Program Notes
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0692513973/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2Date this lecture was recorded: September 1987.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.]
“I used to be a Libertarian, but they had too many rules.”
“And by 1968 a Gallup Poll showed that 70% of the population were against war. There’s never been a time in the history of this country where 70% of the people opposed the government on a thing like war. So I regard LBJ as a pacifist president because he made pacifism so popular.”
“Alan Watts said to me 20 years ago the chief error of academic historians is the belief that the Roman Empire fell. It never did. It still controls the Western World through the Vatican and the Mafia. Well, Alan was exaggerating. It doesn’t control the Western World. It’s just trying to.”
“The American people are the most policed and governed and watched and observed and snooped upon people in the whole world.”
Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati
by Robert Anton Wilson
Download free copies of Lorenzo’s latest books
Previous Episode
635 - The Birth of a New Humanity – Part 4
Next Episode
Similar Episodes
- 619 - RAW and the Information Age – Part 2 - score: 0.78663
- 602 - RAW Theology - score: 0.78285
- 253 - Whatever Happened to Timothy Leary_ - score: 0.78251
- 289 - Robert Anton Wilson The Lost Studio Session - score: 0.76633
- 473 - Outcasts and Future People - score: 0.75201
- 623 - Timothy Leary Meets Jiminy Glick - score: 0.74952
- 133 - The Cyber Society - score: 0.74078
- 192 - Timothy Leary Live at the Stone – 1987″ - score: 0.73804
- 175 - The Intelligent Use of Psychedelic Drugs - score: 0.73484
- 219 - Tim Leary Live in San Francisco 1979″ Part 2 - score: 0.73237
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:25 ►
is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And I am pleased to begin today by thanking Bruce C. and also Peter F. from Seattle for their generous gifts to the salon,
00:00:33 ►
and I thank you both. Now today I’m going to play a recording of one of my favorite people,
00:00:39 ►
Robert Anton Wilson. And in this talk to a libertarian convention in 1987, back when Ronald Reagan
00:00:46 ►
was still president, we were treated to some really great stories, a few of which remind me
00:00:51 ►
of the one and only American political prankster, Abbie Hoffman. Now, not many people today probably
00:00:58 ►
remember Hoffman’s antics, like when he organized several hundred people to, maybe over a thousand people, I guess,
00:01:08 ►
to surround the Pentagon in an attempt to levitate it.
00:01:11 ►
And they didn’t succeed, by the way.
00:01:18 ►
Then there was a time that he disrupted stock trading by throwing dollar bills down at the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
00:01:26 ►
And if I remember correctly, Abbie also urged all of us to send a urine sample to Nancy Reagan every single day.
00:01:32 ►
But, as you’re going to hear in just a moment, Robert Anton Wilson wasn’t that radical.
00:01:40 ►
You see, Wilson urged constraint, and he recommended that we only mail our urine samples to Nancy Reagan once a week.
00:01:47 ►
So you can see, even in chaotic times, calmer heads can prevail. I guess that I should explain to our fellow salonners for whom English isn’t your first language, that my point here is
00:01:53 ►
that humor and sarcasm are two of the main components of political commentary here in the
00:01:59 ►
states, particularly when things get completely out of hand, as they seem to be today.
00:02:09 ►
So if we can’t change the clowns in Washington, we can at least laugh at their stupidity.
00:02:17 ►
Now, after Wilson tells several more humorous stories and talks about the evolutionary need for stupidity, he then goes into a long story about the Freemasons and conspiracies that connect them to the Vatican and with Ronald Reagan.
00:02:26 ►
So, no matter what your political point of view happens to be,
00:02:29 ►
my guess is that you’re going to find this talk highly entertaining.
00:02:33 ►
Where else are you going to hear an analysis of Star Trek’s Captain Kirk
00:02:37 ►
in terms of Dr. Timothy Leary’s concept of mind circuits?
00:02:41 ►
So, here now is the one and only Robert Anton Wilson.
00:02:47 ►
I’ve been living in Ireland
00:02:48 ►
for the last five years
00:02:50 ►
and I just want to say it’s great
00:02:52 ►
to be back in the land of the free
00:02:54 ►
and the home of guaranteed drug-free urine.
00:03:02 ►
When I was young, I read Kafka and Orwell.
00:03:06 ►
I’m astonished that neither Kafka nor Orwell ever thought of a situation
00:03:11 ►
in which guaranteed drug-free urine would be a commodity on the market.
00:03:16 ►
That was the first thing I was told about when I got off the plane in Newark.
00:03:21 ►
People showed me ads, guaranteed drug-free urine.
00:03:26 ►
They come from all these ads.
00:03:28 ►
They’re in Penthouse and The Royal Choice and lots of publications.
00:03:32 ►
They all come from the same post office box in Boulder, Colorado.
00:03:38 ►
And that is a severe puzzlement to me because I’ve been in Boulder.
00:03:43 ►
I’ve been in Boulder many times.
00:03:44 ►
I’ve been in Boulder and Nederland’ve been in Boulder many times.
00:03:45 ►
I’ve been in Boulder and in Boulder and in Denver and all around there. I don’t see how
00:03:50 ►
they can find drug-free urine for 150 miles. But then again, I reread the ads and I noticed
00:03:59 ►
they don’t say human urine. How many of you have noticed that? You’ve got to read carefully these days.
00:04:08 ►
I don’t believe they can find drug-free human urine in that part of Colorado,
00:04:13 ►
so I believe they’re probably selling cow piss through the mail.
00:04:16 ►
Well, Ronald Reagan said he would do great things for small business if he got elected.
00:04:22 ►
He’s created an entirely new small business,
00:04:25 ►
selling cow piss through the air.
00:04:28 ►
That’s what I think they’re doing.
00:04:34 ►
You know, the people who are being subject
00:04:36 ►
most heavily to urine testing
00:04:39 ►
are government bureaucrats.
00:04:41 ►
The people least likely to be smoking grass, right?
00:04:44 ►
And yet, one of these days, one of them is going to be called in,
00:04:48 ►
and his boss is going to say,
00:04:51 ►
Now, Williger, your urine test showed no drug,
00:04:54 ►
but it seems you’ve got foot and mouth disease,
00:04:56 ►
and we’re going to have to put you down.
00:05:03 ►
But I’m not here to make trouble. I mean, I grew up in this country, but I live not here to make trouble
00:05:05 ►
I grew up in this country but I live in Ireland now
00:05:09 ►
and I didn’t come over here to make trouble
00:05:11 ►
so I want to say I think Ronald Reagan is really a wonderful president
00:05:14 ►
and Nancy is a wonderful first lady
00:05:17 ►
she’s the one who thought up the urine testing I’ve been told
00:05:20 ►
which reminds me
00:05:23 ►
one of the local literary lights, he lives in Oregon,
00:05:29 ►
but that isn’t far from here in American distances, Ken G.C. has proposed that everybody should
00:05:34 ►
send a urine sample to Nancy every day. I think that’s a revolting idea. I think that is very obscene humor, and I’m totally against it.
00:05:47 ►
And I hope nobody here will do it.
00:05:49 ►
I just mentioned it to tell you not to do it.
00:05:52 ►
I don’t want to get the idea I’m urging you to do it.
00:05:55 ►
But on the other hand, if you have a lot of test tubes handy,
00:05:57 ►
and, oh, no, no, no, I really think it’s disgusting and you shouldn’t do it.
00:06:02 ►
But since Nancy is so obsessively concerned with the purity of your urine,
00:06:06 ►
maybe you ought to send her one sample a week at least.
00:06:12 ►
Maybe we need to order some test tubes.
00:06:15 ►
Ah, somebody said maybe we need to order some test tubes.
00:06:18 ►
You can get them at any drugstore.
00:06:19 ►
Most people don’t know that.
00:06:20 ►
There you get them.
00:06:21 ►
You can also get empty capsules that you can fill with anything you want. You can get them at drugstores, too. I’m not telling you what
00:06:29 ►
to put in the capsules. I’m an individualist, so I leave that up to you. I’m not a libertarian,
00:06:35 ►
really. I don’t know why they invited me here. I used to be a libertarian, but they had too too many rules.
00:06:50 ►
There is a great deal to be said for Ronald Reagan, though,
00:06:52 ►
seriously.
00:06:54 ►
I regard him as the intelligent
00:06:56 ►
entity’s president.
00:06:57 ►
You’ll notice how I avoided the human
00:06:59 ►
chauvinism of saying the intelligent person
00:07:02 ►
is president.
00:07:03 ►
I’m very careful about such semantic issues these days.
00:07:07 ►
One thing I know about the United States,
00:07:08 ►
you’ve got to be careful what words you use here.
00:07:12 ►
And segregation is back in full force, I’ve noticed.
00:07:18 ►
That’s the one thing you notice coming back here from Ireland.
00:07:21 ►
Back in the 60s, like many other idealistic young people,
00:07:24 ►
I know you don’t believe I was younger in the 60s, like many other idealistic young people, I know you don’t believe I was young in the 60s,
00:07:27 ►
but I was comparatively young.
00:07:30 ►
When I look around at how many young faces there are in this audience,
00:07:33 ►
most of you probably imagine dinosaurs still roam the Earth back then.
00:07:36 ►
Ronald Reagan, I was saying, is the intelligent entity’s president.
00:07:41 ►
I mean this in the same way I regard LBJ as the pacifist president.
00:07:46 ►
He started the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place,
00:07:50 ►
and he fought it with the most disgusting possible weapons,
00:07:54 ►
such as napalm, which reaches a thousand degrees centigrade on contact with human skin.
00:08:00 ►
And that war was so, as J.D. Salinger would say, vomit-making.
00:08:07 ►
Salinger was a great writer.
00:08:08 ►
That’s a word we really need in English.
00:08:10 ►
Nobody ever coined that word before Salinger.
00:08:13 ►
P.S. Salinger could have used it more often, of course,
00:08:16 ►
but it was J.D. Salinger who coined it.
00:08:18 ►
That was really a vomit-making war.
00:08:21 ►
And by 1968, a Gallup poll showed that 70% of the population were against the
00:08:27 ►
war. There’s never been a time in the history of this country where 70% of the people opposed
00:08:33 ►
the government on a basic thing like war. So I regard LBJ as the pacifist president,
00:08:39 ►
as he made pacifism so popular. In the same way, I regard Nixon as the anarchist president.
00:08:47 ►
After five years of Nixon, most people in the country have the same view of government
00:08:51 ►
that you find only in extreme anarchist literature, far, far more extreme than libertarian literature.
00:08:58 ►
And as a matter of fact, Nixon left a permanent permanent legacy you just have to go to the movies that are on television
00:09:08 ►
and you can see
00:09:09 ►
back when I was young
00:09:11 ►
and I was young once
00:09:12 ►
back in the 30s and 40s
00:09:15 ►
you could always tell the villain in a movie
00:09:17 ►
because he had a laboratory smart phone
00:09:19 ►
a white laboratory
00:09:21 ►
jacket that indicated
00:09:23 ►
that he was a scientist
00:09:24 ►
when he wasn’t in a that he was a scientist.
00:09:26 ►
When he wasn’t in a movie,
00:09:28 ►
he was on television telling you these cigarettes are less harmful than the others.
00:09:31 ►
And he always
00:09:32 ►
known the villain because of his white smock.
00:09:34 ►
And the first thing he said was, the experiment worked
00:09:36 ►
on the rats. Now we must
00:09:38 ►
try it on a higher organism.
00:09:41 ►
Would you commend this myth?
00:09:43 ►
I know Atwell
00:09:44 ►
usually played him,
00:09:45 ►
except for Boris Karloff was playing him.
00:09:48 ►
But since Nixon, you know the
00:09:49 ►
villain in the movie, because he comes in, he’s wearing
00:09:51 ►
a business suit and a solid-collar tie,
00:09:53 ►
and he says, I’m from the government.
00:09:56 ►
Everybody in the audience right away cringes
00:09:57 ►
with fear. You want to know
00:09:59 ►
why libertarianism is so popular
00:10:01 ►
these days? It’s Richard Nixon.
00:10:03 ►
Those of you who are not atheists, you should all say
00:10:06 ►
a prayer for Richard Nixon every day.
00:10:08 ►
He created the image of government
00:10:10 ►
in which libertarianism can flourish.
00:10:13 ►
And anarchism
00:10:14 ►
flourishes even better.
00:10:16 ►
And in the same way, Reagan is the intelligent
00:10:18 ►
entity’s president.
00:10:19 ►
I still haven’t slipped into saying the intelligent person.
00:10:22 ►
You notice I’m not going to give
00:10:24 ►
away to human chauvinism.
00:10:27 ►
Reagan has made stupidity seem de classe.
00:10:32 ►
Nixon had 18 minutes erased from the tape,
00:10:36 ►
but Reagan goes around with his bare face hanging out saying,
00:10:38 ►
I don’t know what was going on in the White House.
00:10:41 ►
Did you know what was going on in your house that week?
00:10:43 ►
Me, folks.
00:10:49 ►
And the funny thing
00:10:50 ►
about the Reagan gambit,
00:10:51 ►
I don’t remember
00:10:52 ►
what I was doing that day.
00:10:53 ►
Do you remember
00:10:54 ►
what you were doing that day?
00:10:55 ►
Most people think,
00:10:57 ►
no, I can’t remember
00:10:57 ►
what I was doing that day.
00:10:59 ►
And so that seems to make sense,
00:11:00 ►
but put it another way.
00:11:02 ►
Put it in a more realistic,
00:11:04 ►
existential context.
00:11:06 ►
Do you remember the last time you conspired
00:11:08 ►
on a major felony?
00:11:11 ►
I remember every
00:11:15 ►
major felony I’ve been involved in.
00:11:18 ►
I remember exactly the last time
00:11:20 ►
I got involved in a major felony.
00:11:22 ►
And if Reagan really can’t
00:11:24 ►
remember when he conspired to commit these major felonies,
00:11:27 ►
then what the Democrats say must be true.
00:11:30 ►
The guy is off his knockoff key.
00:11:33 ►
But what am I doing?
00:11:35 ►
I come to this country
00:11:36 ►
and I start bad-rapping the president right away.
00:11:39 ►
Well, this is the thing about living in Ireland.
00:11:41 ►
You begin to develop Irish attitudes.
00:11:44 ►
I was in a movie theater in Dublin recently, and in Ireland they have travel lots before the movies,
00:11:51 ►
just like they used to have in the United States back in the 40s.
00:11:55 ►
And in many ways, Ireland is like the United States in the 30s or 40s.
00:11:59 ►
And I get used to it, I have to sit to a travel lot before I can see the movie I came for.
00:12:04 ►
I don’t know why they make travel lots, I’ve never to it, I have to sit to a travelogue before I can see the movie I came for. I don’t know why they make travelogues.
00:12:06 ►
I’ve never met anybody who…
00:12:08 ►
I never asked anybody, do you like the travelogue?
00:12:10 ►
They all say, God, no!
00:12:12 ►
And they keep making travelogues.
00:12:14 ►
Somebody must be making those.
00:12:16 ►
This is another conspiracy that’s worthy of serious investigation.
00:12:19 ►
Why do they make travelogues?
00:12:20 ►
Nobody likes them.
00:12:22 ►
But they still show them in Ireland.
00:12:24 ►
I was in a Dublin theater and they had a travelogue about Gl likes them. But they still show them in Ireland. I was in a Dublin
00:12:25 ►
theater and they had a travelogue about
00:12:27 ►
Glastonbury Cathedral.
00:12:29 ►
And it was narrated by Prince Charles.
00:12:33 ►
You know, you know
00:12:33 ►
Prince Charles.
00:12:36 ►
He’s married to Di.
00:12:38 ►
And
00:12:38 ►
at the end of the film, Prince Charles came on
00:12:41 ►
the screen after we just heard his voice
00:12:43 ►
for 15 minutes. He came on the screen and pleaded with everybody
00:12:46 ►
to send money to the Glastonbury Fund
00:12:48 ►
to help rebuild Glastonbury Cathedral.
00:12:51 ►
And as soon as he appeared, before he even began his play,
00:12:55 ►
a Dublin inner-city voice in the audience cried out,
00:12:58 ►
Look at the fucking ears on the booger!
00:13:11 ►
That’s the Irish attitude. I’ve acquired some of that relationship since I’ve been over there. I don’t know. All this bum-rapping of Reagan is rather unfair. I’d like to say
00:13:21 ►
a few words in defense of stupidity.
00:13:30 ►
Stupidity has been around so long that it must be serving some evolutionary function.
00:13:32 ►
That’s common Darwinian savvy.
00:13:40 ►
Nothing lasts for long geological epics that isn’t serving some function in the evolutionary process.
00:13:42 ►
And look how much stupidity there is in the world.
00:13:47 ►
As my spiritual leader, J.R. Bob Dobbs,
00:13:51 ►
are you often with you with J.R. Bob Dobbs, I hope?
00:13:54 ►
We must have slack.
00:13:56 ►
We must have slack, yes.
00:14:02 ►
J.R. Bob Dobbs is the founder of the Church of the Subgenius in Dallas.
00:14:09 ►
Yes, I was recently a guest on his radio show,
00:14:10 ►
The Hour of Slack.
00:14:15 ►
There’s an hour of Slack every Sunday evening on Dallas radio.
00:14:19 ►
Slack is the goal of the subgenius.
00:14:22 ►
The subgenius must have Slack.
00:14:25 ►
But somebody threw that in from the back about slack.
00:14:26 ►
It distracted me.
00:14:29 ►
But I really wanted to call it from Bob.
00:14:30 ►
Praise Bob.
00:14:32 ►
Praise Bob.
00:14:35 ►
This is a marvelous saying.
00:14:37 ►
This is the key to power,
00:14:40 ►
which libertarians aren’t interested in, of course,
00:14:41 ►
except when they’re running for office.
00:14:44 ►
But the secret of power, J.R. Bob Dobbs has put it all in a nutshell.
00:14:47 ►
You know how dumb the average guy is, right?
00:14:50 ►
You all know that.
00:14:53 ►
Mathematically, by definition,
00:14:54 ►
half of them are even dumber than that.
00:15:03 ►
Absolutely.
00:15:04 ►
Mathematically, it’s got to be true uh how do you think roshanish got the 93 rolls
00:15:09 ►
voices some people think uh he got 93 because he was an admirer of alistair crowley this is the
00:15:17 ►
pregnant moment which half the people in the audience looked confused and the other half
00:15:21 ►
chuckled mildly having gotten that very obscure capitalistic joke.
00:15:27 ►
I throw in a few jokes just for specialized members so I can spot who they are.
00:15:29 ►
When I get to the drug jokes, I’ll know who the
00:15:31 ►
pushers are.
00:15:34 ►
Oh, wait, I did a few drug jokes
00:15:35 ►
already, didn’t I? Peptides.
00:15:38 ►
Peptides.
00:15:39 ►
Let’s get something serious. Have you taken
00:15:41 ►
peptides into your heart?
00:15:43 ►
Brothers and sisters, you need peptides.
00:15:46 ►
You feel let down. You feel
00:15:48 ►
the world isn’t treating you right. You feel
00:15:50 ►
you’ve got problems you can’t solve.
00:15:52 ►
You feel that you need something extra
00:15:54 ►
in your life. You feel your life is empty
00:15:55 ►
and meaningless. You need peptides, brothers
00:15:58 ►
and sisters. You just open your heart
00:15:59 ►
and take in peptides, and you
00:16:01 ►
will find the peace that passeth all
00:16:03 ►
understanding. Are you ready for peptides? Are you willing to accept peptides, and you will find the peace that passeth all understanding.
00:16:06 ►
Are you ready for peptides?
00:16:08 ►
Are you willing to accept peptides?
00:16:10 ►
Are you going to take peptides into your heart?
00:16:11 ►
Send money!
00:16:14 ►
And I’ll tell you, I’ll give you my address in a minute,
00:16:15 ►
but I’ll tell you where to send them,
00:16:17 ►
and I will tell you all about peptides.
00:16:19 ►
But meanwhile, I’ll give you a brief hint.
00:16:22 ►
I’ve been traveling through the South for the last couple of months.
00:16:24 ►
I’m on a lecture tour that I’ve been on for the south for the last couple of months I’m on a lecture tour
00:16:27 ►
that I’ve been on for about
00:16:29 ►
three months now and I’ve got one month to go
00:16:31 ►
I have been pressurized
00:16:33 ►
and depressurized and repressurized
00:16:35 ►
and depressurized
00:16:37 ►
I have crossed time zones
00:16:38 ►
I have gone from East Germany to Maui
00:16:41 ►
in one week and from Maui to Atlanta
00:16:43 ►
Georgia in another week
00:16:44 ►
and
00:16:44 ►
it’s a fascinating experience Germany to Maui in one week, and from Maui to Atlanta, Georgia in another week.
00:16:48 ►
It’s a fascinating experience.
00:16:51 ►
You find you can’t build a reality tunnel.
00:16:53 ►
You can’t create a consistent reality when you’re traveling that fast.
00:16:55 ►
Everything turns into a blur.
00:16:56 ►
But there is one thing that stands by me,
00:16:59 ►
brothers and sisters,
00:16:59 ►
and one thing that’s peptides.
00:17:02 ►
You know what peptides are?
00:17:05 ►
Peptides are those little buggers that don’t know whether they’re neurotransmitters or hormones.
00:17:10 ►
Sometimes they act like neurotransmitters, and sometimes they act like hormones.
00:17:15 ►
And if you’ve got enough peptides, you are doing fine.
00:17:18 ►
Yeah, peptides, neurotransmitters make the networks in your brain
00:17:23 ►
that make up memory and make the capacity for learning. Peptides select neurotransmitters make the networks in your brain that make up memory and make the capacity for learning.
00:17:26 ►
Peptides select the realities you experience.
00:17:30 ►
I think that’s worth repeating.
00:17:35 ►
Peptides select the realities you experience.
00:17:39 ►
Everybody has their own private reality tunnel.
00:17:41 ►
If this was one of my workshops, I would do a couple of exercises
00:17:44 ►
to show you that you’ve got
00:17:45 ►
your own reality tunnel different than anybody
00:17:47 ►
in the audience. But since this
00:17:49 ►
is just a brief talk, you can come to my seminar
00:17:52 ►
two weeks from now in Seattle and I’ll
00:17:54 ►
demonstrate that. Meanwhile,
00:17:56 ►
what makes up the
00:17:57 ►
networks to hold the brain together and make
00:17:59 ►
consistency out of the chaos of
00:18:01 ►
signals that are bombarding us all the time?
00:18:03 ►
It’s been estimated that we’re receiving a hundred million
00:18:06 ►
signals every minute. The brain is processing well enough that very few of them can be admitted to consciousness.
00:18:13 ►
The brain sends most of them down to the body to deal with. It just wipes the slate clean.
00:18:18 ►
Hepatites determine which signals are going to be imprinted on the brain and remember to become part of your reality tunnel, what you consider the reality
00:18:26 ►
outside you.
00:18:28 ►
Everybody thinks it’s outside
00:18:30 ►
them, even though the peptides are what
00:18:32 ►
select you. And
00:18:33 ►
the peptides not only select your realities,
00:18:36 ►
they turn you into hormones, or they act
00:18:38 ►
like hormones, and they run all over your body
00:18:40 ►
and make you feel high.
00:18:42 ►
It’s peptides that have
00:18:44 ►
made you the person you are.
00:18:45 ►
And if you don’t have enough peptides,
00:18:47 ►
you’re leading a pretty miserable life.
00:18:48 ►
That’s why you need more peptides.
00:18:51 ►
That’s true.
00:18:54 ►
How much?
00:18:59 ►
Well, now, if I were really one of those fundamentalist preachers
00:19:02 ►
that I’ve been doing a bit of an imitation of,
00:19:05 ►
I would say send money and…
00:19:07 ►
But, no, you produce your own peptides.
00:19:10 ►
Everybody produces their own peptides.
00:19:12 ►
The problem is most of us don’t know how to produce peptides.
00:19:16 ►
There’s been a lot of…
00:19:17 ►
That was part of my defense of stupidity.
00:19:20 ►
You know, the stupidest thing the United States government has done in my lifetime
00:19:24 ►
was, in my opinion, banning LSD research in 1966.
00:19:29 ►
That was the most promising area of psychotherapy
00:19:33 ►
and unleashing potential creativity and creating basic behavior change
00:19:38 ►
that we had ever discovered in the whole history of psychology.
00:19:41 ►
I have a degree in psychology myself, so I have a right to be skeptical about it. Psychologists don’t know shit, basically. In all my years of studying psychology, I’ve
00:19:55 ►
only found one law that seems to me to be really true, and that wasn’t in any psychology
00:20:00 ►
class. That was in a movie called The Magnificent Seven with Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen.
00:20:06 ►
And some of you remember that blessed movie, praise Bob. There’s a scene in there where Eli
00:20:12 ►
Wallach, the head of the bandits, has captured the seven gunfighters who have been hired to
00:20:17 ►
defend these Mexican farmers from the bandits. He captures all seven of them and he says,
00:20:22 ►
now I’m going to have to kill you. And it’s really a terrible shame.
00:20:25 ►
Talented men like you, so good with the guns, and I have to kill you all
00:20:29 ►
because you went to work for these dumb farmers.
00:20:31 ►
Why did you do that?
00:20:32 ►
Farmers are sheep, and sheep are meant to be sheared.
00:20:35 ►
Why did you get yourself into this terrible situation?
00:20:39 ►
And Steve McQueen says, well, it’s like a fellow I knew once in El Paso.
00:20:45 ►
He took off all his clothes and jumped in a clump of cactus.
00:20:49 ►
And when people afterwards asked him, why did you do that, you damn fool?
00:20:53 ►
He said, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
00:20:57 ►
And when I saw that film, I thought, praise Bob.
00:21:01 ►
This is the one psychological law that really seems consistent.
00:21:05 ►
That’s why people do most things.
00:21:06 ►
There are all sorts of complicated Freudian, Adlerian, Jungian, theoretical.
00:21:10 ►
But the main reason people do things is because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
00:21:15 ►
That’s why I agreed to do three lecture tours this year.
00:21:27 ►
Peptides. peptides peptides
00:21:30 ►
when they’re acting like neurotransmitters
00:21:33 ►
you are developing tremendous capacities
00:21:35 ►
to learn, if you’re learning very rapidly
00:21:37 ►
have you gone through periods where you felt
00:21:39 ►
you were learning a lot very fast
00:21:41 ►
have you had times when you had a tremendous
00:21:43 ►
burst of insight and you thought my god this is what Archimedes felt like
00:21:47 ►
when he cried Eureka and ran through the streets?
00:21:51 ►
That’s peptides working as neurotransmitters.
00:21:53 ►
Your brain has reorganized on a higher level of coherence.
00:21:57 ►
You ever felt good all over without taking cocaine?
00:22:01 ►
Really, really great swimming.
00:22:04 ►
That’s peptides.
00:22:05 ►
They work as both neurotransmitters and hormones.
00:22:08 ►
And there are many ways of triggering the release of peptides.
00:22:13 ►
Meditation is a well-known way, well-known in the Orient.
00:22:18 ►
Many people in the United States have taken up meditation in the last 20 years.
00:22:21 ►
If you get good at meditation and you start feeling higher than
00:22:25 ►
a kite and you think, oh man, I don’t have to pay those horrible marijuana bills anymore,
00:22:29 ►
you have learned how to generate more peptides. That’s what you’ve been doing while you’ve been
00:22:33 ►
meditating. Another way of generating a lot of peptides is work that you really enjoy.
00:22:39 ►
There’s, look at Michael Hutchison’s book, Mega Brain. I’m not making any of this up. I’ve been joking a bit, but I’m not joking about peptides.
00:22:48 ►
If you’re doing work you deeply enjoy,
00:22:51 ►
you’re releasing floods and floods of peptides every day.
00:22:55 ►
I used to wonder, why am I so happy,
00:22:57 ►
and most of the world is so damn miserable?
00:22:59 ►
What’s wrong with them?
00:23:00 ►
I even wrote a book about it.
00:23:01 ►
I wrote a book called Prometheus Rising.
00:23:03 ►
Plug, plug, plug.
00:23:06 ►
Somebody read it. And I was trying to explain to people how to, it originally had a subtitle,
00:23:11 ►
which the publisher, due to absent-mindedness, left out. The subtitle was How to Use the Human
00:23:17 ►
Brain for Fun and Profit. And that’s what the book is about. It was my best ideas about how
00:23:23 ►
you can use your brain more efficiently.
00:23:26 ►
And that was because I
00:23:28 ►
was grieved in my heart and
00:23:29 ►
sorrowful to see so much misery and
00:23:31 ►
suffering all over the world and people
00:23:33 ►
using their brains entirely for misery
00:23:35 ►
and suffering.
00:23:38 ►
Some people, if you tell them it’s
00:23:39 ►
Wednesday, they say, oh my God, it’s
00:23:41 ►
Wednesday. They go into a collapse
00:23:44 ►
right away. Anything you tell them, they find it’s my God, it’s Wednesday. They go into a collapse right away.
00:23:46 ►
Anything you tell them, you know,
00:23:48 ►
they find it’s another cause for misery.
00:23:50 ►
And that’s because they’re just not producing enough
00:23:52 ►
peptides. They’re producing a lot
00:23:54 ►
of adrenochrome and other negative chemicals
00:23:56 ►
like that.
00:23:58 ►
I finally found out
00:24:00 ►
from this recent research
00:24:02 ►
on brain chemistry, the reason I’m so
00:24:04 ►
bloody happy
00:24:05 ►
is that I enjoy my work I sit down there at the word processor when I’m not on
00:24:09 ►
one of these lecture tours I sit at the word processor for about 10 hours at a
00:24:13 ►
batch my wife keeps saying come and eat something for Christ’s sake you’ll
00:24:17 ►
starve you’re gonna get ice train again come on I’m bad I’m still hammering away
00:24:22 ►
at the word processor and you know why I’m doing it? I’m addicted.
00:24:27 ►
I’m addicted to my own peptides.
00:24:29 ►
I’m producing more and more peptides all the time.
00:24:31 ►
That’s why people keep climbing mountains.
00:24:33 ►
Somebody gets to the top of the Matterhorn and they say,
00:24:34 ►
wow, what an achievement.
00:24:37 ►
And he says, I want to go off to the Himalayas now.
00:24:39 ►
I want to take on K2.
00:24:42 ►
That’s because he’s getting high on mountain climbing. Anything you really deeply enjoy produces peptides.
00:24:46 ►
And that’s one of the best arguments for a libertarian society.
00:24:49 ►
If people could do what they really enjoy, they’d all be high and happy.
00:24:52 ►
And high and happy people don’t go around making others miserable.
00:24:56 ►
I have made a close study of the people who spend most of their time trying to make other people miserable.
00:25:03 ►
And my conclusion is they’re all miserable themselves.
00:25:06 ►
That’s why they do it.
00:25:06 ►
If you’re high and happy,
00:25:07 ►
you have no need to make others miserable.
00:25:11 ►
Work you really enjoy, meditation.
00:25:14 ►
It seems that a lot of popular recreational drugs
00:25:17 ►
are precursors of peptides.
00:25:21 ►
You’re not really getting high on your favorite drug.
00:25:23 ►
You’re probably getting high on the peptides that that drug triggers in your brain
00:25:27 ►
sex frequently triggers the release of peptides
00:25:32 ►
which is why you find it very easy to remember your best sexual experiences
00:25:36 ►
art that’s deeply moving
00:25:39 ►
if you’ve really been carried out of yourself
00:25:42 ►
by Beethoven’s Ninth, perhaps,
00:25:46 ►
that’s because Beethoven pushed your peptide buttons.
00:25:50 ►
And now there are machines to produce peptides.
00:25:53 ►
How many people have heard of these new brainwave machines?
00:25:56 ►
I got a terrible reputation back in the 60s for going around talking about psychedelics.
00:26:02 ►
But now I’m not talking about them anymore
00:26:05 ►
because we’ve got more efficient tools now.
00:26:06 ►
We’ve got machines.
00:26:08 ►
And some people tell me,
00:26:10 ►
don’t go around talking about these machines.
00:26:12 ►
The next thing you know,
00:26:12 ►
the government will make them illegal too.
00:26:16 ►
It seems there are several million people
00:26:19 ►
in the United States
00:26:20 ►
using one type or another of brainwave machine,
00:26:23 ►
most of them encouraged by
00:26:25 ►
their doctors. So I think it’s too late to turn the clock back on that, and I don’t think they
00:26:29 ►
will be made illegal. And besides, Americans have never been as paranoid about machines as they are
00:26:35 ►
about chemicals. So I think these machines are here to stay. If you want to generate more peptides,
00:26:40 ►
get yourself an ISIS machine, and you just turn it down to alpha. You just turn the dial.
00:26:46 ►
That’s all it is. It’s as simple as the television
00:26:48 ►
said. You just turn it to alpha
00:26:49 ►
and the ISIS machine flickers
00:26:52 ►
alpha in your eyes and
00:26:53 ►
bombards alpha in your ears and your
00:26:56 ►
brain adjusts to alpha and
00:26:57 ►
endorphins and all sorts of peptides start
00:27:00 ►
forming and
00:27:00 ►
you’ll find you’re a much more
00:27:04 ►
creative person than you ever realized you were.
00:27:06 ►
Turn it down to theta and you’ll get so creative that you might alarm your neighbors.
00:27:15 ►
But I seem to have digressed.
00:27:17 ►
I’m talking about becoming more creative, more free, getting higher and happier,
00:27:22 ►
and I really started out to talk about the evolutionary advantages of stupidity.
00:27:27 ►
Yeah, well, there’s so much stupidity around
00:27:29 ►
it must be serving a function.
00:27:31 ►
Voltaire said,
00:27:33 ►
the only way to understand
00:27:35 ►
what mathematicians mean by infinity
00:27:37 ►
is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.
00:27:41 ►
Anybody who studied religious history
00:27:43 ►
will have to agree with that.
00:27:44 ►
and anybody who studied religious history will have to agree with that.
00:27:50 ►
You know, to let up on America for a while,
00:27:53 ►
you know, over in Iran they are governed by a man who believes he is in contact with Allah.
00:27:56 ►
Allah is a gaseous vertebrate of some sort of astronomical heft
00:28:01 ►
who dictated the Koran to Muhammad,
00:28:04 ►
some sort of astronomical heft who dictated the Koran to Muhammad.
00:28:13 ►
And Allah has a paranoid obsession with the sexual behavior of domesticated primates.
00:28:20 ►
And among other things that the Ayatollah has learned from Allah is that divorce is so horrible that it should not be granted except in extremely few and specified situations.
00:28:29 ►
The Ayatollah has written a commentary on the Koran in which he specifies that if a man is in
00:28:35 ►
the habit of sodomizing camels, that does not give his wife the right to a divorce.
00:28:40 ►
Now, she might catch something worse than AIDS, but Allah is very strict about divorce.
00:28:46 ►
However, the Ayatollah does say that if a man is in the habit of sodomizing his brother-in-law,
00:28:52 ►
then Allah says his wife can get a divorce.
00:28:55 ►
So you see, the Ayatollah is a flaming liberal in comparison with the Pope.
00:29:13 ►
the catholic teaching is that divorce is forbidden in all cases and the catholics like guy and rand are strict aristotelians so to them all cases means no case means all cases uh in ireland where
00:29:21 ►
the catholic church is still in full power, divorce is still illegal.
00:29:26 ►
And a guy can sodomize all the camels he can find in County Kerry and his brother-in-law too,
00:29:31 ►
and his wife still can’t get a divorce.
00:29:33 ►
The Catholic God is even more against divorce than our eyes.
00:29:38 ►
And if you look at political history, you’ll find even more astounding examples of the infinitude of human stupidity.
00:29:45 ►
Well, praise Bob. That’s the secret of power.
00:29:48 ►
As Bob says, you know how dumb the average guy is?
00:29:51 ►
Half of them are even dumber than that, right?
00:29:53 ►
Yeah, that’s how Rajneesh got 93 Rolls Royces.
00:29:59 ►
He grew up in India, in a small town in India,
00:30:02 ►
in the most impoverished part of the world,
00:30:04 ►
and he read in a newspaper when he was seven years old
00:30:07 ►
that Krishnamurti had gotten himself a Rolls Royce
00:30:10 ►
just by coming to the Western world
00:30:12 ►
and bringing Hindu wisdom to all the seekers in the Western world.
00:30:17 ►
Krishnamurti realized there’s a seeker born every minute.
00:30:23 ►
So Rajneesh
00:30:26 ►
said when I grow up
00:30:27 ►
I am going to the western world
00:30:29 ►
and he came to the western world
00:30:30 ►
and he found there are even more seekers now
00:30:32 ►
than there were in Krishna Murthy’s day
00:30:34 ►
and he got himself 93 Rolls Royces
00:30:36 ►
and you can do the same
00:30:39 ►
I was talking peptides before
00:30:42 ►
now I’m talking cash on the barrel
00:30:44 ►
the subgenius church is doing better all the time I was talking peptides before, now I’m talking cash on the barrel.
00:30:49 ►
The subgenius church is doing better all the time,
00:30:53 ►
just because Bob got caught in an elevator with L. Ron Hubbard in 1957.
00:30:56 ►
And L. Ron Hubbard told him the secret of power, just as I have revealed it to you tonight,
00:30:59 ►
as Bob revealed it to me when I met him in Dallas on that blessed day.
00:31:04 ►
And as H.L. Mencken said, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of
00:31:10 ►
the American people.
00:31:12 ►
Some people were horrified when they read, I’ve been hearing this all through this tour,
00:31:16 ►
people say to me, didn’t you get chills of terror when you read that the readers of the
00:31:21 ►
National Enquirer voted 15 to 1 that they’d like to have Ali North as president?
00:31:26 ►
And I said, no, I’d be surprised if the readers of the National Enquirer
00:31:29 ►
didn’t pick Ali North.
00:31:32 ►
But if it was a choice, if you gave the readers of the National Enquirer
00:31:36 ►
a choice between Paul Newman and Ali North, they’d pick Paul Newman.
00:31:42 ►
And I’m not here to try to revolutionize the Libertarian Party. They brought me here.
00:31:48 ►
I’m their guest. I don’t want to make problems. But I think the Libertarian Party is a little
00:31:52 ►
bit naive, almost as naive as the Democrats. You keep talking about issues as if there
00:31:58 ►
are people out there who can think. Now, you want to make an impact on American politics, what you want
00:32:05 ►
to do is persuade Paul Newman to become a
00:32:07 ►
libertarian and be your presidential candidate.
00:32:10 ►
He’d beat Ollie North hands down.
00:32:12 ►
He’d beat anybody the Republicans
00:32:14 ►
or Democrats could find.
00:32:16 ►
The only possible
00:32:18 ►
way the Republicans or Democrats
00:32:19 ►
or the socialists
00:32:22 ►
for that matter, the only way anybody
00:32:24 ►
could beat the libertarians
00:32:25 ►
if you had Paul Newman
00:32:26 ►
is if somebody was smart enough to get George Burns.
00:32:30 ►
I don’t know.
00:32:31 ►
Most people really believe George Burns is God.
00:32:36 ►
Do you know when somebody gets sick on a soap opera,
00:32:39 ►
people send in get well cards?
00:32:42 ►
They have that little sense of the distinction
00:32:44 ►
between fiction and reality.
00:32:46 ►
When J.R. got shot,
00:32:48 ►
people were sending condolence letters to Sue Ellen.
00:32:51 ►
I saw Dallas in German recently,
00:32:53 ►
and that was an unforgettable experience.
00:32:56 ►
Can you imagine J.R. and Sue Ellen and Bobby
00:32:59 ►
and even the black servants all talking German?
00:33:02 ►
It gives an entirely different flavor to Dallas.
00:33:06 ►
I saw that in Berlin.
00:33:09 ►
When I went to Berlin, my wife made me promise I wouldn’t go to East Berlin.
00:33:13 ►
She thinks I’m too much of an adventurer.
00:33:15 ►
I don’t know if she ever got that idea.
00:33:18 ►
And so I promised her I wouldn’t go to East Berlin,
00:33:20 ►
and then I found to get from Bavaria to Berlin, I had to go through East Germany.
00:33:27 ►
And you know what? It’s even worse than you libertarians think. Really. They come on the
00:33:33 ►
train in the middle of the night, and they wake you up and say, you’re a bapers, please.
00:33:37 ►
And they look just like the Nazis in those old war movies that I grew up on. I couldn’t
00:33:42 ►
believe it. They have the same expressions, the same accents,
00:33:45 ►
they walk the same way,
00:33:47 ►
this whole mechanical man bit that Wilhelm Reich analyzed
00:33:50 ►
in The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
00:33:53 ►
And when the train stops at a station,
00:33:55 ►
they have secret policemen get off the train with Tommy guns
00:33:58 ►
and stand on the other side
00:34:00 ►
so nobody can get off the train on the wrong side
00:34:02 ►
and sneak into East Germany to do mischief against them.
00:34:06 ►
It is even more paranoid than Washington.
00:34:08 ►
And that’s saying a lot.
00:34:10 ►
I got out of East Germany and I felt just like the hero of that recent film, Gotcha.
00:34:15 ►
Any of you seen Gotcha?
00:34:17 ►
Yeah, when he gets out of East Germany, he turns around and says,
00:34:19 ►
Fuck you!
00:34:21 ►
That’s just the way I felt when I finally got out of there.
00:34:22 ►
that’s just the way I felt when I finally got out of there
00:34:23 ►
but
00:34:26 ►
I did get out of East Germany and now I’m back
00:34:28 ►
in the land of the free
00:34:29 ►
and you know back in the
00:34:32 ►
60s I was involved in the
00:34:34 ►
desegregation movement
00:34:36 ►
not on
00:34:39 ►
sentimental grounds I felt
00:34:40 ►
very pragmatic about it I had the idea
00:34:43 ►
that if we didn’t
00:34:44 ►
if this country didn’t change radically
00:34:47 ►
in the matter of race relations,
00:34:49 ►
we were going to have an increasingly violent crime problem
00:34:51 ►
escalating to the point where in a hotel,
00:34:54 ►
in an average hotel, you’d have three locks and signs
00:34:57 ►
telling you how to protect yourself while you’re in your room.
00:34:59 ►
Now, I know that sounds paranoid,
00:35:01 ►
but that’s what it seemed to me was likely to happen.
00:35:03 ►
So I thought we needed to desegregate this country.
00:35:06 ►
And to some extent this country has desegregated a bit.
00:35:10 ►
The blacks can sit anywhere on the bus they want now.
00:35:12 ►
Now it’s the smokers who have to sit in the back.
00:35:18 ►
And, well, that’s primate psychology.
00:35:22 ►
One of my standard lectures is called How to tell your friends from the apes
00:35:25 ►
and the point of the lecture is that it’s pretty
00:35:27 ►
difficult in most cases
00:35:29 ►
it’s a basic feature of primate
00:35:32 ►
psychology that you’ve got to have an out group
00:35:34 ►
like how many of you have ever heard
00:35:36 ►
of the tinkers?
00:35:37 ►
my god, this is incredible
00:35:39 ►
you probably know that Northern Ireland isn’t part of Ireland
00:35:42 ►
too, right? Most Americans tell me
00:35:44 ►
why do you live in Ireland? Doesn’t the violence frighten you? There’s no violence
00:35:47 ►
in Ireland. It’s one of the most peaceful countries in the world. The violence is in
00:35:50 ►
Northern Ireland. But most people can’t tell the difference. Most people in this country
00:35:54 ►
don’t know they’re two different countries. And most people here have never heard of the
00:35:58 ►
Tinks, or the Tinkers, generally called the Tinks. That’s a bunch of people who were dispossessed
00:36:04 ►
from their lands by Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century,
00:36:07 ►
and they’ve been on the roads ever since.
00:36:09 ►
And Ireland, which has the honor of being the only country in Europe
00:36:13 ►
which never persecuted the Jews, as Mr. Deasy says in Joyce’s Ulysses,
00:36:17 ►
because they never let them in.
00:36:20 ►
No, actually there are Jews in Ireland.
00:36:23 ►
The mayor of Dublin was a Jew a few years ago,
00:36:26 ►
and the mayor of Cork even more recently.
00:36:28 ►
But Ireland is remarkably free of the kind of racism you find in most of the world.
00:36:35 ►
That’s because they have the tinks.
00:36:37 ►
These are these wandering vagabonds that were dispossessed by Cromwell.
00:36:41 ►
And they are called the tinkers when they’re 50 miles away. The government calls them
00:36:47 ►
the itinerants. And most people call them the Tinkers until they come within 20 miles. And then
00:36:53 ►
they’re called the Tinks. And when they move in next door, they’re called the fucking Tinks.
00:36:57 ►
So Ireland persecutes the Tinks. It’s widely believed that they have all the deplorable
00:37:03 ►
characteristics that most Americans attributed to the Irish 100 years ago
00:37:07 ►
and that were attributed to blacks 20 years ago.
00:37:11 ►
As far as I can make out, there’s no difference between the Tinks and anybody else in Ireland,
00:37:15 ►
except they have less money.
00:37:17 ►
So every group has got to have an out group,
00:37:18 ►
and in the United States today it’s the cigarette smokers.
00:37:22 ►
So now the blacks can sit in the front of the bus and the cigarette smokers sit in the back.
00:37:27 ►
I come into it,
00:37:29 ►
when I arrive in Ireland,
00:37:30 ►
people can smoke anywhere they want.
00:37:32 ►
I know that sounds incredible.
00:37:34 ►
But they’re a backward country.
00:37:36 ►
They haven’t got civilization yet.
00:37:38 ►
I come to this country
00:37:39 ►
and I walk into a restaurant
00:37:40 ►
and they say smoking and non-smoking.
00:37:43 ►
I thought they were kidding.
00:37:44 ►
So I said, smoking, white, Protestant.
00:37:49 ►
They stared at me like I was crazy.
00:37:52 ►
I said, well, if you’re reviving segregation, let me…
00:37:55 ►
I want smoking filtered only, white, Protestant, Episcopalians.
00:37:59 ►
They said, no, no, we can’t do that.
00:38:01 ►
It’s against the law.
00:38:01 ►
We can only discriminate against smokers.
00:38:03 ►
Well, every in-group has got to have an out-group. No, no, we can’t do that. It’s against the law. We can only discriminate against smokers.
00:38:07 ►
Well, every in-group has got to have an out-group.
00:38:12 ►
I went out to the concierge a while ago.
00:38:13 ►
I wanted to mail a letter.
00:38:15 ►
He’s got a sign on his desk that said,
00:38:16 ►
Thank you for not smoking.
00:38:19 ►
So I said to him, Thank you for not picking your nose.
00:38:35 ►
He gave me the weirdest look I get mailings from the friends of the vanishing malaria mosquito
00:38:38 ►
have any of you got any of that?
00:38:41 ►
this is a group that
00:38:43 ►
I get on a lot of weird mailing lists.
00:38:47 ►
I probably have more copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
00:38:50 ►
than anybody in the world.
00:38:53 ►
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is one of those books
00:38:57 ►
in which the alleged villains talk like the villains in an Ayn Rand novel,
00:39:01 ►
which is the kind of thing I can’t believe for a minute
00:39:03 ►
because all the villains I’ve met in the real world say, we’re doing this for your own good. But the Protocols
00:39:09 ►
of the Elders of Zion, they say, in order to exploit the goyim further, our next sinister
00:39:13 ►
plan will be… Nobody talks like that. But I get on these weird mailing lists and I get
00:39:19 ►
things like that. And I get mailings from the friends of the vanishing malaria mosquito. And they are seriously
00:39:25 ►
concerned that throughout Africa and India and Polynesia and parts of South America, the malaria
00:39:32 ►
mosquito has declined in the last 30 years at an alarming rate. It’s one of the most endangered
00:39:37 ►
species on this planet. Places where there used to be literally billions, well, I’ll do my Carl Sagan bit,
00:39:46 ►
billions and billions of malaria mosquitoes,
00:39:49 ►
now there’s five or ten left in some of these areas.
00:39:53 ►
They may be totally extinct by 1992, according to the latest mailing.
00:39:58 ►
And these people, you know, well, you can just check it against the malaria rate.
00:40:02 ►
You find the number of people dying of malaria has been going straight down for the last 30 years.
00:40:06 ►
Hardly anybody dies of malaria anymore,
00:40:09 ►
which shows the extent to which the malaria mosquito has been persecuted, harassed,
00:40:14 ►
and murdered en masse by the heartless chemists and the chemical manufacturers
00:40:19 ►
who have no care for how much life they destroy.
00:40:23 ►
I get these mailings regularly, and I keep looking at them and thinking,
00:40:26 ►
is this a satire, or is it for real?
00:40:29 ►
I can’t tell, because a lot of ecology magazines I get are just as nutty as that,
00:40:33 ►
but they seem to be serious.
00:40:35 ►
Paul Krasner has been saying for 20 years,
00:40:38 ►
it’s getting harder and harder to tell the reality from the satire.
00:40:42 ►
And when the president is going around saying,
00:40:43 ►
I can’t remember the last
00:40:45 ►
time I conspired to break the law, I say, how can you tell the reality from the satire anymore?
00:40:51 ►
I think since I was supposed to have a dialogue with Carl Hess, and I came here prepared to sit
00:40:58 ►
down and have Carl in the next seat, I would say Carl, found any
00:41:06 ►
good windowpane acid lately?
00:41:08 ►
Or something like that.
00:41:09 ►
But Carl isn’t here and so I’m
00:41:12 ►
on my own and
00:41:13 ►
I’d be giving you bits and pieces
00:41:15 ►
of various of my standard lectures
00:41:17 ►
and I
00:41:20 ►
could go on and give you bits and pieces of a
00:41:22 ►
few more of my standard lectures
00:41:23 ►
or entertainments or whatever they are,
00:41:25 ►
but I think it would be more amusing and enlightening
00:41:29 ►
if we had a question period until our time is up.
00:41:32 ►
Oh, wow, that didn’t take long.
00:41:34 ►
I’d like to hear more about the conspiracy theory.
00:41:42 ►
Somebody wants to hear about conspiracy.
00:41:43 ►
I’m not interested in conspiracy theories. I’m not interested in conspiracy theories.
00:41:47 ►
I’m interested in conspiracy facts these days.
00:41:52 ►
Theories are peptide networks in the brain to hold facts together,
00:41:57 ►
to make models that will organize the facts in a coherent way,
00:42:01 ►
and these are dependent on the subjectivity of the person creating the
00:42:05 ►
models. And you can interpret the facts dozens of ways. If you want to hear conspiracy facts,
00:42:11 ►
I’ll spew out the latest conspiracy facts I have picked up lately. Okay, in Miami, Florida,
00:42:20 ►
there used to be a bank called the World Finance Corporation? How many people have heard of the World Finance Corporation?
00:42:25 ►
Only one?
00:42:27 ►
Oh, a few have, yeah.
00:42:28 ►
The World Finance Corporation got in trouble
00:42:30 ►
when the garbage men reported to the DA
00:42:34 ►
that they continually found large stems of marijuana plants in the garbage.
00:42:40 ►
Rather thinky garbage men, I must say.
00:42:43 ►
But the DA got interested, and he put the bank under surveillance,
00:42:47 ►
and he collected enough evidence to get writ from the judge to do wiretapping.
00:42:52 ►
And he got more evidence, and he finally busted the bank,
00:42:55 ►
and it turned out this bank was the biggest drug laundromat in the northern hemisphere.
00:42:59 ►
They were laundering all the profits from the marijuana fields of South America
00:43:06 ►
and a large part of the cocaine business, too.
00:43:09 ►
And the curious thing is that the bank was also used by the CIA
00:43:13 ►
as a fund for deep cover operations.
00:43:19 ►
As a matter of fact, two directors of the bank were former CIA agents.
00:43:24 ►
A former CIA agent, that’s an interesting expression.
00:43:28 ►
Sometimes that means somebody who’s left the agency,
00:43:31 ►
but when you join the agency, you sign the thing saying
00:43:33 ►
you’ll be on call for the rest of your life if they need you.
00:43:36 ►
And so it’s hard to see how anybody can truly be a former CIA agent.
00:43:40 ►
Usually it means somebody who’s working on a project at the agency
00:43:43 ►
doesn’t want tracked back to them, so the worst
00:43:45 ►
that Walter Cronkite can say
00:43:47 ►
is a former CIA agent was
00:43:49 ►
involved instead of the agency
00:43:52 ►
has been laundering cocaine money.
00:43:55 ►
The
00:43:56 ►
World Finance Corporation
00:43:57 ►
transferred the money from the cocaine
00:43:59 ►
industry and the marijuana
00:44:02 ►
industry to the Cisalpine
00:44:03 ►
Bank in the Bahamas, which was owned by Archbishop
00:44:07 ►
Marchinkas and Roberto Calvi.
00:44:11 ►
Roberto Calvi was the one found hanging from a bridge in London two years ago, no, more
00:44:17 ►
than that, five years ago, June 18, 1982.
00:44:21 ►
That was two days after I arrived in Ireland, as a matter of fact.
00:44:24 ►
- That was two days after I arrived in Ireland, as a matter of fact.
00:44:31 ►
Roberto Calvi was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London where the rising tide had covered his dead body.
00:44:39 ►
That’s the penalty threatened in the first degree Masonic initiation for Freemasons who betray their fellow Freemasons,
00:44:46 ►
which suggests that Calvi was either killed by Freemasons or by people who devoutly wish us to think he was killed by Freemasons.
00:44:51 ►
Funny coincidence.
00:44:54 ►
I’m interested in coincidences as well as conspiracies.
00:44:54 ►
Funny coincidence.
00:44:57 ►
The day Calvi was found hanged in London, his secretary fellow was pushed out of a window of the Banco Ambrosiano in Milan.
00:45:03 ►
The Banco Ambrosiano owned part of the Cisalpine Bank in the Bahamas,
00:45:07 ►
and the Vatican Bank owned part of it,
00:45:10 ►
but part of it was owned by Archbishop Marcinkus personally,
00:45:13 ►
which is why they have so many writs out for him in Italy,
00:45:16 ►
that he only comes out of the Vatican on Groundhog’s Day.
00:45:19 ►
And if he sees a policeman’s shadow, he ducks back in,
00:45:22 ►
as you may have read about that.
00:45:24 ►
sees a policeman’s shadow, he ducks back in, as you may have read about that.
00:45:33 ►
Licio Gelli was the grandmaster of the Paidue Lodge of Freemasons in Italy.
00:45:39 ►
Paidue is short for Propaganda Due, or P2 in English.
00:45:55 ►
Gelli got to the third degree in Egyptian Freemasonry, the Grand Orient Lodge, which was founded by Cagliostro and the Duke of Orléans in the 18th century, and many founded his own secret Freemasonic lodge called Pei
00:46:05 ►
Due, of which Roberto Calvi and Archbishop Marchinkas were members.
00:46:10 ►
And Calvi was found hanging from the bridge.
00:46:13 ►
Another member was Michele Sindona, who was the manager of Vatican Affairs and Vatican
00:46:18 ►
Finances in the United States.
00:46:21 ►
Sindona was at Nixon’s second inauguration. He was later indicted for 65 counts of stock and
00:46:29 ►
currency fraud in New York and disappeared and then returned saying he had been kidnapped and
00:46:35 ►
he was indicted for faking his own kidnapping along with the 65 charges of stock and currency
00:46:41 ►
fraud. It turned out he had embezzled $55 million from his own bank
00:46:45 ►
before he sold it back to the Vatican Bank.
00:46:48 ►
Sandona was extradited to Italy to stand trial for murdering a bank examiner.
00:46:52 ►
He was convicted of that, and then he was poisoned in his cell.
00:46:57 ►
Licio Gelli, who set up the Paidue Lodge,
00:47:00 ►
which Sandona and Calvi and Marchinkas were members of,
00:47:04 ►
infiltrated 950 members of Pai Due into the Italian government,
00:47:09 ►
which is why three Italian governments have fallen in the last seven or eight years
00:47:13 ►
because they keep finding more Pei Due members in their government.
00:47:18 ►
Gelli returned.
00:47:20 ►
When he was about to be indicted, he left Italy in a big hurry
00:47:23 ►
because the secret police was infiltrated by his people too.
00:47:28 ►
The head of the secret police was indicted for being a member of the P2 conspiracy.
00:47:33 ►
He died while awaiting trial.
00:47:35 ►
The deputy director of the secret police was indicted on the charge of conspiring
00:47:40 ►
in various bombings and stock and currency frauds and heroin and cocaine deals,
00:47:46 ►
and he’s still awaiting trial.
00:47:48 ►
So there were enough pay-the-way people in the secret police
00:47:51 ►
that when the writ went out to arrest Jelly,
00:47:53 ►
he left Rome immediately and went to Uruguay,
00:47:55 ►
where he had a lot of friends like Klaus Barbie,
00:47:57 ►
whom he had helped get false identity papers.
00:48:00 ►
One of Jelly’s principal jobs before he founded P2 was creating false identity papers
00:48:07 ►
for Nazi war criminals and getting them gainful employment with the CIA in South America.
00:48:15 ►
So he had lots of friends in Uruguay. He went to Uruguay, but later he came back to Switzerland
00:48:20 ►
to take some money out of a numbered bank account, and the Swiss bankers recognized him, turned him over to the police.
00:48:28 ►
The Swiss police are allegedly the most incorruptible police in Europe,
00:48:32 ►
which is what makes it rather astounding that they were only able to hold Jelly for three days.
00:48:39 ►
They put him in a maximum security prison, and in three days he got out and went back to Uruguay.
00:48:44 ►
I was in Switzerland recently, and I was in Geneva.
00:48:48 ►
As a matter of fact, Jelly just disappeared out of that maximum security prison
00:48:52 ►
in such an inexplicable way that the Swiss government is still investigating its own employees
00:48:57 ►
to find out how it was done.
00:48:59 ►
I suggested they should put over the gate of that prison to make it a tourist attraction
00:49:03 ►
the three monkeys, hear no evil
00:49:06 ►
see no evil, speak no evil
00:49:07 ►
and in the best gothic German
00:49:09 ►
script, ficken sie nicht mit
00:49:11 ►
der Freimaurern
00:49:12 ►
don’t fuck around with the Freemasons
00:49:18 ►
Jelly was at Ronald Reagan’s inauguration,
00:49:27 ►
and you’ll find in most books on the Baidu-Ai conspiracy,
00:49:30 ►
you’ll find a photo of Jelly and Reagan together at the inauguration.
00:49:34 ►
They both have big, friendly smiles,
00:49:36 ►
and they seem to be sharing some secret and private joke
00:49:39 ►
that the rest of us haven’t found out about yet,
00:49:42 ►
which may have something to…
00:49:44 ►
You know, Nixon in the Watergate
00:49:46 ►
tapes, the most fascinating line in the
00:49:48 ►
Watergate tapes is the one that hardly anybody
00:49:50 ►
comments on. That’s when
00:49:52 ►
Nixon says, we better pay Hunt.
00:49:54 ►
Even if he wants a million dollars,
00:49:56 ►
but I know how to raise a million dollars.
00:49:57 ►
I can get my hands on a million dollars, and we’ve got to pay
00:50:00 ►
him. He’s threatening to blow the whole
00:50:02 ►
Bay of Pigs thing.
00:50:03 ►
Now the question is, what Bay of Pigs
00:50:05 ►
thing was there that we didn’t know about in 1973 that Hunt could blow? Whatever it is, we still
00:50:11 ►
don’t know about it. It hasn’t been blown yet because Nixon paid the money and Hunt’s wife got
00:50:16 ►
the money and the plane mysteriously exploded, as you all know, destroying most of the evidence.
00:50:22 ►
But whatever Hunt knew about the Bay of Pigs thing,
00:50:25 ►
Hunt was involved in the CIA at the time that Johnny Roselli and Sam Gientana
00:50:30 ►
and the CIA were starting to collaborate on the cocaine business,
00:50:34 ►
all of which flowed through the World Finance Corporation in Miami,
00:50:38 ►
went to the Cisalpine Bank in the Bahamas run by Pei Dewey and Archbishop Marchinkas
00:50:43 ►
and then disappeared into the Vatican Bank,
00:50:45 ►
which is a financial black hole.
00:50:48 ►
That is to say that just like a cosmological black hole
00:50:51 ►
emits nothing that ever enters it, even light can’t get out,
00:50:55 ►
the Vatican Bank, nothing ever gets out.
00:50:57 ►
The Italian government has no authority to edit their books
00:50:59 ►
because the Vatican is a sovereign and independent state.
00:51:02 ►
That’s why they can’t arrest Archbishop Marchinkas.
00:51:05 ►
He’s not living in Italy. He’s living in the Vatican, which sovereign and independent state. That’s why they can’t arrest Archbishop Machinkas. He’s not living in Italy.
00:51:06 ►
He’s living in the Vatican, which is very cozy for him.
00:51:10 ►
Okay, there’s a few conspiracy facts.
00:51:12 ►
You make any theories you want out of them.
00:51:14 ►
Yes?
00:51:14 ►
I don’t want to interrupt you,
00:51:16 ►
but I want to know how this all fits in the trilateral.
00:51:18 ►
You said they care about foreign relations.
00:51:21 ►
Oh, well, you see, the trilateralists
00:51:24 ►
and the Council on Foreign Relations,
00:51:26 ►
now you want me to speculate.
00:51:28 ►
I will speculate as long as everybody in the room says yes at the end of this question.
00:51:34 ►
Do you fully understand that I am speculating and that this is not proven fact?
00:51:40 ►
I will speculate.
00:51:41 ►
Pei Dewei is the tip of the iceberg,
00:51:48 ►
which is part of the age-old Italian conspiracy to control the Western world.
00:51:50 ►
Alan Watts said to me 20 years ago,
00:51:52 ►
the chief error of academic historians
00:51:54 ►
is the belief that the Roman Empire fell.
00:51:57 ►
It never did.
00:51:58 ►
It still controls the Western world
00:52:00 ►
through the Vatican and the mafia.
00:52:03 ►
Well, Alan was exaggerating.
00:52:04 ►
It doesn’t control the Western world. It Vatican and the mafia. Well, Alan was exaggerating. It doesn’t control the Western
00:52:06 ►
world. It’s just trying to.
00:52:08 ►
Now, the trilateralists in the Council
00:52:10 ►
on Foreign Relations, Nelson
00:52:11 ►
Rockefeller, David Rockefeller’s attempt
00:52:14 ►
to control the Western world.
00:52:16 ►
And sometimes they work together
00:52:18 ►
with Pei Dewei and the Vatican and the mafia
00:52:20 ►
and sometimes they fight them.
00:52:21 ►
Meanwhile, Prince Bernhardt has his own
00:52:23 ►
conspiracy to control the Western world, which is the Bilderbergers,
00:52:26 ►
which includes David Rockefeller as a sometimes member.
00:52:30 ►
And so sometimes they work together and sometimes they fight each other.
00:52:34 ►
And then there is the Priory of Sion in France,
00:52:38 ►
which is the most delightful of all modern conspiracies.
00:52:41 ►
But if I try to talk about that, we’d never get finished. Yes? I’d like to pursue your point that
00:52:48 ►
anything that survives over eons of geological time must be serving
00:52:52 ►
some kind of function. Is this idea also applying to the government
00:52:56 ►
and to God?
00:52:59 ►
Yeah, I told you, I’m an individualist, not a libertarian, so I don’t have to
00:53:04 ►
stick to party dogma.
00:53:05 ►
Yeah, my feeling is we’ve got as much government as we need.
00:53:09 ►
When we’ve got more government than we need, there’ll be enough opposition to drive the government back.
00:53:14 ►
I believe in the invisible hand.
00:53:17 ►
There’s this Adam Smith mystique that the invisible hand only acts in a free market.
00:53:25 ►
But I believe the invisible hand acts
00:53:26 ►
everywhere. And when
00:53:28 ►
the government gets obnoxious enough
00:53:30 ►
in any place, any time in history, when it’s
00:53:32 ►
obnoxious enough, there are enough people opposing
00:53:34 ►
it to stop it. When there aren’t enough
00:53:36 ►
people opposing it, that means it’s not obnoxious
00:53:38 ►
enough yet, and it’s got to get more obnoxious.
00:53:41 ►
When it gets more obnoxious, it will
00:53:42 ►
produce the necessary opposition.
00:53:45 ►
So I see the invisible hand everywhere.
00:53:47 ►
So I don’t worry as much as libertarians
00:53:50 ►
do.
00:53:51 ►
What about dialectics?
00:53:54 ►
What about the invisible hand?
00:53:58 ►
Well, you can make a dialectical if you want,
00:54:00 ►
but actually it’s economic Taoism.
00:54:04 ►
It’s based on the profound wisdom of Charles II of England
00:54:08 ►
who said, the more you stir a turd, the more it stinks.
00:54:12 ►
Yes.
00:54:14 ►
What?
00:54:15 ►
How about the stolen bums, the Yale attorney?
00:54:18 ►
Oh, that’s a WASP conspiracy to take over the United States.
00:54:23 ►
I met a district attorney in California recently who told me spontaneously,
00:54:29 ►
without knowing any of my books, we just happened to meet at Esalen,
00:54:33 ►
and he told me that any city in the United States has at least 24 conspiracies
00:54:36 ►
fighting to take over that city.
00:54:38 ►
And that’s just what I’ve argued in several of my books.
00:54:40 ►
Any sociological system, whether it’s a city, a state, a country, or the whole world,
00:54:46 ►
you find basically 24 mega-conspiracies fighting over the turf.
00:54:50 ►
And if it’s big enough, you find a few hundred minor conspiracies
00:54:53 ►
trying to get in on the fight.
00:54:55 ►
This is normal mammalian politics.
00:54:57 ►
It’s been going on for billions of years.
00:55:00 ►
Ah, yes.
00:55:01 ►
Which do you tend most to blame the best on, stupidity or conspiracy?
00:55:07 ►
Stupidity.
00:55:08 ►
Stupidity and conspiracy
00:55:09 ►
are practically synonymous.
00:55:13 ►
This district
00:55:13 ►
attorney I was quoting said something else.
00:55:16 ►
It amazed me
00:55:17 ►
when somebody who’s been in a position of power
00:55:19 ►
agrees with me. I feel that’s a deep
00:55:21 ►
confirmation of my suspicions.
00:55:24 ►
He said the most paranoid people
00:55:26 ►
in the world are the most successful
00:55:27 ►
conspirators because
00:55:30 ►
they know how easy it is to deceive
00:55:31 ►
people. They know how easy it is to double-cross
00:55:34 ►
people and they know what’s going to happen to them
00:55:35 ►
eventually so they’re constantly looking around.
00:55:38 ►
The Godfather complex.
00:55:39 ►
Who’s coming for me with the gun next?
00:55:42 ►
When there was the rebellions
00:55:44 ►
in East Germany in the 50s,
00:55:46 ►
after they were put down, one government
00:55:47 ►
official said the people are going to have
00:55:50 ►
to work at reestablishing
00:55:52 ►
the confidence of the government in them.
00:55:55 ►
And
00:55:55 ►
Bertolt Brecht said, if the government doesn’t
00:55:58 ►
trust the people, why doesn’t it dissolve
00:55:59 ►
them and elect the new people?
00:56:06 ►
In this country, there’s a
00:56:07 ►
government that doesn’t trust the people.
00:56:09 ►
They’re tapping phones constantly.
00:56:13 ►
In California, you can’t even start
00:56:15 ►
a bank account without two pieces of
00:56:17 ►
identification now, which is
00:56:19 ►
incredible. When I was young, you could just walk in
00:56:21 ►
and say, I want to start a bank account. My name is
00:56:23 ►
Snively Waterford. You can start a bank account. My name is Snively Waterford.
00:56:25 ►
You could start a bank account.
00:56:26 ►
Now you’ve got to have two pieces of IT.
00:56:29 ►
The American people are the most policed and governed
00:56:32 ►
and watched and observed and snooped upon people in the whole world,
00:56:37 ►
which is why every time I fly the Atlantic,
00:56:39 ►
when I see the Statue of Liberty, I’ve got to agree with Bernard Shaw.
00:56:42 ►
That must be the most ironic thing in the history of art.
00:56:47 ►
But it’s standing at the entrance to this country.
00:56:51 ►
No place else in the world are they testing urine, you know. This is a strictly American invention. Yes. Oh, what about
00:56:56 ►
God? God is obviously serving a very important evolutionary function.
00:57:00 ►
He gets all the morons together in one place so we can recognize them
00:57:04 ►
and stay out of it yes
00:57:10 ►
do you see something big coming out of the Persian Gulf
00:57:14 ►
a novel or a story that you might write
00:57:17 ►
am I going to write a novel
00:57:19 ►
no I’m not going to write a novel about the Persian Gulf
00:57:23 ►
because I’m too busy right now.
00:57:25 ►
I’ve got other writing projects.
00:57:26 ►
By the time I get around to the Persian Gulf,
00:57:28 ►
it’ll be all over and nobody will be interested in it anymore.
00:57:32 ►
But it’s typical of the affairs of governments.
00:57:36 ►
It’s what keeps me in my firm faith in Our Lady Ares,
00:57:43 ►
the goddess of chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy, and international relations.
00:57:50 ►
Hail Eris, yes.
00:57:52 ►
She was the one who created the golden apple and wrote on it Callisti,
00:57:57 ►
which is Greek for the prettiest one, and started the brawl on Olympus,
00:58:01 ►
which led to the bigger brawl, which became the Trojan War,
00:58:04 ►
which led to the whole development of Western civilization as we know it,
00:58:08 ►
and the steady escalation of chaos, confusion, discord, bureaucracy,
00:58:12 ►
and international relations.
00:58:15 ►
And so, hail Ares.
00:58:18 ►
She’s in charge.
00:58:18 ►
The best we can do is just accept her
00:58:21 ►
and figure out that eventually the chaos and discord and confusion will
00:58:26 ►
create enough entropy that there will be
00:58:27 ►
interstices in which we
00:58:29 ►
individualists can survive.
00:58:31 ►
Especially if we move fast enough.
00:58:35 ►
Yes?
00:58:36 ►
Talk a little bit about LSD.
00:58:38 ►
Ken Kiki said not too long ago
00:58:40 ►
that the two drugs that he
00:58:41 ►
used, they were for anybody, were LSD
00:58:43 ►
and marijuana.
00:58:46 ►
That’s to get a little serious.
00:58:49 ►
Does that in accord with your knowledge?
00:58:53 ►
Well, if you want me to get serious, no.
00:58:54 ►
You don’t have to get serious.
00:58:56 ►
No, that’s not in accord with my knowledge.
00:58:59 ►
I think people have been killed by LSD and marijuana.
00:59:02 ►
People have been killed by overindulging in mashed potatoes.
00:59:04 ►
People have been killed by aspirin.
00:59:05 ►
People have been killed by overindulging in mashed potatoes. People have been killed by aspirin. People have been killed by Valium.
00:59:10 ►
I think Ken Kesey rather overstated the case. I would say that marijuana, my 30 years of experience with marijuana and its users,
00:59:21 ►
I think it’s one of the most harmless drugs in the world.
00:59:24 ►
But some people will find a way to get themselves in trouble even with marijuana.
00:59:29 ►
And as for LSD, I have never, I’ve written a lot of complaints about the government
00:59:34 ►
for making scientific research with LSD illegal,
00:59:38 ►
but I have never felt that LSD is a safe drug for anybody and everybody.
00:59:43 ►
I definitely think it’s highly dangerous to some people,
00:59:47 ►
and it’s dangerous to the very young and immature.
00:59:51 ►
And it has been widely demonstrated that it creates paranoia, anxiety,
00:59:57 ►
and disorientation, and government bureaucrats will never try it.
01:00:04 ►
But, I mean, compared to cocaine, those things are really lovely. Those things
01:00:10 ►
have done more good than, certainly have done a lot more good than harm in loosening up
01:00:15 ►
people’s imprints, freeing up their brains, releasing more peptides, and so on. Cocaine,
01:00:22 ►
I don’t know, since the CIA seems to be
01:00:25 ►
the CIA and the Vatican seem to be making the most money out of cocaine
01:00:29 ►
I am more willing to share my suspicions about cocaine
01:00:32 ►
than I used to be
01:00:33 ►
there were years when I was afraid to say what I really think about cocaine
01:00:37 ►
because so many people I knew were heavily into it
01:00:40 ►
but nowadays I’ve got more courage
01:00:43 ►
there has been a major scientific breakthrough
01:00:46 ►
recently. It has been definitely demonstrated. You can get exactly the same effects as cocaine
01:00:51 ►
by putting talcum powder up your nose, rubbing it in with sandpaper, and then running around
01:00:57 ►
the house burning all the money you can find. If you do that for 30 days,
01:01:06 ►
the effects are exactly like a month on cocaine,
01:01:08 ►
especially when you look at your bank balance.
01:01:13 ►
But as Richard Pryor says,
01:01:15 ►
cocaine is only nature’s way of letting you know
01:01:18 ►
you’ve got too damn much money.
01:01:21 ►
Yes?
01:01:22 ►
I saw a future feed on Cotton’s tape for you
01:01:24 ►
in which you
01:01:25 ►
mentioned that James Tiberius Kirk
01:01:27 ►
was one of your favorite fictional characters
01:01:28 ►
same for me, I was wondering if you could sort of talk
01:01:31 ►
a little bit about why you like him
01:01:33 ►
James Tiberius Kirk
01:01:36 ►
very few people know
01:01:39 ►
that his middle name is Tiberius
01:01:41 ►
as a matter of fact it was never mentioned in any of the
01:01:43 ►
Star Trek shows
01:01:44 ►
this may be absolutely apocryphal that he has that middle name,
01:01:47 ►
but it was on a Star Trek cartoon on a Sunday, Saturday morning my kids were looking at.
01:01:52 ►
And they said, hey, Daddy, look at this.
01:01:55 ►
Oh, yeah, it looks like Spock.
01:01:57 ►
Oh, yeah, it looks like Kirk.
01:01:59 ►
And he gave his full name as James Tiberius Kirk.
01:02:02 ►
He never did that in any of the unanimated
01:02:05 ►
Star Trek TV.
01:02:09 ►
Yeah, okay.
01:02:10 ►
Why do I like Kirk?
01:02:13 ►
Well,
01:02:14 ►
in terms of Leary’s model of the nervous
01:02:16 ►
system, we all have an oral
01:02:18 ►
bio-survival circuit, which is
01:02:19 ►
mainly concerned with how do I get fed
01:02:21 ►
and what dangers are threatening me.
01:02:23 ►
That’s the most primitive part of the mind.
01:02:26 ►
And then we’ve got an anal, territorial, emotional circuit,
01:02:30 ►
which has to do with how much space I can control and who am I on top of.
01:02:33 ►
And this in domesticated primates generally takes the form of who am I morally superior to.
01:02:39 ►
If you want to understand politics and the quarrels and the bitchy little feuds that go on in all political parties,
01:02:46 ►
including the libertarians,
01:02:48 ►
just observe how many people are really playing the game of
01:02:51 ►
I am morally better than you.
01:02:53 ►
That’s such primate politics, putting themselves one up, you know.
01:02:57 ►
And then there’s the third circuit, which is the semantic circuit,
01:03:00 ►
which is concerned with solving problems,
01:03:02 ►
making a map of the universe in the left brain
01:03:06 ►
and then manipulating the universe with the right hand
01:03:08 ►
to see if the map fits and then adjusting the map,
01:03:11 ►
which is profoundly satisfactory to those who don’t want to adjust their maps
01:03:15 ►
and would rather keep one static map forever.
01:03:18 ►
They say she’d really cut off their right hand
01:03:21 ►
so they were never tempted to monkey around with the universe
01:03:23 ►
and find out if their maps work.
01:03:26 ►
And then there’s the socio-sexual
01:03:27 ►
circuit, which has to do with orgasm,
01:03:30 ►
mating, reproduction, and the rearing
01:03:31 ►
of young. And all
01:03:34 ►
primates have these four circuits,
01:03:35 ►
and domesticated primates have surrounded them
01:03:37 ►
all with the most fantastic mythology
01:03:39 ►
and systems of taboos, which is most
01:03:41 ►
of the comedy of human life.
01:03:44 ►
In terms of Star Trek,
01:03:45 ►
Scotty is the bio-survival circuit.
01:03:48 ►
Scotty is down there trying to make
01:03:50 ►
sure that the Starship Enterprise survives
01:03:52 ►
no matter what is put up against it,
01:03:53 ►
and always complaining that our lithium
01:03:55 ►
crystals are a bit low, Captain.
01:03:57 ►
Bio-survival is always a little bit paranoid.
01:04:00 ►
There’s not enough energy. I’m not sure
01:04:02 ►
we’re going to make it. And then Dr.
01:04:04 ►
McCoy is the emotional territorial circuit, the moralist. That’s not moral. I know what’s not enough energy I’m not sure we’re going to make it and then Dr. McCoy is the emotional territorial
01:04:06 ►
circuit the moralist that’s not moral I know what’s
01:04:09 ►
moral I’m a doctor god damn it Jim I know what’s moral
01:04:12 ►
and I don’t want to hear any more of this abstract reason from that
01:04:15 ►
pointy eared Vulcan and of course Spock is the
01:04:18 ►
semantic circuit concerned with solving problems and can’t
01:04:21 ►
understand all the emotional moralistic trips that McCoy
01:04:24 ►
is always on.
01:04:26 ►
And Kirk is the sublimated form of the socio-sexual circuit.
01:04:30 ►
Kirk has never gotten married, although he’s had a few affairs.
01:04:34 ►
Kirk has sublimated the sexual circuit into love for the ship and its crew and desire to protect them.
01:04:40 ►
And I guess I have some kind of adolescent,
01:04:45 ►
still-surviving admiration for that type of person
01:04:49 ►
who protects other people, cares about them,
01:04:53 ►
and is willing to risk his life for them.
01:04:55 ►
That’s why I like Captain Kirk, in terms of evolutionary history.
01:04:59 ►
Besides, Shatner is a terrific actor.
01:05:02 ►
He gave Kirk a sense of humor, even before the scriptwriters did.
01:05:05 ►
In the early scripts where Kirk didn’t have a funny thing to say,
01:05:08 ►
Shatner made it seem funny by the way he said it.
01:05:11 ►
And then the scriptwriters caught on and gave him funny lines.
01:05:14 ►
And Kirk has always had more of a sense of humor
01:05:16 ►
than those people really usually have in real life.
01:05:18 ►
That’s another reason I like Captain Kirk.
01:05:21 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:05:23 ►
where people are changing their lives
01:05:25 ►
one thought at a time. And who doesn’t like Captain Kirk? Of course, my guess is that while
01:05:33 ►
many of our fellow slaughters may know who that character is, they most likely haven’t seen many
01:05:39 ►
of the original Star Trek episodes. And to be honest, well, they don’t really hold up for me very well either.
01:05:45 ►
But Star Trek The Next Generation, well, that’s another story. In my overactive imagination,
01:05:52 ►
the captain of the Enterprise in that series, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, is a descendant of
01:05:58 ►
our own Leonard Picard, author of The Rose of Paracelsus. And I had to smile when Bob was going through that long list of conspiratorial organizations
01:06:08 ►
who were all trying to control the Western world,
01:06:11 ►
because I remembered what Terence McKenna once said
01:06:14 ►
when somebody asked him who was really running things.
01:06:18 ►
And his answer was simple.
01:06:20 ►
He said, nobody is in charge.
01:06:23 ►
And if you think about that for a moment, if true, well, it should worry you even more
01:06:28 ►
than if some evil cabal of coke-crazed billionaires were calling the shots from their underground cities.
01:06:34 ►
Maybe you haven’t heard that one yet, I guess.
01:06:37 ►
Probably because I just made it up.
01:06:39 ►
Or did I?
01:06:42 ►
I guess that before I get even more carried away with making up new conspiracy theories,
01:06:48 ►
I better get out of here for today. I’m in a good mood, as you can tell.
01:06:52 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.