152 - Question Authority and Think for Yourself

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary

[NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.]

“When I say think for yourself, I don’t mean think selfishly for yourself. I mean think independently.”

“If you’re going to think for yourself, you gotta learn to think clearly.”

“The person who thinks for herself or himself has to have a sense of humility, and of modesty, and of relativity because you have to realize that I’m thinking for myself, but hopefully you are too, and you’re bound to come out with something a little different from me. So there has to be an ability to listen, compassion, plus the modesty. No matter how smart we are there’s a lot we aren’t going to be able to figure out tonight.”

“I’m glad we’re laughing together because that’s a key. A sense of humor is the key. … That ability to laugh together certainly goes along with the ability to think together.”

“Any time you introduce a new technology of thought processing, or of thought communication, you change everything else.”

[Speaking about the biblical Eve] “I’m really pleased that the first member of my species was a woman who had the courage to stand up on her feet and think for herself.”

“The idea that any human being should be forced by economics, forced to do work that can be done better by a machine or a computer is totally humiliating to any concept of our human dignity and worth.”

“Now in the Industrial Age, a good person was someone who was prompt, reliable, dependable, productive, efficient, and replaceable.”

“It’s always the artists, by the way, I think. The artists, and the entertainers, and the writers, and the musicians whose job it is to prepare society, to become a comfortable way for changes that otherwise would be too frightening.”

“The point of the 20th century, you can argue, is to get us to accept knowledge, processing, and reality on screens.”

“To me, a computer is a thought processor.”

A case in defense of Salvia divinorum

Mythic Imagination

Fred Johnson and Michael Meade

Johnson sings an introduction for Ari Berk

“What Was Said to the Rose”

Mythic Journeys (preview trailer)

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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So here we are in August of 2008 and guess what? Today is my 66th birthday.

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So I first want to thank my mother and father, without whom we obviously wouldn’t all be together here in cyberdelic space today.

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space today. And even though they are no longer here with us on this lovely little planet,

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I still feel their spirits touching me, and for their love and all they did for me, I will remain forever grateful. But I have a question. Since both of my parents have died,

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does that make me an orphan? Is there an age limit to orphanhood, or do I still qualify?

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age limit to orphanhood, or do I still qualify?

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Okay, I’ll give up on my feeble attempts at humor and get on with today’s program.

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But while I’m into thank yous, I also want to thank David A., who very kindly sent in a donation this week to help us out with the expenses

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associated with producing these podcasts.

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So thank you very much, David.

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It was very kind of you to help out.

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producing these podcasts.

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So thank you very much, David.

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It was very kind of you to help out.

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Well, it feels like it’s time to give Terrence McKenna’s material a little rest and give a listen to one of the other elders of our community, Timothy Leary.

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By the way, just so you don’t get into thinking that I may also be an elder just because of my age,

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I should remind you that I’m still just getting

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started and have a long way to go toward elderhood.

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For example, within a few weeks this summer, Gary Fisher turned 77 and Myron Stolaroff

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turned 88.

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And that’s actually one of the reasons I so enjoy their company, because compared to them,

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I’m still a kid.

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Anyway, I’ve been getting some feedback that tells me

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I’ve been playing too many Terrence McKenna talks without any breaks.

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Now, this will come as a surprise to some of our fellow slaughters.

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In fact, it was a surprise to me.

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But there is a sizable number of people who don’t resonate at all with the good bard McKenna.

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When I first learned that interesting little fact,

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I just assumed that they hadn’t been around the tribe long enough

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to appreciate what he had to say.

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But last month, my friend Rafael spent a few days with us

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while he was on a holiday away from his new home in Thailand,

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and I was shocked to learn that Rafael seldom listens to any of Terrence’s talks.

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He just doesn’t resonate with Raphael,

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and since then I heard the dope being reading an email from another listener

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who also doesn’t groove on McKenna.

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As well as I’ve heard similar things from a number of other directions,

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and so I’m going to let Terrence rest a bit,

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and we’ll go on for a while without him.

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But don’t think I’m going to let you get away without hearing from another Irishman.

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And you know who I’m talking about, the one and only Dr. Timothy Leary.

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I’ve got a couple of things that I want to mention about Dr. Leary,

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but first I’d like to play another talk from the Leary Archive.

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This one was recorded in 1987 and took place in Fort Worth, Texas.

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Having lived for several years in Dallas, Texas myself,

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I have a fairly good idea of what the vibe was like in that area back in the 80s.

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And I think that rednecked and screwed down is one way to describe

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the good old boys who haunt the highways and byways of Texas.

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But for this talk, I think the more conservative vibe of that area

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may have acted like a steadying keel for Tim, and he gave what I think is one of his best

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organized and interesting talks that I’ve heard anyway.

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So where were you in 1987, before the falls of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union?

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What were you doing during those last few years of the Cold War?

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And how do you think that you would have reacted then

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to what we’re about to hear right now?

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On second thought, we’d better forget that question

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because at least half of our fellow salonners were quite young back then.

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Some were probably just learning to walk

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and many weren’t even born yet, probably.

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Nonetheless, I think that the ideas Dr. Leary presents here are still very much worth considering yet today.

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But I’ll let you decide that for yourself, since thinking for yourself is actually the point of today’s talk.

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So now, here is Dr. Timothy Leary recommending to a 1987 Texas audience that they should question authority and think for themselves.

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I’m very happy to be here.

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By the way, can I have the lights down a little so that I can see the audience more clearly, please?

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Thank you.

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I’m privileged to be here.

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This is, I won’t say a hallucination come true, but a very good dream come true. In the many ice ages ago, say in the 1960s, we coined many bumper stickers and wore

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many t-shirts to encourage us to go where human beings hadn’t been for quite a while.

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And one of our bumper stickers was a turn on, tune in, drop out, which everybody misunderstood, including those of us that originated it.

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But the general idea, as I remember, was that you would turn on, that means you would activate circuits of your brain or areas of consciousness.

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We can debate the terminology here, but, you know, turn on the illumination and the spirits and powers within.

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But tune in was equally necessary because it didn’t do any good if you were turned on and, you know, running around saying, wow.

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Listen to Beatles records.

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Tune in, Matt, you had to tune it back in.

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You had to make visible, tangible expressions of the divinity or the glory or the wonder or the horror

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or whatever it was that you had experienced.

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So I would call this incredible territory here in the center of Fort Worth, a wonderful example of seeking within some sort of inner vision that brought these wonderful people together.

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And then making it happen.

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Because, you know, that’s certainly what we call the bottom line of the 80s.

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It’s deeper than the bottom line,

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that you’ve got to express it in your activities, in your behavior, in your creations.

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And I congratulate those of you who have made this happening,

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and I congratulate those of you in Fort Worth who share this wonderful monument to the human spirit.

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this wonderful monument to the human spirit.

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Now, the title of my talk uses five wonderful red, white, and blue Yankee Doodle words

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that have been the guiding motto of my life.

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T-F-Y-Q-A.

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Think for yourself and question authority.

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Now, when I say question authority, don’t get upset.

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I know this is 1987.

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I don’t mean to rattle the establishment here.

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I mean simply that.

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Question authority.

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I mean simply that, question authority.

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Ask authorities, experts, politicians, generals, ministers.

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Ask them, hey, what’s going on?

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What are you trying to do?

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Now, it’s part of the realism of the 80s that you know that much of the time authorities ain’t going to answer your questions.

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They tend to discourage people asking questions.

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I should make a couple of other caveats here about thinking for yourself and questioning authority.

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When I say think for yourself, I don’t mean think selfishly for yourself.

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I mean think independently and when I say think for yourself

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I don’t mean that you have to come out with original innovative ideas

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60 of them every minute

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as a matter of fact

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if you think for yourself

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and you get really dedicated and responsible

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you know and thorough in thinking for yourself

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you know nine times out of ten

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you’re going to agree with the old traditional ways

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you know, nine times out of ten, you’re going to agree with the old traditional ways. You know, honesty is the best policy.

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And love thy neighbor and honor thy father and thy mother.

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Never play poker with a guy named Doc.

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Or never shoot pool with someone who has a name for,

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save the city for his first name.

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You know, they’re tried and true,

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traditional guideposts of human wisdom

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that have brought our species all the way

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in that lonely, lonely period in the pre-Cambian slime

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four and a half billion years ago we started.

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So thinking to yourself doesn’t mean you have to be a smart aleck

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and run around, you know, producing.

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Now, my job, my task, my pleasure

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is to try to encourage you and empower you

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to think for yourself.

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Now, I have to encourage you first because we get a lot of discouragement when we try to think for ourselves.

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You well know that most authorities, most establishments, most of the people in charge of human societies

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tend to really discourage you from thinking for yourself.

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You know, who are you, kid?

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You know,

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what degree do you have?

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Or who nominated you

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as spokesman for wisdom?

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And, you know,

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matter of fact,

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you can get in trouble

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if you think for yourself

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or think for yourself

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too publicly or loudly. I can testify in trouble if you think for yourself or think for yourself too publicly or loudly.

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I can testify in my own personal experience.

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As a matter of fact, I would say in two-thirds of the countries today, perhaps 75% of the human race lives in countries under regimes which absolutely, totally forbid you from thinking for yourself.

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I would cite the fundamentalist religious countries like Iran or the communist countries

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where anyone who thinks for themselves is called a hooligan.

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I mean, it’s the worst crime against the Soviet Union or the socialist workers’ order

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if you try to think for yourself.

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I mean, come on, it’s all down there in the book.

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It’s down there in that book that Allah wrote.

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So it can become quite unpopular if you hard to think for yourself and also let’s face

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it we’re tribal animals where we’re social animals and we all want social

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approval and there is that wonderful feeling that cozy warm feeling of being

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in the herd rubbing your woolly warm bodies together all trotting off to

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Nicaragua and you can’t knock that.

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It’s a basic human animal instinct that goes back thousands of years.

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To be a member of the hive and hear the buzz of a million friendly brothers and sisters out there making honey for you.

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And the Tennessee is to sting to death any bee that comes along with some strange idea.

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You know, it’s also, it is, it’s a tough thing to think.

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You have to wake up in the morning and, you know, you have to figure it all out.

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I can understand why people get discouraged.

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You know, there’s a lot of things we don’t know.

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Matter of fact, you know, some of the basic issues of human nature and how to get along together and how to stop war.

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And why can’t we live in peace? And why can’t we?

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You know, we don’t know. There’s a lot of mystery out there.

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So that you get discouraged.

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And I can see why people go down on their knees and pray to some divine power to think for me.

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Or people will get on their knees and take the good book that was written 4,000 or 5,000 years and say, yeah, that’s the manual, read it.

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I can understand why.

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I think, of course, I must say about thinking for yourself, I’ve gotten into a lot of trouble trying to express thoughts because there are certain things that become so obvious and at certain times society doesn’t want to hear it.

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So you tend to want to talk louder or you try to exaggerate.

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Can’t you see it? Come on, can’t you see it?

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And then particularly if you’re Irish descent and your forefathers have kissed the Blarney Stone,

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there’s a tendency to try to get people’s attention or try to look at this new thing so obviously

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if you’re going to think for yourself

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you better learn how to think clearly

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and that’s the other part of the equation

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I’ve been trying to give you the old pep talk

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the locker room dragois there

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in the second half, kids

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and start thinking for yourself

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but it can be discouraging

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it can be dangerous and. It can be dangerous.

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And so it’s my duty, too, to try to pass on some tips as to how to think for yourself.

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Because you have to have that know-how.

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It doesn’t do any good to have wonderful visions unless you have the know-how to make incredible ecological deserts in the middle of Fort Worth.

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Know-how.

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Now, let’s face it. Our species, we have to be compassionate with each other, too. with know-how.

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Now, let’s face it.

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Our species, we have to be compassionate with each other, too.

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And the person who thinks for herself or himself, you know, has to have a sense of humility and of modesty and of relativity, because you have to realize that I’m thinking for myself, but hopefully you are, too,

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and you’re bound to come out with something a little different from me.

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So there has to be the ability to listen and a compassionate you know uh plus the the modesty that no matter how

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smart we are there’s a lot we’re not going to be able to figure out tonight

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i’m glad we’re laughing together because uh uh that’s a key sense of humor is the key and uh

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that’s einstein in relativity you know every, it all depends on your point of view.

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And as you move around, everyone’s got a different point of view.

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You can look back at where you were yesterday and kind of laugh.

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That ability to laugh together certainly goes along with the ability to think together.

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Well, let’s talk a little bit about the technology of thinking.

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Now, I use the word technology of thinking because,

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oh, by the way, you know,

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I’m going to try to strafe you and strobe you with a lot of interesting ideas,

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I hope interesting, new ideas, provocative ideas.

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Don’t believe them.

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You know, I’m just trying to, you know, to get you thinking a little bit

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and get you to make me think back.

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I’m going to pass on what I think are interesting points of view about how to think for yourself.

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At the present time, I define the mental clearness and the intellectual performance of an individual or of a society or of a species in terms of

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the technology that they use to think.

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Now, that may seem strange to me to talk about the technology of thinking.

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Thinking is such a psychological thing.

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It’s something that you, almost like an instinct, you know, fish, women, you’re supposed to

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think.

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But think about this for a minute.

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You know, in a way, you could say that the technology of thought is like the technology of travel.

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Now, there are lots of ways you can travel.

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The best, of course, the earliest, the first one we have to learn is on foot.

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You crawl and then you walk.

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And certainly walking, jogging, running, dancing are parts of our repertoire of how you want to travel.

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But then, of course, there’s the body-moved bicycles,

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and then you get automobiles, and you get rockets, and you get planes.

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There’s a lot of ways to travel.

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And you can tell a lot about the prosperity and success of an individual

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or of a country in terms of what technologies do they have to travel.

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And the same thing is true, I submit to you, about the technologies of thought.

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Now, we all start off, of course, with the basic technology of the vocal cords and the muscles.

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Our species developed this, apparently, as their first means of packaging thought,

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defining thought, storing thought, packaging thought, defining thought, storing

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thought, remembering thought, communicating thought, the vocal cords, or maybe gestures.

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And as individuals recapitulating, presumably, the history of our race, we have gone through

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the same thing.

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The first way we package and communicate thought with our parents is, of course, oohs and ahhs

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and gestures.

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Now, every form of thinking and thought technology has its advantages and its disadvantages.

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And I’m not here to try to, it’s not either or.

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One thing you know about relativity is never either or.

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It’s both and and multiply by ten.

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And if I praise one technology of thought, by no means am I derogating

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urging you to give up the other

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the aim is to know what you’re doing

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and to use the right way of packaging thought

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at the appropriate time

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now the oral tradition of course

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it works wonders in a tribal situation

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for the sound of your voice

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and it does come from the earliest moments of human history

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but when you think about it,

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the vocal cords and gestures

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are not the best way to communicate

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highly complicated ideas.

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Basically, oral tradition and gestures

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communicate emotions.

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And they’re very powerful techniques

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for communicating emotions

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because they wake up and activate mid-brain circuits

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that we relied upon when we were back there in the caves

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and the hyenas out there and the lions

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and the head of the tribe would say,

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halter, choper, and we had to listen.

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The oral tradition is still wonderful,

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still wonderful for communicating emotions and the little intimate, the tender, the private things we want to communicate.

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Do we want to whisper?

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So I’m not knocking the oral tradition.

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But I must say that the oral tradition being limited mainly to emotions does not basically encourage thinking for yourself.

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You’d be in a lot of trouble in the average tribe if you tried, you know.

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Memory, the old person, the tribal sage was the one that saw the floods and the invasions

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and the plagues and the comings and goings of the generations and would pass on the word.

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And young kids, of course, were not supposed to get involved in that.

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And young kids, of course, are not supposed to get involved in that.

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Now, the next level of thinking and thought technology that, as individuals and as species, we have learned to master, is, of course, hand stuff, hand-operated computers, the papyrus and the illuminated manuscripts.

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Now, as soon as the Babylonians and the Phoenicians started making little notations on clay tiles, that changed society.

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It changed philosophy.

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It changed our definitions of human nature.

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And that tends to be true.

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Anytime you introduce a new technology of thought processing or thought communication, you change everything else.

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Now, what this sort of stuff made possible was, of course, the feudal state, the kingdom,

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because the king could tell the scribes and the scribes would send the messages out.

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Before, the old tribal guy could only shout across the valley,

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but now from Babylon and from Damascus and from Egypt and from Rome.

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The popes and the kings and the sultans and the emperors could send their messages out

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and lo and behold, a new society developed.

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Now, the feudal society and the feudal concept of human nature does not encourage thinking for yourself.

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Basically, in a feudal society, the average human being is a serf.

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God runs the whole thing.

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It’s all hierarchy, and God has his agents, and he has his messages.

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You can’t mess around with those messages because you’re not in urge to go out there and start writing. To show you

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how discouraging the feudal

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order was to, thinking for yourself,

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I could take from, say, the Koran or I could take from

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the Bible. I’ll take the Bible. That’s more familiar. Let’s take the first chapter of Genesis

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in the Bible. It lays right out, openly, no fooling around, the theory of thinking and thinking for yourself that’s based in that book.

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God, who of course is a man, and a rather bad-tempered man when you think about it,

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says, hey, I made the whole thing.

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I made the stars and the heavens and I made the planets and I made the earth and I made the waters and I made the land and the creepy crawly things

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and I made you, Adam, and I put you in the ultimate destination resort, boy.

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Garden of Eden.

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Go for it, boy.

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You can do anything you want here.

00:22:30 ►

I’ve even made you an assistant.

00:22:32 ►

I put a rib out and gave you a helpmate.

00:22:34 ►

I forget her name.

00:22:35 ►

Eve or something.

00:22:35 ►

I forget, but that’s not important.

00:22:37 ►

So go for it.

00:22:39 ►

Do whatever you want.

00:22:40 ►

Except there are two food and drug regulations, boy.

00:22:47 ►

You all see that tree over there?

00:22:49 ►

That’s the…

00:22:51 ►

The fruit of that tree is a controlled substance.

00:22:57 ►

Y’all are forbidden under pain of immortal,

00:23:00 ►

mortal, eternal damnation

00:23:02 ►

to ingest in that because that

00:23:09 ►

free of knowledge

00:23:09 ►

all right

00:23:11 ►

well you know what happened

00:23:20 ►

when God jumped in his squad car

00:23:23 ►

and back to headquarters

00:23:24 ►

it was Eve oh yeah what happened when God jumped in his quad car and back to headquarters.

00:23:28 ►

It was Eve.

00:23:29 ►

Oh, yeah.

00:23:31 ►

It was Eve that caused all that.

00:23:34 ►

It was Eve that looked around and said, oh, yeah. And went over and looked at the tree and examined it.

00:23:41 ►

And thinking for herself, took a bite.

00:23:45 ►

And said, Adam, you got to try this.

00:23:49 ►

Because it’s true.

00:23:50 ►

The thinking for yourself can be, it’s a great thrill.

00:23:53 ►

It’s a great turn and it’s a great joy.

00:23:55 ►

And you’ll want to communicate.

00:23:56 ►

You’ve got to have someone to communicate it and share it with.

00:23:58 ►

But of course, that comes later in the story.

00:24:03 ►

Well, I find it interesting

00:24:06 ►

that they lay the blame on Eve.

00:24:10 ►

As you can gather from my comments so far,

00:24:13 ►

I’m not a great supporter

00:24:15 ►

and enthusiast of fundamentalist religions.

00:24:21 ►

I think I’m religious.

00:24:23 ►

I’m totally committed to the notion of higher powers and higher intelligence and that sort of thing.

00:24:31 ►

But I guess Jerry Falwell would call me the worst name in his book.

00:24:38 ►

A secular humanist.

00:24:50 ►

I won’t cop a plea, I’ll plead guilty I think everyone of course has their own definition of humanist

00:24:56 ►

but to me a humanist is someone who believes

00:25:00 ►

that human nature is basically good, and I do

00:25:03 ►

granted we’ve got a long way to go, but I’m

00:25:06 ►

quite sure, and I really want to believe, and can give you a lot of evidence to prove why it’s

00:25:12 ►

reasonable to assume that human beings do have potential, and that we can activate, and we can

00:25:17 ►

learn how to become better people, and that, matter of fact, most of the pre-Christian religions,

00:25:23 ►

Hinduism and Buddhism, you know, tell us that the aim of any life is to illuminate yourself

00:25:28 ►

or to, through meditation or through any technique possible,

00:25:31 ►

get to bring out your higher intelligence.

00:25:33 ►

So I like those notions.

00:25:35 ►

I like the notion of humanism because it means that all humans are kind of in it together.

00:25:41 ►

And that makes sense to me.

00:25:43 ►

Humans are kind of in it together, and that makes sense to me.

00:25:51 ►

And I like the idea of humanism because it implies some sort of progress.

00:25:53 ►

It’s kind of an optimistic thing.

00:25:55 ►

You can do something about it, and it implies evolution, basically. So I’m proud to be a humanist, and I’m really pleased that the first member of my species was a woman who had the courage to stand up on her feet and think for herself.

00:26:08 ►

So we were talking about the oral tradition and we talked about the tendency of technique of packaging thought in terms of hand operated computers like illuminated

00:26:28 ►

manuscripts the problem with the illuminated manuscripts is that only a special cadre of

00:26:34 ►

computer hackers could do that they were the monks up there and the the big main frame was up there

00:26:39 ►

in the castle of the duke of the cardinal And we ordinary people didn’t have access to the computers.

00:26:46 ►

We had to have a security clearance, and the hackers knew the machine language, which was Latin.

00:26:52 ►

And you weren’t encouraged to change it.

00:26:54 ►

As a matter of fact, if a scribe made a mistake or tried, even worse, deliberately changed something,

00:26:59 ►

you’d get your hand lopped off, if not your head.

00:27:04 ►

Now, the big, big liberating technology of thought and communication, of course, that

00:27:09 ►

created the modern world happened in the year 1456 when Johann Gutenberg designed, invented,

00:27:15 ►

produced the movable type printing press.

00:27:19 ►

Now, I’m sure when Johann did that, the top management, you know, kings and the popes, they said, oh boy, that’s wonderful.

00:27:30 ►

Just as when the computer first came along, top management said, boy, this is wonderful.

00:27:36 ►

It’s certainly going to improve management to have a printing press around.

00:27:40 ►

There are four uses of a printing press, four applications of a printing press.

00:27:44 ►

Number one is telecommunications.

00:27:46 ►

We can send the edicts around the kingdom very quickly.

00:27:48 ►

And two, it’s for word processing.

00:27:51 ►

The scribes, you know, can do it much more efficiently.

00:27:53 ►

And three, it’s good for processing numbers, too.

00:27:58 ►

And we can send out the budgets and that sort of thing.

00:28:00 ►

And then for games, too.

00:28:00 ►

And that sort of thing.

00:28:11 ►

And then for games, too, the second book ever printed in the English language by William Caxton was Emmanuel Howe Played Chess.

00:28:14 ►

For those of you that don’t know what chess is, it’s an early form of Pac-Man.

00:28:21 ►

Now, you know what happened.

00:28:24 ►

Of course, and all the moralists said the same thing.

00:28:26 ►

Don’t let your kid read.

00:28:28 ►

It’ll ruin her eyes.

00:28:31 ►

They should be out there plowing or in the fields or like that.

00:28:38 ►

And if your kid reads a lot, they’ll be alienated socially, you know, and not true at all.

00:28:41 ►

As soon as you started reading, you know, you wanted to share it with someone.

00:28:45 ►

You ran over to the next cottage or the next home, and you were reading, too.

00:28:47 ►

You would tell me what you were doing.

00:28:54 ►

The marketeering people were pretty down on E. Botenberg.

00:28:58 ►

They said, Johan, we’ve done an in-depth marketing study of Europe,

00:29:04 ►

and there’s no market for a personal, cheap, home rag and glue computer.

00:29:05 ►

No one can read.

00:29:08 ►

But you know what happened.

00:29:10 ►

When it’s steamboat time, it steamboats.

00:29:12 ►

And when it’s backbone time, it backbones.

00:29:15 ►

And when it’s reading time, it’s time for a new thought technology to take over.

00:29:16 ►

It just sweeps.

00:29:18 ►

Everyone starts doing it once.

00:29:19 ►

The 100,000 monkey thing.

00:29:20 ►

You know about that.

00:29:24 ►

Within one generation, there were thousands and thousands of printing presses.

00:29:31 ►

There was not one town or city in Europe that didn’t have a printing press.

00:29:34 ►

And the printing press became the hub and the node of thinking and, of course, of free thinking.

00:29:39 ►

Because once you had the printing press and the book, the home, cheap, micro book,

00:29:44 ►

you could read, but then you could write.

00:29:47 ►

So then you began, that of course started universal literacy, it started freedom of thought, it started the industrial age, it started science, it started the rights of men, and we didn’t get to the rights of women until the 60s later.

00:30:02 ►

the rights of women until the 60s later.

00:30:11 ►

The printing press was the first mass-assembled object, probably,

00:30:17 ►

and it made possible the industrial society that we all live in and have enjoyed so much.

00:30:23 ►

Well, I don’t knock the industrial, you know, factory age.

00:30:37 ►

It certainly served its purpose and the benefits from it will be, of course, in the information age, as you probably suspect, there are no more workers.

00:30:38 ►

Nobody does any work. Under feudalism, you’re a serf and you obey. In the workers’ paradises, socialist paradises, and the industrial countries, you’re a worker or you’re a commissar.

00:30:54 ►

But in the post-industrial age, in the information age, work is done by robots and by computers.

00:31:03 ►

by robots and by computers.

00:31:11 ►

And the idea that any American or really any human being should be forced by economics,

00:31:17 ►

forced to do work that can be done better by a machine or a computer, is totally humiliating to any concept of human dignity and worth.

00:31:23 ►

So in the information age, you perform, you’re a free agent,

00:31:27 ►

you may provide services and that sort of thing, but you certainly don’t work.

00:31:33 ►

The problem with this mass-assembled factory civilization was, and it’s always true,

00:31:40 ►

we tend to define God and we tend to define human virtue in terms of the technology we’re using.

00:31:48 ►

Now, in the industrial age, a good person was someone who was prompt, reliable, dependable, productive, efficient, and replaceable.

00:32:01 ►

In other words, a good man or a good woman was someone who was a good appendage or cog in the machinery.

00:32:08 ►

And if you’re on the assembly line and you can’t encourage individual thinking,

00:32:15 ►

it’s like a Cheech and Chong comedy, you know.

00:32:18 ►

We’re on the assembly line and Cheech says to Chong,

00:32:22 ►

Hey, man, I’m going to go eat.

00:32:26 ►

Man, you can’t eat.

00:32:28 ►

You have to wait until 12 o’clock to eat.

00:32:30 ►

Well, why? I’m hungry now.

00:32:32 ►

Well, you eat when the bell rings.

00:32:35 ►

Oh, yeah.

00:32:39 ►

Well, I can go on with that comedy if you get the point.

00:32:41 ►

with that comedy to get the point.

00:32:53 ►

The post-industrial society,

00:32:56 ►

which has been called the information society,

00:32:58 ►

you call it the communication society, in a sense it’s the psychological society,

00:33:00 ►

or it’s the thinking society,

00:33:02 ►

I think started around the turn of the century.

00:33:05 ►

And I see the task for humanity in this century as preparing ourselves to assume a new role,

00:33:16 ►

almost as a new species of creatures who deal information.

00:33:22 ►

Creatures who deal information.

00:33:37 ►

Now, I use the, I call the, by the way, I’ll show you how foolish one can get.

00:33:39 ►

I don’t think in terms of decades anymore. I think in terms of centuries.

00:33:40 ►

A lot of fun.

00:33:42 ►

You know, we’ve got end of a century coming up in 13 years.

00:33:44 ►

Countdown to 21st century. I like to think of the century we’re in as the roaring 20s,

00:33:50 ►

and it sure has been a wild ride. I’ve been around for most of it, and I’ll tell you,

00:33:55 ►

there’s no better time to have been alive, I think, than this incredibly dynamic, explosive,

00:34:01 ►

changing century. It started around the year 1900 when Einstein introduced the notions of relativity and quantum mechanics and quantum

00:34:08 ►

physics started telling us that actually all this solid

00:34:12 ►

matter and all this stuff and heavy mechanical Newtonian force

00:34:16 ►

and momentum, all this stuff here is actually made up of clusters

00:34:20 ►

of all fine particles that have a certain temporary

00:34:24 ►

form but they keep changing all the time.

00:34:26 ►

Now, that’s heavy duty.

00:34:28 ►

I mean, how can a member of the Victorian period working, you know, in a factory

00:34:34 ►

and then these crazy physicists come around and say,

00:34:37 ►

it’s all a dance of off-on particles.

00:34:40 ►

Give me a break, Albert.

00:34:41 ►

I mean, it’s like a very bad acid trip, you know.

00:34:48 ►

I think that it was a task of the intellectuals and the artists in the early 20th century

00:34:56 ►

to prepare our species, who just climbed out of feudalism and hunter-gatherer domestication of animal stuff,

00:35:02 ►

just learn how to put bolts on Model T4s.

00:35:05 ►

I think you’ve done that, yeah.

00:35:06 ►

Prepare this lumbering, innocent, rather young species

00:35:12 ►

for a quantum mechanical Heisenberg indeterminacy Einsteinian relativity situation.

00:35:21 ►

Now, the way to start off, it’s always the artist, by the way, I think,

00:35:24 ►

the artist and the entertainers and the writers and the musicians whose job it is to prepare society in kind of a comfortable way for changes that otherwise would be too frightening.

00:35:35 ►

You know, the turn of the century, there was this new art, expressionism, post-expressionism, cubism,

00:35:40 ►

where they were breaking down representational Newtonian reality and showing it as shifting planes, impressionism.

00:35:47 ►

Pointillism, you know, Seurat.

00:35:48 ►

They were actually using pixels like a colored TV screen to represent reality.

00:35:53 ►

So finally we got, you know, surrealism.

00:35:56 ►

We got used to watches bending in the middle.

00:36:00 ►

That was comforting.

00:36:17 ►

Radio, literature, of course, literature, the literature of the 20th century has been, again, in this direction. Joyce, of course, was the great, great pioneer in 20th century quantum literature.

00:36:24 ►

great pioneer in 20th century quantum literature.

00:36:31 ►

He did for words what Mendeyev did for chemical elements and molecules.

00:36:35 ►

He just cut and sliced and put words together in five different ways.

00:36:37 ►

Joyce was not, I think, he was not a writer.

00:36:38 ►

He was a word processor.

00:36:45 ►

Then the long tradition of Elliot and Pound and of cut-ups,

00:36:51 ►

and we owe a great debt to two great friends of the Caravan of Dreams,

00:36:54 ►

Brian Geisen and William Burroughs.

00:36:57 ►

I think William Burroughs is one of your first people to speak here.

00:37:03 ►

I’m honored to be in the same room where William strode because he and his partner, Brian Geisen,

00:37:06 ►

showed us how to cut up words and take words from different pieces of literature

00:37:10 ►

and slice them and move them together and gave us courage to move ideas around

00:37:15 ►

and move letters around and be creative so that literature, radio helped too.

00:37:23 ►

You know, radio convinced the farmer in Minnesota was suddenly comfortably listening to mysterious, invisible, they call them wireless.

00:37:35 ►

My mother used to call the refrigerator an icebox.

00:37:41 ►

And my grandmother used to call the automobile the horseless carriage so you always tend to lay the values and the language of the old on the new one

00:37:50 ►

radio, when you had people listening to Amos and Andy and Lowell Thomas

00:37:56 ►

and the powerful popular shows, it was comforting

00:38:01 ►

think about it, it’s all magic, where is it coming from?

00:38:04 ►

it’s coming all the way from the roof of the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York.

00:38:09 ►

But radio helped. Another group of

00:38:11 ►

sound engineers, Afro-American

00:38:16 ►

background, helped a lot too. I’m talking about jazz. Jazz

00:38:20 ►

just absolutely came along in the 20s, just at that right time.

00:38:23 ►

What the jazz musicians did, of course, was to take this symphonic Beethoven and all the marching bands of Sousa

00:38:30 ►

and made it spontaneous and made it innovative and made it improvisational and made it syncopated.

00:38:34 ►

And boy, they made it dance just the way Einstein’s equations had reality dancing.

00:38:41 ►

Then movies came along.

00:38:43 ►

Oh, now that’s fascinating.

00:38:42 ►

Then movies came along.

00:38:44 ►

Oh, now that’s fascinating.

00:38:50 ►

Suddenly, suddenly, people come to a room like this, and on a flat screen, there was a new reality.

00:38:54 ►

And, you know, bought it right away.

00:38:55 ►

It was all an illusion.

00:38:58 ►

Your eye, you know, kind of makes up the missing links and so forth. And suddenly, you were accepting, in some ways, you know, the great movie stars of the 30s and 40s were more real than the neighbor next door.

00:39:08 ►

We were comfortably accepting clusters and patterns of pixels and light waves reflected on a screen.

00:39:17 ►

We’re accepting that as reality.

00:39:39 ►

Then, of course, no accident, you know, I don’t think that, no accident that when Jobs and Wozniak invented the home, personal, private, intimate microcomputer, they called it the Apple.

00:39:41 ►

In honor of Eve, I guess, huh?

00:39:45 ►

I’ve asked Jobs and Wozniak about that.

00:39:45 ►

I should say,

00:39:47 ►

St. Stephen I and St. Stephen II.

00:39:51 ►

They denied that they did that.

00:39:54 ►

There’s no accident that IBM, you know,

00:39:56 ►

uses that little Charlie Chaplin clown because it’s comforting.

00:39:57 ►

What’s going to be more comforting

00:39:58 ►

than Charlie Chaplin on that screen,

00:40:00 ►

you know, kind of doing

00:40:01 ►

these funny little things?

00:40:02 ►

Then, of course, television came along.

00:40:04 ►

Now, the point of the 20th century, you’d argue,

00:40:09 ►

is to get us to accept knowledge processing and the reality on screens.

00:40:17 ►

Now, you know, the idea one time that a book would be considered, you know,

00:40:23 ►

more real than life would be absurd,

00:40:24 ►

but now they talk about, you know, more real than life would be absurd.

00:40:28 ►

But now they talk about, you know, there are millions, hundreds of millions of people that believe that the book,

00:40:36 ►

this book, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, or this book, the Bible or the Koran, is more real than what you see with your own eyes.

00:40:45 ►

So the screen, the notion that you accept the screen as a very authentic form of knowledge.

00:40:50 ►

Who can deny that we’re a screen species?

00:40:53 ►

Who can deny that the average American, I’m told, watches television

00:40:55 ►

7.4 hours a day.

00:40:59 ►

Now, they don’t read books that much.

00:41:01 ►

They don’t look into the eyes

00:41:01 ►

of their loved ones that much.

00:41:04 ►

To the average American, the screen is more real

00:41:07 ►

than…

00:41:11 ►

May I submit as evidence

00:41:17 ►

the amazing Reagan administration phenomena.

00:41:23 ►

The final triumph of the boob tube.

00:41:37 ►

Now, I’m going to try to wrap this up fairly quickly,

00:41:42 ►

because I really want to get into questions and answers and dialogue

00:41:45 ►

I’d rather want this to be a more interactive adventure for us

00:41:49 ►

but I’ll just say a few words about the next step

00:41:52 ►

in human knowledge

00:41:53 ►

processing and thinking and communicating of thought

00:41:58 ►

which of course is the personal computer

00:41:59 ►

now for a long time in the 60s and 70s

00:42:04 ►

I shared perhaps with many of you, a revulsion of computer and the whole computer culture.

00:42:11 ►

I felt there was another trick on the part of top management to, you know, make us feel more helpless as individuals.

00:42:19 ►

We’ve all had that feeling many times of standing in front of the airline clerk and, you know, you can’t see what she’s got here.

00:42:28 ►

You know you’re going to be bumped for the airline.

00:42:32 ►

Click, click, click, click, click, and there’s your future and you can’t see it.

00:42:37 ►

How about the bank clerk?

00:42:40 ►

You’re hoping your check is not going to bounce or the check they gave you.

00:42:55 ►

Yeah, just like the Vatican did with Gutenberg, top man of the other.

00:43:03 ►

Four applications of a computer and word processing, database management, spreadsheets, and games for the kiddies.

00:43:06 ►

Shoot them up games, get them ready for Nicaragua. That’s right.

00:43:10 ►

It never occurred to the Vatican and to the kings of Europe back then

00:43:17 ►

that the printing press would explode democracy and literacy.

00:43:24 ►

And it didn’t occur to Thomas Watson, who started this thing.

00:43:28 ►

They called it, can you believe, they called the computer, it’s called the international business machine.

00:43:38 ►

Now, it’s not a machine. A machine is something that gears over. It’s not a machine.

00:43:43 ►

machine is something that gears over. It’s not a machine. And the notion that it’s mainly to be used for business

00:43:46 ►

reflects naturally the expectations of that time.

00:43:55 ►

I think in 1976, a great event happened

00:43:59 ►

that was brought forth onto this planet

00:44:03 ►

and in our country.

00:44:07 ►

A great, great liberating mutational situation.

00:44:12 ►

It was born not in a manger, but in a garage in Silicon Valley

00:44:16 ►

when St. Stephen I and II gave us the personal computer.

00:44:22 ►

Now, the story of the personal computer is very interesting

00:44:27 ►

because the big companies could have made it. DEC and IBM, but the last thing in the

00:44:32 ►

world would have occurred to a guy who was running an international business machine

00:44:36 ►

or an infernal bureaucracy mechanism. Home computer? What do you want a home computer

00:44:46 ►

what do you want a home computer for

00:44:47 ►

you got a payroll

00:44:48 ►

we’re going to keep it in the garage

00:44:52 ►

get out of here

00:44:53 ►

the computer is basically

00:44:58 ►

when you think about it

00:44:59 ►

now I’m a psychologist

00:45:01 ►

I’m just fascinated by the mind

00:45:03 ►

I always have been

00:45:03 ►

I think that’s the only game in town.

00:45:05 ►

So I’ve got a bias here.

00:45:06 ►

But to me, a computer is a thought processor.

00:45:10 ►

You put numbers in there, it’ll change your numbers and as if functions.

00:45:13 ►

And Lotus 1, 2, 3, you can magically say anything with your thoughts.

00:45:18 ►

You can put your thoughts in there.

00:45:20 ►

Now, the fact that people haven’t done it, well, my gosh.

00:45:25 ►

Why haven’t they used a personal computer?

00:45:27 ►

Why?

00:45:29 ►

Isn’t there one piece of software on the market right now for the personal computer that would interest or challenge a sophisticated, college-educated, book-reading adult?

00:45:40 ►

Why?

00:45:40 ►

Why?

00:45:41 ►

Well, hey, let’s keep it together, lads.

00:45:46 ►

The personal computer is only 10 years old.

00:45:48 ►

You know, I mean, it’s a 10-year-old baby.

00:45:50 ►

So naturally, the first thing, we had Pong and all that.

00:45:53 ►

And then we had Pac-Man running around.

00:45:57 ►

And then we had Donkey Kong and jumping.

00:45:59 ►

We had Donkey Kong Jr. climbing up.

00:46:01 ►

In a sense, the person who’s computer has recapitulated the history of human, you know, of you as a kid.

00:46:08 ►

So you have to wait until around 14 or 15 years old before it really gets X-rated, I guess.

00:46:15 ►

But I was very pleased when Activision, the company that I work with in California, came out with a computer program this year called the Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

00:46:29 ►

I leave aside the sexist implications because, but I was pleased to see that this is a sign that the nerds are getting interested.

00:46:41 ►

So maybe we’ll really get some adult, mature stuff coming up.

00:46:44 ►

So maybe we’ll really get some adult, mature stuff coming up.

00:46:51 ►

I think I’ve covered enough ground here.

00:46:55 ►

I’ll say one more thing.

00:47:03 ►

I see the 20th century, the roaring 20s, as a preparation for the information age.

00:47:05 ►

We climbed from the water to the shoreline.

00:47:12 ►

There were thousands of physiological and chemical and biochemical changes we had to make.

00:47:16 ►

It’s been a wild century.

00:47:18 ►

And it’s a scary century. Because any time you change things dramatically in a little void,

00:47:23 ►

you better believe that the information age is going to change everything.

00:47:27 ►

It’s scary, and everyone’s securities are suddenly at stake.

00:47:32 ►

And that’s why I think we’ve had this recent reversion into superstition, into barbarous racism and religious warfare and tribal warfare.

00:47:41 ►

I think that’s the last gasp of…

00:47:48 ►

I think we’re going to be moving ahead.

00:47:52 ►

I’m really looking forward to the year 2000.

00:47:54 ►

The millennium thoughts, boy, they’re very powerful.

00:47:58 ►

The last half of the 20th century is the story of the Veyvun generation.

00:48:02 ►

And how many of you in this room

00:48:04 ►

are between the ages of 20 and 40?

00:48:06 ►

Could I have a show of hands?

00:48:07 ►

Yeah.

00:48:08 ►

Oh, okay.

00:48:11 ►

My job in the last 25 years,

00:48:13 ►

as a matter of fact, my job,

00:48:14 ►

my job since the year 1946,

00:48:17 ►

when the baby boom,

00:48:18 ►

see, the baby boom started in 1946,

00:48:20 ►

and the birth rate doubled for 18 years to 64.

00:48:23 ►

Now, those of you who know anything about demographics or human, you know, biology,

00:48:27 ►

you just don’t go around doubling birth rates.

00:48:30 ►

I mean, that’s, you know, that’s the unconscious decisions being made by millions of boys and girls and men and women.

00:48:38 ►

And also, in all the industrial democracies, the birth rate had been going down.

00:48:43 ►

So they predicted after World War II, maybe a little bump when G.I. Joe comes back, but we had everything to expect

00:48:51 ►

going down. Instead of 36 million, there are 76 million now. There are 40 million of you

00:48:57 ►

more than we expected. You were uninvited guests and very unexpected guests, and you were very lively.

00:49:07 ►

You were the first post-Hiroshima generation, the first generation to be grown up in the smog and pollution of nuclear threat.

00:49:18 ►

After World War II, you were the first electronic generation.

00:49:22 ►

After World War II, all these wonderful electronic devices,

00:49:25 ►

radar, sonar,

00:49:27 ►

the first analog computers were now available for civilian use.

00:49:29 ►

The time you guys,

00:49:31 ►

the time you climbed out of the crib,

00:49:33 ►

you were inundated with electronic data.

00:49:37 ►

You sucked it from the tube

00:49:39 ►

and you peeped and wee-wee’d electronic data

00:49:42 ►

into your disposable diapers.

00:49:44 ►

And you’ve been playing and wee-wee’d electronic data into your disposable diapers. And you’ve experienced, when you were five years old, you experienced more information, more bits and bytes of information.

00:49:55 ►

More facts, more history, more geography.

00:49:58 ►

You had a new religion.

00:50:00 ►

There’s a new Bible just for you, boys and girls.

00:50:03 ►

There’s a new Bible just for you boys and girls.

00:50:10 ►

Your Bible was written in the year 1946 by a Navy doctor named Dr. Benjamin Spock.

00:50:14 ►

And it was called the Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.

00:50:19 ►

And what Spock said was really amazing.

00:50:24 ►

I’m paraphrasing Spock, but he said, treat your kids as individuals.

00:50:29 ►

And listen to them, interact with them, and feed them on demand.

00:50:35 ►

I mean, when they’re hungry, feed them.

00:50:37 ►

Not when you, because you’re not training them.

00:50:39 ►

See, Spock didn’t realize that.

00:50:41 ►

But what he was telling, I was an absolute gung-ho Spock parent.

00:50:47 ►

I had kids back then in the late 40s and 50s, and we had the baby in one hand, and he’d be reading Spock with the other hand.

00:50:53 ►

Spock kept saying.

00:50:55 ►

Basically, Spock was telling us, when he said, feed them on demand, he was telling us, preparing us, to raise a generation of consumers.

00:51:09 ►

us, preparing us to raise a generation of consumers. He was also saying, preparing us,

00:51:13 ►

he didn’t realize this, I’m sure, preparing for a new species. Never in history. It’s one thing that all dictators, all religions, all tribes agreed on. You know, in feudalism,

00:51:18 ►

kids were considered to be like little animals. You know, you have to whack them and, you

00:51:23 ►

know, feed them and domesticate them, basically.

00:51:26 ►

You can domesticate the flocks, you can domesticate.

00:51:29 ►

And then in the industrial age, kids were considered basically like colonial wogs.

00:51:36 ►

You know, you had to kind of, you know, train them.

00:51:41 ►

Now, Spock came with this amazing idea to listen to kids. It became a menu-driven

00:51:49 ►

universe for a SPOC kid. You don’t realize how different it is. Because American industry

00:51:55 ►

was delighted because there were 40 million more consumers of you. So the whole country

00:52:00 ►

went on a binge. We doubled the baby baby diaper factories and we doubled the primary schools and we doubled the high schools.

00:52:10 ►

And we were there having a great time giving you exactly what you wanted.

00:52:15 ►

Because you knew what you wanted because you were spending hours in front of the boob tube.

00:52:20 ►

Remember?

00:52:21 ►

M-I-C-K-Y-M-O-U-S-E.

00:52:25 ►

Hey, breakfast of Champions kid.

00:52:27 ►

Hey, you’re the Pepsi generation.

00:52:30 ►

It was wonderful.

00:52:32 ►

It was wonderful.

00:52:33 ►

There’s never been such cute kids as you were.

00:52:38 ►

But the pudding hit the fan when you got into high school and college.

00:52:47 ►

Because, to our horror, we discovered that you were going to demand feeders, you were going to be demand breeders, and you

00:52:55 ►

wanted enriched technicolor sex and technicolor education. You didn’t want any of those dumb black and white wars. In a way, you can say that Dr. Spock’s book and that psychology which developed after World War II and the parents,

00:53:11 ►

we were basically training you to be Americans.

00:53:16 ►

Because at that moment, 1946, America was the greatest empire in all history.

00:53:20 ►

Like, remember the Romans, it’s chivas romanus.

00:53:22 ►

So I’m a Roman citizen.

00:53:24 ►

That was a ticket to go anywhere through the world, civilized world.

00:53:28 ►

I’m an American, baby, and my mudra is a flash the old, we’re number one, mom, and mom’s cheering back, go for it, kid.

00:53:37 ►

America’s by far, it was true, it was a, boy, that was a great culture in 1946. It never had soldiers been so, really, the rape quotient of the American soldiers was less by far

00:53:48 ►

than any war in history. We had a lot to be proud of then.

00:53:54 ►

Until my life, of course.

00:53:58 ►

Basically, what Spock

00:54:00 ►

was teaching us to do was to raise you

00:54:03 ►

the way aristocrats

00:54:06 ►

had been raised in the past.

00:54:08 ►

Aristocrats had to be trained

00:54:09 ►

to be consumers.

00:54:10 ►

And little aristocratic kids,

00:54:12 ►

you know,

00:54:13 ►

you get what you want.

00:54:16 ►

So basically,

00:54:17 ►

we had 76 million little aristocrats,

00:54:19 ►

entitled kids running around.

00:54:21 ►

You know,

00:54:22 ►

hey,

00:54:23 ►

you behaved just like aristocrats when you got into teenage.

00:54:26 ►

You weren’t going to, you guys weren’t going to settle down with a metal hat and a factory.

00:54:32 ►

Like your daddy and your granddaddy and worked for the union for 50 years.

00:54:38 ►

Naturally, like aristocratic kids have always done in Europe and England.

00:54:43 ►

You want to experiment, free love, any dope you want

00:54:45 ►

screw anyone you want because you’re entitled, right?

00:54:48 ►

I’m an American

00:54:49 ►

there’s a certain contempt for the law

00:54:56 ►

well, that goes with breeding

00:55:00 ►

and there was a total contempt for the military.

00:55:08 ►

Children of aristocrats have been draft dodgers for years.

00:55:12 ►

It was cute when this new prince, you know, said,

00:55:14 ►

hell no, he wouldn’t go to the Marines in England, wasn’t it?

00:55:17 ►

Amazing.

00:55:18 ►

And 80% of the English people even backed him.

00:55:20 ►

Did you know that?

00:55:21 ►

That’s very interesting.

00:55:23 ►

I like that.

00:55:32 ►

I hope the time is here. him? Did you know that? That’s very interesting. I like that. How much time do I have? It’s now 9.10.

00:55:38 ►

20 minutes. Okay, well, I’ll stop and we’ll get into questions.

00:55:42 ►

I’ll say one more. Oh,‘ve got to tell you this about there’s 76 million of you

00:55:46 ►

now you began in your teenagers

00:55:50 ►

to swarm

00:55:51 ►

because all species, social species tend to swarm

00:55:56 ►

you know, swallows swarm at sunrise

00:55:57 ►

to see how big you are

00:55:59 ►

you swarmed at that, you know, just 20 years ago this month

00:56:02 ►

when Sgt. Pepper started to play in the first San Francisco

00:56:05 ►

love-in. And all during the

00:56:07 ►

60s and 70s you were swarming.

00:56:09 ►

Nixon was crouching in his

00:56:12 ►

bunkered White House looking out

00:56:13 ►

00:56:14 ►

400,000 of you in Washington.

00:56:18 ►

You were showing your

00:56:19 ►

numbers and

00:56:20 ►

give yourself some credit.

00:56:23 ►

You did stop the war. Nobody could believe that.

00:56:26 ►

You stopped the war. Kids stopped that war with the flowers in gun barrels. You know

00:56:31 ►

why? Because you knew the media tricks. You’d been watching the boob-tooth so long.

00:56:54 ►

1968, believe it or not, you guys, and at that, 68, you were between the age of something like 10 and 20,

00:56:56 ►

hardly any of you could vote.

00:56:59 ►

You almost elected a president.

00:57:02 ►

Remember, you had kids going clean for Gene. Oh, they couldn’t even vote, Gene McCarthy.

00:57:04 ►

And then Bobby Kennedy, of all people, decided he was going to be a kids’ candidate.

00:57:08 ►

And there was one moment when Kennedy won the nomination for the primary in June in California for an hour there or two.

00:57:17 ►

It looked certain that Kennedy would get the Democrat nomination and beat that turkey Nixon up and down,

00:57:25 ►

the baby boomers, kids, the Mickey Mouse generation, would have elected a president, even though you can’t vote.

00:57:31 ►

Well, Sirhan Sirhan with one bullet shot stopped that.

00:57:34 ►

And then the 68th convention, you got trampled by Mayor Daley’s police.

00:57:43 ►

But 1972, you guys took over the Democratic Party.

00:57:47 ►

You nominated, of all people, that ministerial, you know, white bread guy, George McGovern.

00:57:54 ►

You lost that.

00:57:56 ►

You know why?

00:57:56 ►

Because you couldn’t vote.

00:57:58 ►

But within one year, you had Nixon out of the White House, an incredible coup of media. And when the right-wing Republicans say, well, Nixon was railroaded by the media,

00:58:08 ►

in a way they’re right, because there’s nothing wrong with that, because he got in through the media.

00:58:11 ►

But that’s a pretty good track record.

00:58:18 ►

1976, the Baby Boos did elect a real, honest-to, tousled head hippie, Jimmy Carter, running around with his sleeping bag, remember?

00:58:31 ►

And he was playing softball with Ralph Nader and he had Bob Dylan singing.

00:58:35 ►

He was talking about lust in his heart.

00:58:39 ►

Marijuana was legalized in 14 states.

00:58:43 ►

Not to mention peace and love

00:58:45 ►

my God, he did the unthinkable

00:58:47 ►

he had Israel and Egypt come over there

00:58:50 ►

and he just said

00:58:50 ►

give peace a chance, baby

00:58:52 ►

hey, minimum

00:58:55 ►

all you need is love, Anwar

00:58:58 ►

oh yeah, okay

00:58:59 ►

they put a stop to that fast

00:59:04 ►

there’s one thing that every dictator

00:59:06 ►

left and right wing in the world

00:59:07 ►

that could agree on with every religious leader in the world

00:59:09 ►

and all the military and all the industrialists

00:59:12 ►

and the communists too

00:59:12 ►

this Carter ship’s got to stop

00:59:15 ►

we’ll all be out of a job

00:59:19 ►

so anyway

00:59:21 ►

okay

00:59:23 ►

now

00:59:24 ►

remember those of you born between the years 46 and 64 so anyway okay now remember

00:59:26 ►

those of you

00:59:26 ►

born between the years

00:59:27 ►

46 and 64

00:59:29 ►

stretch it a little

00:59:30 ►

because you have a lot of

00:59:30 ►

now I’m not saying

00:59:32 ►

you’re all saints

00:59:33 ►

there are just as many

00:59:33 ►

assholes among you

00:59:34 ►

percentage wise

00:59:35 ►

as any other generation

00:59:38 ►

but it’s those experiences

00:59:39 ►

of childhood

00:59:41 ►

that are absolutely

00:59:41 ►

your imprints

00:59:42 ►

were laid down

00:59:43 ►

basically

00:59:43 ►

you’re the best educated

00:59:45 ►

by far

00:59:46 ►

ten times better educated

00:59:47 ►

than any other generation

00:59:49 ►

in history

00:59:49 ►

you’re the most sophisticated

00:59:51 ►

you remember

00:59:52 ►

you’re the first generation

00:59:53 ►

of the information

00:59:54 ►

electronic age

00:59:55 ►

you’re used to dialing

00:59:56 ►

and tuning realities

00:59:56 ►

you’re used to a menu driven

00:59:58 ►

gourmet approach to life

01:00:00 ►

you’re going to demand

01:00:01 ►

two or six

01:00:04 ►

or ten years you’re simply going to demand two or six or ten years.

01:00:05 ►

You’re simply going to demand

01:00:07 ►

a good government.

01:00:12 ►

Already all the statistics show

01:00:13 ►

you’re not partisan.

01:00:14 ►

You don’t believe in partisan politics.

01:00:16 ►

You’re not Democrats or Republicans.

01:00:18 ►

Remember they say

01:00:18 ►

the baby boomers are…

01:00:20 ►

By the way,

01:00:22 ►

you’ve always, since 1960s,

01:00:24 ►

they’ve been giving you a bad rap.

01:00:25 ►

And I’ll hate you because you’re getting away with too much.

01:00:28 ►

Anyway, they suspect you.

01:00:31 ►

And then even when you got down and started working hard, they called you yuppies and said you were materialistic.

01:00:35 ►

Ha, ha, ha, ha.

01:00:36 ►

Can you imagine the moral?

01:00:39 ►

And you want money? Ha, ha, ha.

01:00:41 ►

And you want money? Ha ha.

01:00:52 ►

Now, the old guys and the conservatives of both left and right hate you because they know you can’t be trusted.

01:00:53 ►

You’re not reliable.

01:00:54 ►

You’re not committed.

01:00:55 ►

Committed to what?

01:00:57 ►

You’re not committed to a bureaucracy.

01:00:58 ►

You’re not committed to labor unions.

01:01:00 ►

You hold them all in contempt.

01:01:04 ►

You’re going to change politics. A representational government will

01:01:05 ►

be changed. The average, maybe I’ll submit to you. Would you give $100 to Senator Helms

01:01:13 ►

or to Tip O’Neill and send him across the street to buy you wine? Or throw tickets to

01:01:21 ►

a movie? I mean, you wouldn’t send those turkeys or something.

01:01:28 ►

Would you send them to Washington to make your laws?

01:01:29 ►

I mean, give me a break.

01:01:32 ►

So we’re going to have a decentralized government.

01:01:35 ►

We’re going to have a debureaucratization.

01:01:36 ►

It’s going to be televoting.

01:01:40 ►

You’re going to be voting through computer networks and through telephones.

01:01:45 ►

That means you’re going to have to take responsibility because, see, oh yeah, nothing you say about your generation.

01:01:49 ►

Well, the yuppies and the, they’re apathetic.

01:01:50 ►

Oh yeah, you’re apathetic.

01:01:53 ►

Yeah, you were kicking ass in the 60s, now you’re apathetic.

01:01:56 ►

Now that is such a crock.

01:02:00 ►

Listen, if you’re a yuppie, as I said, it’s hard work to be a yuppie.

01:02:07 ►

You know, the easy thing to do is order a double mac fries and a diet Pepsi, see? But if you’re a gourmet connoisseur, yuppie, you know, you’re going to have nine

01:02:13 ►

kinds of cheese and 13 kinds of spices on your salad, because it takes you a half hour

01:02:20 ►

just ordering a menu in a restaurant, right? It’s hard work to be responsible for your body

01:02:25 ►

and your health and you think all these. It’s not, it’s easier to just go along with the crowd

01:02:31 ►

than to think for yourself or to be a connoisseur. So anyway, I feel, it’s my sincere feeling that

01:02:39 ►

your generation is going to take over. And when you do, I think you’re more intelligent,

01:02:44 ►

you’re more realistic. You’re more realistic.

01:02:46 ►

God damn, you’ve been kicked around and had your heart broken so many times with Kennedy and King and Watergate and so forth.

01:02:52 ►

And now Reagan.

01:02:54 ►

I mean, you’re skeptical.

01:02:56 ►

You’re tough as nails.

01:02:58 ►

You’re not going to take no bullshit from any demagogue.

01:03:01 ►

You’re basically tolerant.

01:03:03 ►

I mean, you don’t go for the cliches and the rhetoric, but basically you believe

01:03:08 ►

in a live and let live world and you’re basically fair minded. I think you’re the greatest generation

01:03:11 ►

in history. It’s been my proud pleasure for the last 20, 25 years

01:03:16 ►

to be not your leader because

01:03:19 ►

don’t follow leaders, watch your parking meters.

01:03:24 ►

I have been proud to be your cheerleader for the last 20 years.

01:03:27 ►

And I want to rhyme.

01:03:29 ►

Rah, rah, rah.

01:03:39 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:03:41 ►

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

01:03:48 ►

I have to admit to being surprised at how well this talk holds up after more than 20 years.

01:03:54 ►

Say what you will about Timothy Leary, but you can’t say that he wasn’t leading the way.

01:04:00 ►

And I’ll be bringing you more from Tim Leary in the months ahead.

01:04:04 ►

Thanks, first of all, to Bruce Dahmer for putting me in contact with this material,

01:04:09 ►

but I’m sure that Bruce would agree with me that the lion’s share of credit should go to Dennis Berry,

01:04:14 ►

a wonderful woman who has preserved and protected this amazing archive for so long now.

01:04:20 ►

As you know, last year Dennis allowed me to spend an afternoon

01:04:24 ►

digging through box after box of Dr. Leary’s records, and it was one of the most memorable afternoons of my life.

01:04:32 ►

I have to admit to being unexpectedly carried away by all of the fantastic material Tim saved, it is perhaps the most complete record of the psychedelic part of the 60s that’s in existence.

01:04:44 ►

the most complete record of the psychedelic part of the 60s that’s in existence.

01:04:52 ►

And for what it’s worth, the good Dr. Leary knew exactly how complete and important an archive that it really is.

01:04:57 ►

I say this with great confidence because there’s a video of Timothy Leary on YouTube in which he goes out of his way to talk about this archive.

01:05:01 ►

And rather than tell you what he says, I’ll instead place a link to that video

01:05:06 ►

on the program notes to today’s podcast

01:05:09 ►

in the event you’d like to hear his own take on this material.

01:05:13 ►

But a big thank you to Bruce and Dennis for their help

01:05:16 ►

in getting this material out to a much larger audience.

01:05:20 ►

Think for yourself.

01:05:22 ►

Question authority.

01:05:23 ►

I don’t know if there is any better advice one could give other than the proviso he added by also saying,

01:05:30 ►

if you’re going to think for yourself, you’ve got to learn to think clearly.

01:05:34 ►

And as we know, that is quite often more difficult than it sounds.

01:05:39 ►

But one of our fellow slaunters, who not only thinks very clearly, also writes clearly.

01:05:45 ►

And it’s my friend ErockX1, whose Guyon Botanicals website you can find via the link on the Psychedelic Salon blog, which, you know, is at psychedelicsalon.org.

01:05:56 ►

Recently, ErockX1 wrote an excellent essay about salvia divinorum.

01:06:25 ►

Salvia Divinorum. And I’ll post a link to it along with the program notes for this podcast.

01:06:33 ►

But if you want to go there directly, just go to erocx1.blogspot.com and search for the August 3, 2008 postings.

01:06:37 ►

As he points out, Salvia is an intelligent plant spirit,

01:06:41 ►

and it even evaded the Inquisition.

01:06:43 ►

So thanks for keeping her spirit alive, E-Rock X1, and thanks for all the good work you are

01:06:49 ►

doing for our community.

01:06:51 ►

Some of the other news from our fellow salonners includes a YouTube music video titled,

01:06:58 ►

Tryptosane, Dark Places.

01:07:00 ►

I’ve watched it a couple times now and really enjoyed it.

01:07:04 ►

Again, I’ll link to it from the program notes,

01:07:06 ►

but if you want to see what some of your fellow salonners are up to,

01:07:10 ►

well, you might want to check that out too.

01:07:12 ►

Another thing you might find worth your time is to attend the Horizons Perspectives on Psychedelics conference

01:07:19 ►

that will take place in New York City from September 19th to the 21st of this year.

01:07:25 ►

And that’s 2008 for those of you who aren’t paying attention to details like that.

01:07:31 ►

I received a note from Kevin, who is one of the organizers of the event,

01:07:35 ►

and he tells me that this is a community and volunteer-run non-profit event.

01:07:41 ►

And I noticed the cost is lower than anything I’ve seen lately.

01:07:44 ►

So if you’re

01:07:45 ►

in the area, you really might want to stop

01:07:48 ►

by. I know that Alex

01:07:49 ►

and Allison Gray will be speaking,

01:07:51 ►

as will be Daniel Pinchbeck and

01:07:54 ►

the Shulgens, both Ann and

01:07:55 ►

Sasha. So if you’ve never had a chance

01:07:58 ►

to experience these people in person,

01:08:00 ►

you might want to stretch a little to

01:08:01 ►

make this conference. Because you

01:08:03 ►

never know when the opportunity is going to pass your way again.

01:08:07 ►

And a big thank you also to Kevin and to all of the other psychedelic conference and event producers around the world.

01:08:14 ►

Thanks for putting on events like this.

01:08:16 ►

I know from experience that this is a labor of love.

01:08:20 ►

And that an enormous amount of time and work goes into putting these things on.

01:08:25 ►

Not to mention the financial risk if not enough people show up to support you.

01:08:30 ►

So if you find yourself anywhere close to New York City this September,

01:08:34 ►

well, you might want to stop by and meet your next new best friend.

01:08:38 ►

Another announcement of sorts, and this is a repeat from a few podcasts back,

01:08:44 ►

and it pains me to say it,

01:08:45 ►

but I’m not going to be able to make it to Burning Man this year.

01:08:49 ►

There are a lot of reasons for this, not the least of which is financial.

01:08:54 ►

However, the big reason is that my wife and I were fortunate to be able to welcome a new

01:08:59 ►

grandchild to the world a few days ago, and the truth is that I don’t want to miss any

01:09:04 ►

of her first few months

01:09:05 ►

of life. It’s just so magical to watch these tiny little infants begin to develop their own

01:09:11 ►

personalities. And this will most likely be my last chance to have this experience. So I’m very

01:09:18 ►

regretfully passing on the opportunity to go to Burning Man again this year. And what prompted me

01:09:23 ►

to mention this again is a message I received from a fellow salonner

01:09:27 ►

named Matt.

01:09:28 ►

And here’s part of what he had to say.

01:09:31 ►

Hey Lorenzo, I’m hoping you get this message in time for the burn.

01:09:35 ►

I have a question.

01:09:36 ►

I’m making patches to hand out as gifts on the playa, mostly text.

01:09:41 ►

And I’m wondering if you might have suggestions for any text.

01:09:44 ►

Any favorite McKenna quote that you think needs to be propagated around the playa and the world.

01:09:49 ►

They can be as long as a page or as short as a few words.

01:09:53 ►

Give me some suggestions and I’ll create the patches and see you with them on the playa.

01:09:58 ►

Well, Matt, I really wish I could be there to meet you and to get one of your patches.

01:10:03 ►

Maybe somebody will start a thread on one of the forums to collect pithy little McKenna sayings.

01:10:09 ►

The first one that comes to my mind is, keep the old faith and stay high.

01:10:15 ►

I still smile every time I hear that one.

01:10:17 ►

Keep the old faith and stay high.

01:10:20 ►

That not only sounds great, it’s also good advice.

01:10:24 ►

I wish I had the time and energy to pass along all of the interesting things that come my way,

01:10:30 ►

but the truth is that I don’t even have time to follow all of the links and other bits of news that come in every day.

01:10:36 ►

For example, Mark sent me a series of links that sounded quite interesting,

01:10:40 ►

but if I’m not careful, I could spend all day following them.

01:10:43 ►

Actually, I did get to the first two, and they were really great.

01:10:47 ►

One was to mythicimagination.org, and the other is to a music video on YouTube featuring a performance by Fred Johnson and Michael Mead,

01:10:57 ►

which I also found to be very much worth my time to listen to more than once.

01:11:01 ►

And I’ll post the raw links that he sent me.

01:11:04 ►

I bet you want to track them down yourself. But thanks for the links, Mark, and

01:11:07 ►

thanks for being a part of the salon. Now, let’s see.

01:11:11 ►

What else do I want to mention today? Oh, yeah, I know. The Olympics.

01:11:16 ►

Now, don’t get nervous. I’m not going to go on about sports right now.

01:11:20 ►

In fact, I’ve got mixed feelings about the Olympics.

01:11:24 ►

I love the way that event inspires athletes to perform at their highest levels,

01:11:28 ►

but I really abhor all the nationalism involved.

01:11:32 ►

I’d much prefer to see an Olympics in which no competitor’s nationality was ever mentioned.

01:11:37 ►

But then, of course, it wouldn’t be the Olympics, would it?

01:11:41 ►

But what I feel compelled to mention today is the opening ceremony of the Beijing

01:11:45 ►

Olympics this year. If you saw it, you know what I’m talking about. And if you missed it,

01:11:51 ►

there’s simply no way that any description of that production can even come close to giving

01:11:56 ►

you a picture of it. I’ve been around a bit and seen some interesting things in my life,

01:12:01 ►

but never before have I witnessed such a magnificent human

01:12:05 ►

spectacle.

01:12:07 ►

And I want to go out of my way to compliment the people of China on what they have accomplished.

01:12:12 ►

To me, the opening ceremony was a window into the potential, not just of China, but of all

01:12:19 ►

of humanity.

01:12:20 ►

You know, building that stadium, coordinating 15,000 performers with clock-like precision,

01:12:26 ►

integrating the highest high-tech into a show that blended the ancient and the modern,

01:12:32 ►

well, there just aren’t enough superlatives in my vocabulary to express what I’m feeling,

01:12:38 ►

even several days later now.

01:12:40 ►

I know that we have a lot of fellow slaunters who are Chinese.

01:12:44 ►

In fact, of the more than 100 countries that these podcasts reach each week,

01:12:49 ►

China consistently remains in the top ten.

01:12:52 ►

So to all of the people of China, I send you my love and praise

01:12:56 ►

for showing the world what spectacular heights the human spirit is capable of reaching.

01:13:02 ►

Now there are two more quick things

01:13:05 ►

I want to mention before I go.

01:13:06 ►

The first is to congratulate my friend Lefty,

01:13:09 ►

who just completed his first full year

01:13:11 ►

of podcasting from Lefty’s Lounge

01:13:13 ►

each Friday at dopefiend.co.uk.

01:13:17 ►

And this isn’t Lefty’s first show either.

01:13:19 ►

Before Lefty’s Lounge,

01:13:21 ►

he was podcasting Storytime with Lefty.

01:13:24 ►

And over the past few years, he’s contributed immensely to my own well-being

01:13:28 ►

by keeping me entertained with music, comedy, and his own great stories.

01:13:34 ►

So congratulations, Lefty.

01:13:36 ►

I’m looking forward to many more years of The Lounge.

01:13:40 ►

And speaking of the Cannabis Podcast Network, which is the dopefiend.co.uk family of podcasts,

01:13:47 ►

the other day I was listening to Dopecast number 136, I think it was,

01:13:52 ►

and one of our fellow salonners, Michael, I believe, sent in a recording of the blues group he plays with.

01:14:00 ►

His group is called The Lowdown and can be found at myspace.com slash xthelowdownx.

01:14:08 ►

Having grown up listening to the blues on Chicago radio stations,

01:14:11 ►

I have to admit that Michael’s band took me back to the time when I was just getting into music,

01:14:17 ►

and their cover of the old Muddy Waters song, Champagne and Reefer, really took me back.

01:14:22 ►

Great music, you guys. I hope to hear you live someday.

01:14:27 ►

Well, this has been a bit longer than I planned, but there is one last thing I want to mention.

01:14:32 ►

It’s a painting, one that has already been sold,

01:14:35 ►

but there’s still an image of it on the web that I hope is there when you get around to checking it out.

01:14:42 ►

The artist’s name is Leo Plaw, P-L-A-W,

01:14:45 ►

and his website is simply leoplaw.com.

01:14:50 ►

And when you go there right now,

01:14:51 ►

you’ll see a few thumbnail images of his work,

01:14:54 ►

and about the third one down is titled Ape to Angel.

01:14:59 ►

And it has moved me perhaps more than any other work of art I’ve seen.

01:15:04 ►

And I’ve been to some of the world’s greatest art galleries.

01:15:07 ►

But art, at least for me, is more in my emotional response than in what my eye takes in.

01:15:14 ►

And this piece, for me, well, it just takes my breath away.

01:15:19 ►

And the reason I think this particular work maybe strikes me so strongly is because I’ve so many times heard the stories of McKenna talking about apes coming down out of the trees, eating mushrooms for the first time, and thus really taking the first steps to become human.

01:15:37 ►

I’ve never seen anything that better captures that moment, the very first moment when one of our very, very distant ancestors experienced in Theospace.

01:15:47 ►

For me, Leo’s presentation of that moment is as good as it gets.

01:15:52 ►

Right now, I’m not even sure where I found the link to his website, but I’m sure glad I did.

01:15:57 ►

He does some wonderful work, and as you can tell, he certainly moved my soul.

01:16:02 ►

As you can tell, he certainly moved my soul.

01:16:05 ►

Well, that’s about it for today. And so I’ll close once again by saying that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are available for your use under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license.

01:16:17 ►

And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon web page, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org. And that’s also where you’ll find the program notes for today’s podcast.

01:16:31 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.

01:16:39 ►

Hello, my name is Jim Gray, and I am a judge of the Superior Court in California

01:16:43 ►

and a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles.

01:16:46 ►

I would like to talk to you for a moment about marijuana.

01:16:51 ►

Did you know that since the federal government first banned marijuana in 1937,

01:16:57 ►

usage in this country has actually gone up by about 4,000%?

01:17:01 ►

Or did you know that in the Netherlands,

01:17:03 ►

where adults are allowed to possess small amounts of marijuana and buy it from government-regulated businesses,

01:17:09 ►

fewer adults and fewer teenagers smoke marijuana than here in our country? Or that an American

01:17:15 ►

is arrested on marijuana charges every 38 seconds? If you are wondering if any of this

01:17:22 ►

makes sense, you are not alone.

01:17:31 ►

To find out more, contact the Marijuana Policy Project at 1-877-JOIN-MPP or visit them on the web at mpp.org.

01:17:35 ►

Thank you and good luck to us all.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

152 - Question Authority and Think for Yourself

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Program Notes

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