We live at the end of a 1000 year binge on
the philosophical position known as materialism
in its many guises and the basic message of
materialism is that the world is what it appears
to be, a thing composed of matter and pretty
much confined to its surface.
For approximately 500 years the great era
for the triumph of modern science materialism
has had the field all to itself, and its argument
for its preeminence was the beautiful toys
that it could create, aircraft, railways,
television, spacecraft; but that is a fools
argument.
And now at the end of 500 years of the process
of rational quote unquote scientific culture
we are literally at the end of our rope, reason
and science and the practice of unbridled
capitalism have not delivered us into an angelic
realm, quite thew contrary they have delivered
about 3% of us into an angelic realm completely
overshadowed by guilt about the other 97%
of the population who are eating it.
It's not pretty picture modern civilization,
most people in the world are quite miserable
actually.
It's as though nature is saying we are willing
to place the entire planetary ecology in danger
for approximately 50,000 years in order for
the opportunity to be explored of language
using technology expressing intelligence carrying
all of life to the next level.
And it's a terrifying enterprise, because
apparently to carry life to the next level
tremendous intellectual sophistication is
required about the release and control of
energy.
The problem is that energy can be used to
destroy as well as build.
So as the human enterprise has moved toward
greater and greater power and ability to manipulate
the environment the stakes in the cosmic game
have risen, and now what we have have is approximately
100 billion dollars sitting in the centre
of the crap table and one roll of the dice
more and we are either going to win it or
loose everything.
What civilization is, is 6 billion people
trying to make themselves happy by standing
on each other's shoulders and kicking each
other's teeth in.
It's not a pleasant situation.
And yet, you can stand back and look at this
planet and see that we have the money, the
power, the medical understanding, the scientific
know-how, the love and the community to produce
a kind of human paradise.
But we are led by the least among us - the
least intelligent, the least noble, the least
visionary.
We are led by the least among us and we do
not fight back against the dehumanizing values
that are handed down as control icons.
This is something, culture is not your friend.
Culture is for other people's convenience
and the convenience of various institutions,
churches, companies, tax collection schemes,
what have you.
It is not your friend.
It insults you.
It disempowers you.
It uses and abuses you.
None of us are well treated by culture.
Yet we glorify the creative potential of the
individual, the rights of the individual.
We understand the felt-presence of experience
is what is most important.
But the culture is a perversion.
It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania,
it preaches endless forms of false happiness,
endless forms of false understanding in the
form of squirrelly religions and silly cults.
It invites people to diminish themselves and
dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines
- meme processors of memes passed down from
Madison Avenue and Hollywood
All primates have dominance hierarchies, that
simply means that the hard bodies long fanged
young male kick everyone else around, they
control the females, the children, homosexuals,
the elderly everybody is taking orders from
this dominance hierarchy, and this is true
way back into squirrel monkeys, its a generalized
feature of primate behaviour, and it's an
aspect of our behaviour as we sit here It's
a general-
ized feature of primate behavior.
And it's an aspect of our behavior, as we
sit here.
Women -- the feminine -- is not
honored, the elderly are marginalized, homosexuals,
that whole issue.
Many of 
our social and political ills stem from this
attitude.
Well, but you see I believe that
when we left the trees and admitted psilocybin
into our diet that it has the effect
of dissolving boundaries and making this maintenance
of a dominance hierarchy
very very difficult.
First of all, the key on one level to maintaining
the dominance hierarchy is
monogamous pair-bonding.
That's where it begins.
In a society taking a lot of 
psilocybin monogamous pair-bonding breaks
down because of CNS activation
and sexual arousal.
So in a psilocybin-using culture there will
be a tendency to
orgiastic sexual behavior rather than monogamous
pair-bonding.
What that does
is, it causes an incredible social cohesion
because in an orgiastic society men
cannot trace lines of male paternity.
So men's attitude toward children is, 'These
children are all ours.
We the group'.
It's a glue that we, in our paranoid social
style with everybody having the deed to their
property and their 11-foot-high
fence can hardly imagine.
But psilocybin was artificially suppressing
this domina-
tor behavior style in the primate, the evolving
proto hominid, now hominid, now
human being.
 When psilocybin was taken out of the diet
the old, old primate program was still
there.
It had not been bred out.
The genes were always there.
It's just that for
50,000 or 100,000 years, we medicated ourselves
-- literally, religiously -- we
religiously medicated ourselves every new
and full moon, perhaps oftener.
These
orgies were happening, creating social cohesion,
propagating everybody forward.
The problem was, when the psilocybin was taken
away we had been under its
influence for perhaps half a million years.
We had evolved language, rudimentary
abstract philosophy, a sense of religion.
We had invented technology in the form
of using fire and chipping flint and all that.
The psilocybin goes away and
suddenly these skills, these tools, these
technologies, are in the hands of maraud-
ing apes -- not any more cohesive caring human
social groups -- but marauding
territorial apes driven by the desire to control
all weaker members of the social
group.
And that's our circumstance.
We have, you know, the tools that would allow
us to
sculpt paradise but we have the reflexes and
value systems of anthropoid apes of 
some sort.
So the split between our conscious hopes,
our best foot and the bottom
of the human scale is appalling.
I mean, look at the spread.
It's a spread from,
well, from Mother Teresa to serial killers.
I mean, you don't get serial killers in
the chipmunk population, or the grasshopper
population.
I mean, these animals
are not so set at variance with their basic
nature that these kinds of pathologies
can erupt.
 We, on the other hand, are half angel, half
pack-hunting killer ape.
I mean, we
are an object-fetish society.
I mean, our entire psychology is characterized
by a
profound discontent.
That's what we're about.
It doesn't matter -- no matter
what's going on, after a little while we get
restless and move on.
Other animal
species are embedded in a kind of world of
endless genetic cycling.
No fox grows
bored with hunting, you know?
And yet our thing is a profound
dis-ease
.
And I believe it's because -- and slowly you've
forced me to do this whole rap,
which I swore I wouldn't do -- I believe it's
because the psilocybin led us halfway
toward a kind of godhead.
But then it disappeared and we are left in
this very
peculiar situation.
This is the myth of the Fall.
You know, we are half angel, half 
beast.
And these two natures are united in every
one of us.
And when you take
psilocybin you feel generally a great sense
of community, an ascent to a higher
level.
If you completely restrict your intake of
intoxicants of any sort then you get the teetotaler
type personality, which is characterized by
incredible smugness,
limited intellectual horizons, and an unbearable
aura of self-congratulation that makes it
pretty hard for the rest of us to put up with.
