of techniques about

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which I talked seem to be here already, and that there seems to be

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a general movement in the direction of this kind of ultimate revolution, this method of

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control by which people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs which, by any decent standard,

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they ought not to enjoy.

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This, I mean, the enjoyment of servitude.

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Well, this process, as I say, has gone on for over the years,

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and I become more and more interested in what is happening.

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And here I would like briefly to compare the parable of Brave New World

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with another parable which was put forth more, in George Orwell’s book, 1984,

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Orwell wrote his book between, I think, between 45 and 48,

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at the time when the Stalinist terror regime was still in full swing,

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and just after the collapse of the Hitlerian terror regime. And his book, which I admire

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greatly, it’s a book of very great talent and extraordinary ingenuity, shows, so to

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say, a projection into the future of the immediate past of what for him was the immediate past and the immediate present.

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It was a projection into the future of a society where control was exercised wholly by terrorism

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and violent attacks upon the mind-body of individuals.

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upon the mind-body of individuals.

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Whereas my own book, which was written in 1932,

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when there was only a mild dictatorship in the form of Mussolini in existence,

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was not overshadowed by the idea of terrorism,

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and I was therefore free, in a way which Orwell was not free to think about these other methods of control, these non-violent methods. scientific dictatorships of the future, and I think there are going to be scientific dictatorships in many parts of the world, will be probably a good deal nearer to the brave new world

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pattern than to the 1984 pattern. They will be a good deal nearer not because of any humanitarian

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qualms in the scientific dictators, but simply because the brave new world pattern is probably a good deal more efficient than the other.

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That if you can get people to consent to the state of affairs in which they are living,

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the state of servitude, the state of having their differences ironed out

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and being made amenable to mass production methods on the social level,

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amenable to mass production methods on the social level,

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if you can do this, then you are likely to have a much more stable and much more lasting society,

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a much more easily controllable society than you would if you were relying wholly on clubs and firing squads and concentration camps.

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and firing squads and concentration camps.

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So that my own feeling is that the 1984 picture was tinged, of course,

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by the immediate past and the present in which Orwell was living,

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but that the past and present of those years does not represent, I feel,

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the likely trend of what is going to happen.

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Needless to say, we shall never get rid of terrorism.

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This will always find its way to the surface.

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But I think that insofar as dictators become more and more scientific, more and more concerned with a technically perfectly running society,

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they will be more and more interested in the kind of techniques which I imagined and described from existing realities in Brave New World.

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in Brave New World.

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So that it seems to me then that this ultimate revolution

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is really not very far away,

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that we already,

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a number of the techniques

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for bringing about this kind of controller here,

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and it remains to be seen

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when and where and by whom

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they will first be applied in any large scale.

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And first, let me talk a little bit about the improvement even in the techniques of terrorism.

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I think there have been improvements.

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improvements. Pavlov, after all, made some extremely profound observations, both on animals and on human beings. And he found, among other things, that conditioning techniques applied

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to animals or humans in a state either of psychological or physical stress,

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sank in, so to say, very deeply into the mind-body of the creature

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and were extremely difficult to get rid of.

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They seemed to be embedded more deeply than other forms of conditioning.

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And this, of course, this fact, I think, was discovered empirically in the past.

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People did make use of many of these techniques.

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But the difference between the old empirical intuitive methods and our own methods

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is the difference between a sort of hit-and-miss craftsman’s point of view

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and the genuinely scientific point of view.

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I mean, I think there is a real difference between ourselves

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and, say, the inquisitors of the 16th century.

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We know much more precisely what we are doing than they knew,

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and we can extend, because of our theoretical knowledge,

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we can extend what we are doing over a wider area

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with a greater assurance of producing something which really works.

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In this context, I would like to mention the extremely interesting chapters

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in Dr. William Sargent’s Battle for the Mind,

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where he points out how intuitively some of the great religious teachers, leaders of the past,

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hit on the Pavlovian method.

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He speaks specifically of Wesley’s method of producing conversions,

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He speaks specifically of Wesley’s method of producing conversions,

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which were essentially based upon a technique of heightening psychological stress to the limit by talking about hellfire, and so making people extremely vulnerable to suggestion,

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and then suddenly releasing this stress by offering the hopes of heaven.

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and then suddenly releasing this stress by offering the hopes of heaven.

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And this is a very interesting chapter,

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showing how completely, on purely intuitive and empirical grounds,

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a skilled natural psychologist, as Wesley was,

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could discover these Pavlovian methods.

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Well, as I say, we now know the reason why these techniques worked, and there is no doubt at all that we can, if we want to,

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carry them much further than was possible in the past.

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And, of course, in the recent history of brainwashing,

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both as applied to prisoners of war and to the lower personnel within the Communist Party in China,

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we see that the Pavlovian methods have been applied systematically and evidently with extraordinary efficacy.

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I mean, I think there can be no doubt that by the application of these methods,

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a very large army of totally devoted people has been created.

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The conditioning has been driven in, so to say,

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by a kind of psychological ionophoresis, into the very depth of the people’s being

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and has got so deep that it’s very difficult for it ever to be rooted out.

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And these methods, I think, are a real refinement on the older methods of terror

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because they combine methods of terror

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with methods of acceptance,

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the person who he subjected to a form of terroristic stress,

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but for the purpose of inducing

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a kind of voluntary, quotes,

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of inducing a kind of voluntary, quotes, acceptance of the state,

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the psychological state into which he has been driven,

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and the state of affairs within which he finds himself.

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So that, as I say, there has been, I think, a definite improvement, shall we say,

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even in the techniques of terrorism.

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But then we come to the consideration of other techniques, of non-terroristic techniques for inducing consent and for inducing people to love their servitude.

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Here, I mean, I think we can, I don’t think I can possibly go into all of them because I don’t know all of them,

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but I mean, I can mention a few of the more obvious methods which can now be used and which are based upon recent scientific findings.

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First of all, there are the methods connected with straight suggestion and hypnosis.

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I think we know much more about this subject than was known in the past.

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People, of course, have always known about suggestion,

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and although they didn’t know the word hypnosis, they certainly practiced it in various ways. But we have, I think, a much greater

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knowledge of the subject than in the past, and we can make use of our knowledge in ways

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which I think the past was probably never able to make use of it. For example, one of the things we have, we now know for certain, is that

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there is, of course, an enormous, I mean, this has been always known, a very great difference

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between individuals in regard to their suggestibility. But we now, I think, know pretty clearly the

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sort of statistical structure of a population in regard to its suggestibility.

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It’s very interesting when you look at the findings in different fields.

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I mean, in the field of hypnosis, in the field of administering placebos, for example,

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in the field of general suggestion in states of drowsiness or of light sleep,

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you will find the same sorts of orders of magnitude continually cropping up.

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You will find, for example, that the experienced hypnotists will tell one that the number of people,

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the percentage of people who can be hypnotized with the utmost facility, just like that, is about 20%.

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That about a corresponding number at the other end of the scale

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are very, very difficult or almost impossible to hypnotize.

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And that in between lies a large mass of people who can, with more or less difficulty, be

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hypnotized, that they can gradually be, if you work hard enough at it, be got into the

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hypnotic state. And in the same way, the same sort of figures crop up again, for example, in relation to the administration of placebos.

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A big experiment was carried out three or four years ago in the General Hospital in Boston on post-operative cases

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where several hundred men and women suffering comparable kinds of pain after serious operations,

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were given injections whenever they asked for them, whenever the pain got bad.

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And the injections, 50% of the time, were of morphine, 50% of the time were of distilled water.

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And about 20% of those who went through the experiment,

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about 20% of them got just as much relief from the distilled water as from the morph pure.

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About 20% got no relief from the distilled water

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and in between were those who got some relief or got relief occasionally.

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So here again we see the same sort of distribution. And

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similarly with regard to what in Brave New World I call

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hypnopedia, which is the sleep teaching, I was

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talking not long ago to a man who manufactures

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records which people can listen to

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during their light part of sleep.

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I mean, these are records for getting rich, for sexual satisfaction,

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for confidence in salesmanship and so on.

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And he said it’s very interesting that these records are sold on a money-back basis.

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And he says that there is regularly between 15 and 20 percent of people who write indignantly,

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saying the records don’t work at all, and he sends the money back at once.

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On the other hand, there are some, what, over 20 percent,

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who write enthusiastically, saying they’re now much richer,

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their sexual life

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is much better, etc., etc. And these, of course, are the dream clients, and they buy more of

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these records. And then in between are those who complain they’re not getting much results,

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and they have to have letters written to them saying, well, go persist, my dear, go on,

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and you’ll get there. And they generally do get results in the long run.

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Well, as I say, on the basis of this, I think we see quite clearly that the human populations can be categorized according to their suggestibility fairly clearly.

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I suspect very strongly that this 20% is the same in all these cases.

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And I suspect also

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that it would not be at all difficult

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to recognize in very early childhood

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who were those who were extremely suggestible,

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who were those who were extremely unsuggestible,

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and who were those who

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occupied the intermediate

00:27:46 ►

space.

00:27:48 ►

Quite clearly, if everybody were extremely unsuggestible, organized society would be

00:27:54 ►

quite impossible.

00:27:56 ►

And if everybody were extremely suggestible, then dictatorship would be absolutely inevitable.

00:28:04 ►

I mean, it’s very fortunate we have people who are moderately suggestible in the majority

00:28:08 ►

and who therefore preserve us from dictatorship but do permit organized society to be formed.

00:28:18 ►

But once given the fact that there are these 20% of highly suggestible people,

00:28:24 ►

it becomes quite clear

00:28:25 ►

that this is a matter of enormous political importance. For example, any demagogue who

00:28:31 ►

is able to get hold of a large number of these 20% of suggestible people and to organize

00:28:39 ►

them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any country. And I mean,

00:28:43 ►

is really in a position to overthrow any government in any country. And I mean, I think this, after all, we’ve had the most incredible example in recent years

00:28:51 ►

of what can be done by efficient methods of suggestion and persuasion in the form of Hitler.

00:29:00 ►

Anybody who’s read, for example, Bullock’s Life of Hitler,

00:29:04 ►

Hitler, anybody who’s read, for example, Bullock’s Life of Hitler,

00:29:13 ►

comes forth from this with a sort of horrified admiration for this infernal genius who really understood human weaknesses, I think, almost better than anybody,

00:29:19 ►

and who exploited them with all the resources then available.

00:29:24 ►

I mean, he knew everything.

00:29:25 ►

I mean, for example, he knew intuitively this Pavlovian truth

00:29:29 ►

that conditioning installed in a state of stress or fatigue

00:29:34 ►

goes much deeper than conditioning installed at other times.

00:29:39 ►

This was why all his big speeches were organized at night.

00:29:43 ►

He speaks of this quite frankly, of course, in Mein Kampf.

00:29:47 ►

He says this was done solely because people are tired at night

00:29:50 ►

and therefore are much less capable of resisting persuasion than they would be during the day.

00:29:56 ►

And in all his techniques, he was using, he had discovered intuitively and by trial and error,

00:30:09 ►

a great many of the weaknesses which we now know about in a sort of scientific way,

00:30:15 ►

I think much more clearly than he does, than he did.

00:30:19 ►

But the fact remains that this differential suggestibility, this susceptibility to hypnosis,

00:30:28 ►

I do think is something which has to be considered very carefully in relation to any kind of thought about democratic government.

00:30:41 ►

I mean, if there are 20% of the people who can really be suggested into believing

00:30:47 ►

almost anything, as evidently they can be, then we have to take extremely careful steps

00:30:55 ►

to prevent the rise of demagogues who will drive them on into extreme positions and then organize them into very, very dangerous armies,

00:31:09 ►

private armies which may overthrow the government.

00:31:15 ►

Well, this, as I say, is in this field of pure persuasion.

00:31:20 ►

I think we do know much more than we did in the past.

00:31:26 ►

persuasion. I think we do know much more than we did in the past, and obviously we now have mechanisms for multiplying the demagogue’s voice and image in a quite hallucinatory way.

00:31:35 ►

I mean, the television and the radio, Hitler was making enormous use of the radio, he could

00:31:41 ►

speak to millions of people simultaneously.

00:31:47 ►

This alone, of course,

00:31:52 ►

creates an enormous gulf between the modern and the ancient demagogue. The ancient demagogue could only

00:31:55 ►

appeal to as many people as his voice could reach by the yelling

00:32:00 ►

at his utmost, but the modern demagogue

00:32:04 ►

can touch literally millions at a time.

00:32:08 ►

And, of course, with the multiplication of his image,

00:32:10 ►

he can produce this kind of hallucinatory effect,

00:32:15 ►

which is of enormous hypnotic and suggestive importance.

00:32:26 ►

But then there are various other methods which one can think of

00:32:30 ►

which have, thank heaven, as yet not been used,

00:32:35 ►

but which obviously could be used.

00:32:37 ►

There is, for example, the pharmacological method.

00:32:40 ►

This was one of the things I talked about in Brave New World. I invented a hypothetical

00:32:48 ►

drug called Soma, which of course could not exist as it stood there because it was simultaneously

00:32:54 ►

a stimulant, a narcotic, and a hallucinogen, which seems unlikely in one substance. But

00:33:01 ►

the point is that in several, if you applied several different substances, you could get almost all these results even now.

00:33:09 ►

And the really interesting thing about the new chemical substances, the new mind-changing drugs, is this,

00:33:16 ►

that whereas if you look back into history, it’s clear that man has always had a hankering after mind-changing chemicals.

00:33:27 ►

He has always desired to take holidays from himself.

00:33:31 ►

But the, and this is the most extraordinary fact of all,

00:33:36 ►

is that every naturally occurring stimulant, narcotic, sedative, or hallucinogen

00:33:42 ►

was discovered before the dawn of history

00:33:47 ►

I don’t think there is one single one

00:33:50 ►

of these naturally occurring ones

00:33:51 ►

which modern science has discovered

00:33:55 ►

modern science of course has discovered

00:33:56 ►

better ways of extracting the

00:33:58 ►

active principles from these drugs

00:34:00 ►

and of course has discovered numerous

00:34:03 ►

ways of synthesizing new substances of extreme

00:34:06 ►

power. But the actual discovery of these naturally occurring things was made by primitive men

00:34:14 ►

goodness knows how many centuries ago. There is for example in the underneath the lake dwellings

00:34:25 ►

the

00:34:26 ►

early neolithic

00:34:28 ►

lake dwellings which have been dug up

00:34:30 ►

in Switzerland

00:34:32 ►

we find poppy heads

00:34:34 ►

which looks as though people

00:34:36 ►

were already using

00:34:38 ►

this most ancient

00:34:40 ►

and powerful and most

00:34:42 ►

dangerous of narcotics

00:34:44 ►

even in the days before the

00:34:47 ►

rise of agriculture so that man was apparently a dope egg addict before he

00:34:52 ►

was a farmer which is a very very curious comment on human nature but the

00:35:01 ►

difference as I say between the ancient mind changers, the traditional mind changers, and these new substances, is that they were extremely harmful.

00:35:11 ►

And the new ones are not.

00:35:13 ►

I mean, even the permissible mind changer, alcohol is not entirely harmless, as people may have noticed.

00:35:26 ►

entirely harmless as people may have noticed and the the other ones the non permissible ones such as opium and cocaine opium and all its derivatives

00:35:31 ►

are very harmful indeed that they they rapidly produce addiction and and in

00:35:38 ►

some cases lead it was an extraordinary rate to physical degeneration and death.

00:35:46 ►

Whereas these new substances, this is really very extraordinary,

00:35:52 ►

that a number of these new mind-changing substances can produce enormous revolutions

00:35:58 ►

within the mental side of our being, and yet do almost nothing to the physiological side.

00:36:07 ►

I mean, you can have an enormous revolution, for example, with LSD-25 or with the newly

00:36:17 ►

synthesized drug psilocybin, which is the active principle of the Mexican sacred mushroom.

00:36:23 ►

You can have this enormous mental revolution

00:36:26 ►

with no more physiological revolution

00:36:29 ►

than you would get from drinking two cocktails.

00:36:33 ►

And this is really a most extraordinary fact.

00:36:37 ►

And it is, of course, true that pharmacologists

00:36:41 ►

are producing a great many wonder drugs

00:36:43 ►

where the cure is almost worse than the disease.

00:36:49 ►

Every new edition of medical textbooks contains a longer and longer chapter

00:36:55 ►

on what are called iatrogenic diseases, that is to say, diseases caused by doctors.

00:37:07 ►

and this is quite true that many of the wonder drugs are extremely dangerous

00:37:11 ►

I mean they can produce extraordinary effects

00:37:14 ►

and in critical conditions they should certainly be used

00:37:17 ►

but they should be used with the utmost caution

00:37:20 ►

but there is evidently a whole class of drugs

00:37:24 ►

affecting the central nervous system

00:37:27 ►

which can produce enormous changes in sedation, in euphoria, in energizing the whole mental

00:37:39 ►

process without doing any perceptible harm to the body.

00:37:45 ►

And in this sense, this represents, it seems to me, the most extraordinary revolution that

00:37:52 ►

it, in the hands of a dictator, these substances of one kind or another could be used in the most, well, with complete, first

00:38:09 ►

of all, with complete harmlessness, and the result would be that, I mean, you can imagine

00:38:17 ►

a euphoric which would make people thoroughly happy even in the most abominable circumstances.

00:38:24 ►

I mean, these things are possible. I mean, even in the most abominable circumstances. I mean, these

00:38:25 ►

things are possible. I mean, this is the extraordinary thing. I mean, after all, this has even been

00:38:31 ►

true with the crude old drugs. I mean, as a houseman years ago remarked, apropos of

00:38:38 ►

Milton’s Paradise Lost, he says, and beer does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to men.

00:38:48 ►

And beer is, of course, an extremely crude drug compared with these ones.

00:38:55 ►

And you can certainly say that some of the psychic energizers and the new hallucinants

00:39:01 ►

can do incomparably more than Milton and all the theologians combined could possibly do

00:39:07 ►

to make the terrifying mystery of our existence seem more tolerable than it does.

00:39:15 ►

So that here I think one has an enormous area in which the ultimate revolution could function very well indeed,

00:39:26 ►

an area in which a great deal of control could be used

00:39:30 ►

by, not through terror,

00:39:32 ►

but through making life seem much more enjoyable than it normally does,

00:39:36 ►

enjoyable to the point where, as I’ve said before,

00:39:39 ►

human beings come to love a state of things

00:39:43 ►

which by any reasonable and decent human standard they ought not to love.

00:39:48 ►

And this, I think, is perfectly possible.

00:39:50 ►

Well, then, very briefly, let me speak about one of the more recent developments in the sphere of neurology,

00:40:03 ►

the implantation of electrodes in the brain,

00:40:07 ►

this, of course, has been done on a large scale in animals,

00:40:12 ►

and in a few cases it’s been done in cases of the hopelessly insane.

00:40:20 ►

insane and it is

00:40:23 ►

anybody who’s watched

00:40:25 ►

the behaviour of rats

00:40:27 ►

with electrodes

00:40:29 ►

planted in different centres

00:40:31 ►

must

00:40:34 ►

come away from this experience with the most

00:40:37 ►

extraordinary doubts

00:40:39 ►

about what on earth is in store for us

00:40:42 ►

if ever this

00:40:43 ►

is got hold of by a dictator.

00:40:47 ►

I saw not long ago some rats in Magoon’s laboratory at UCLA.

00:40:56 ►

There were two sets of them,

00:40:58 ►

one with electrodes planted in a pleasure centre.

00:41:02 ►

And these rats, the technique was that they had

00:41:05 ►

a bar which they pressed

00:41:07 ►

and which

00:41:09 ►

turned on a very

00:41:11 ►

small current for a short space of time

00:41:14 ►

which

00:41:15 ►

had a wire connected with their

00:41:17 ►

electrode and which

00:41:19 ►

stimulated

00:41:21 ►

this pleasure centre which was evidently

00:41:23 ►

absolutely ecstatic,

00:41:29 ►

was these rats were pressing the bar 18,000 times a day.

00:41:34 ►

Apparently, if you kept them from pressing the bar for a day,

00:41:38 ►

they would press the bar 36,000 times on the following day and would fall till they fell down in complete exhaustion.

00:41:42 ►

And they would neither eat nor be interested in the opposite

00:41:46 ►

sex and would just go on pressing this card. Then the most extraordinary rats were those

00:41:53 ►

where the electrode was planted halfway between a pleasure and a pain center and where evidently

00:41:59 ►

the result was a kind of mixture of the most wonderful ecstasy

00:42:05 ►

in being on the rack at the same time.

00:42:08 ►

And you would see the rat sort of looking at its bar

00:42:11 ►

and sort of saying, to be or not to be, that is the question.

00:42:14 ►

Finally would approach and do it.

00:42:17 ►

And then he would go back with this awful,

00:42:24 ►

I mean, if one can humanize an anthropomorphize, I mean, he was

00:42:29 ►

feeling something terribly mixed. And he would wait for quite a long time before pressing

00:42:34 ►

the bar again, but he would always press it again. This was the extraordinary thing. And

00:42:39 ►

I noticed in this most recent issue of Scientific American, there’s a very interesting article on electrodes in the brains of chickens,

00:42:50 ►

where the technique is very ingenious.

00:42:53 ►

You sink into their brains a little socket with a screw on it, and the electrode then can be screwed deeper and deeper into the brain stem,

00:43:04 ►

electrode then can be screwed deeper and deeper into the brain stem,

00:43:07 ►

and you can test at any moment, according to the depth, which goes in fractions of a millimetre, of what you’re stimulating.

00:43:12 ►

And these creatures are not merely stimulated by wire.

00:43:17 ►

They are fitted with a miniaturised radio receiver,

00:43:21 ►

weighing less than an ounce, which is attached to them,

00:43:24 ►

so that

00:43:25 ►

they can be communicated with at a distance.

00:43:28 ►

I mean, they can run about in the barnyard, and you can press the button, and this particular

00:43:33 ►

area of the brain to which the electrode’s been screwed down to will be stimulated, and

00:43:38 ►

you will get these fantastic phenomena that a sleepy chicken will suddenly get up and rush about

00:43:46 ►

or an active chicken will suddenly sit down and go to sleep

00:43:50 ►

or a hen will suddenly start sitting as though it were hatching out an egg

00:43:55 ►

or a rooster will start fighting or suddenly go into a state of extreme depression.

00:44:15 ►

depression. The whole picture of the absolute control of the drives is terrifying. And in the cases, the few cases in which this has been done with very sick human beings, the

00:44:20 ►

effects are evidently very remarkable too. I was talking last summer in England to Gray Walter, who is the most eminent exponent of the electroencephalogram techniques in England.

00:44:35 ►

And he was telling me that he’s seen hopeless inmates of asylums with these things in their heads,

00:44:43 ►

and that these people were suffering from uncontrollable depression. And they’d had the electrodes inserted into something resembling

00:44:53 ►

evidently the pleasure center of the rat. Anyhow, when they felt too bad, they just

00:44:58 ►

pressed a button on the battery in their pocket, and he said the result was fantastic. The

00:45:03 ►

mouth, which had gone down, would suddenly turn up, and they would evidently feel, I

00:45:09 ►

don’t know for how long at a time, very cheerful and happy.

00:45:13 ►

So that here again one sees the most extraordinary revolutionary techniques which are now available

00:45:24 ►

to us.

00:45:27 ►

Now, I think what is obviously perfectly clear is that for the present,

00:45:37 ►

these techniques are not being much used except in a purely experimental way. But I think it is extraordinarily important

00:45:46 ►

for us to realize what is happening, to make ourselves acquainted with what has already

00:45:56 ►

happened, and then to use a certain amount of imagination to extrapolate into the future,

00:46:06 ►

the sort of things that might happen.

00:46:09 ►

I mean, what might happen if these fantastically powerful techniques

00:46:15 ►

were used by unscrupulous people in authority?

00:46:20 ►

What on earth would happen?

00:46:22 ►

What sort of society would we get? And I think

00:46:29 ►

this is peculiarly important, because as one sees, and looking back over history, we have

00:46:34 ►

allowed in the past all those advances in technology which have profoundly changed a

00:46:42 ►

social and individual life, we have allowed them to take us by surprise.

00:46:46 ►

I mean, it seems to me that during the late 18th century, early 19th century, when the

00:46:52 ►

new machines were making possible the factory system, it was not beyond the wit of man to

00:46:59 ►

see what, to look at what was happening and to project into the future,

00:47:09 ►

and maybe to forestall the really dreadful consequences which plagued England and most of Western Europe and most of this country

00:47:14 ►

for about 50 or 60 years, the horrible abuses of the factory system.

00:47:20 ►

If a certain amount of forethought had been devoted to the problem at that time,

00:47:26 ►

if people had first of all found out what was happening and then used their imagination to see what might happen,

00:47:32 ►

and then had gone on to work out means by which the worst applications of the new techniques should not take place. Then I think Western humanity might have been spared

00:47:47 ►

about three generations of utter misery

00:47:50 ►

which was imposed upon the poor at that time.

00:47:54 ►

And similarly with various technological advances now,

00:47:58 ►

I mean, it’s quite clear we have to start thinking

00:48:00 ►

very, very hard about the problems of automation.

00:48:05 ►

And again, I think we have to think still more profoundly about the problems which may arise in relation to these new techniques,

00:48:14 ►

which may contribute to this ultimate revolution.

00:48:20 ►

Our business is to, first of all, as I say, to be aware of what is happening,

00:48:25 ►

then to use our imaginations to see what might happen, how this might be abused,

00:48:30 ►

and then, if possible, to see that the enormous powers which we now possess,

00:48:37 ►

thanks to these scientific and technological advances,

00:48:41 ►

shall be used for the benefit of human beings and not for their

00:48:45 ►

ultimate degradation. Thank you. We do have a few moments.

00:49:14 ►

I’m very sorry I’ve talked much too long.

00:49:16 ►

It’s quite all right.

00:49:17 ►

It was a brief discussion, and those of you who are interested in staying and listening,

00:49:22 ►

I’m sure that it will be worthwhile.

00:49:25 ►

John, Mr. Post, would you like to ask a question?

00:49:28 ►

Well, I’m afraid my question shows a certain optimism which may not be justified in a way.

00:49:34 ►

Your quote from Hausman, that Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man,

00:49:40 ►

indicates that my remarks may show that I’m looking into the pewter pot to see the world

00:49:44 ►

as the world is not.

00:49:45 ►

At any rate, I’m a bit worried about your picture, the picture you paint,

00:49:52 ►

that the future may contain a number of monolithic scientific dictatorships,

00:49:59 ►

that there may be a groundswell in this direction,

00:50:09 ►

groundswell in this direction, a groundswell caused by a human tendency to seek pleasure where it can be found.

00:50:11 ►

But I’m struck by the fact that movements of that sort are always far more complex than

00:50:16 ►

any of our attempts at characterizing them.

00:50:20 ►

And I think that perhaps in this complexity lies a ray of hope that the future may not contain such monolithic scientific dictatorships and that the developments which we can expect in light of the various technological achievements you mentioned may not lead in the direction of scientific dictatorships in the way you indicate,

00:50:45 ►

that this may depend to a great extent upon the nature or the characteristics of the nations

00:50:50 ►

in which these results are first introduced.

00:50:55 ►

In other words, my question really is, when you project into the future

00:50:59 ►

and you say that the chances are very great of dictatorships of this kind occurring.

00:51:06 ►

Could you qualify a bit more what the chances are?

00:51:10 ►

Well, I don’t think the chances are very great.

00:51:14 ►

I think they are there.

00:51:15 ►

And I would think that one of the reasons why we may get more dictatorships than we like

00:51:21 ►

lies in quite a different field. I mean, with large parts

00:51:28 ►

of the world increasing at 3% per annum in the population, goodness knows what is going

00:51:35 ►

to happen. I mean, for example, I was in India last autumn, and this is unutterably depressing, the enormous poverty.

00:51:46 ►

And the depression grew a great deal with the announcement just when we were there

00:51:53 ►

that the United Nations had come to the conclusion that its earlier estimates of the increase of Indian population

00:52:01 ►

were very much too low.

00:52:04 ►

The estimates had been in the neighborhood of 1.7% per annum,

00:52:08 ►

which is about the same as the United States,

00:52:10 ►

which had to be corrected up to 2.2 or 2.3,

00:52:14 ►

which I think doubles the population in about 32 years.

00:52:19 ►

And, of course, there are large parts of the world

00:52:21 ►

where the increase is fully 3%,

00:52:24 ►

and in certain parts of the world even 4%.

00:52:26 ►

I mean, 3% doubles the population in 24 years,

00:52:30 ►

and 4%, I forget, is about 16, I think.

00:52:34 ►

But it seems to me that the danger in regard to dictatorship

00:52:39 ►

arises as the population presses more heavily upon resources

00:52:46 ►

and as the rising tide of expectation,

00:52:51 ►

which certainly exists in these underdeveloped countries,

00:52:54 ►

is frustrated, as undoubtedly it is going to be,

00:52:58 ►

because it is almost impossible to make any development

00:53:03 ►

which shall catch up with, much less go faster than the population increase.

00:53:09 ►

So we may get a great deal of social unrest.

00:53:13 ►

And, of course, social unrest leads first to chaos and then to dictatorship.

00:53:17 ►

I mean, I think that the prospect of some kind of dictatorship, either military or communistic, I think in most cases more likely military,

00:53:26 ►

seems to me very great within the next 15 to 20 years.

00:53:32 ►

And whether some of these dictatorships may make use of these modern methods

00:53:37 ►

remains to be seen.

00:53:38 ►

But I think that unhappily the prospects for dictatorships

00:53:43 ►

in large areas of the world seem to me very great at the moment.

00:53:48 ►

I think that there is a considerable likelihood of this thing happening.

00:53:53 ►

The implication seems to be that we ought to be apprehensive

00:54:00 ►

that these techniques fall into the hands of dictatorships, demigods, etc.

00:54:04 ►

hence these techniques fall into the hands of dictatorships, demigods, etc. But I could easily envisage a situation where Western democracies could use these methods,

00:54:12 ►

such as electrodes attached to the brain of the SAC in order to avoid accidental war.

00:54:21 ►

to avoid accidental war.

00:54:25 ►

This could be put in very moral terms.

00:54:30 ►

Or that you give Soma to the discontented minority of the population who are suffering from

00:54:33 ►

anony, etc.

00:54:36 ►

Would you care to comment about the use of

00:54:38 ►

the use of these techniques by democracy,

00:54:42 ►

by democratic states?

00:54:43 ►

Well, you’re a lot more pessimistic than I am.

00:54:46 ►

But maybe your pessimism is justified.

00:54:50 ►

I mean, this is the awful fact remains that when techniques have been discovered, sooner

00:54:59 ►

or later they tend to be applied.

00:55:10 ►

later they tend to be applied. And in these techniques, where the object of application is the human being, you’re obviously up against the most dangerous situation. And what will

00:55:20 ►

be the temptation for those in power? I mean, after all, we pray regularly not to be led

00:55:26 ►

into temptation, and this is a very profound and important prayer. I mean, experience sadly

00:55:33 ►

shows that if we are tempted long enough and strongly enough, we almost invariably succumb,

00:55:40 ►

and that the whole process of setting up a decent society is essentially setting up a society in which temptations to abuse power shall be reduced to a minimum.

00:56:09 ►

a series of very powerful temptations, which to those in authority may finally turn out to be irresistible. I hope not, but I think what you say is something which we have to

00:56:17 ►

think about. I mean, this might be applied with justification, as you say, in the highest patriotic and moral terms,

00:56:29 ►

even in democratic societies.

00:56:31 ►

I trust not, but one never knows, particularly under conditions of extreme military stress.

00:56:41 ►

It would appear, sir, that the type of dictatorship which you have outlined for us here today

00:56:46 ►

and more detail in the grave new world would tend to be self-perpetuating

00:56:52 ►

unless there’s a rise such a sharp social crisis as to disrupt the pattern of authority

00:56:56 ►

and break the hold which is being passed on from one generation to the other in these terms.

00:57:02 ►

But it would appear that the type of social crisis involved in large-scale warfare, whether

00:57:07 ►

it be nuclear warfare or otherwise, or the type of crisis involved in a widespread famine,

00:57:12 ►

et cetera, would tend to disrupt this pattern of dictatorship.

00:57:16 ►

Therefore, would you say that it’s necessary to have a high degree of social stability

00:57:20 ►

in terms of economic conditions, in terms of world peace, before a dictatorship of the sort you have described for us would be able to really imprint itself upon a popular…

00:57:30 ►

This, I think, is very important.

00:57:31 ►

I mean, I think it’s obvious that such a dictatorship, if it were going to survive,

00:57:35 ►

would have to guarantee the adequate food supplies. I mean, I think, and whether it could in fact do this while the kind of international tensions,

00:57:51 ►

whether we can expect a long-lasting dictatorship within the context of nationalism, I don’t know.

00:58:00 ►

I don’t think so.

00:58:01 ►

I think we can expect dictatorships to arise, but not long-lasting ones.

00:58:07 ►

I mean, I think that even the best organized dictatorship within the context of of mind will lead it into conflict,

00:58:26 ►

which will, of course, destroy it, finally destroy it.

00:58:32 ►

I mean, this is a very important point.

00:58:35 ►

And then, of course, another point which was made by Sir Charles Darwin in his book,

00:58:39 ►

The Next Million Years, which I think was one which, in different terms, I envisaged in Brave New World.

00:58:48 ►

I mean, he points out that the human species is still a wild species.

00:58:54 ►

It has never been domesticated.

00:58:56 ►

I mean, a domesticated species is one which has been tamed by another species.

00:59:01 ►

Well, until we get an invasion from Mars, we shall not be tamed by another species. Well, until we get an invasion from Mars, we shall not be tamed by another species.

00:59:06 ►

All we can do is to try to tame ourselves,

00:59:09 ►

that an oligarchy tries to tame ourselves.

00:59:11 ►

But the oligarchy still remains wild.

00:59:14 ►

I mean, however much it succeeded in taming the,

00:59:16 ►

domesticating the rest of the race,

00:59:18 ►

it must remain wild.

00:59:20 ►

And this was the part of the fable,

00:59:24 ►

the dramatic part of the fable of Brave New World,

00:59:27 ►

is that the people in the upper hierarchy, who were not ruthlessly conditioned, could break down.

00:59:36 ►

And Charles Darwin insists that because man is wild, he can never expect to domesticate himself,

00:59:46 ►

because the people on top will always be undomesticated and will sooner or later always run wild.

00:59:52 ►

I think there’s a good deal to be said for this point of view in regard to the permanence of any dictatorship.

01:00:03 ►

Yes, I have a question.

01:00:06 ►

I’m worried about

01:00:07 ►

a relationship that seems to exist

01:00:09 ►

between cost, consent, and control.

01:00:13 ►

If a government wants to control its people,

01:00:15 ►

of course its job will be easier

01:00:17 ►

if they are more willing to consent,

01:00:20 ►

and the job will be correspondingly

01:00:22 ►

more costly if the corresponding consent isn’t there.

01:00:26 ►

Could you make a few remarks about the economic feasibility of introducing biological controls of the sort you talk about?

01:00:34 ►

I don’t know.

01:00:36 ►

I mean, wouldn’t it, I would have thought in some ways it would be cheaper than maintaining very large security forces and concentration camps and so on. I mean, just as in asylums, chemical control is a great deal simpler and cheaper than physical control.

01:00:55 ►

I mean, the bad old days of straight jackets and manacles and so on

01:01:01 ►

required quite a lot of people to handle the insane,

01:01:09 ►

whereas the tranquilizers seem to require much fewer.

01:01:13 ►

I mean, that you can get equal results with simpler and certainly pleasanter means.

01:01:24 ►

simpler and certainly pleasanter means.

01:01:29 ►

I have no idea about the actual cost situation,

01:01:33 ►

but it seems to me that it might actually be cheaper.

01:01:33 ►

I don’t know.

01:01:36 ►

Yes?

01:01:39 ►

Dr. Hudson, did you adhere to the view or comment on the view that precisely

01:01:41 ►

the American society of Western democracy is particularly

01:01:47 ►

susceptible to this type of brave new world for the following reason, that society is

01:01:54 ►

conditioned to adhere to a great degree of social conformity.

01:01:59 ►

In your creative stress, this idea of conformity is further pushed and consequently makes it much easier

01:02:07 ►

to develop these techniques.

01:02:09 ►

And it seems that politically, the extremities, there’s a growing feeling that we have to

01:02:15 ►

do away with the extremities.

01:02:16 ►

We have to keep on going the central path.

01:02:18 ►

And this would seem to me to make this much easier for a type of dictatorship, as you said, to slowly using the mass media that we’re

01:02:27 ►

developing, mold the population, plus the factor

01:02:32 ►

that in some of the other type societies,

01:02:34 ►

you have less inhibition about the brutal struggle for power

01:02:39 ►

within the top hierarchy.

01:02:40 ►

Whereas here, there would be some type of inhibition

01:02:44 ►

due to the so-called legal process

01:02:46 ►

that has developed, which would keep

01:02:48 ►

man from then violently attacking the leaders.

01:02:54 ►

Well,

01:02:55 ►

this business

01:03:00 ►

about conformity,

01:03:02 ►

I just don’t know.

01:03:04 ►

It seems extremely difficult, certainly for

01:03:08 ►

me to judge whether there is a higher degree of conformity here and now than there has

01:03:14 ►

been in other places and in the past. I mean, I would have thought the tendency towards conformity was to some extent offset by the enormous differentiation of function in modern society.

01:03:32 ►

I mean, nothing could be less homogeneous in function than a complex modern society.

01:03:39 ►

I mean, people are doing extraordinarily different things.

01:03:42 ►

People are doing extraordinarily different things.

01:03:51 ►

And although there may be a pressure to conformity in the suburbs, so to speak, or at home,

01:04:01 ►

there does seem considerable pressure to non-conformity or to differentiation in the functional life of people. I mean, I have no idea to what extent one offsets the other

01:04:05 ►

and whether the conforming drive is stronger than the drive towards differentiation. I

01:04:15 ►

just don’t know what the answer to this is. I mean, I read about the high degree of conformity

01:04:23 ►

and, of course, one does see that certainly as compared with the 19th century,

01:04:28 ►

this society does seem to be more conformist.

01:04:31 ►

I mean, if one reads the history of the utopian colonies

01:04:36 ►

which were set up during the 19th century,

01:04:41 ►

this is really extravagant.

01:04:43 ►

I mean, it’s inconceivable to think of anything like

01:04:46 ►

the Oneida community or Brook Farm even being set up today. I mean, this would be so outrageous

01:04:56 ►

that it would be impossible to imagine. And yet, in these Victorian days, there was this freedom to make experiments, social experiments, of the wildest character.

01:05:16 ►

Again, exactly what this means and exactly what the significance is for us and for the future, I don’t really know.

01:05:25 ►

I mean, I just feel so incapable of really understanding the unutterably odd facts of real life.

01:05:38 ►

I mean, I think one very often just has to accept them.

01:05:40 ►

There they are, and what really they mean, I don’t know.

01:05:46 ►

accept them. There they are, and what really they mean, I don’t know. Perhaps this is one of the charms of history, that one never really knows what it means.

01:05:57 ►

Well, this is finally related to the whole mind-body problem. I mean, we still don’t know very much about the relation of mind and body.

01:06:12 ►

I mean, we know clearly that they’re related to one another very closely,

01:06:17 ►

but exactly how electrochemical events in the central nervous system turn into the G minor quartet of Mozart, we really

01:06:27 ►

haven’t a faintest idea. I mean, I don’t think we have any more idea than Aquinas or Aristotle.

01:06:33 ►

All we can say is that it happens. And we do know a good deal more about the nature

01:06:39 ►

of the electrical and the chemical events. But again, what the bridge is, and whether it’s enough to say,

01:06:47 ►

like the neutral monists,

01:06:49 ►

that the two aspects,

01:06:52 ►

the mental and the physical,

01:06:54 ►

are merely the same thing seen from different sides.

01:06:58 ►

Again, I don’t know.

01:06:59 ►

I mean, even then,

01:07:01 ►

how can the same thing look so profoundly different?

01:07:05 ►

Something I don’t understand.

01:07:08 ►

And in relation to the mystical experience, I mean, clearly this is correlated with electrochemical states within the central nervous system.

01:07:22 ►

And I would be all for studying these states.

01:07:25 ►

I mean, I think it’s exceedingly important we should know about it.

01:07:31 ►

I mean, I can imagine a whole branch of science

01:07:33 ►

which would be called neurotheology or mycomysticism.

01:07:43 ►

I mean, this sounds funny, but nevertheless, we have to be able to speak in the same kind of language about the two aspects of any of these experiences, the neurological and the subjective.

01:08:01 ►

And then we, I suppose, on the philosophical level, we have to make the decision

01:08:05 ►

which William James posed for us. I mean, he says perfectly obvious that the mind is

01:08:14 ►

a function of the nervous system, but is it a productive function or is it a transmissive

01:08:20 ►

function? I mean, it does, as Cabanis said at the beginning of the 19th century,

01:08:27 ►

does the brain secrete thought as the liver secretes bile?

01:08:32 ►

Or is it some kind of valve, as James himself, I think, thought,

01:08:38 ►

and as certainly as Bergson thought,

01:08:40 ►

through which a preexistent mental element finds access into the human being.

01:08:48 ►

I mean, Bergson’s view was that, of course, it was a kind of reducing valve

01:08:53 ►

which permitted only those aspects of a universal consciousness

01:08:59 ►

which were useful to our survival as animals on the surface of the planet

01:09:03 ►

and as social creatures within a society, to come through.

01:09:08 ►

Well, I don’t know.

01:09:09 ►

As James says, both points of view are quite difficult from a philosophical point of view to justify,

01:09:19 ►

but the transmissive view is no more difficult than the productive view.

01:09:26 ►

And perhaps he’s right.

01:09:28 ►

I think my own view is that, on the whole,

01:09:31 ►

that he and Bergson were nearer the truth than the Cabanis, but I don’t know.

01:09:37 ►

I have one written question here I’d like to read out to you, sir.

01:09:41 ►

The population explosion is a grave danger to mankind,

01:09:44 ►

yet the right to bear children is a grave danger to mankind,

01:09:47 ►

yet the right to bear children is a right of free will.

01:09:54 ►

The only apparent way to stem this explosion is by some large-scale kind of conditioning or external coercion.

01:09:56 ►

Yet this is also a grave danger.

01:09:58 ►

Is there any way out of this dilemma?

01:10:07 ►

Well, the way out of the dilemma surely has been pointed out in most countries of the West where people voluntarily have limited the size of their families.

01:10:11 ►

I mean, this has happened without any coercion,

01:10:14 ►

unless you call the desire to have a good economic life and to bring up your children well a coercion.

01:10:22 ►

But, I mean, this has in fact occurred.

01:10:22 ►

bring up your children well, a coercion.

01:10:24 ►

But, I mean, this has in fact occurred.

01:10:33 ►

And, I mean, in this country, after having reached a low during the Depression,

01:10:34 ►

the birth rate happens to have gone up. But, I mean, the point is that the control of the size of families is now completely voluntary here.

01:10:41 ►

I mean, more or less completely voluntary,

01:10:44 ►

are completely voluntary here, I mean, more or less completely voluntary,

01:10:52 ►

which makes it profoundly different from the people in the underdeveloped societies who are still going on producing ten children because the habit persists

01:10:59 ►

that in order for three children to survive, you have to produce ten.

01:11:03 ►

But now if you produce ten children, seven survive

01:11:05 ►

because of elementary public health precautions which have been brought in.

01:11:13 ►

Hence, of course, the enormous sudden increase.

01:11:17 ►

The death rate which used to be in the upper 30s, as was the birth rate,

01:11:29 ►

has now fallen in many of these countries to 15 and 12 and even 10.

01:11:32 ►

So naturally there’s an enormous increase.

01:11:42 ►

But it’s certainly going to take some time to get people to change their habits. I mean, psychological inertia is much more powerful than physical inertia.

01:11:48 ►

I mean, it’s much easier to push a 10-ton truck than a human being.

01:11:52 ►

Mr. Post has one further question here.

01:11:55 ►

You’ve spoken of the ends to which drugs should not be devoted,

01:11:59 ►

such as increasing conformity, making men more content with what is actually an intolerable situation,

01:12:06 ►

securing the power of a small elite, and so on.

01:12:08 ►

To what ends do you think these drugs should be devoted, granted that they happen?

01:12:15 ►

Well, I mean, I think therapeutically some of them are very valuable.

01:12:20 ►

I think already, for example, some of the so-called psychic energizers have done

01:12:25 ►

a great deal in the mental field. I mean, I understand from Dr. Nathan Klein, for example,

01:12:32 ►

that in very many cases you can use some of these psychic energizers instead of the electroshock

01:12:40 ►

therapy. And people say that electroshock therapy doesn’t do any harm,

01:12:46 ►

but I cannot believe that partial electrocution is good for anybody.

01:12:51 ►

And it seems to me a very good thing that if you can get people on a maintenance dose

01:12:57 ►

to get them out of these awful catatonic and depressed conditions,

01:13:03 ►

which you seem to be able to do.

01:13:06 ►

And, after all, there are many people, it seems to me, outside institutions

01:13:09 ►

who have tendencies in the same direction,

01:13:14 ►

which I think a genuine psychic energizer might be,

01:13:21 ►

which could be used without harm to people would be of immense value.

01:13:26 ►

It was stated a few years ago, I remember,

01:13:29 ►

that the Russians had a five-year plan for increasing mental efficiency by chemical means.

01:13:37 ►

I don’t know whether this has gone on and what they’ve discovered,

01:13:40 ►

but I would think it’s probably on the cards that you could increase the span

01:13:46 ►

of attention, the amount of time you could concentrate on things, the power of observation

01:13:54 ►

and so on, by chemical as well as by educational means. I mean, I think that there are a number

01:14:01 ►

of probably quite good things you could do.

01:14:12 ►

And then, again, in the case of these very strange substances like psilocybin and lysergic acid, I think there’s a great deal to be said for doing what William James talked about,

01:14:19 ►

for getting people to realize that their ordinary sort of common sense view of the world is not the only view,

01:14:26 ►

that the universe they inhabit is not the only possible universe,

01:14:31 ►

and that there are other very strange universes which some people spontaneously inhabit.

01:14:37 ►

I mean, a man like William Blake obviously inhabits an extremely different universe from that which most people inhabit.

01:14:45 ►

And I think it’s probably very wholesome for people to be permitted to realize this fact,

01:14:53 ►

to perceive that the world of the mind is immensely large

01:14:57 ►

and that there are these very strange and extraordinary areas in them.

01:15:02 ►

And there are plenty of cases in the literature

01:15:05 ►

where these kind of experiences have produced a kind of conversion.

01:15:10 ►

The work which is being done at Harvard now by Leary,

01:15:14 ►

the prison, the local prisons in Boston,

01:15:18 ►

is very interesting, a series of extraordinary conversion experiences

01:15:25 ►

where hardened criminals have emerged from this.

01:15:28 ►

And here again, there may be, I mean, we don’t know enough about the subject yet,

01:15:33 ►

but there may be possibilities of very great importance here

01:15:39 ►

of sort of removing obstacles. I mean, the justification there was stated by Berg some years ago

01:15:50 ►

when he was defending William James against his use of nitrous oxide.

01:15:55 ►

A number of fellow philosophers thought this was infradig,

01:16:00 ►

that an eminent philosopher should resort to these chemical means, which enabled,

01:16:07 ►

I mean, James remarked that only under nitrous oxide could he understand what Hegel meant.

01:16:18 ►

Bergson said that it must be realized that the experiences which Mr. James describes are not caused by the gas.

01:16:30 ►

The gas is merely the occasion.

01:16:32 ►

The gas removes certain obstacles which might have been removed equally well by psychological or psychophysical means,

01:16:40 ►

so-called spiritual exercises of the various religions,

01:16:48 ►

means, so-called spiritual exercises of the various religions, but can also be removed by these chemical means, and that if you can do so without doing harm to yourself, so much

01:16:54 ►

is better.

01:16:54 ►

And incidentally, it’s one of the greatest tragedies, I think, in psychological research

01:17:01 ►

is I think in psychological research that

01:17:02 ►

James

01:17:04 ►

I think in about 1905

01:17:07 ►

made an experiment

01:17:09 ►

with peyote

01:17:10 ►

and as he had a rather weak stomach

01:17:13 ►

all that he got was violent

01:17:15 ►

vomiting. He said I’m

01:17:17 ►

afraid I must take the visions for granted

01:17:19 ►

I got only the nausea

01:17:21 ►

and it’s an awful pity if he had

01:17:23 ►

a stronger stomach we should have had this research beginning 50 years ago.

01:17:28 ►

But his weak stomach prevented this,

01:17:31 ►

and we’ve had to wait so much later to get this thing really going.

01:17:37 ►

I want to express our appreciation to Mr. Huxley

01:17:39 ►

on behalf of all of those who are here

01:17:42 ►

for less than our augmented knowledge restrict our understanding.

01:17:46 ►

Thank you very much.

01:17:47 ►

Thank you. You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:18:08 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:18:15 ►

Well, I hope you found that as rewarding to listen to as I did.

01:18:20 ►

And as I was listening with you just now, it struck me that,

01:18:24 ►

and at least this is just my opinion,

01:18:26 ►

but it seems to me that Terrence McKenna is more in the line of Huxley than of Leary, both in content and in style.

01:18:34 ►

And I’ll play another Timothy Leary talk next week and follow that up with a McKenna talk just to help us all make the comparison.

01:18:42 ►

All three of them, of course, were pivotal in the ongoing

01:18:45 ►

evolution of the worldwide psychedelic community, and we owe them all a great deal of thanks for

01:18:52 ►

their pioneering and sometimes risky work. All in all, I think our community is standing on the

01:18:58 ►

shoulders of giants, and Altus Huxley was one of the greatest. Had you heard that story about William James and Piotr before?

01:19:08 ►

I can’t say that I have,

01:19:09 ►

but one of the things that I liked about hearing Huxley tell the story of James’ weak stomach

01:19:15 ►

is the fact that, unless I’m badly mistaken,

01:19:19 ►

it was Piotr that Huxley ingested for his first psychedelic experience.

01:19:24 ►

I’m probably reading too much into this,

01:19:26 ►

but I’m sure that I heard a little note of pride in Huxley’s voice

01:19:30 ►

as he sadly noted that perhaps our work could have begun 50 years earlier

01:19:35 ►

if James only had the constitution that he had

01:19:38 ►

and could have held the peyote down a little longer.

01:19:42 ►

Also, I found Huxley’s premise to be frighteningly close I’ll see you next time. to check out the Cognitive Liberty site just to keep up with the state of research in the field of mind control

01:20:06 ►

that various government-supported laboratories

01:20:09 ►

are conducting right now.

01:20:11 ►

And did you pick up on what Huxley was saying just now

01:20:14 ►

about how it is possible for a small segment of the population

01:20:18 ►

to control the majority?

01:20:21 ►

What he said was,

01:20:23 ►

given the fact that there are these 20% of highly suggestible people, What he said was, and to organize them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any country.

01:20:46 ►

And, my friends, that seems to be precisely what the Bush-Cheney crime family has done.

01:20:52 ►

When you analyze the votes that Bush allegedly received,

01:20:55 ►

compared with the total number of eligible voters,

01:20:59 ►

you see that he only got about 20% of them.

01:21:02 ►

But that was enough for the coup they engineered to take over the country for the past seven

01:21:07 ►

years of hell.

01:21:08 ►

And so, as drugs such as the one Richard Glenn Boyer spoke about in our podcast number 99,

01:21:16 ►

do you remember that one?

01:21:17 ►

The drug that would keep you from ever getting high again?

01:21:20 ►

Well, people are actually working on things like that because, as you well know, psychedelics eliminate boundaries

01:21:27 ►

particularly the political boundaries in your mind

01:21:30 ►

that keep you from seeing the truth

01:21:32 ►

as Aldous Huxley said so clearly

01:21:35 ►

our business is to be aware of what is happening

01:21:39 ►

and then to use our imagination to see what might happen

01:21:43 ►

how this might be used

01:21:44 ►

and then, if possible, to see what might happen, how this might be used, and then,

01:21:45 ►

if possible, to see that the enormous powers which we now possess, thanks to these scientific

01:21:50 ►

and technological advances, to be used for the benefit of human beings and not for their

01:21:56 ►

degradation.

01:21:58 ►

I wonder what you would think today with the news that the American public is by far the

01:22:03 ►

most drug society that has ever existed.

01:22:06 ►

And I’m not talking here about illegal drugs.

01:22:08 ►

I’m talking about the whole range of feel-good drugs that your neighborhood doctor is pushing.

01:22:14 ►

You know the ones, Prozac, Xanax, Valium, among others.

01:22:19 ►

These are precisely the drugs that Huxley warned us about.

01:22:22 ►

Drugs that lull you into accepting the fact that you’re on a treadmill whose only purpose

01:22:27 ►

is to enrich those who are already so rich that they don’t actually need anything else,

01:22:33 ►

but their avarice just keeps them wanting more.

01:22:37 ►

Oh well, it takes all kinds, I guess.

01:22:39 ►

I’m just glad that you and I aren’t that kind of a person.

01:22:42 ►

And I guess in my case I I should add the words anymore,

01:22:46 ►

because there certainly was a time when I was on the greed train myself.

01:22:50 ►

Although I was always able to convince myself that the only reason I wanted to get rich

01:22:55 ►

is so that I could use my money to help others,

01:22:59 ►

it was a false dream that I was chasing, of course.

01:23:01 ►

And fortunately, I found our wonderful psychedelic medicines and

01:23:05 ►

was able to break down some

01:23:07 ►

boundaries myself and get a little better

01:23:09 ►

focus on life.

01:23:12 ►

And speaking of focus,

01:23:14 ►

you might want to surf over to

01:23:16 ►

fellow salonner Barry Hoon’s website

01:23:18 ►

at www.quantumdrawing.co.uk

01:23:23 ►

As Barry told me recently,

01:23:26 ►

I don’t know where my drawings come from.

01:23:29 ►

I just sit down with a pad and pen,

01:23:31 ►

and after a couple of hours, I have another drawing.

01:23:34 ►

People tell me that they are so trippy,

01:23:36 ►

and they see much stuff in them,

01:23:37 ►

that I should get them out there.

01:23:40 ►

And now, I’m one of those people

01:23:42 ►

who has seen some very trippy stuff in these drawings.

01:23:45 ►

So if you’re looking for a new art experience, you might want to check this out.

01:23:51 ►

And finally, I want to read part of an email that I received from our fellow salonner, Mojo, who says,

01:23:58 ►

It almost seems necessary to start putting together an underground community capable of merging resources in such a way

01:24:05 ►

that our tribe can demonstrate to the rest of the world, not only that we can be responsible,

01:24:12 ►

but that we can show a better, peaceful, cooperative way of living.

01:24:16 ►

In my mind, just as important as actually getting to the Mayan ruins leading up to the 21st of December

01:24:22 ►

is maintaining the beauty of the setting in which the ruins exist.

01:24:26 ►

From an ecological standpoint, it would be horrendous for hundreds of thousands of people

01:24:31 ►

to show up in the middle of the jungle and start camping out without a game plan,

01:24:35 ►

which can not only protect the immediate environment,

01:24:38 ►

but can also keep the people there in a safe and sanitary living situation.

01:24:43 ►

In this sense, we would need to embrace a scientific necessity Thank you. the energy to turn those ideas into action. Although I can’t say I’ve got any good ideas myself about where to begin,

01:25:28 ►

like you, I remain confident that a leave-no-trace society is certainly possible,

01:25:34 ►

and I join you and all of our other fellow salonners in that dream.

01:25:39 ►

Now, as always, I’ll close this podcast by saying that this and all of the podcasts

01:25:44 ►

from the Psychedelic Salon are available for your use under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.

01:25:52 ►

If you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.

01:26:01 ►

And that’s also where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts.

01:26:04 ►

And that’s also where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts.

01:26:11 ►

Before I close for today, I want once again to thank my dear friend Jacques,

01:26:15 ►

the main person behind Chateau Hayouk, whose music I’ve used.

01:26:20 ►

Here’s our theme song for all 144 podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon.

01:26:22 ►

Thanks a lot, Jacques.

01:26:25 ►

Your music has been a perfect companion for these programs.

01:26:30 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:26:33 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

144 - The Ultimate Revolution

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