288 - What’s So Great About Mushrooms

Program Notes

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“It’s impossible to stop the forward march of information.”

“This is the chaos at the end of history.”

“Because our culture crisis is so much deeper [than during the Renaissance], we are casting back to 20,000 or 30,000 years back into the past.”

“I think the task of finding the extraterrestrial is a task of recognizing it when you find it.”

“When talking about evolution it is important to remember that the cardinal dictum of Darwinian mechanics is that there is no teleology. That means that evolution is not moving toward something. All notion of purpose has to be given up. It isn’t that things evolve or move toward higher forms. It’s just that things complexify, and this complexification gives rise to what we define as higher form.”

“Culture is sort of a shockwave which follows behind language. Culture is fossilized language.”

“One of the reasons I think these psychedelic compounds still are important is because they catalyze the evolution of language.”

“I see the whole world we’re living in as basically the legacy of LSD.”

“The dreams of the alchemists of the 16th Century have been entirely realized in the technical accomplishments of the 20th Century.”

“[Acid] heads are in charge of designing the cutting edge of culture.”

“But there are no professionals in the field of self-exploration. That’s everybody’s job. I mean, you all are Ph.D.s in consciousness exploration, or if you’re not you should be, because what else have you got going?”

Occupy Video Streams
Livestream.com
Ustream.com

OccupyStream.com
Links to David Graeber’s Work
Wikipedia entry about David Graeber
Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination by David Graeber

A conversation with anarchist David Graeber about anthropology on the Charlie Rose program

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1933633867/190-6872823-0568614

Transcript

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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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And today is day 46 of Occupy Wall Street.

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And to begin with, I’d like to thank the following salonners who have sent in donations to help with the expenses here in the salon by either sending in a direct donation or by paying for a copy of the Pay What You Can audiobook edition of my novel, The Genesis Generation.

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for a copy of the Pay What You Can audiobook edition of my novel,

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The Genesis Generation.

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And these kind souls are

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fellow author, Julie Kay,

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Nexus 112,

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who is not only a salonner, but

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is also an important contributor

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to several of the Dope Tribes projects,

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and regular

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monthly donor, Mark C.

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So, thank you one and all, and

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that also goes out to all of our fellow salonners

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who are telling their friends about the salon and helping to further the global discussion about

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psychedelic consciousness in many other ways. It’s really great for me to feel so much love

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and friendship from all of you. It means a lot to me and it’s what keeps me going each week.

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It means a lot to me and it’s what keeps me going each week.

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So now we’ll pick up where we left off in the previous podcast and join Terrence McKenna for the question and answer session that took place right after the talk that we heard in the last program.

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And while it may at first sound as if he’s actually speaking about the current Occupy movement,

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what he actually had in mind at the time was the public face of the psychedelic community, which of course today is part of the 99%. And so it seems that some of his

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ideas back in 1987, when this talk was given, are still quite relevant yet today. So let’s join

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Terence McKenna for a little clarification of the ideas that he spoke of in my last podcast.

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Oh, and just a little heads up, in about five minutes,

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you’re going to hear Terrence say something about psychotherapy involving Adam.

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And that’s not a person.

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Just to remind you, Adam was the code name for MDMA or ecstasy back in the 80s.

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Even at Ground Zero in Dallas,

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we called it Adam as often as we called it X.

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Leary and the whole episode in the 1960s

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proved it can’t succeed if it’s waged as a mass movement.

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It’s a hell of a party.

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But it doesn’t in the end.

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You have to get science.

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You have to subvert it in some way.

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I assume the front door is locked.

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You have to subvert science in some way.

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And I have studied science from the point of view of a man with a catapult

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searching the walls of a great keep for its point of weakness.

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And I think, dear friends, that psychology is the place to put the pressure on.

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You see, around the turn of the century, science was really erecting its tent.

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And you had the phrenologists,

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those were the people who felt the bumps on your head

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and said whether you had criminal tendencies or not.

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You had palmistry, you had a number of the, homeopathy is a good example,

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you had a number, and psychology.

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Psychologists recall were called alienists in the pre-Freudian period.

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And all of these theories about human types

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were in furious competition

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to get themselves declared a science

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because they sensed that otherwise

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you were reduced to quackery.

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Well, the phrenologists couldn’t bring it off.

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My impression is the homeopathists only convinced themselves.

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The palmists convinced not a great number of people,

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but the psychologists actually brought it off.

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And around the mumbo-jumbo of Freudian analysis,

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they were able to claim that they had a science

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that described what was going on with human beings.

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The truth is, I believe,

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that psychology, though well-meaning,

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I mean, I don’t cast aspersions on their intentions,

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but I think its effectiveness is close to zero.

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It depends entirely on the personality of the therapist.

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is close to zero.

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It depends entirely on the personality of the therapist.

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Reikian, Freudian, Jungian, you name it.

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30% get better, 30% get worse, and 30% stay the same.

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What this means is that the theories are no good. It’s just the people are either good, bad, or indifferent.

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One in three, you see.

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So psychology needs tools. Psychology needs ways into the psyche beyond what it has previously

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had available. And I think most psychologists, psychiatrists who’ve thought about this understand that drugs are the way to do it.

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That the way you study the atom is you smash it,

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and then you pick up the pieces and weigh them and calculate their trajectories and all this.

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The way you study the psyche should be by perturbing it, you know?

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You cannot figure out what’s going on

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with a pond of still water

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unless you drop a rock into it

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and then you see waves move out

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and you say, oh my gosh, it’s a fluid medium.

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It has a shifting refractive index.

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It has all these properties.

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This is a reasonable strategy for understanding anything.

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And the fascination with shamanism is, I think, the sign

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that psychology is willing to own up to the fact that it is desperate for new insights into human

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dynamics. So I am hopeful that we can arrest the attention of psychologists and get them looking at shamanism, all of shamanism, even

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the parts which are perhaps less effective than the intoxicating and hallucinogenic plants,

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but studying how sound drives imagery and how certain kinds of linguistic expectations lead to certain kinds of results.

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And so this garden in Hawaii, which will appeal, as I say, to chemists and taxonomists and botanists,

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but these are established sciences with established methods,

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which will simply inculcate us into their triumphal forward march.

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inculcate us into their triumphal forward march, but there is actually a possibility of revisioning psychology, of changing it. One of the great things, I think, about the

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recent flap about Adam was that unnoticed in all the shilly-shallying that went back

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was a new paradigm actually was introduced into the practice of psychotherapy,

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a paradigm that has been absent for thousands of years.

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It was the notion that the doctor takes the drug.

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In some cases,

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you know,

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that has been absent.

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There is no concept of that in Western medicine.

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That really is a new paradigm.

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So,

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what a garden

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such as I’m describing

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would do in Hawaii

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is it would simply

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lower the energy barriers,

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make it easier

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for these professionals to explore these areas

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which otherwise might be closed to them for institutional or financial reasons.

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So you haven’t heard of the cultural survival?

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No, I haven’t heard of it.

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Oh, it’s an attempt to save a lot of these preliterate cultures in situation.

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Like their present project is to try to keep

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Huitzolet culture reliable,

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that they’re being exploited for those cheap labor and so on

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and being taken off the reservation.

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Well, see, I’m ambivalent about that.

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I mean, I think it’s a very strange kind of cultural chauvinism

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which goes to somebody else and says,

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you know, you’re a museum piece,

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and we’re going to give you a 500,000 acre reserve,

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and we’re not going to let anybody bring metal or transistor radio

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so that your wonderful culture can be preserved.

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I think that what has to be preserved is the knowledge,

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you know, because it’s impossible

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to stop the forward

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march of information

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it is even today

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when you go to the Amazon you go

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miles and miles and miles

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up these rivers and the people are

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hardly wearing any clothes and there’s only

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one motorboat on the river

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and they’ve never seen an

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automobile but everybody’s carrying transistor radios and can get the London fix one motorboat on the river, and they’ve never seen an automobile,

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but everybody’s carrying transistor radios and can get the London fix on gold

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at the end of the switch.

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And how do you stop it?

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It permeates everything.

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So rather than try to halt

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the inevitable globalization of electronic culture,

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I think we should furiously try to preserve the information

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and interview everybody and then do what we can with it.

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Otherwise, it becomes a kind of cultural prominence.

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Well, I’m not sure if all cultures want to be assimilated, really.

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Well, but what culture ever got to vote in the past?

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It’s a problem.

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I agree, because I am not enamored of this culture.

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I think it’s tremendously dynamic.

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I think it is transitional to a culture of star flight and psychological depth.

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But this is the chaos at the end of history. This is the accumulation of 10,000 years of muddling through with progressively,

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you know, we are deep in the woods at this point.

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And the proof of that is the fact that our religion, which is science,

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has bequeathed to us our arsenal of hydrogen weapons.

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I mean, our religion has betrayed us into the valley of dry bones

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that T.S. Eliot anticipated in the wasteland.

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The well has gone dry.

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And what we do about this, I’m not sure.

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But I have said, sitting in this chair,

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that what the 20th century is about

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is an effort to recover our origins,

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that in the same way that the Renaissance

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steadied itself in the face of the inevitability of modern times

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was by harking back to Greek and Rome and translating Plato

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and the dramatists and trying to realize the ideals of Greek aesthetics and Roman law.

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What we are trying to do in the 20th century is realize the meaning of a, because our culture

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crisis is so much deeper, where we are casting back to is 20,000, 30,000 years into the past.

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This is why Freud and Auschwitz and modern art and rock and roll

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and sexual permissiveness and drug taking and all of these things,

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we are trying to understand and culturally revivify in a modern context that time of origins.

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And it’s real rocky.

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We don’t know how all this is going to come out

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because there’s so much we don’t know about the constraints on the situation.

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I wonder if you know or anyone here may know what Larry and Lily referred to as vitamin K.

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Is that a common plant or something?

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No, no, that’s an entirely synthetic compound that is an anesthetic in ordinary medical usage,

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but that in sub-anesthetic doses is a mind-altering drug.

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I’m not sure I would call it a psychedelic,

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but, you know, one man’s psychedelic is another man’s… Do you know what it is?

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It’s ketamine.

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I mean, it’s ketamine.

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It’s related to PCP.

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It’s an anesthetic.

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Oh, they take that?

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Different strokes.

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Different strokes.

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Yeah.

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Terrence, about trivializing it,

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it sounds to me what you’ve got is a real good candidate

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for the big black thing in 2001.

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But one problem I have, though,

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is that, as you said,

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you’re taking off from orthodox evolutionary biology.

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And I may be wrong about this,

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but one of my impressions of that viewpoint is,

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one of the assumptions of that viewpoint,

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is a denial of the phenomenon of consciousness in non-human species.

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And so I’m not sure how your theory would relate to, for example,

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dolphin intelligence

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or speculating tree consciousness or any things along those lines?

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Well, now let’s see if I understand you right.

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Consciousness is a very difficult thing to recognize.

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And dolphin consciousness, tree consciousness, these things

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are for dolphins and trees. It’s very, very hard to bridge the gap between the species.

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I mean, I think the task of finding the extraterrestrial is not so much, it’s a task of recognizing it when you find it, you know.

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I’m not suggesting that it’s necessary that the mushroom be an extraterrestrial intelligence

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for all of this to have happened.

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If psilocybin only increases visual acuity,

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it could have given sufficient dominance to this pack-hunting primate adaptation

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as opposed to the root-eating gorilla-type adaptation to give it dominance. And then I

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think a plus for the theory and the kicker is this weird thing which it does to language and

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the fact that another pressure on developing language

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is this pack-hunting lifestyle.

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So, to my mind, it all falls together so neatly

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that it has a certain kind of logical momentum.

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But you’re very right, and it’s important,

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when talking about evolution,

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to remember that the cardinal dictum of Darwinian mechanics

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is that there is no teleology.

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That means evolution is not moving toward something.

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All notion of purpose has to be given up.

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It isn’t that things evolve or move toward higher forms.

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It’s just that things complexify,

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and this complexification gives rise to what we define as higher forms. It’s just that things complexify, and this complexification gives rise

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to what we define as higher forms.

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No, the voice of the mushroom,

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the question of the mushroom as an intellect

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grows, to my mind, murkier every day.

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I mean, I used to firmly believe

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it was simply an extraterrestrial

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and that we were going to have to come to terms with the fact

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that in the ecology of this planet there was another minded species,

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but that it was just so different from us that the task was to cognize it

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and that it in fact had probably been intelligent and on this planet longer than we had.

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And then I came, I was willing at one time to entertain a sort of Jungian,

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you know, it’s the oversoul,

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the collective unconscious,

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or personified as the psychopompic archetype

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which teaches.

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But, you know, this is like conjuring.

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This doesn’t explain anything.

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This is just some kind of stream of gobbledygook.

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I mean, Jung talks about autonomous psychic complexes

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which have escaped the control of the ego.

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That’s what he means.

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He means an elf, you see.

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But when you call it an autonomous psychic complex,

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then it’s somehow the, oh, of course, a pedestrian.

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And it’s not pedestrian at all.

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Well, I was being playful with the 2001 reference,

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but the actual question is that

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dolphins, as an example, in my view,

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have demonstrable intelligence

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and have something approaching culture.

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Do you think they had their own mushroom?

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Or is that, in fact, not necessary

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to the development of that type of intelligence?

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No, I don’t think it is necessary.

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First of all, I’m not sure they’re intelligent.

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If they are, there’s ample spans of time.

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I mean, they were land animals and then they went back to the sea.

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And it’s really hard to realize how much time there has been for these changes to go on.

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there has been for these changes to go on. As to culture, culture is sort of a shockwave which follows behind language.

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Language or culture is fossilized language.

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And one of the reasons that I think these psychedelic compounds still are important

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is because they catalyze the evolution of language, and that very directly issues into a catalysis of culture. I see the whole world we’re living in as basically the legacy of LSD.

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What it did to language in the 1960s is now visible as culture in the 1980s. You see, we don’t realize that when you don’t have language, you have instead reality.

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And that when you take a piece of reality and put a word to it, this is like a process of fossilization.

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to it, this is like a process of fossilization. The original thing is completely dissolved away,

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and mimicking it and left in its place is a template of it, a pseudomorph of the original thing. Well, first you have a word for one thing, and then you have a word for one thing and then you have a word for another thing and pretty soon, like a

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coral creature, you have

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completely erected a

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symbolic reality. It

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stretches from the moment of

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the Big Bang to the heat

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death of the universe. You can

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explain everything, but

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this explanation

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has somehow precluded any

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kind of involvement with it.

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And we’re living inside this.

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What is real is not the walls, the streets, the buildings, and the electrical wiring.

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What is real are the linguistic structures which allow such things to come into existence.

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And I think that these psychedelic compounds, these psychedelic plants, catalyze language.

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This is why before history or before modern history, the shaman was is in the aesthetic expression of it, not the curing expression of it,

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what shamanism was, was language work, stretching the envelope.

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Isn’t that what engineers call it when they design a plane which can go a certain speed and then they go one mile faster. This is what the shaman tries to do.

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He tries to stretch the envelope of the linguistic context

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and over thousands and thousands of years of doing this,

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you arrive where we are.

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We have the legacy.

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And science is certainly an expression of the shamanic thing.

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I mean, the dreams of the alchemists of the

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16th century have been entirely realized in the technical accomplishments of the 20th

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century. I mean, we do convert base metals to gold. We do, you know, create diamonds

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out of ashes and all of these things.

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But it turns out it wasn’t the literalizing of these things

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that was so illuminating and inspiring to our humanness.

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It was the creation of the linguistic models.

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Then it became trivial when someone actually did it.

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That’s like a misunderstanding, you know.

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One more short one.

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What’s the time frame on this? There’s a couple

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three million years between

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the first upright walking

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between the Thames and the

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You have the original aridity

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three million years ago,

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and then you have the growth

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of the grasslands. Really

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you don’t have a lot

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happening until 10,000 years ago. That’s where we begin to

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see that all the elements are in place and that this has probably been going on for a long,

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long time. This is post-Neanderthal, basically. Yes, very recent. Did I mention that in the

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Tsele Plateau of southern Algeria, there are cave paintings,

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which have never been commented upon,

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so far as I’m aware, by any orthodox anthropologist,

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which clearly show human beings dancing,

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holding mushrooms in their hand,

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racing in a kind of round dance in one case,

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and then in another instance,

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a single human figure wearing a kind

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of long apron and with mushrooms sprouting out of the body and with mushrooms clutched

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in the hands.

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And this is the earliest and only evidence of mushroom use that we have from Africa,

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but it’s very, very conclusive.

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The massive growth in brain size has occurred over the past 30,000 years.

00:22:50 ►

In other words, within the time frame when all of these elements would have been present on the African veld.

00:22:58 ►

And I’ve sketched this very quickly because, first of all,

00:23:02 ►

you’re not professionally interested in the details of

00:23:06 ►

evolution of ecosystems but for instance carl sauer has argued that there is no such thing

00:23:13 ►

as a natural grassland that grasslands are the earliest artifact of human existence on this

00:23:20 ►

planet and that we created them with fire and repeated yearly burning because

00:23:27 ►

yearly fires promoted the growth and rapid evolutionary selection of grasses which promoted

00:23:36 ►

the production of cereals and the proof of this contention is pretty easy to understand and hard to overthrow and it is simply this that if you

00:23:46 ►

have a grassland which abuts a virgin forest you go into the forest and you find that none of the

00:23:54 ►

grassland species none of the newly evolved grassland species are present in the forest, but in the grassland, many of the forest species are found to have adapted forms which are living in the grassland.

00:24:11 ►

Well, that’s a very, very clear proof that the grasslands are recent and, worse, successive upon the forest. Perhaps humans were the agency which created this entire environment where

00:24:25 ►

this evolution of ungulate animals and pack hunting

00:24:30 ►

and all of this could have evolved.

00:24:32 ►

The impact of human beings on the planet.

00:24:35 ►

There was just a conference about six months ago in Boston

00:24:39 ►

in which mammalian paleontologists of the mammalian

00:24:46 ►

paleontologists gathered

00:24:48 ►

together and pretty much concluded

00:24:51 ►

that the major force

00:24:52 ►

promoting the extinction of the

00:24:55 ►

large mammals all over the world

00:24:56 ►

was man

00:24:57 ►

up to that the Irish elk

00:25:00 ►

the ontidoth

00:25:02 ►

the

00:25:03 ►

huge pigs which were seven feet high at the shoulder,

00:25:08 ►

the giant armadillo, the 14-foot-high ground sloth.

00:25:13 ►

All of these creatures disappeared because of human agency.

00:25:17 ►

It wasn’t, as had previously been thought, that their size caused them,

00:25:24 ►

placed such constraints on their food-gathering ability that they became extinct.

00:25:28 ►

No, it was that they were hunted out of existence.

00:25:31 ►

Phil?

00:25:31 ►

There’s a parallel point I think that’s important to bring up.

00:25:35 ►

You’ve been talking to your brother about the occurrence of tripulants in the Middle East

00:25:39 ►

and some of our recent experiments.

00:25:40 ►

And one thing I think that should be added is throughout the Middle East,

00:25:44 ►

there are human-containing plants and beta-carboline-containing plants. The beta-carboline-containing

00:25:48 ►

plants would make the illusions much more stronger of any mushroom or the tryptamines. And these are

00:25:53 ►

found in ancient agricultural sites and found in folk medicine. In fact, I was unaware that there

00:25:59 ►

were tryptamine-containing plants in the Middle East until I talked to your brother. Yes, I simplified the story and I concentrated on Africa

00:26:07 ►

because Africa is thought to be the point of origin

00:26:11 ►

where all this hominoid speciation went on.

00:26:15 ►

But you’re correct.

00:26:15 ►

There could be other plants which could synergize this

00:26:19 ►

or in the new world you have a completely different situation

00:26:23 ►

where different plants, Banisteriopsis copy

00:26:27 ►

or Morning Glories or Peyote

00:26:30 ►

or the other psilocyne-containing mushrooms

00:26:34 ►

would have worked the same kinds of effects on culture

00:26:38 ►

but you don’t have quite the coincidence of events

00:26:42 ►

or of factors necessary for the kind of

00:26:45 ►

scenario I’ve sketched out.

00:26:48 ►

You need the grasslands.

00:26:50 ►

You need the pack-hunting

00:26:52 ►

style of life.

00:26:54 ►

And

00:26:55 ►

these other

00:26:58 ►

psychedelic plants are not subject

00:27:00 ►

to being associated with the

00:27:01 ►

domestication situation. For instance,

00:27:04 ►

Banisteriopsis calci is a wild, a rare wild woody vine,

00:27:09 ►

and the admixture plants are similar.

00:27:12 ►

Only in the case of the ergot, well, no, there are three cases.

00:27:16 ►

The ergot, the coprophytic mushrooms, and then, of course, hemp is another one.

00:27:23 ►

And then, of course, hemp is another one. I mean, we cannot, there’s no telling how long hemp cannabis has been under domestication

00:27:31 ►

because we find hemp and mats that are, you know, 45,000 years old.

00:27:38 ►

It was being twisted into skeins and the seeds are found in fire pits.

00:27:43 ►

So, again, this is an example of one of these things being brought in.

00:27:48 ►

Yeah.

00:27:49 ►

Somebody back there?

00:27:51 ►

Yes.

00:27:51 ►

Yeah, regarding hallucinogens and how people abuse them,

00:27:56 ►

to me there’s a difference between a hallucinogen stimulating something in the brain

00:28:01 ►

and the brain actually evolving,

00:28:02 ►

and it’s stimulating something in people that is manifested through the culture.

00:28:08 ►

And I wonder if in the last 20 years or so, since at least a few million people have started

00:28:14 ►

taking hallucinogens, any real evidence has come out that there is a measurable increase

00:28:19 ►

in intelligence or any other skills besides this visual acuity in human beings who have

00:28:23 ►

taken any of a number of hallucinogens or mind-altering drugs?

00:28:27 ►

Well, an evolutionary biologist would say there just hasn’t been time,

00:28:31 ►

and that’s a reasonable answer.

00:28:33 ►

But, you know, if you go down to Silicon Valley to these software writing places

00:28:38 ►

or anywhere where technology is on the cutting edge,

00:28:41 ►

I mean, all these guys have ponytails down to their ass,

00:28:45 ►

and it’s very clear that they are heads,

00:28:49 ►

that heads are in charge of designing

00:28:52 ►

the cutting edge of culture.

00:28:54 ►

And I don’t know whether that means

00:28:57 ►

there’s been an evolution in intelligence or not,

00:29:00 ►

but you’ve got to take seriously,

00:29:08 ►

and it’s too bad that it wasn’t taken seriously,

00:29:16 ►

the notion that what these things do is they are consciousness-expanding compounds.

00:29:20 ►

Well, we’ve got to have more consciousness.

00:29:27 ►

That’s what we’re short of at every level, especially the managerial and control level.

00:30:06 ►

So if these things actually expand consciousness, then we should be going full bore to find out what this is all about, because it is just unbelievably perversely locked in closed loops of behavior patterns and the stock broker sells his house and this sort of thing. They decondition and this is a precondition

00:30:15 ►

for consciousness. How can you evolve your consciousness if you do not decondition yourself from the mold into which it has been poured and ossified,

00:30:28 ►

they liquefy.

00:30:29 ►

It’s almost like the alchemical metaphor of the solucio.

00:30:34 ►

You know, everything is dissolved and then everything is recrystallized in a new form.

00:30:41 ►

But consciousness expansion must loom large

00:30:45 ►

in the history of the species.

00:30:47 ►

I see all of history

00:30:49 ►

as a psychedelic trip.

00:30:52 ►

If by psychedelic trip

00:30:53 ►

we mean an experience

00:30:55 ►

of consciousness expansion

00:30:57 ►

that ascends through

00:30:59 ►

successive levels.

00:31:01 ►

I mean, this, we have become,

00:31:03 ►

this is a trip which has lasted 1,500 generations, and we are not the form of records of some sort to the next generation.

00:31:32 ►

We have amassed a vast amount of consciously expressed material.

00:31:40 ►

The problem is we’re not making good use of it.

00:31:44 ►

The problem is we’re not making good use of it.

00:31:48 ►

I mean, in a microcosm, I think it was William James who said,

00:31:52 ►

it’s fine that we line our rooms with books,

00:31:57 ►

but if we don’t read those books, we’re no better off than our cats and dogs.

00:32:03 ►

And this is sort of what the psychedelics experience is an invitation to.

00:32:05 ►

It’s an invitation to read the Akashic records,

00:32:08 ►

the real books,

00:32:09 ►

the books that have accumulated

00:32:10 ►

in hyperspace

00:32:12 ►

out of the blood, sweat, and tears

00:32:13 ►

of 1,500 generations of explorers.

00:32:17 ►

We are the inheritors

00:32:20 ►

of that legacy.

00:32:21 ►

They have carried us

00:32:23 ►

from monkeyhood

00:32:25 ►

to within 15 or 20 years

00:32:28 ►

of star flight,

00:32:31 ►

machine intelligence,

00:32:32 ►

genetic immortality,

00:32:34 ►

so forth and so on.

00:32:36 ►

It would be a great pity

00:32:38 ►

if we were to drop the ball.

00:32:40 ►

And I think that blame

00:32:43 ►

would accrue rather directly upon us.

00:32:47 ►

We owe a debt to those people.

00:32:49 ►

The only way that the conquests, the pillaging, the dispersions of people, the pogroms,

00:33:00 ►

the only way the horror of history can be redeemed is by giving history a meaning, you know?

00:33:09 ►

And the meaning has to somehow be commiserate with the toil and the suffering

00:33:15 ►

that was required to produce the situation where that meaning could be generated.

00:33:20 ►

So every successive generation of human beings has had this incrementally increasing

00:33:28 ►

responsibility and an incrementally increasing set of tools for righteously shouldering that

00:33:39 ►

responsibility. And this is our situation. It’s simply that we are either the penultimate or the

00:33:46 ►

ultimate generation. You know, there’s an Irish prayer, may you be alive at the end of the world,

00:33:54 ►

meaning may you be a part of the transformation of transformations, which gives everything meaning.

00:34:02 ►

And I really believe it isn’t going to go on for centuries, people.

00:34:06 ►

We aren’t going to put standard stations on planets around Alpha Centauri.

00:34:12 ►

We aren’t going to export Tylenol to the stars.

00:34:17 ►

It isn’t like that.

00:34:18 ►

It is accelerating at so rapid a rate

00:34:22 ►

that we are going to become unrecognizable to ourselves

00:34:27 ►

within the lifetimes of most people living in this room.

00:34:32 ►

So how do you come to terms with that?

00:34:35 ►

And how do you help everybody else come to terms with that?

00:34:39 ►

This is, I think, the dilemma of all of our lives, and I’ve chosen to respond to it

00:34:45 ►

by centering in on the hallucinogenic, ecstatic experience.

00:34:52 ►

I couldn’t have done otherwise.

00:34:54 ►

It seems to me obvious,

00:34:57 ►

but I suppose to Hitler,

00:34:58 ►

National Socialism seemed the obvious solution.

00:35:03 ►

So I’m not saying follow me.

00:35:05 ►

I’m saying we all have to respond in some way

00:35:09 ►

to this legacy, this responsibility,

00:35:13 ►

and this challenge.

00:35:14 ►

And if there is anything on this earth

00:35:17 ►

which expands consciousness,

00:35:20 ►

it should be fully and exhaustively explored

00:35:23 ►

without cultural bias, without fear or prejudice.

00:35:27 ►

And talks like this, people like yourselves, we are, you know, a small, thin voice in the wind,

00:35:36 ►

but it has to be said because it seems to be right.

00:35:43 ►

Then why are you going to do this under the reach of American

00:35:45 ►

jurisdiction?

00:35:47 ►

You mean why not do it in another country?

00:35:51 ►

Why not

00:35:51 ►

do it under American jurisdiction?

00:35:56 ►

How?

00:36:00 ►

Well, yes, I mean, we’re not discussing

00:36:02 ►

anything illegal,

00:36:03 ►

are we?

00:36:06 ►

What are we discussing?

00:36:16 ►

I’m advocating that all these ethnometrically significant plants need to be preserved so that professionals will have an opportunity to sort through them.

00:36:20 ►

The issue of consciousness expansion is just like the issue of your sexual conduct.

00:36:27 ►

It’s nobody’s business.

00:36:28 ►

I mean, surely your mind must be the most private part of your body,

00:36:32 ►

and it should be treated as such.

00:36:36 ►

So on one level, I’m talking about almost political and societal programs.

00:36:41 ►

Let’s preserve plants.

00:36:43 ►

Let’s preserve plants. Let’s preserve folklore.

00:36:46 ►

For professionals.

00:36:48 ►

But there are no professionals

00:36:49 ►

in the field of self-exploration.

00:36:52 ►

That’s everybody’s job.

00:36:54 ►

I mean, you all are PhDs

00:36:56 ►

in consciousness exploration,

00:36:58 ►

or if you’re not, you should be,

00:37:01 ►

because what else have you got going?

00:37:04 ►

Yes?

00:37:06 ►

I was thinking myself about the legality of keeping your garden and keeping its costs.

00:37:12 ►

Are you going to differentiate between mushrooms that are not kind of liquid to have or give or sell?

00:37:21 ►

Yes, no, I’m not really.

00:37:23 ►

We wrote a book years ago on the cultivation of mushrooms,

00:37:27 ►

and I consider that work pretty much finished.

00:37:30 ►

And I’m much more concerned about these very obscure plants,

00:37:36 ►

higher plants, you know, not fungi, but higher…

00:37:39 ►

They haven’t been illegal yet.

00:37:41 ►

No, they’re not illegal.

00:37:42 ►

They’re virtually unknown to science.

00:37:45 ►

I mean, what we’re talking about is tracking down rumors and that sort of thing.

00:37:51 ►

No, it’s not necessary to break any laws to explore the fringes of psychobotany.

00:37:59 ►

Laws only are passed against drugs in response to epidemic outbreaks of usage.

00:38:07 ►

The compounds I’m interested in are totally unavailable

00:38:11 ►

and no one’s ever heard of them anyway.

00:38:13 ►

And that’s where the interest lies.

00:38:16 ►

I mean, I certainly wish that it were legally possible

00:38:21 ►

for professionals to do research on the effects of all psychedelic drugs

00:38:26 ►

in the context

00:38:28 ►

of medical research, but apparently

00:38:30 ►

this is not to be.

00:38:32 ►

And so

00:38:33 ►

this is then a different approach

00:38:36 ►

saying, okay, we are not asking

00:38:38 ►

to be that something

00:38:40 ►

which is illegal be declared

00:38:42 ►

legal, or that something

00:38:44 ►

which is illegal be declared legal, or that something which is illegal be, exceptions be made for researchers.

00:38:49 ►

I think this is fruitless. I think the Adam thing proved that.

00:38:53 ►

I mean, I think Adam was extremely efficacious for therapy.

00:38:58 ►

I think the case for its use in therapy was brilliantly made.

00:39:02 ►

I think the people who made the case were extremely sincere,

00:39:07 ►

and I think that they just got kicked all over the board

00:39:10 ►

because they didn’t realize that sincerity doesn’t count,

00:39:15 ►

and it’s not about making a reasonable case to reasonable people.

00:39:20 ►

You’re going up against a much more draconian kind of thing.

00:39:27 ►

So no, I’m advocating an exploration of the botanical and ethnomedical fringes, and it

00:39:33 ►

doesn’t involve any kind of legal issues at all in the present context.

00:39:38 ►

It’s perfectly reasonable to go forward, and I think this is the way to do it, you know.

00:39:45 ►

Any other points?

00:39:47 ►

Yeah, I thought you’d, briefly relating to your last point, I thought you were doing

00:39:51 ►

some experimentation with iboga root, which containing ibogaine happens to be illegal.

00:39:58 ►

No, I’ve never experienced ibogaine. I’m very interested in it.

00:40:07 ►

Of course, if I ever did it, I would go to Gabon,

00:40:10 ►

where it’s not only legal but a tradition.

00:40:15 ►

But that wasn’t one of the plants I have in mind.

00:40:17 ►

It would certainly be interesting. I know it’s being used in studies of inhibiting heroin addiction and this kind of thing.

00:40:23 ►

But there are a number.

00:40:25 ►

My focus of interest over the years has been the Amazon basin,

00:40:31 ►

and I think that that’s probably where the focus will be,

00:40:36 ►

just sort of by default.

00:40:39 ►

Yes, one of the interesting things,

00:40:41 ►

when Watson tried to show that Soma was Amanita muscaria,

00:40:47 ►

he ignored this very rich set of associations that the Hindus have to cattle.

00:40:58 ►

I think that probably Soma was not Amanita muscaria, but it was Stropharia cubensis.

00:41:07 ►

The interesting thing about Soma, the god, because it is also a god as well as an intoxicant,

00:41:13 ►

was that it was a male lunar deity.

00:41:17 ►

And throughout the world, the moon is almost universally associated with the feminine.

00:41:24 ►

I believe there’s a North American

00:41:26 ►

Indian tradition that associates

00:41:28 ►

the moon with masculinity,

00:41:30 ►

but in this Sona tradition

00:41:31 ►

you get a masculine lunar

00:41:33 ►

figure, and then in Mesopotamia

00:41:36 ►

in the god

00:41:38 ►

Nanar, or Sin,

00:41:40 ►

there is also a

00:41:42 ►

male lunar deity.

00:41:44 ►

He is the lunar goddess Sibyl,

00:41:50 ►

is actually his daughter.

00:41:52 ►

He represents an earlier stratum of mythological material.

00:41:56 ►

So yes, one of the unsolved mysteries of ethno-medicine,

00:42:00 ►

which if anybody’s looking for a project,

00:42:03 ►

is to go to India and try and find

00:42:06 ►

out exactly what the status of mushrooms is in India now and in prehistory. Hinduism was

00:42:14 ►

reformed quite radically a few centuries ago by the introduction of the Mahabharata. The

00:42:20 ►

Mahabharata specifically forbids eating mushrooms to high caste Brahmins.

00:42:27 ►

There is, in other words, a mycophobia there.

00:42:31 ►

And one of the puzzles of Wasson’s theory of Soma, or anybody’s theory of Soma for that matter,

00:42:38 ►

is if it was so wonderful, and when you read the ninth mandala of the Rig Veda it is clearly wonderful

00:42:46 ►

if it was so wonderful

00:42:47 ►

then how could they have ever lost it?

00:42:51 ►

and I think the answer is probably

00:42:53 ►

it occurred through a series of stages

00:42:56 ►

originally it was the orgiastic intoxicant

00:43:01 ►

of a general tribal group

00:43:03 ►

then over time,

00:43:05 ►

it became the

00:43:07 ►

secret property of a

00:43:09 ►

priest class

00:43:11 ►

and knowledge of it

00:43:13 ►

was much more restricted.

00:43:16 ►

And then, there was

00:43:17 ►

a popular rebellion

00:43:19 ►

against the priestly hierarchy

00:43:22 ►

and the priest and everything

00:43:23 ►

associated with them was swept away and the priest and everything associated with them

00:43:25 ►

was swept away and the mushroom went with it.

00:43:28 ►

This is the only scenario I can imagine

00:43:31 ►

where a psychedelic drug could actually be lost to a culture

00:43:35 ►

other than massive disruption in contact with another culture.

00:43:41 ►

But it’s very interesting.

00:43:42 ►

There are aboriginal people in India

00:43:45 ►

people not of the Indo-Aryan stock or even of the Dravidian stock the tribal

00:43:52 ►

people in Orissa and Bengal called the Santal and they have unlike the

00:44:02 ►

Orthodox Hindus they have a tremendously rich mushroom vocabulary.

00:44:08 ►

They have hundreds of words for mushrooms.

00:44:10 ►

They recognize 50 species with common names.

00:44:14 ►

They eat 12 species.

00:44:16 ►

In other words, they appear to represent

00:44:19 ►

a mycophilic culture that was extant in India before the Indo-Aryan invasions,

00:44:29 ►

and their relationship to psychedelic mushrooms has never been fully explored.

00:44:37 ►

They have a very interesting language where everything is designated male or female.

00:44:45 ►

Everything is given this designation,

00:44:48 ►

except one thing in the entire universe,

00:44:51 ►

and it happens to be a mushroom.

00:44:55 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

00:44:58 ►

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

00:45:04 ►

And so, since I know that we have quite a few anthropologists

00:45:08 ►

among us here in the salon,

00:45:10 ►

maybe those last ten minutes or so

00:45:13 ►

may have given you several ideas about areas of research

00:45:16 ►

that you might be interested in pursuing.

00:45:18 ►

Of course, getting a grant to study ancient psychedelic cultures right now

00:45:24 ►

may be a little hard to come by,

00:45:26 ►

but I’m sure that if you become passionate enough about finding the truth out about Soma,

00:45:31 ►

that, well, you’ll find a way to do the research, I’m sure.

00:45:35 ►

So, did you hear anything new from the Bard McKenna this time?

00:45:40 ►

Well, I did, although he may have said it before.

00:45:43 ►

Well, I did, although he may have said it before.

00:45:51 ►

This is the first time I remember him saying so clearly that his ideas about mushroom consciousness or mushroom intelligence had been changing from his original position of thinking that they were definitely extraterrestrials

00:45:57 ►

to a very different take on how they actually fit into the picture of life here on the planet Earth.

00:46:03 ►

actually fit into the picture of life here on the planet Earth.

00:46:09 ►

But if I’m not mistaken, later on he revisited the extraterrestrial idea about the mushroom,

00:46:12 ►

at least when it fit the point he was trying to make.

00:46:19 ►

But right now I’m not here to quibble with Terence about the ultimate origin of mushroom spores.

00:46:24 ►

Rather, I’m more interested in what I heard just now as a call to arms.

00:46:27 ►

Do you remember the part that I’m talking about?

00:46:31 ►

Well, better yet, let me just repeat it for you right now.

00:46:37 ►

You know, there’s an Irish prayer, may you be alive at the end of the world,

00:46:43 ►

meaning may you be a part of the transformation of transformations, which gives everything meaning.

00:46:46 ►

And I really believe it isn’t going to go on for centuries, people.

00:46:50 ►

We aren’t going to put standard stations on planets around Alpha Centauri.

00:46:56 ►

We aren’t going to export Tylenol to the stars.

00:47:00 ►

It isn’t like that.

00:47:02 ►

It is accelerating at so rapid a rate that we are going to become unrecognizable to ourselves within the lifetimes of most people living in this room.

00:47:22 ►

you help everybody else come to terms with that.

00:47:26 ►

This is, I think, the dilemma of all of our lives,

00:47:36 ►

and I’ve chosen to respond to it by centering in on the hallucinogenic, ecstatic experience.

00:47:37 ►

I couldn’t have done otherwise. It seems to me obvious, but I suppose to Hitler, national socialism seemed the obvious solution. So

00:47:47 ►

I’m not saying follow me, I’m saying we all have to respond in some way to this legacy,

00:47:55 ►

this responsibility, and this challenge, and if there is anything on this earth which expands

00:48:02 ►

consciousness, it should be fully and exhaustively explored without cultural bias, without fear or prejudice.

00:48:11 ►

And talks like this, people like yourselves, we are, you know, a small, thin voice in the wind,

00:48:20 ►

but it has to be said because it seems to be right.

00:48:24 ►

But it has to be said because it seems to be right.

00:48:30 ►

We all have to respond in some way, so says the Bard McKenna.

00:48:35 ►

Little did he know at the time, the time he said those words back in 1987,

00:48:41 ►

that you and I would be hearing his call today on the 46th day of Occupy Wall Street.

00:48:46 ►

As I mentioned in my last podcast, each week now I’ll be ending these programs with some news and thoughts from the Occupy movement

00:48:49 ►

that has now spread all over the planet.

00:48:52 ►

And at the end of this program,

00:48:53 ►

I’m going to play a clip from a Michael Moore speech

00:48:56 ►

at Occupy San Francisco the other day.

00:48:59 ►

And in it, he points out that

00:49:00 ►

although this movement is only six weeks old,

00:49:03 ►

it already has the support

00:49:05 ►

of over half the U.S. population, according to a recent poll.

00:49:09 ►

And what’s so astounding about that, you ask?

00:49:12 ►

Well, during the 60s, the anti-war protests went on for over five years or so before gaining

00:49:18 ►

that amount of national support.

00:49:20 ►

As the song goes, there’s something happening here.

00:49:23 ►

As the song goes, there’s something happening here.

00:49:34 ►

Now, I’ve been spending a significant amount of time lately watching the live video streams of the Occupy demonstrations and conversing in their associated chat rooms.

00:49:46 ►

And I highly recommend that you do the same, or at least take a little tour of this movement by going to either or both livestream.com or ustream.com, or both, better yet,

00:49:49 ►

and just enter the word Occupy in their search boxes.

00:49:53 ►

That’ll bring up a listing of all the cities around the world that are feeding the video record of their occupations, demonstrations, and marches into these sites,

00:49:58 ►

where they’re not only available as live video feeds,

00:50:01 ►

but where much of this video is also recorded and available for you

00:50:05 ►

to go back and see for yourself what actually happened without having to depend on your local

00:50:11 ►

corporate media to distort the truth for you. And the people at these demonstrations, by the way,

00:50:17 ►

are just like you and me. Here’s a short bit that I recorded from Occupy Detroit this weekend.

00:50:23 ►

Here’s a short bit that I recorded from Occupy Detroit this weekend.

00:50:34 ►

The thing about Occupy Wall Street is that Occupy Wall Street is really a coalition of a whole bunch of activism groups.

00:50:44 ►

How I got involved is that I just basically felt like this is the time, this is the watershed moment where so many people

00:50:47 ►

at the same time are just feeling the same way and they just fed up.

00:50:51 ►

So what Occupy Wall Street allowed us to do is that it just gave us a megaphone to scream

00:51:01 ►

out to the world, look, enough is enough.

00:51:04 ►

Enough is enough and we’re just not going to take it anymore.

00:51:08 ►

And it also provided us a place where we can organize,

00:51:14 ►

where we can network, where we can share ideas,

00:51:18 ►

where we forced America, as well as the world,

00:51:22 ►

to have conversations that they were uncomfortable or afraid to have.

00:51:29 ►

So personally, the reason why I got involved with Occupy Wall Street is because I believe that

00:51:36 ►

we have no other choice. We don’t have any other choice. This is where we make our stand.

00:51:45 ►

And it’s going to be a long process, but we have to start somewhere.

00:51:50 ►

As the young man just said, it’s going to be a long process,

00:51:54 ►

but we’ve got to start somewhere.

00:51:57 ►

Also, he said that the people just aren’t going to take it anymore,

00:52:01 ►

which, of course, I’m sure brought that scene from the movie Network to your mind.

00:52:05 ►

You know the one? It’s where that newscaster completely lost it and said, I’m mad as hell

00:52:10 ►

and I’m not going to take it anymore.

00:52:12 ►

Well, life has now imitated art once again, because a guy named Dylan Radigan, who hosts

00:52:19 ►

an American television show dealing with finance and politics, had a major meltdown that was

00:52:24 ►

equally entertaining as the one in the movie was.

00:52:28 ►

And for your listening pleasure right now, I’m going to play a clip of that meltdown.

00:52:33 ►

And as you’re listening to it, keep in mind that this guy is a big-time financial pundit on a corporate network that is owned by the 1%.

00:52:41 ►

network that is owned by the 1%. The clip’s on YouTube

00:52:43 ►

also, and you may want to take a look at

00:52:45 ►

it there, because it’s not only

00:52:47 ►

funny in some sort of perverse

00:52:50 ►

black humor kind of way,

00:52:51 ►

it’s also quite interesting to

00:52:53 ►

see the expression on the faces of the

00:52:55 ►

other people sitting around the table while

00:52:57 ►

he kind of went off like this.

00:53:00 ►

Here it is.

00:53:02 ►

We owe $70 trillion

00:53:04 ►

to walk out a $4 trillion. I understand that.

00:53:05 ►

It goes to you to walk out a $4 trillion solution, which is basically just a way for the Democrats to avoid dealing with this until 2017.

00:53:12 ►

I’m not here to talk about plans to deal with this until 2017.

00:53:15 ►

I’m saying we’ve got a real problem.

00:53:17 ►

And I’m tired of Republicans and Democrats who either want Republicans who want to burn the place to the ground and Democrats, with all due respect,

00:53:24 ►

who either want Republicans who want to burn the place to the ground and Democrats, with all due respect,

00:53:28 ►

who want to offer a plan that gets it through the end of their second term of their presidency and then screws me and my kids when it’s over.

00:53:31 ►

And until we do that, we have to deal with the extraction that is at foot.

00:53:35 ►

It is the reason the financial markets are behaving the way they’re behaving.

00:53:39 ►

That is a mathematical fact. This is not some opinion. This is a mathematical fact.

00:53:44 ►

Tens of trillions of dollars

00:53:46 ►

are being extracted from the United States of America. Democrats aren’t doing it. Republicans

00:53:52 ►

are not doing it. An entire integrated system, financial system, trading system, taxing system

00:53:57 ►

that was created by both parties over a period of two decades is at work on our entire country

00:54:03 ►

right now. And we’re sitting here arguing about whether we should do the $4 trillion plan

00:54:09 ►

that kicks the can down the road for the president for 2017,

00:54:12 ►

or burn the place to the ground, both of which are reckless, irresponsible, and stupid.

00:54:18 ►

And the fact of the matter is, until we actually, and I’m sorry to lose my temper,

00:54:22 ►

but I’ll tell you what, I’ve been coming on TV for three years doing this.

00:54:27 ►

And the fact of the matter is that there’s a refusal on both the Democratic and the Republican side of the aisle to acknowledge the mathematical problem, which is that the United States of America is being extracted.

00:54:39 ►

It’s being extracted through banking.

00:54:41 ►

It’s being extracted through trade.

00:54:43 ►

And it’s being extracted through taxation. And it’s being extracted through taxation.

00:54:45 ►

And there’s not a single politician that has stepped forward, Susan, to deal with this.

00:54:49 ►

But there’s only one right now.

00:54:51 ►

The leader of the free world, whether you like it or not, the president of the United States,

00:54:55 ►

is arguably one of the most powerful individuals we have out there.

00:54:58 ►

But, Susan, what you’re saying is exactly the point that Dylan is making.

00:55:01 ►

It’s not about one guy.

00:55:03 ►

It’s about all of them coming together to get together.

00:55:04 ►

No, I actually disagree. I think Dylan’s saying it isn’t about one guy.

00:55:08 ►

It is about one guy. What would you like him to do?

00:55:10 ►

I would like him to go to the people of the United States of America and say, people of the United States of America,

00:55:16 ►

your Congress is bought. Your Congress is incapable of making

00:55:19 ►

legislation on health care, banking, trade, or taxes, because

00:55:24 ►

if they do it, they will

00:55:25 ►

lose their political funding, and they won’t do it.

00:55:28 ►

But I’m the president of the United States, and I won’t have a country that is run by

00:55:32 ►

a bought Congress.

00:55:32 ►

So I’m not going to work with a bought Congress and try to be Mr. Big Guy.

00:55:36 ►

I’m working with the bought Congress.

00:55:37 ►

I’m going to abandon the bought Congress, like Teddy Roosevelt did, and I’m going to

00:55:41 ►

go to the people of the United States, and I’m going to say, you’ve got to block Congress. And until we get rid of the block Congress, which is Jimmy Williams’

00:55:48 ►

constant point, which is get the money out of politics, and until a president says that’s the

00:55:52 ►

problem and says he’s going to fix it, there is no policy that I can possibly see, no matter how

00:55:57 ►

brilliant your idea may be, or your idea, or my idea, or her idea, or your idea at home,

00:56:07 ►

idea or her idea or your idea at home is that idea will not happen as long as there is the capacity to basically fire a politician who disagrees with me by taking funding away from

00:56:12 ►

him. Is that a fair assessment?

00:56:14 ►

Money in politics is the root of all political evil. It is corruption at its worst. And until

00:56:21 ►

we step up and kick that out of the park, it’s going to be the same system

00:56:25 ►

all the way. And only the president

00:56:27 ►

can do that. No, no, no. The Congress

00:56:29 ►

has to do it, too. The Congress has to do it, too.

00:56:32 ►

But I’ll tell you what. How bad does it

00:56:33 ►

have to get? How much money has to be extracted?

00:56:36 ►

How many things have to be heard?

00:56:38 ►

Okay, physically, what do you

00:56:40 ►

do? You go and give a speech

00:56:42 ►

to, yeah, right now. Right now.

00:56:43 ►

And then what happens tomorrow?

00:56:45 ►

Tomorrow what happens is you begin the process of actually investing in solving the problem.

00:56:50 ►

So I come out and I say, how?

00:56:52 ►

I create an infrastructure bank with 2% blending immediately.

00:56:56 ►

Once I explain to people the problem, once I explain to you you have cancer,

00:57:00 ►

once you understand how screwed up your trade tax and banking policies are,

00:57:03 ►

believe me, you will have no issue when I incorporate an infrastructure bank that I fund with repatriated offshore money that I bring in and then use to which is what I want my president to do. That at that exact

00:57:26 ►

moment, I say, you know what? We got a screwed up situation here, people. You all know it. And now

00:57:30 ►

what? I’m going to admit it. And as a result, not only have I admitted it, but we’re going to begin

00:57:35 ►

the process of solving it like grownups. They did it in World War II. They did it after the Civil

00:57:38 ►

War. They did it in Latin America with the Brady Bonds. We are not seeing it happen now. The panel

00:57:42 ►

stays a little more emotional than I anticipated getting at work this afternoon,

00:57:46 ►

but what am I going to do?

00:57:50 ►

And I guess I’m getting a little emotional here at work, but what am I going to do?

00:57:54 ►

So says a financial pundit.

00:57:57 ►

And keep in mind that this guy is only talking about one main issue, finance.

00:58:02 ►

But the Occupy movement isn’t limited to just that one cause.

00:58:06 ►

There are also issues like funding for education, a proper system of health care, race issues, gender issues, sexual orientation issues, and a raft of others.

00:58:18 ►

In fact, when you begin to think about all of the things that have gone wrong since the uprising of the 60s,

00:58:24 ►

it’s very difficult to not

00:58:26 ►

get as mad and worked up as that guy that we just heard. However, getting mad and acting violent is

00:58:32 ►

exactly what the 1% are hoping for. They know how to deal with violence because, well, they’re

00:58:37 ►

basically violent people themselves. And that is exactly why it’s so important to ensure that

00:58:43 ►

every one of these demonstrations remain peaceful on the part of the demonstrators.

00:58:47 ►

But rather than me say it, let’s hear what Michael from Occupy Nashville has to say about the difference between terrorists and the Occupy movement.

00:58:57 ►

Now I understand that they have a reason to be violent.

00:59:00 ►

They’ve been beaten and shot and bombed and imprisoned for 75 years now.

00:59:07 ►

But what they fail to understand is that they lose public sympathy. You lose public sympathy

00:59:17 ►

when you do an act of terrorism. So terrorism is a stupid idea. Violence is a stupid idea. However, when the cameras see people being

00:59:30 ►

beaten who are not being violent, who are not fighting back, it goes around the world

00:59:36 ►

instantly. That’s what happened here two nights ago, three nights ago. The cameras saw, the

00:59:42 ►

news cameras saw people who were clearly not going to lift a finger

00:59:47 ►

to defend themselves if they were had been attacked by the police and they were still

00:59:53 ►

arrested and ripped kind of violently apart from each other and those images were very moving

00:59:58 ►

and they went global and the reason they went global is because they are so compelling.

01:00:06 ►

Because the people don’t look like they have any desire to be violent.

01:00:12 ►

But when the police gather and we’re standing there going,

01:00:14 ►

No! Fucking pigs!

01:00:16 ►

Okay, well, that is a threat.

01:00:19 ►

So we shouldn’t do that.

01:00:22 ►

We should be hollering out,

01:00:23 ►

Hey, you’re us, come and join us.

01:00:26 ►

Don’t attack us.

01:00:28 ►

We’re just like you.

01:00:30 ►

And this will disarm them.

01:00:33 ►

We had several state troopers break down in tears during, before, and after the arrests.

01:00:40 ►

Several were sent home, being incapable of exercising the order they were given.

01:00:49 ►

Now that’s an important thing to note. When the people who are told to attack you can’t

01:00:57 ►

bring themselves to do it because they don’t see you as a threat, That’s good. That means we’re winning. That’s how we win. That’s how Gandhi won.

01:01:09 ►

That’s how Martin Luther King Jr. won. That’s how Nelson Mandela won. That’s how these great

01:01:16 ►

struggles are won. And that’s something that we need to begin to spread to the other,

01:01:22 ►

our brothers and sisters all across the nation. We need to teach the techniques on how to present yourself in a manner

01:01:30 ►

that it is completely understood without any shadow of a doubt

01:01:35 ►

that you will not be violent.

01:01:37 ►

Then if they do attack, watch it spread across the nation.

01:01:42 ►

Watch it spread across the globe.

01:01:44 ►

Watch those images go all over the world and into people’s hearts and minds.

01:01:49 ►

And watch the swell of support grow.

01:01:52 ►

That’s how we do it.

01:01:54 ►

That’s how it’s done.

01:01:55 ►

That’s how it’s always been done when it’s successful.

01:01:58 ►

Oh, you brought out the heavy arms.

01:02:00 ►

You know?

01:02:01 ►

Oh, it’s handy.

01:02:02 ►

It’s for trick-or-treaters.

01:02:04 ►

If you fancy yourself an army, you’ve got to ask yourself, where’s your guns?

01:02:10 ►

Where’s your bomber planes?

01:02:11 ►

Where’s your tanks?

01:02:12 ►

If you don’t have these things, you’re not an army.

01:02:15 ►

So don’t try and be like one.

01:02:17 ►

Don’t try and be like one.

01:02:19 ►

Be a movement.

01:02:20 ►

A movement that doesn’t believe in violence.

01:02:22 ►

A movement that believes it can achieve without violence.

01:02:27 ►

A movement that knows it can change the world without lifting a hand in violence.

01:02:33 ►

That’s how we win.

01:02:35 ►

That’s how we win.

01:02:37 ►

A lot of people worry about agent provocateurs, people infiltrating your group, trying to steer an off message, trying to

01:02:47 ►

bring a violent element into the group.

01:02:50 ►

Don’t worry about them.

01:02:51 ►

Invite them.

01:02:53 ►

Be open with everything you do.

01:02:56 ►

Transparency is what we are fighting for in our government, so we must also be transparent.

01:03:02 ►

We have no secrets. We are an open book for them to come and read

01:03:07 ►

because we want them to know us. We want them to understand us. See, because we are moral.

01:03:16 ►

We are correct. And we will win. Join us. All right.

01:03:33 ►

And we will win. Join us.

01:03:36 ►

So says Michael from Occupy Nashville.

01:03:40 ►

And I happen to think that he is completely correct in his assessment that if this movement continues to remain non-violent, that ultimately it

01:03:45 ►

can’t be turned back.

01:03:46 ►

Now, here are some comments from several people at the Occupy Minnesota demonstration this

01:03:51 ►

past weekend.

01:03:53 ►

In this country, you know, no one wants to be, you know, admit that they’re a part of

01:04:00 ►

the loser class, even though the loser class, you know, would be, is a solid 80% of the

01:04:06 ►

country in terms of their income growth, in terms of their net wealth, and in terms of

01:04:13 ►

their life security. So I think that’s my concern. That’s why I’m being out here, contributing another body,

01:04:27 ►

showing this to make people feel like there’s a lot more of us than you might think

01:04:38 ►

and that they’re not alone.

01:04:40 ►

Show up. Get down here. Do something.

01:04:44 ►

You’re not on your own.

01:04:47 ►

Most of us are suffering.

01:04:51 ►

The powers that be would sure like us to feel like we’re all isolated and it’s just our own fault.

01:04:55 ►

That’s what they tell us. It’s your own fault.

01:04:58 ►

The cane guy was just saying that, wasn’t he?

01:05:00 ►

If you’re poor or you’re not rich, blame yourself.

01:05:04 ►

Again, pardon my french

01:05:05 ►

asshole

01:05:06 ►

get out there get down here do something get involved in the party politics hell show up at

01:05:18 ►

the republican party politics help change that party do Do something. Turn the damn TV off.

01:05:25 ►

Turn the damn Internet off.

01:05:26 ►

Sorry, now I’m for sure not going to get on.

01:05:29 ►

Get out and do something.

01:05:32 ►

Yeah.

01:05:33 ►

Well, we need more and more people to get together.

01:05:35 ►

Like I say, black, white.

01:05:38 ►

I’m going to put it to you this way.

01:05:39 ►

If the government can keep us separated,

01:05:42 ►

this is like my fingers.

01:05:44 ►

If I hit you like this, I might knock you back.

01:05:47 ►

If I bring the fingers like this and ball them up and come together and hit you,

01:05:50 ►

I have to spend a chance of knocking you out.

01:05:52 ►

So that’s what I’m saying.

01:05:52 ►

Black and white people, everybody, we’ve got to come together as one.

01:05:55 ►

Like this fist, we’ve got to come together as one.

01:05:58 ►

As long as they keep us separated and going against each other and putting us against each other,

01:06:02 ►

we’ll remain weak like we are.

01:06:04 ►

Weak.

01:06:05 ►

We’ve got to come together as one.

01:06:07 ►

I guess my message is just to keep an open mind

01:06:10 ►

and just put yourself in everyone else’s shoes

01:06:12 ►

and see what’s really happening in the world.

01:06:15 ►

Develop your opinion, not off what you see with one facet.

01:06:18 ►

Look at all the facets, study them all,

01:06:21 ►

and then decide what you want to believe.

01:06:25 ►

As that young man just said,

01:06:29 ►

don’t just follow this movement on the internet,

01:06:31 ►

get out there yourself.

01:06:33 ►

And by that I don’t mean that you have to go downtown

01:06:35 ►

and camp out for the next two years.

01:06:38 ►

There are all kinds of opportunities to spend an hour or two

01:06:41 ►

on a street corner demonstration near where you live,

01:06:44 ►

and if there isn’t anything close by, start it yourself.

01:06:48 ►

Last Saturday, my wife and I went to the Occupy Encinitas demonstration, which was only a

01:06:53 ►

few miles from where we live.

01:06:55 ►

It wasn’t a huge gathering, maybe about 100 people at its peak, I’d guess, but I’m sure

01:07:00 ►

it made a difference, because not to mention the two short marches that we made through

01:07:04 ►

the downtown area, what was most amazing to me was the support from people and cars going by the busy

01:07:10 ►

corner that we were standing on. I’d say that well maybe about one in every four or five cars would

01:07:16 ►

honk or give a thumbs up and if you’ve ever demonstrated on a corner like that before well

01:07:21 ►

you know that’s an unusually high percentage of support from people passing by. But the real importance of doing something like that is that all those

01:07:30 ►

people who drove by without a clue about what we were standing there for, well, by that evening,

01:07:35 ►

my bet is that the majority of them are now paying some attention to this issue when it

01:07:40 ►

flies by in the mainstream media. It’s all about awareness. Another interesting

01:07:46 ►

thing that I noticed while standing there with a group of people that spanned all ages and all

01:07:51 ►

walks of life, from the unemployed new graduate to the retired corporate attorney to the union man.

01:07:57 ►

Well, standing there with them, we all noticed that in many of the cars that went by, there were

01:08:01 ►

young children in the back seats who, very furtively at least in the cars that didn’t honk,

01:08:07 ►

were flashing the peace sign and waving to us.

01:08:09 ►

Apparently, these kids know a lot more about what’s going on than their parents do,

01:08:13 ►

or will at least admit.

01:08:16 ►

Now I want you to hear just a brief bit from Dwayne,

01:08:19 ►

who is one of the new celebrity webcasters on one of the New York livestream channels.

01:08:25 ►

Dwayne does a late night show and interacts with the people in the chat room.

01:08:29 ►

Even late at night, there are always 300 or more people there,

01:08:33 ►

and yet this thing has the feeling of a small, intimate conversation

01:08:36 ►

with a young man freezing his butt off under a tarp in Liberty Park in New York City.

01:08:42 ►

So here’s Dwayne.

01:08:45 ►

You know, we need a total revolution

01:08:47 ►

because all this, all this on mainstream is poison,

01:08:50 ►

poison, poison, poison.

01:08:51 ►

And the only, on mainstream media outlets,

01:08:54 ►

you know what they talk about?

01:08:55 ►

They talk about the police.

01:08:56 ►

They talk about, you know, the people that are out here.

01:08:59 ►

They talk about the cold weather and they’re still here.

01:09:01 ►

Not a message.

01:09:02 ►

They don’t talk about the issues.

01:09:04 ►

Why are we here? You know, they don’t talk about who’s behind this. They don’t talk about the wars that they’re still here. Not a message. They don’t talk about the issues. Why are we here?

01:09:05 ►

You know, they don’t talk about who’s behind this.

01:09:08 ►

They don’t talk about the wars that we’re still fighting.

01:09:10 ►

They don’t talk about, you know,

01:09:11 ►

people losing their houses.

01:09:12 ►

They don’t talk about the people

01:09:13 ►

who are sleeping on the streets.

01:09:14 ►

They don’t talk about the police

01:09:15 ►

dropping off homeless people here.

01:09:17 ►

They don’t talk about the police dropping off drug addicts

01:09:19 ►

and, you know, drug dealers here in the park.

01:09:22 ►

They don’t talk about that.

01:09:24 ►

You know, so we need to take as people…

01:09:25 ►

Has that been videoed? Is that actually videoed?

01:09:28 ►

We have witnesses. We have plenty of witnesses.

01:09:30 ►

And Rikers Island stopped when they

01:09:32 ►

took the regular bars two blocks away.

01:09:34 ►

So if they’re coming here, you guys have everything.

01:09:36 ►

You get a camera, you have a cell phone.

01:09:38 ►

That’s what we do. We document.

01:09:39 ►

You document everything?

01:09:41 ►

We try to document as much as we can.

01:09:43 ►

And tell them about the guy who climbed up the scaffolding.

01:09:46 ►

You’re creating your own media.

01:09:47 ►

Yes.

01:09:48 ►

You don’t need regular media.

01:09:49 ►

You care about regular media.

01:09:50 ►

That’s correct.

01:09:51 ►

Are they going to come and start truth-reading?

01:09:52 ►

No, we do not care at all about, we do not need the regular media to get this out at

01:09:55 ►

all.

01:09:56 ►

We are creating our own media.

01:09:57 ►

We use social media.

01:09:58 ►

We use live stream.

01:10:00 ►

We use YouTube.

01:10:01 ►

And that’s where people are getting objective journalism.

01:10:03 ►

That’s where people are going to find the truth out,

01:10:05 ►

not through these pundit lapdogs that they call the mainstream media.

01:10:10 ►

Well, I love that.

01:10:12 ►

No, you’ve got to see CNN this morning is condescending.

01:10:14 ►

They’re going to be very blunt with you.

01:10:15 ►

They’re condescending.

01:10:16 ►

Some guy wrote, you have no leaders.

01:10:18 ►

You’re going to be inept.

01:10:19 ►

You don’t have a core thing, and you’re going to dissipate and fade away

01:10:22 ►

because you don’t have any.

01:10:23 ►

Because we don’t have any demands.

01:10:24 ►

Any leader in any which way.

01:10:26 ►

They just don’t want to acknowledge our demands.

01:10:28 ►

They won’t acknowledge them.

01:10:29 ►

You know why we don’t have demands?

01:10:31 ►

Because we don’t need nothing from anybody else.

01:10:33 ►

Eventually this thing right here is going to be

01:10:35 ►

self-sustaining. When you put this in an area

01:10:37 ►

where you can grow your own crops, where you can

01:10:39 ►

grow your own food, this is self-sustaining.

01:10:41 ►

You can even have people come out here and build

01:10:43 ►

sweaters. Terrorists have demands. That’s right. That’s a very good quote. Because I

01:10:50 ►

always thought in my heart that a change needed to be made. You know, I’ve been part of this

01:10:55 ►

struggle almost my whole life. You know, struggling at home, struggling, you know, we struggle

01:11:02 ►

to eat food sometimes. You know, I’ve been homeless.

01:11:05 ►

At 16 years old, my parents were foreclosed on.

01:11:08 ►

You know, my father’s been unemployed since then.

01:11:10 ►

You know, my father hasn’t had a real job since.

01:11:13 ►

We left New York, we left Virginia,

01:11:15 ►

and I was about 12 years old.

01:11:18 ►

You know, he’s been job, getting a job there,

01:11:22 ►

and he’s a licensed contractor.

01:11:25 ►

You know, a licensed electrician.

01:11:27 ►

What does it do to you when you cut wide to the most

01:11:30 ►

of those things?

01:11:31 ►

You don’t go try to get some job,

01:11:33 ►

go out on the road, get some…

01:11:35 ►

No, not at all.

01:11:36 ►

…insurance company job.

01:11:37 ►

I’m not like that.

01:11:38 ►

Yeah, yeah.

01:11:39 ►

You said it’s radical that we decided to do this.

01:11:41 ►

Yeah, because I’m passionate about helping people.

01:11:43 ►

I’m passionate about, you know, inspiring something in somebody else because that’s what happened to me.

01:11:49 ►

I thought that was the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me.

01:11:52 ►

As an artist, I had my own inspirations as a kid.

01:11:56 ►

You know, poets and writers and actors, whatever it may be.

01:12:01 ►

I was inspired and in my heart that blossomed something beautiful.

01:12:04 ►

And I always, my entire life since that happened, I wanted to do the same for somebody else,

01:12:07 ►

whether it be jumping in front of a bus or, you know, just inspiring with the word, you

01:12:13 ►

know, for whatever, that’s why I’m here because it has, it opens a door and an opportunity

01:12:17 ►

for me to come out and help somebody speak up, say something.

01:12:21 ►

Speak up. Say something.

01:12:29 ►

As Dwayne just said, we’ve all got to speak up to say something.

01:12:33 ►

And someone who has been speaking up for many, many years now and who had an awful lot to do with everything that is now underway,

01:12:37 ►

including the coining of the powerful phrase,

01:12:40 ►

we are the 99%,

01:12:41 ►

is the anthropologist and author of the important new book,

01:12:45 ►

Debt, the First 5,000 Years, David Graeber.

01:12:49 ►

And I’ll try to remember to put up some links to his work when I post the program notes for this podcast.

01:12:55 ►

Now, I don’t have any audio clips of David Graeber speaking,

01:12:58 ►

but I would like to read just a few lines from a recent essay he wrote for The Guardian.

01:13:03 ►

to read just a few lines from a recent essay he wrote for The Guardian.

01:13:11 ►

We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans,

01:13:17 ►

a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future,

01:13:21 ►

but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt.

01:13:26 ►

Most, I found, were of working class or otherwise modest backgrounds,

01:13:32 ►

kids who did exactly what they were told they should, studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated, faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats,

01:13:38 ►

moral reprobates. Is it really surprising that they would like to have a word with the

01:13:43 ►

financial magnates who stole their future?

01:13:46 ►

Everything we’d been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie.

01:13:51 ►

Markets did not run themselves, creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses,

01:13:57 ►

and debts did not really need to be repaid.

01:14:00 ►

In fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument,

01:14:04 ►

In fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument,

01:14:08 ►

trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it.

01:14:11 ►

When the history is finally written, though,

01:14:14 ►

it’s likely that all of this tumult, beginning with Arab Spring,

01:14:17 ►

will be remembered as the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations

01:14:21 ►

over the dissolution of the American empire.

01:14:24 ►

Thirty years of relentless prioritizing of propaganda over substance

01:14:28 ►

and snuffing out anything that might look like a political basis for opposition

01:14:32 ►

might make the prospects for the young protesters look bleak.

01:14:37 ►

And it’s clear that the rich are determined to seize as large a share of the spoils as remain,

01:14:42 ►

tossing a whole generation of young people to the wolves in order to do so.

01:14:47 ►

But history is not on their side.

01:14:51 ►

And so if you’re still here with me, I’ve got one more clip to play for you.

01:14:56 ►

It’s a bit longer than the others, but it’s by a very inspiring speaker, Michael Moore.

01:15:02 ►

And here he is speaking at Occupy San Francisco this past weekend.

01:15:07 ►

But, you know, listen, this is the beauty of this movement.

01:15:12 ►

It really doesn’t need the Jerry Browns or the Naomi Kleins or really the Michael Moores.

01:15:18 ►

In fact, I’ve spent the last 20 years making movies about corporate America and Wall Street.

01:15:24 ►

I’ve occupied it before it was occupied.

01:15:34 ►

I was arrested there.

01:15:37 ►

I was arrested there with Rage Against the Machine about 10 years ago.

01:15:43 ►

And I’ll tell you, this is a hell of a lot better than just me and four guys in

01:15:47 ►

a rock band trying to get arrested when it’s happening all over the country. It’s so huge

01:15:54 ►

and the police forces don’t know what to do about it because the people outnumber their

01:16:00 ►

force, their violent force. Can’t stop. I was over in Oakland yesterday.

01:16:06 ►

The police have backed out.

01:16:08 ►

The police are nowhere to be found.

01:16:11 ►

The people won.

01:16:16 ►

The people won.

01:16:18 ►

The people stood up. You see, what they were hoping for after Wednesday night was that no one would come back Thursday night.

01:16:24 ►

That’s what they were counting on.

01:16:26 ►

But everybody came back.

01:16:27 ►

Plus some.

01:16:32 ►

And they came back in larger

01:16:34 ►

numbers on Friday.

01:16:36 ►

And they’re back there again today.

01:16:38 ►

This isn’t going away.

01:16:40 ►

This isn’t going away.

01:16:46 ►

Well, a lot of the media also, they want to know what’s next.

01:16:50 ►

What are we going to do?

01:16:51 ►

What candidates are we going to get behind?

01:16:59 ►

Let me explain the derisive laughter that you just heard.

01:17:07 ►

We have all spent a large portion of our lives getting behind candidates, getting behind bills in Congress, voting.

01:17:17 ►

And I’m not saying that we’re not going to stop voting.

01:17:20 ►

But we are no longer going to depend on the old model of getting something done.

01:17:28 ►

That doesn’t work. And, I mean, if we can actually elect Barack Obama to the presidency,

01:17:36 ►

something I thought, something like that would never happen in my lifetime. Even with that,

01:17:42 ►

today, 13 American soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

01:17:47 ►

The war is still going on.

01:17:49 ►

What is that war?

01:17:50 ►

Why is that still going on?

01:17:51 ►

That is not why he was elected to the White House.

01:17:54 ►

He’s made Bush’s war Obama’s war.

01:17:58 ►

We all understood he inherited a huge mess given to him by Bush.

01:18:04 ►

The economy, the wars. But he was elected to do something

01:18:07 ►

about it. And to use the excuse that, well, the Republicans are going to filibuster. They’re

01:18:14 ►

going to filibuster. He never made them filibuster. You know, they just went, oh, they’ve already

01:18:21 ►

sent us a note saying they’re going to filibuster. Okay, well, we better not do anything now.

01:18:26 ►

You know, I mean, that is not the mandate he was given.

01:18:31 ►

He was elected by a 10 million vote margin.

01:18:35 ►

That’s three times what Bush beat Kerry with, even if you don’t count Ohio.

01:18:50 ►

So, this movement is not about getting behind a candidate or a bill right now.

01:18:54 ►

Right now, our main job, remember, this is only six weeks old today.

01:19:02 ►

In six weeks, just six weeks old, this movement already has, according to the National Journal, the support of 59% of the American people.

01:19:13 ►

If you’re my age or older, you remember other movements, the feminist movement, the civil rights movement,

01:19:19 ►

the anti-Vietnam war movement, the hippie movement, and anything else that emanated from San Francisco.

01:19:28 ►

But did we have 59%

01:19:30 ►

of support for the American people

01:19:31 ►

in the sixth week of the movement?

01:19:34 ►

No!

01:19:35 ►

This is years it took!

01:19:37 ►

Years!

01:19:40 ►

You know, just with gay rights,

01:19:41 ►

last month was the very

01:19:44 ►

first national poll.

01:19:46 ►

Very first time, the majority of Americans, 54%, said they believe that gay marriage should be the law of the land.

01:19:55 ►

The majority of Americans.

01:19:57 ►

But how long did that take?

01:19:58 ►

Too long.

01:19:59 ►

Too long.

01:20:02 ►

This movement in six weeks, 59% say they agree with the aims and goals of this movement.

01:20:08 ►

And yet the media keeps asking them a question.

01:20:10 ►

What are your aims? What are your goals?

01:20:13 ►

I think it’s quite clear by the name, Occupy Wall Street.

01:20:17 ►

Period.

01:20:20 ►

And if you need a definition of that, it means we the people want to occupy the economy that is ours.

01:20:28 ►

This is our democracy.

01:20:31 ►

It’s as simple as that.

01:20:33 ►

We’re demanding democracy.

01:20:35 ►

This is our democracy movement.

01:20:38 ►

And I want to just say something here and give some credit to somebody because people, they keep asking again,

01:20:44 ►

well, who started this? Who’s the instigator of this you know and i say first of all we’re all

01:20:50 ►

instigators and they’re no leaders because we’re all the leaders of this movement and there’s no

01:20:57 ►

spokesperson all spokespeople anybody here can speak at the General Assembly. Right?

01:21:05 ►

So.

01:21:06 ►

All right.

01:21:20 ►

All right, get ready for the important part. Bum. Bum.

01:21:27 ►

Bum. Bum.

01:21:33 ►

Oh, Michael Moore was singing the time today.

01:21:37 ►

What’s happened to him?

01:21:39 ►

Oh, thank you so much.

01:21:41 ►

Just sit here.

01:21:44 ►

Go with the flow, Michael.

01:21:49 ►

I wore a sweatshirt today because I figured I was in San Francisco.

01:21:56 ►

There’s only like five warm days out of the year here.

01:21:59 ►

This turned out to be a nice one, didn’t it?

01:22:01 ►

This turned out to be a nice one, didn’t it?

01:22:08 ►

But, no, I wanted to say something about,

01:22:12 ►

they’re trying to find out who instigated this.

01:22:17 ►

Much of, we owe a lot to the Arab Spring and the democracy movement

01:22:18 ►

that were and are taking place across the Arab world.

01:22:24 ►

And we owe a lot to that young man in Tunisia

01:22:28 ►

who couldn’t take it anymore and set himself on fire

01:22:32 ►

to make this statement that really ignited this movement.

01:22:37 ►

But even before that, what got him upset,

01:22:40 ►

what got him politically charged,

01:22:44 ►

was that he read the truth about the corruption

01:22:46 ►

of his own government that was supplied to him by WikiLeaks. And where did WikiLeaks

01:22:54 ►

get that information? Allegedly, from a young, private, a gay soldier by the name of Bradley

01:23:01 ►

Manning.

01:23:04 ►

Let’s give it up for Bradley Manning. Let’s just, let’s give it up for Bradley Manning.

01:23:20 ►

It is completely sad and tragic and criminal that he is still in jail,

01:23:26 ►

having not been charged with a crime or put on trial.

01:23:31 ►

After doing a very brave thing,

01:23:34 ►

that when you draw the connecting lines from A to B to C,

01:23:38 ►

we’re here in part today because of his courage.

01:23:41 ►

And we must not forget that.

01:23:45 ►

Will you promise me that?

01:23:48 ►

We should rename this Bradley Manning Plaza.

01:23:50 ►

Bradley Manning Plaza, that’s a good idea.

01:23:55 ►

Here we go.

01:23:58 ►

Can we try to reach some consensus on this?

01:24:02 ►

People in favor?

01:24:04 ►

All right. Thank you for having me here today at Bradley Matty

01:24:10 ►

Plaza. So in conclusion, I’m going to head over to actually out to Grass Valley

01:24:26 ►

because I’m trying to also go to these small towns where this is happening

01:24:30 ►

and support their efforts.

01:24:37 ►

I’m going to go out to Nevada County because if it’s happening there,

01:24:42 ►

you know it’s happening everywhere.

01:24:44 ►

You’re not alone.

01:24:46 ►

And if people ask you, well, what has this accomplished, Occupy SF?

01:24:51 ►

What has this accomplished?

01:24:53 ►

It’s already had some incredible victories.

01:24:56 ►

Victory number one, it has killed despair.

01:25:02 ►

Despair that so many Americans have felt.

01:25:06 ►

So many people thinking

01:25:07 ►

there’s no way out of this.

01:25:09 ►

Or I’m alone. Or it’s just me and a few

01:25:11 ►

friends. Now they’ve seen

01:25:13 ►

across the country that they’re not

01:25:16 ►

alone. That they are in fact in the majority.

01:25:19 ►

This moment has

01:25:19 ►

eliminated that feeling of despair.

01:25:24 ►

The second thing it’s done, it has killed apathy.

01:25:28 ►

It has killed apathy.

01:25:30 ►

There are so many people who haven’t been involved,

01:25:33 ►

who have just been sitting at home,

01:25:34 ►

angry and upset,

01:25:38 ►

but figuring, what can I do?

01:25:40 ►

A question that should never be asked in a democracy.

01:25:43 ►

What can I do?

01:25:45 ►

In the sense of, in other words, there’s nothing I can do.

01:25:50 ►

That is over.

01:25:51 ►

That is over.

01:25:52 ►

People, every week this thing builds.

01:25:55 ►

Every week it grows.

01:25:57 ►

Because people are coming out of that place of apathy.

01:26:00 ►

The third thing that this has done is it has changed the national discussion.

01:26:05 ►

They don’t talk about the debt ceiling anymore, do they?

01:26:09 ►

Or the deficit.

01:26:11 ►

That was just six weeks ago.

01:26:12 ►

That’s what they were talking about six weeks ago.

01:26:14 ►

That’s gone now, isn’t it?

01:26:16 ►

This is what they’re talking about.

01:26:18 ►

Issues of this.

01:26:19 ►

That is what they’re talking about.

01:26:22 ►

You helped to change that.

01:26:23 ►

So, remember, this is just the infancy of this moment.

01:26:28 ►

And remember, too, that it’s good that it’s not, quote, organized.

01:26:33 ►

I think that’s been its success, in fact.

01:26:37 ►

So beware of any group or individuals who want to co-opt this

01:26:42 ►

or turn it into a left tea party.

01:26:46 ►

Don’t compare us to the tea party.

01:26:48 ►

That’s something funded by the Koch brothers.

01:26:51 ►

All right?

01:26:52 ►

This is supported by the majority of the American people.

01:26:57 ►

Never forget that.

01:27:12 ►

I know we’re in the General Assembly here, and we need to let other people speak.

01:27:16 ►

Everybody in this park has a story to tell.

01:27:18 ►

And I tell this to the media who are here.

01:27:22 ►

Everybody here has a story about what it’s like not to have health insurance,

01:27:30 ►

what it’s like not to have a job, or to have a job, but to be told that you have to take less money. People in this park know what it’s like to have their house underwater. Students here know what it’s like

01:27:36 ►

to be in debt at the age of 22 and hot for the next 20 plus years of their lives. No other civilized country does that to their

01:27:48 ►

young people. In other countries, they make sure they can afford to go to college, and

01:27:53 ►

in many countries, such as France, they don’t pay to go to college. And it doesn’t matter

01:27:58 ►

in France whether you go to a trade school or the Sorbonne, you go for free. You go for free.

01:28:06 ►

Why is that?

01:28:09 ►

I mean, you have to pay for your books,

01:28:11 ►

and there’s a few fees.

01:28:14 ►

In fact, they will have demonstrations over, you know,

01:28:15 ►

a fee raise of 20 euros.

01:28:19 ►

But why do the French do that?

01:28:20 ►

Are they better than us?

01:28:21 ►

I don’t think so.

01:28:22 ►

I mean, it’s human beings, right?

01:28:23 ►

We’re all human beings. We’re all basically good at our core.

01:28:26 ►

So why do the French do this?

01:28:28 ►

They do it because they want to live in a society that’s not only civilized,

01:28:35 ►

that not only treats each other well, but a society that can get better.

01:28:39 ►

You can’t get better if you have an uneducated country.

01:28:42 ►

If you have a lousy education.

01:28:46 ►

Things will not advance and get better.

01:28:48 ►

We will not fix the things

01:28:50 ►

we need to fix if we keep

01:28:51 ►

the population ignorant and stupid.

01:28:55 ►

40 million

01:28:56 ►

functional, illiterate adults

01:28:58 ►

works in the benefit of

01:29:00 ►

those who are in charge of this

01:29:01 ►

country. And this must be

01:29:04 ►

stopped.

01:29:15 ►

So thank you for letting me take a few minutes to say this before I head out into the Republican territory of California.

01:29:23 ►

And Flint is occupied.

01:29:25 ►

It has been occupied for a long time.

01:29:30 ►

But keep this up.

01:29:32 ►

Don’t despair.

01:29:34 ►

Know that tens of millions are with you.

01:29:36 ►

And make this thing grow.

01:29:38 ►

Do not stop.

01:29:40 ►

Do not relent.

01:29:40 ►

Do not relent.

01:29:44 ►

When they ask you, why aren’t you in Sacramento occupying or why aren’t you in D.C. occupying?

01:29:50 ►

The answer is because we live here.

01:30:03 ►

It’s because the California corporations that are headquartered here in San Francisco,

01:30:10 ►

they call the shots for Sacramento.

01:30:12 ►

Why waste your time right now in Sacramento talking to the servants of their masters?

01:30:18 ►

Here I am.

01:30:19 ►

All right?

01:30:23 ►

We’re not in D.C.

01:30:26 ►

We’re not on Wall Street

01:30:27 ►

because that’s who pays for the politicians in D.C.

01:30:31 ►

Why waste your time with the middleman?

01:30:33 ►

We have taken it to the source.

01:30:36 ►

You have taken it to the source.

01:30:37 ►

You have done something that is going to be historic.

01:30:40 ►

Thank you for being here.

01:30:42 ►

Thank you, Occupy Center.

01:30:58 ►

Well, it’s kind of hard to top that talk right now, particularly since this podcast is way over time as it is. So I’m going to save the comments sent in by fellow salonners Mike K., Andrew, and Localman.

01:31:06 ►

I’m going to save them for my next podcast, and hopefully you will add your voice to that mix as well

01:31:11 ►

by sending either an email message or a short audio message in MP3 format to lorenzo at occupysalon.us.

01:31:21 ►

And instead of playing so many sound bites from the video streams that are coming out from

01:31:25 ►

the Occupy sites, I’ll first focus on what our fellow salonners are saying about the times we

01:31:30 ►

are now living in. And by the way, thanks to fellow podcaster Joe Metheny of the G-Spot podcast,

01:31:38 ►

my next few programs are going to feature the one and only Robert Anton Wilson.

01:31:42 ►

I haven’t heard these talks yet myself, and so they’ll be coming out soon, Thank you. projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.

01:32:09 ►

And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.

01:32:15 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends,

01:32:21 ►

and I want to leave you with a song. As I see it, this isn’t a revolution that’s taking place, it’s an evolution.

01:32:30 ►

You know, revolutions are often violent and seldom do more than replace one set of one percenters with another batch of them.

01:32:37 ►

Whereas in this ongoing evolution that is now underway, well, we aren’t just changing the officers on the bridge of the Titanic,

01:32:45 ►

that is now underway, well, we aren’t just changing the officers on the bridge of the Titanic.

01:32:51 ►

We’re jumping ship and searching for an entirely new vessel to carry us across the oceans of the future.

01:32:55 ►

And in my opinion, every good evolution needs some good music.

01:33:00 ►

And this tune I first heard in my friend Lefty’s podcast number 121

01:33:06 ►

from Lefty’s Lounge on the Cannabis Podcast Network at dopefiend.co.uk.

01:33:11 ►

It’s by Twisted Sister and it’s called We’re Not Gonna Take It,

01:33:14 ►

which may be a perfect anthem for these times.

01:33:22 ►

We’re not gonna take it.

01:33:25 ►

No, we ain’t gonna take it. We’re not gonna take it No, we ain’t gonna take it We’re not gonna take it anymore

01:33:29 ►

We’ve got the right to choose it

01:33:39 ►

There ain’t no way we’ll lose it

01:33:42 ►

This is our life. This is our song.

01:33:48 ►

We’ll fight for powers that be just.

01:33:52 ►

Don’t pick your destiny cause.

01:33:55 ►

You don’t know us.

01:33:57 ►

You don’t belong.

01:34:01 ►

We’re not gonna take it.

01:34:07 ►

No, we ain’t gonna take it We’re not gonna take it anymore

01:34:12 ►

Oh, you’re so condescending

01:34:17 ►

Your goal is never ending

01:34:20 ►

We don’t want nothing

01:34:23 ►

Nothing from you.

01:34:27 ►

Your life is trinicated, boring and confiscated.

01:34:34 ►

If that’s your best, you’re best from now on.

01:34:40 ►

Whoa, whoa. We’ll ride

01:34:47 ►

We’ll fight

01:34:50 ►

We’re not gonna take it

01:34:57 ►

We ain’t gonna take it

01:35:00 ►

We’re not gonna take it anymore

01:35:04 ►

We’re not gonna take it anymore We’re not gonna take it

01:35:09 ►

No, we ain’t gonna take it

01:35:13 ►

We’re not gonna take it anymore

01:35:17 ►

No way

01:35:20 ►

You know, there’s an Irish prayer,

01:35:23 ►

may you be alive at the end of the world, meaning may you be a part of the transformation of transformation, which gives everything meaning.

01:35:34 ►

So I’m not saying follow me, I’m saying we all have to respond in some way to this legacy, this responsibility, and this challenge. We’re not gonna take it No, we ain’t gonna take it

01:36:06 ►

We’re not gonna take it anymore

01:36:10 ►

We’re not gonna take it

01:36:15 ►

No, we ain’t gonna take it

01:36:19 ►

We’re not gonna take it anymore

01:36:23 ►

Just you try and make us We’re not gonna take it anymore. Just you try and make us.

01:36:26 ►

We’re not gonna take it.

01:36:28 ►

Come on.

01:36:29 ►

Hello.

01:36:30 ►

We ain’t gonna take it.

01:36:31 ►

Get on with the story.

01:36:32 ►

We’re not gonna take it anymore.

01:36:36 ►

Don’t you ever give me a point.

01:36:38 ►

You know, there’s an Irish prayer,

01:36:40 ►

may you be alive at the end of the world,

01:36:43 ►

meaning may you be a part of the transformation of transformations,

01:36:49 ►

which gives everything meaning.

01:36:51 ►

So I’m not saying, follow me.

01:36:53 ►

I’m saying, we all have to respond in some way to this legacy,

01:37:00 ►

this responsibility, and this challenge.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

288 - What’s So Great About Mushrooms_ Part 2

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Program Notes

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