patrick.net

Waddya supposed to 'learn' from fake history?

Ideology is not our friend. Where is it writ in adamantine that semi-carnivorous monkeys can or should be capable ot understanding reality?

That seems to me one of the first illusions, and one of the more prideful illusions of human culture. Better to try and frame questions which can do it and leave off searching for answers, because answers are like operating systems; they are being upgraded faster than you can keep up with it. If we go back a long ways in time, the universe is a very simple place. There are no cultures, there are no animals, there are no plants. Indeed, if we go far enough back in time, there are no stars and planets. The universe is simply a swarming ocean of energy.

But as we approach the present it’s as though the universe has undergone a series of crystallizations out of itself of higher and higher forms of organization. And this is what I call novelty. Now, there is a retardant force, and I call it habit—to keep it away from concepts like thermodynamic entropy. Habit. And so, in my model of the way things work—gleaned from observation; stoned and unstoned—is that the cosmos, your life, the politics of this city, the history of Western civilization, is a struggle between habit and novelty.

Habit is also an intuitively graspable concept. It means conservatism, recidivism, doing things the traditional way, not taking chances. And these things are not moral values. Sometimes the right move is habitual, sometimes the right move is novel. But the universe, as a system, is what I call a novelty-conserving engine. In other words, where novelty is produced it tends to be tenaciously hung onto. It can’t always be hung onto, but it is tenaciously hung onto.

Well, why should culture imprison us and somehow place a barrier between ourselves and our true humanness? Well, I think I said at the beginning of this thing: culture and ideology are not your friends. They are not your friends. This is a hard thing to come to terms with, because a certain kind of alienation lies at the end of this thought process. On the other hand, you can’t live in the cradle forever. You can’t be clueless forever. So somebody might as well just lay it out for you and say culture is for the convenience of culture, not you. How many times have your sexual desires, career aspirations, financial dealings, and aesthetic inclinations been squashed, twisted, rejected, and minimized by cultural values? And if you don’t think culture is your enemy, ask the 18-year-old kid who is given a rifle and sent to the other side of the world to murder strangers if culture is his friend. These extreme examples should bring it home to us that it’s a kind of a con game.

It is, in fact, strangely enough, a kind of virtual reality. We have been led to think of virtual realities as something on the screen of a computer, or presented through a headset, but that’s an electronic virtual reality. The primary technology for the building of virtual realities is language. Once you start talking about race pride, loyalty, our destiny, our God, our mission, it’s like building virtual realities. And people begin to treat these things as though they had the substantiality of real objects, and to build their lives as though these things were real.

And what is this? It’s a diminution of humanness. You’re choosing to limit yourself to a cultural reality—whether it’s the reality of being Witoto, or Orthodox Jewish, or whatever it is. It’s a smaller world than the simple hardware you were born into this universe with. And the substances—the drugs, the plants, the things which perturb consciousness—they don’t address cultural values, they blast through them. They address the animal body, the mammalian brain. They perturb these information fields outside of the relativistic set of values that culture is giving you.

- Terrence McKenna, Culture and Ideology Are Not Your Friends, April, 1999

gabbar says

Where is it writ in adamantine that semi-carnivorous monkeys can or should be capable ot understanding reality?

Not a good start for a lecture on reality. Humans are apes, not monkeys.

Gabbar. You pulled an Ohomen here. Not trying to be negative, but paragraph breaks are nice for ease of reading.

WookieMan says

Gabbar. You pulled an Ohomen here. Not trying to be negative, but paragraph breaks are nice for ease of reading.

You are correct. I tried to fix it. I collect quotes, I have nearly 1000 pages of them so far. Just copied and pasted it instead of dividing into paragraphs.

@gabbar

“Well, why should culture imprison us and somehow place a barrier between ourselves and our true humanness? Well, I think I said at the beginning of this thing: culture and ideology are not your friends. They are not your friends. This is a hard thing to come to terms with, because a certain kind of alienation lies at the end of this thought process. On the other hand, you can’t live in the cradle forever. You can’t be clueless forever. So somebody might as well just lay it out for you and say culture is for the convenience of culture, not you. […]

Once you start talking about race pride, loyalty, our destiny, our God, our mission, it’s like building virtual realities. And people begin to treat these things as though they had the substantiality of real objects, and to build their lives as though these things were real. And what is this? It’s a diminution of humanness. You’re choosing to limit yourself to a cultural reality—[…] It’s a smaller world than the simple hardware you were born into this universe with.”

Yes, I would have agreed with this general sense of overcoming cultures to seek truth, humanness, and oneness back when it was written. The past is a foreign country in a way, and the culture Terrence McKenna was immersed ca 1999 was under no external threat. Not from war and especially not from replacement levels of immigration, coupled with hostile media. He’s right — stoics and mystics have thrown off culture to seek higher truths since the first writings of the Greeks, and almost certainly before.

However we’re also chained to our biology. We yearn for truth, but we also yearn on a biological level for a continuation of our genetic legacy. Culture helps us do that, until it’s hijacked (as ours has been the last 15 years) into teaching that trannies are women, white children are a sign of racist parents, and replacement immigration is necessary. It turns out, the culture of McKenna’s 1990’s (and before) was far more positive for family formation and continuation of genetics than whatever we have now. A benign culture enables the higher seeking. A hostile culture keeps us focused on the venal.

goofus says

Culture helps us do that, until it’s hijacked (as ours has been the last 15 years) into teaching that trannies are women, white children are a sign of racist parents, and replacement immigration is necessary. It turns out, the culture of McKenna’s 1990’s (and before) was far more positive for family formation and continuation of genetics than whatever we have now. A benign culture enables the higher seeking. A hostile culture keeps us focused on the venal.

Why are our countrymen doing to this? Is it because they want to stay in power by destabilizing our society?

https://x.com/BGatesIsaPyscho/status/1883981748251554218

Cats were donated to a prison for the inmates instead of being euthanized. Good idea.

Nursing homes should all have dogs as well. When my mother was in a nursing home dying from a brain tumor, I noticed that someone brought in a dog and all the elderly patients really cheered up. Dog liked it too.