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534 - Drugs, Cultures, and the World Corporate State

Mar 08, 2017, 45 min read

Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

Date this lecture was recorded: August 4,1998

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna

“The nation state is now on the ropes. It’s being replaced by something else, the world’s one thousand companies, the world corporate state.”

“The interesting thing about the world corporate state is it has no real moral agenda. It only wants to pick your pocket, which when you think of what’s been peddled in the ideological market place in the 20th Century, somebody who only wants to pick your pocket is a welcome and humane addition to the rogues gallery. So I think that fairly quickly, more and more drugs will be legalized and even drug taking encouraged because there’s a great deal of money to be made.”

“So all of these things [adverse reactions to drugs] should just be treated as neurotic responses to the problem of being, and if people want therapy or anti-depressants, or whatever they want to get over this hump should be given to them. But to criminalize this is not to do any favor to the victims. It’s simply to turn it into a racket for all kinds of underworld and marginal institutions.”

“What all these things [psychedelic substances] have in common is that without any great danger to body and mind they produce a profound transformation of consciousness, the processing of language, the way in which we model the world and relate to the past. And do they impact on cultural conditioning? You bet your booties they do, because what they do, essentially, is return you to some primal, per-cultural state of conditioning where the animal body and the unacculturated inputs of perception are directly experienced. This is a model of the psychedelic experience.”

“Is culture good or bad? Well, I’m coming slowly to the conclusion that, I’m not sure it’s bad, but it’s certainly a damn nuisance. It’s a limitation, is what it is.”

“The problem is these [world] cultures create less than a full expression of human potential.”

“To the degree that we are integrated into our culture we are not ourselves.”

“Could we end up spending most of our disposable income on code rather than fabricated steel, aluminum, glass, and plastic?”

“So it’s going to be technology, or catastrophe, or fascism. These are the choices, because, of course, because fascism, you know, can just order the liquidation of everybody under five feet, or everybody with brown eyes, or whatever. But the consequences of fascism are the complete distortion and subjugation of the human spirit. When we talk about survival of the human species we’re not talking about at-any-cost or under any circumstances. If humanness does not survive with the human species then we’re no more than another cannibal ape with a bigger club in the hand.”

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic

00:00:23 ►

Salon.

00:00:23 ►

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

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And I’d like to begin today by thanking fellow salonners John S. and Christopher L.

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for their recent donations to help with some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.

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John and Christopher, well, your help is very much appreciated and thanks again for being an important part of the salon.

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and thanks again for being an important part of the salon.

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Now, for today’s program, we are actually going to hear the remaining 40 minutes of the introduction Terrence McKenna gave to a 1998 workshop,

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and the first part of which is what we listened to last week.

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To be honest, had I realized last week that the next tape in the series

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was a continuation of the introduction session, well, I would have just added it to that program. But I didn’t realize that

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until this week when I digitized the second tape in the series. As a result, today’s program

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is going to be somewhat shorter than usual, but it happens to be packed with some things

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that I think you’re going to find interesting. As you know, for all

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of the Terrence McKenna talks, I pick out some quotes of his that I find particularly interesting,

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and I post them in the program notes for that episode. Now, it’s been pointed out to me that

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this is, well, it’s probably a waste of my time, since you’re going to hear them anyway. However,

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the reason that I do it is for the search engines. At this time, at least as

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far as I know, none of the major search engines are indexing mp3 files. And so the only way that

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I know of to get these Terrence McKenna quotes into circulation is to type them out and post

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them on our psychedelicsalon.com website. So, the quotes that caught my attention last week

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totaled 306 words,

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and that was from a one-hour talk,

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whereas in today’s 40-minute talk,

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I’ve posted 446 words of Terrence McKenna.

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I know that’s not a big deal,

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but I did find it interesting in my own little twisted way.

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Now, I do want to give you a little heads-up about one

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topic that is going to come up today. As I mentioned last week, this talk was given on August 4th,

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1998, and one of the things that Terrence touches on is the then-current hot topic of Y2K. Remember

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that? Well, as you’ll hear in a few minutes, Terence was quite dismissive of the concern that a lot of people had

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about the possibility of a worldwide disruption of, well, almost everything you can think about due to the Y2K problem.

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So I’d like to give you just a brief insight into the Y2K event from my own point of view.

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You see, at that time, I was working at one of the largest

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programming and data centers in the country. We had several thousand programmers and support staff

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on the campus, and only the Social Security Administration had more processing power than

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we did. So believe me, the Y2K issue was a really big deal for us. But it began at least five years before any talk about a Y2K

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problem made it into the mainstream media. By the time the average non-IT person heard about it,

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well, the problem was more or less solved. Along with a lot of other tech companies, we had,

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well, we’d been working to solve that problem for many years before it came to Terrence’s attention.

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And so for the most part in the IT world, we knew that there was no longer anything to worry about,

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other than perhaps a few small systems that didn’t have the funding to correct their code on time.

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In fact, one of my friends became quite rich by starting a company that specialized in fixing the old code

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by adding the first two digits of the year, so that when 1999 turned to 2000, the computers didn’t think it was the year zero.

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And by the way, while there was some Fortran code involved, as Terrence is going to mention,

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the bulk of the work for us was in COBOL,

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and there weren’t a lot of COBOL programmers available to free up for that work.

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Anyway, by the time the talk that we were about to listen to was given,

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Terrence was correct. It was going to be a non-issue.

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He just didn’t understand why that would be so.

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In fact, it was such a non-issue that two of my friends,

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who were responsible for keeping the systems running at one of the nation’s largest black box spy companies.

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Well, they were so not worried that something bad would happen,

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but they were nonetheless required to spend the night in their data center.

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Well, these guys were so unconcerned that they both dropped acid that night

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as they set out the night in the data center.

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And I know this because they stopped by our apartment the next morning,

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still tripping

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like the crazy guys they are. Actually, I don’t know why I’m wasting your time with this, but I

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do think that to set the record straight, you should know that at one time, the Y2K problem

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was a huge issue, but it was solved long before the public at large got wind of it.

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long before the public at large got wind of it.

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So, now after that non-introduction introduction,

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let’s go back in time to August 4th, 1998,

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and rejoin Terrence and a few of his friends on the lawn at the big house at the Esalen Institute,

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and there we can listen to the remainder of this introductory session.

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And as you’re going to hear, Terrence’s microphone didn’t pick up the questions that were being asked,

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and so I had to cut out the dead air at those points.

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The situation has now changed.

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The attitude of the nation state toward drugs,

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which is that you regulate their flow into a society in order to control sedation

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and the generation of revolutionary political agendas and so forth and so on, and that you

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use them as a back-channel source of black money, the nation-state is now on the ropes. It’s being replaced by something else, the world’s Fortune 1000 companies, the world corporate state. It’s a similar situation to what happened at the Thirty Years’ War, where the Thirty Years’ War was from 1619 to 48.

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The Thirty Years’ War was from 1619 to 48, and at the beginning, Europe was ruled by popes and kings.

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At the end, it was ruled by peoples and parliaments, and the church had been basically told,

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you can have an acre of land in the center of every village, but the money, the big stuff, the major rackets of European civilization, we will now reserve to ourselves.

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You bury the dead, feed the hungry, run hospitals and insane asylums,

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print books, and we’ll take care of the money-making stuff.

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This is now happening to the nation-state.

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The nation-state is being told, your agenda is now obsolete.

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You provide health care,

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build highways,

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and we’ll take over

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the money-making end of civilization.

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And the attitude of the world corporate state

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is a little different

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than the attitude of the nation state.

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First of all,

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the world corporate state

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hates unregulated markets.

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It just simply doesn’t like unregulated markets. And to it, drugs are a commodity.

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It dealt opium in the 19th century. It dealt spices in the 15th century. It dealt sugar, tobacco, and rum in the 17th century.

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It hates unregulated markets.

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And it also is more interested in drugs

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as sources of entertainment than social control.

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The interesting thing about the world corporate state

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is it has no real moral agenda.

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It only wants to pick your pocket,

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which when you think of what’s been peddled

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in the ideological marketplace in the 20th century,

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somebody who simply wants to pick your pocket

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is a welcome and humane addition to the rogues’ gallery.

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So I would think that fairly quickly more and more drugs will be legalized and

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even drug taking encouraged because there’s a great deal of money to be made. I think

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that the way that it will be done on a cost-benefit basis. And if you’re trying to minimize the amount of social money

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you spend on drug-induced damage control

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without any recourse to humane rhetoric at all,

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the way to do it is to decide that all forms of drug abuse

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are mental illnesses.

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And then you don’t build prisons and mess with people like that.

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You simply give them therapies of various sorts,

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paid for by insurance companies and governments.

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And the cost of this, compared to treating these things as criminal enterprises,

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is one-tenth to one-twentieth.

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And strangely enough, it’s one of those weird situations

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where this is probably what should be done from a moral point of view as well,

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but it’ll be done for all the wrong reasons.

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After all, I mean, think of somebody who has some rare disease

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which you’ve heard of, but other than that know nothing of well

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their problem impacts on your life approximately as much as a 2 cbt2 abuse which must also

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wreck a few lives somewhere out there in the six billion of us on the planet. So all these things should just be treated as neurotic responses to the problem of being,

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and if people want therapy or want antidepressants or whatever they want to get over this hump,

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it should be given to them.

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But to criminalize it is not to do any favor to the victim.

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not to do any favor to the victim.

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It’s simply to turn it into a racket for all kinds of underworld and marginal institutions.

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I think people will be allowed to self-select their drugs.

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And, you know, the consequences of over-sedating yourself

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is lack of economic advancement.

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And this will be so evidently the shining god of all social strategies that very few people, I think, will choose it.

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I mean, in other words, I don’t hold the opinion that if heroin were a dollar a gram, half the world’s population would addict to heroin. I think that’s a scary notion

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that the right wing has propagated. It goes along with

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man’s fall and the Oedipal complex and

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a few other of these man is

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man’s worst enemy kind of rhetoric. If that’s true,

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we’re doomed anyway,

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so we might as well pack it in.

00:11:47 ►

Yeah.

00:11:49 ►

Corporate condition.

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Cultural condition.

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Well, DMT is a short-acting,

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dramatically active psychedelic that’s smoked.

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LSD is a long-acting,

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dramatically active psychedelic that’s smoked. LSD is a long-acting, dramatically active psychedelic that’s ingested that’s a

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quasi-synthetic compound. Psilocybin is an alkaloid found in numerous mushroom species

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that’s a medium-range psychedelic in its activity. And what all these things have in common is that without any

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great danger to body and mind they produce a profound transformation of consciousness

00:12:37 ►

the process the processing of language the way in which we model the world and relate to the past.

00:12:47 ►

And do they impact on cultural conditioning?

00:12:51 ►

You bet your booties they do,

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because what they do, essentially,

00:12:55 ►

is return you to some primal, pre-cultural state of conditioning

00:13:01 ►

where the animal body and the unacculturated inputs of perception

00:13:09 ►

are directly experienced i mean this is a model of the psychedelic experience somebody else might

00:13:16 ►

say that’s bunkum that’s not what it does at all but in my opinion that’s what it does, that culture is some kind of hallucination. It’s a shared,

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associationally driven linguistic malaise that until recently was geologically confined and

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created by cultural forces. And now, of course, in the era of the 747, these languages and language domains are spread around the world.

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And it creates a kind of metaculture.

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But culture is the clothing that you wear over the otherwise naked human psyche.

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In other words, in a given culture, one doesn’t fart in public situations.

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That’s a cultural value.

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That’s not something inherent in the programming of the human body.

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We have the option to fart or not to fart.

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Another example would be polygamy versus monogamy.

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Those are cultural choices.

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But obviously, the vast amount of experience of other

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cultures shows us that people can do it one way or another way or another way is culture good or bad

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well i’m coming slowly to the conclusion that it’s a i’m not sure it’s bad but it’s certainly

00:14:40 ►

a damn nuisance it’s a limitation is what is what it is. It’s like, you know, when you go to,

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I don’t know, pick a country, it doesn’t matter, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Korea, and you notice

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everybody behaves in a certain way, not because they have to, but because they choose to,

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because it’s been culturally modeled for them with such force that the path of least resistance

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seems to fall that way but the problem is these cultures create less than a full expression of

00:15:16 ►

human potential i would almost be willing to say they interrupt the unfolding of full human potential

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and put in its place an infantile, self-indulgent,

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potentially neurotic, unresolved human being.

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And you know, the more somebody is a part of their culture,

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the more parody they are of themselves. So that an Archie Bunker, for example, you know,

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gets a laugh from everybody because he is a paradigm and a parody of limited cultural values.

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A person who really thought no deeper than an Archie Bunker is not really a person at all. Well, so then this leads

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to the interesting perception that to the degree we are integrated into our culture, we are not

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ourselves. And to my mind, that’s, if true, news that must be acted upon.

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You can’t just sit with that.

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Then you say, well, so culture is the enemy.

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And the deconstruction of culture and the individuation of the self are, in fact, the same project, the same agenda.

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And I think that’s true. And then why psychedelics? Well,

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because they are simply more effective than any other known method. I mean, we have two

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methods, two other methods at our disposal. One would be like meditation slash yoga, etc.,

00:17:03 ►

etc. But notice that what that is

00:17:05 ►

is just reacculturation

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to a different cultural vocabulary

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and value system.

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That’s not going to work either.

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So, you know, and people say,

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well, where are you coming from with this?

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Well, might as well admit it.

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I’m some kind of an anarchist.

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In the common imagination,

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anarchy is somehow bankrupt

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because it’s thought that when you talk of anarchy,

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you always mean political anarchy,

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and that obviously wouldn’t work

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because man is a brute, nasty, brutish, and short, etc., etc.

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I’m not a political anarchist. I’m more like a philosophical anarchist.

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But I think we are freest to be ourselves when culture messes with us the least.

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And culture messes with us a lot.

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We are its slaves, you know.

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I mean, we work in the industries and businesses.

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It defines.

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We then take our hard-earned money

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and spend it on the choices which it offers.

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And if anybody raises their hand against this,

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well, then they’re called a dissenter, a maladaptive.

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And if you get too obstreperous about it,

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they drop a net over you

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and either call you a criminal or a madman

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and take you away.

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I mean, funny that we drifted this direction today

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to the fact that the world seems to be reaching some kind of boiling point.

00:18:48 ►

Well, I’ve always felt that the progress of the individual personality or psyche toward

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completion was probably a fractal subset of society’s effort to order its agenda and its house. And, you know, part of the

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consequence of the existence of mass media is that everything that’s going on in the world ends up confined in the pages of something like this.

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The old order is not going quietly.

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And in the most benighted parts of the world, and certainly India and Pakistan qualify as benighted parts of the world,

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the new corporate agenda hasn’t yet asserted itself.

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This is very old-style stuff, this Pakistan-India stuff.

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Corporations, whatever their flaws,

00:19:58 ►

they do not launch thermonuclear strikes against their rivals or their rivals’ markets.

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strikes against their rivals or their rivals markets I you know it’s remarkable that having possessed nuclear weapons for nearly 60 years or 55 years

00:20:19 ►

they were only used once against civilian populations or even inhabited targets.

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I think that essentially law and order is being extended to the outlaw parts of the world.

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And what’s going on in India and Pakistan is outlaw stuff.

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on in India and Pakistan is outlaw stuff. And I’m sure behind the scenes, they’re being manipulated and pulled into line. The situation a couple of months ago in Indonesia was instructive

00:20:59 ►

in this regard. Apparently, how it’s thought of in brussels and london and new york is if you’re

00:21:08 ►

one of these third world countries you can operate any kind of economy you want you can have any kind

00:21:14 ►

of squirrely banking system and investment policy and whatever you can do it however you want

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until you get in trouble and when you get in trouble these guys come from

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the world bank and the imf they just fly in on 747s with briefcases and it’s worse than losing

00:21:36 ►

a war because when you lose a war if you do it right you get to negotiate some kind of peace treaty with International Monetary Fund. With

00:21:48 ►

the IMF and the World Bank, you do not get to negotiate. They come in and they say, here is

00:21:55 ►

your labor policy. We suggest you devalue your currency to this degree. Here is the bank

00:22:03 ►

restructuring plan for you. Here are the cuts

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we suggest you immediately implement in your public service sector. And they basically say,

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and if you don’t do these things, we’re going to cancel your credit and hurl you back to the

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Stone Age. And these countries fall into line. They have choice i mean korea they were having a

00:22:27 ►

presidential election both candidates denounced the imf austerity proposal and within 48 hours

00:22:34 ►

both candidates had reversed themselves this tells you you know real hammers are being thrown around in these boardrooms. So, no, war, I mean, people have this fantasy

00:22:47 ►

that world capitalism is profiting from the arms race

00:22:52 ►

and so forth and so on.

00:22:54 ►

A sector of world capitalism is profiting from the arms race,

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but it’s a dinosaur sector of it.

00:23:01 ►

The world corporate state doesn’t like the busting up of infrastructure. I mean,

00:23:06 ►

what are millions of hungry refugees to the world corporate state except exactly the kind of problem

00:23:14 ►

they want to hand on to government? Say, you know, these people aren’t shopping in malls. They’re not

00:23:20 ►

working in bauxite factories. They’re standing around with rickets with their hand out for a bowl of rice exactly the sort of thing we don’t like to see so I

00:23:29 ►

think the world corporate state is much more interested in having people hard at

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work with middle a with middle-class aspirations that can be endlessly met by a consumer electronics

00:23:46 ►

marketplace of infinite

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extent

00:23:48 ►

and they

00:23:52 ►

don’t make war

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on people with

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bombs and guns and tanks

00:23:57 ►

they narcoticize people

00:23:59 ►

through media

00:24:00 ►

it’s the new

00:24:02 ►

hard edge solid state way of stealing your soul. And war is very

00:24:10 ►

bad. It makes political waves. It polarizes people. It creates very bad TV. And it’s very

00:24:19 ►

hard to do dirty, ugly things in the world now because the images are pushed all over the world.

00:24:27 ►

So, you know, like this thing in the former Yugoslavia and all that, these images have

00:24:37 ►

made these people’s name mud throughout the world.

00:24:48 ►

throughout the world and the the in many cases the ferocity of the conflict i think horrible as it’s been has been held down by the threat of these images going everywhere and what

00:24:56 ►

this means in terms of business and banking and tourism and capital investment? Good question.

00:25:07 ►

I think the thing is that capitalism,

00:25:11 ►

the intelligence of the capitalist organism is approximately that of a flatworm.

00:25:14 ►

And everything you said I agree with.

00:25:17 ►

What is the agenda of world capitalism

00:25:20 ►

since capitalism has always depended to work on a frontier of cheap labor and exploitable natural resources

00:25:31 ►

being fabricated into high-value goods, which are then sold to a core population of the wealthy bourgeoisie.

00:25:42 ►

How can that cycle be continued in the face of dwindling world resources?

00:25:47 ►

The answer is it can’t.

00:25:50 ►

So capitalism itself is self-limiting.

00:25:55 ►

Well, there are different kinds of capitalism.

00:25:57 ►

America practices the most virulent form

00:26:00 ►

of slash-and-burn, take-no-prisoner capitalism.

00:26:09 ►

A few years ago, we had a virtual reality conference here at Esalen and some executives from Fujitsu came and in the course of their presentation

00:26:15 ►

they revealed to us that Fujitsu has a committee and the committee is in charge of the 500 year plan for the corporation

00:26:27 ►

they have a 500 year plan for the Fujitsu corporation well now your first inclination

00:26:35 ►

is to smile and it is a foolish idea obviously the world will be a very different place in 500 years. But still, it shows an attitude.

00:26:47 ►

It shows a way of thinking about resources that we need to emulate.

00:26:53 ►

Capitalism may be able to reinvent itself as a more intelligent animal,

00:26:58 ►

or it may be able to break out of the planetary cycle of limited resources

00:27:04 ►

and return extraterrestrial

00:27:07 ►

material to the earth. In other words, you can imagine a capitalism where the proletarian

00:27:13 ►

classes were actually machines and these machines would be operating off-world and a steady

00:27:23 ►

stream of more refined material was being brought

00:27:26 ►

into Earth orbit and fabricated for a human ruler class.

00:27:31 ►

I don’t think anything like that will happen because I think the evolutionary rate at which

00:27:36 ►

these machines are complexifying makes it highly unlikely that they will be taking orders

00:27:43 ►

from human beings very much longer.

00:27:46 ►

In fact, the main hope is that we don’t have to take orders from them very soon.

00:27:52 ►

But the capitalism thing, there are several other possible scenarios

00:27:58 ►

that might keep the poker game going a few hands longer.

00:28:10 ►

game going a few hands longer. One is, light is an endlessly exploitable resource. Part of the problem may be that capitalism deals too many things when what it should actually deal are

00:28:17 ►

images of things. In other words, could it go virtual? Could we end up spending most of our disposable income on code rather than fabricated

00:28:29 ►

steel, aluminum, glass, and plastic? If the codes were beguiling enough, gave you beautiful interior,

00:28:37 ►

splendid companionship, tremendous educational experiences, and so forth, we would buy it. And capitalism on the Internet is obviously trying to train people

00:28:48 ►

to accept the idea that code is worth money, that data is everything.

00:28:55 ►

So that’s one possibility.

00:28:58 ►

Another possibility, slightly more long-term, is,

00:29:03 ►

and some people are keen for this, I’m skeptical because anything that’s never

00:29:07 ►

happened yet, I would tend to bet against, but some people think you could bring on nanotechnology

00:29:14 ►

and essentially make everything for free. Of course, the question would then be, what would

00:29:20 ►

anybody’s motivation for creating it be? The holy grail of nanotech is a device called a matter compiler.

00:29:30 ►

What is a matter compiler?

00:29:31 ►

It’s something that has seawater or river delta sludge running through it,

00:29:37 ►

and it does to matter what Photoshop 5.0 does to images.

00:29:42 ►

Photoshop 5.0 does to images.

00:29:50 ►

Anything you want would be built from the atoms up by machines. The nanotech enthusiasts talk about we could abandon agriculture within 20 years.

00:29:58 ►

The price of abandoning agriculture would be that China would eat its rice out of machines.

00:30:05 ►

Seawater would be converted directly into rice by nanotechnology.

00:30:10 ►

Well, are we for this or against this?

00:30:12 ►

Is this an appalling idea,

00:30:14 ►

being able to end agriculture

00:30:15 ►

and reforest billions of acres of land,

00:30:20 ►

but at the price of further artificializing

00:30:24 ►

and making even more synthetic the food supply

00:30:27 ►

the world population depends on. It’s interesting how these things always occur in these hellish

00:30:34 ►

dichotomies. The search for ever greater naturalism produces situations of ever greater compacted synthetic cultures.

00:30:46 ►

My faith is that none of these problems will ever reach the levels of, you know, catastrophic contradiction

00:30:55 ►

because the very context in which the whole thing is formed is constantly changing. In other words, new inventions, new possibilities rewrite the equation,

00:31:10 ►

and you never quite reach the black hole implied by this problem or that problem.

00:31:17 ►

We always seem to engineer our way around it.

00:31:20 ►

But that probably can’t go on forever.

00:31:24 ►

Well, this is nanotech. but that probably can’t go on forever.

00:31:26 ►

Well, this is nanotech.

00:31:32 ►

If nanotech came on, we would never have to dig another ounce of gold or another ounce of aluminum or another ounce of molybdenum.

00:31:37 ►

So that means we’re making a more efficient use of copper.

00:31:41 ►

use of copper.

00:31:43 ►

Yeah, the other thing is, you know,

00:31:46 ►

nanotechnology would take the most

00:31:47 ►

appalling

00:31:49 ►

consequence of the industrial era,

00:31:52 ►

which is toxified

00:31:54 ►

land and

00:31:55 ►

waste dump storages and

00:31:57 ►

stuff like that. That’s where the money

00:31:59 ►

is. For a nanotechnological

00:32:02 ►

world, those

00:32:03 ►

are the most desirable pieces

00:32:06 ►

of real estate on the planet

00:32:08 ►

because you engineer bacteria

00:32:10 ►

and nanomachines that

00:32:12 ►

burrow into that stuff

00:32:13 ►

and stack it up for you and then

00:32:16 ►

you have all the platinum, beryllium,

00:32:18 ►

etc., etc.

00:32:19 ►

you could ever possibly need.

00:32:21 ►

It all lies in

00:32:23 ►

the middens of the industrial age.

00:32:28 ►

It’s far.

00:32:30 ►

I mean, five years ago,

00:32:34 ►

which is a thousand years ago in technological development,

00:32:38 ►

Scientific American had a cover

00:32:41 ►

which showed a one centimeter chip

00:32:44 ►

and it had 1, 1500 steam engines on it.

00:32:49 ►

Each more steam engines than were operating in England at the height of the age of steam.

00:32:57 ►

Of course each steam engine produced one ten thousandth of a millinewton of force, basically enough force to kick a water molecule, a couple of

00:33:08 ►

angstroms down a track. But the idea of nanotechnology is that we should build as nature builds at

00:33:17 ►

the molecular level seamlessly using long chain polymers and RNA-like transcription machines

00:33:25 ►

to gather raw molecular materials out of the environment,

00:33:32 ►

and everything could be fabricated at low temperature

00:33:35 ►

out of seawater or river estuaries or something like that.

00:33:42 ►

How far are they?

00:33:45 ►

Well, if you go online and search nanotechnology,

00:33:49 ►

you see this is a burgeoning field,

00:33:51 ►

vast profits to be made,

00:33:54 ►

and there are breakthroughs happening weekly

00:33:57 ►

in laboratories around the world.

00:34:01 ►

Because if we can’t get a control of our political agenda,

00:34:06 ►

meaning our population policies

00:34:08 ►

and stuff like that,

00:34:09 ►

then it is going to be nanotechnology

00:34:12 ►

or it’s going to be back to the wall.

00:34:15 ►

There aren’t very many other choices.

00:34:17 ►

I mean, it’s a fantasy to think

00:34:19 ►

that we’re going to offload people

00:34:22 ►

on Mars or something.

00:34:24 ►

I mean, you would have to have 20,000 people a day

00:34:28 ►

leaving the Earth just to keep the population constant.

00:34:31 ►

So it’s going to be technology or catastrophe or fascism.

00:34:39 ►

These are the choices.

00:34:41 ►

Because, of course, fascism, you know,

00:34:42 ►

can just order the liquidation of everybody under

00:34:46 ►

five feet or everybody with brown eyes or whatever and you know but the the consequences of fascism

00:34:55 ►

are the complete distortion and subjugation of the human spirit when we talk about survival of

00:35:02 ►

the human species we’re not talking about at any cost or under any circumstances. If humanness does not survive with the human species, then we’re no more than another cannibal ape with a bigger club in the hand.

00:35:24 ►

the glitch, the Y2K problem.

00:35:27 ►

I find it fascinating.

00:35:29 ►

I want to… It’s sort of like the objection I had to crop circles.

00:35:33 ►

When people started telling me about crop circles,

00:35:36 ►

the first question I asked was, I said,

00:35:38 ►

well, NATO has these huge atomic weapons depots

00:35:42 ►

all across southern England,

00:35:45 ►

forward-basing for NATO strategic nuclear weaponry.

00:35:49 ►

What does the British defense establishment think of the funny shapes

00:35:54 ►

appearing in the wheat field on the other side of the fence?

00:35:57 ►

They must go berserk over this, because if you can crush a pattern in the wheat,

00:36:03 ►

you can certainly throw switches on an atomic weapon depot.

00:36:08 ►

And the British military establishment treated crop circles like a joke,

00:36:14 ►

which caused me to undertake to believe they probably were a joke.

00:36:19 ►

So the Y2K thing, here we are.

00:36:24 ►

None of us probably own $100 million corporations. We’re worrying

00:36:29 ►

about Y2K. Are they worried in the boardrooms? They’re not worried enough. They’re budgeting

00:36:36 ►

for contingency. They’re making some kind of effort to clean up some of the code. But

00:36:42 ►

if they believed the rhetoric that i see on the internet then they

00:36:47 ►

would have declared martial law 18 months ago every fortran programmer on the planet would

00:36:53 ►

have been told to report to the nearest army base they would have pulled everybody off of their

00:37:00 ►

industry consulting jobs and told them you know you will save the air traffic control systems,

00:37:06 ►

you will save the electrical grid.

00:37:09 ►

Anybody who violates these orders,

00:37:12 ►

a bullet in the head.

00:37:14 ►

Well, that’s the corporate agenda.

00:37:16 ►

But, you know, Bill Clinton is sworn

00:37:21 ►

to preserve and protect the general welfare

00:37:24 ►

of the United States.

00:37:27 ►

Not so to do is a more serious impeachable offense than a blowjob from a secretary.

00:37:34 ►

If the government does not at some point begin to react to the Y2K problem,

00:37:41 ►

you will have to conclude they must have deep intelligence

00:37:44 ►

which tells them that

00:37:46 ►

it’s a sustainable hit. Because otherwise, in the aftermath of a complete pull down of

00:37:55 ►

the electrical grid, meltdown of the air traffic control system, collapse of the banking and

00:38:00 ►

credit system, and so forth and so on, these people would be hunted like dogs

00:38:05 ►

through the streets by angry mobs. They don’t want that. So I think that as we approach

00:38:15 ►

January 31st 1999, I mean December 31st 1999, there will be rollover dates. There will be many Y to K problems. Like, you know,

00:38:29 ►

a number of states, including New York State, budget on a two-year budget, not a one-year

00:38:35 ►

budget. Well, what happens on these rollover dates? They’re like little confined experimental modules of the real thing.

00:38:49 ►

It’s a fascinating problem.

00:38:52 ►

And if you go with the chicken little position,

00:38:56 ►

that it’s going to pull down the electrical grid,

00:38:57 ►

it’s never coming back,

00:39:01 ►

the financial system is going to completely collapse,

00:39:05 ►

the world trade and inventory control system is going to go down, everything is going to completely collapse, the world trade and inventory control system is going to go down,

00:39:11 ►

everything is going to go down, and it will not be three weeks or six months or three years or 30 years before we recover, but it’ll be, you know, 120 years or something like that.

00:39:17 ►

If you believe those people, then it’s a delightful idea that. Because, you know, it didn’t take flying saucers coming from Zenebel Ganubi,

00:39:30 ►

no geomagnetic reversal of the poles,

00:39:34 ►

no coming of the third person of the Trinity,

00:39:37 ►

no deep impact of a planetesimal body.

00:39:41 ►

Just a 30-year-old Fortranran fucka brings the entire system down it’s almost

00:39:50 ►

too good to be true uh i i just i don’t know maybe i’m so sanguine because i’m pretty well

00:40:00 ►

positioned personally to take the hit i mean i live I live in Hawaii on an island, off-grid,

00:40:08 ►

with a wireless connection to the Internet, with a big garden.

00:40:13 ►

And so all that would happen for me would be a very complex news story

00:40:19 ►

would be hard to follow.

00:40:21 ►

But when I think of my friends in lower Manhattan,

00:40:29 ►

picturing that, you cannot picture that. Too many things are happening at once. You know, you can imagine the air traffic system

00:40:35 ►

failing, but you can’t imagine the electrical grid and the natural gas and the, and, and, and,

00:40:42 ►

I mean, it begins to cascade. And, you know, if something gets broken on a large scale in society, you can fix it. Like you have an atomic power plant blow up, if you have a hundred of these things happen at once,

00:41:06 ►

the very fabric of response is rent.

00:41:09 ►

And then it’s a free-for-all.

00:41:12 ►

You know, when the fire department can’t get to the fire,

00:41:15 ►

when nothing works, it would be very interesting.

00:41:21 ►

The thing I’m watching is the stock market.

00:41:24 ►

I mean, the stock market is within two or

00:41:26 ►

three percent of the highest values it’s ever been at. If world capitalism is about to take

00:41:34 ►

this enormous hit, at some point they will begin to liquefy and pull back. and the stock market should fall a thousand points or more well before we get to the

00:41:48 ►

actual crisis date and in fact the stock market has been incredibly robust in the face of the

00:41:54 ►

problems in asia and so forth and so on so i think it’s a thing to be aware of if nothing happens

00:42:01 ►

when it all when the day comes i think we should keep track of the chicken littles of this movement and invite them back on the stage.

00:42:22 ►

angels, from people who are in touch with the high priesthood of high

00:42:23 ►

Atlantis, from people

00:42:25 ►

who get their news

00:42:27 ►

from Sedonia and

00:42:29 ►

locations further east

00:42:32 ►

but we’re not accustomed

00:42:33 ►

to apocalyptic hysteria from

00:42:35 ►

guys with pen protectors

00:42:37 ►

who are

00:42:39 ►

bottom liners and in a way

00:42:42 ►

this Y2K thing, it’s permission

00:42:44 ►

for them to join the party

00:42:45 ►

they too now can have something to be totally hyped up and excited about and they are doing

00:42:54 ►

it with the enthusiasm not outdone by friends of the arantia cult or nostradamus or anybody else. It’s amazing, once you have a reason to believe the world is ending,

00:43:08 ►

how absolutely irresistible the conclusion is.

00:43:13 ►

I think that’s enough for today.

00:43:19 ►

If you found this interesting, come again.

00:43:22 ►

If you didn’t, don’t come again.

00:43:24 ►

Tell your friends in any case tomorrow

00:43:27 ►

we’ll be at watts from six to eight and thursday thursday not tomorrow thank you eight to ten what

00:43:36 ►

did i six to eight eight to ten watts thursday and uh thank you all for showing up. If this wasn’t what you expected,

00:43:46 ►

most things aren’t, are they?

00:43:53 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

00:43:55 ►

where people are changing their lives

00:43:57 ►

one thought at a time.

00:44:00 ►

Well, did you pick up on the fact

00:44:02 ►

that already in 1998,

00:44:12 ►

Terrence had become well aware of the new big push that the U.S. pharmaceutical companies had begun to make for their patented drugs?

00:44:15 ►

Among other things, he said, and I quote,

00:44:26 ►

So I think that, fairly quickly, more and more drugs will be legalized and even drug taking encouraged because there’s a great deal of money to be made, end quote.

00:44:31 ►

Now, you may have thought that he was talking about cannabis and psychedelics,

00:44:34 ►

but he was actually speaking about prescription drugs.

00:44:35 ►

At least that’s what I think.

00:44:39 ►

And it seems that he was spot on with his assumption because while in 1993 the direct-to-consumer,

00:44:44 ►

you know, the ads that you see on television, direct-to-consumer, you know the ads that you see on television,

00:44:47 ►

direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription drugs was only $166 million.

00:44:52 ►

But by 2005 that number had increased to $4.2 billion.

00:44:58 ►

It isn’t the criminal cartels that are the main drug pushers here in the States.

00:45:03 ►

It’s the pharmaceutical companies. And that was only one of the many topics that we just heard Terrence discuss.

00:45:11 ►

Some of the other things that he hit on in this talk were psychedelics, the nation state,

00:45:16 ►

consciousness, anarchy, war, capitalism, robots, virtual reality, nanotechnology,

00:45:23 ►

as well as the Y2K issue.

00:45:27 ►

And do you remember what he said about all of them?

00:45:30 ►

Well, if you don’t remember that he covered all of these topics in this short talk,

00:45:34 ►

then it might be worth your time to go back and re-listen to it.

00:45:38 ►

As I’ve said before, Terrence McKenna talks usually have to be listened to more than once

00:45:43 ►

if you really want to get the most out of them.

00:45:46 ►

The reason for this is that when he says something that strikes your fancy,

00:45:50 ►

well, your mind tends to think about them for a moment or two, but in the interim,

00:45:54 ►

while you were thinking about what he just said,

00:45:56 ►

you most likely have missed something new that would be of equal interest to you.

00:46:01 ►

And now I’ve found someone else like that, and I found him on Joe Rogan’s podcast,

00:46:06 ►

which I know a lot of our fellow salonners listen to. Joe’s guest that I’m talking about here is

00:46:12 ►

Neil deGrasse Tyson, and if you’re like me, you’ve most likely heard Neil before, but usually it’s in

00:46:18 ►

short bits and pieces where he answers a single question for a newscaster or somebody. For me,

00:46:24 ►

however, this was the first time that I’ve been able to listen to him go on at length.

00:46:29 ►

And the program that I’m talking about is Joe’s Podcast number 919.

00:46:33 ►

And, by the way, Joe had another conversation with Tyson back on his podcast number 310,

00:46:39 ►

which I’m looking forward to listening to later this week.

00:46:43 ►

But I found this latest interview by Joe to be one of those podcasts

00:46:46 ►

that you have to listen to more than once.

00:46:49 ►

Simply because so many things are covered,

00:46:51 ►

well, I’m sure I missed a few of them the first time I listened.

00:46:55 ►

For example, when Tyson pointed out that while there are a lot of subatomic particles,

00:47:00 ►

that at the very bottom level there are really only four types of particles, electrons,

00:47:06 ►

photons, quarks, and neutrinos. At least that’s what I think he said, but I’ll be going back to

00:47:12 ►

listen again later this week. And the reason that my mind began to drift a bit when I heard him say

00:47:17 ►

that is that, well, I was taken by the fact, if I heard it correctly, that there are only four

00:47:24 ►

fundamental particles. Now if you go back in the history of if I heard it correctly, that there are only four fundamental particles.

00:47:26 ►

Now, if you go back in the history of science for a few centuries,

00:47:30 ►

you’ll read that people back then thought that the entire world was made of only four components,

00:47:35 ►

earth, air, fire, and water.

00:47:38 ►

Now, doesn’t it strike you as interesting that, once again,

00:47:41 ►

our scientists have settled on only four fundamental components that make up

00:47:45 ►

physical reality. The fractal nature of it really intrigues me. I wonder if a thousand years from

00:47:52 ►

now there will be a different four components that scientists consider to be the basis of all

00:47:57 ►

our stuff. If so, I suspect that they will think of us the same way that we think of those poor unenlightened souls who thought the answer was simply earth, air, fire, and water. So your assignment for today

00:48:12 ►

is to see if you can uncover some other instances of the history of science that are fractal as well.

00:48:18 ►

And if your explorations are fueled by my favorite plant, cannabis, well, I’m sure that you’re going to find many interesting additions to this line of thought.

00:48:28 ►

I better give this up for now.

00:48:30 ►

So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off

00:48:32 ►

from Cyberdelic Space.

00:48:34 ►

Be well, my friends. © transcript Emily Beynon you

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