Our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas

History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.

I don't think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water and show them off to the rest of us and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures.

It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.

Psychedelic experiences are beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it.

I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage.

Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.