We are so perversely committed in the way we invest energy. A modern, well-equipped fighter plane costs 75 million dollars. The United States government orders them in lots of 500 at a time. You know what 75 million dollars would do to consciousness research in California? The cost of one fighter plane! I, and the people I know, and they people they know could deliver the millennium for that kind of money if the law stood back. Because what we’re talking about is a correlation of data that has gone on now for 400–500 years: botanical data, chemical data, human data, anthropological data, data about language, data about complex systems generally, mathematical models, dynamics, chaos theory, so forth and so on. These are the tools out of which an understanding of the dynamics of mind can be created. And creating an understanding of the dynamics of mind is the way out of the political logjam. No amount of haranguing and preaching is going to do it. It requires a breakthrough to the mechanics of our selves. That’s what it basically comes down to: that we must see ourselves as potentially salvageable, reprogrammable, and worth saving.
We can actually begin to figure out what’s going on. Not in terms of the first three milliseconds of the universe, but actually: what is going on on this planet? What is human history? What is a cognizing species doing, running around by the billions on the surface of this planet, obsessed with religions, and driven by vice and hatred and visionary longing? This is not what they talk about in the biology books—still less is it what they talk about in the physical chemistry books. Something has torn loose on the surface of this planet, and we are embedded in it, and we are it, and it is sweeping us and all life on this planet into some kind of apotheosis; some kind of shit-hit-the-fan situation where all the hopes and dreams and fears and obsessions are going to be held up to some kind of transcendental inspection. Nothing can stop this.
We are like monkeys sitting in the presence of a flying saucer whose doorway has just been flung open. This is what we need to become conscious of. We need to dissolve the assumptions of the culture. And this is why LSD was so terrifying, because I firmly believe that one of the things psychedelics do is: they dissolve cultural assumptions. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a member of the politburo or a go-go dancer in Berlin or a professor of agronomy in Kansas, you will doubt your beliefs and your world if you take psychedelics. This is good. We need to dissolve our cultural conditioning and try to get down to brass tacks, because I’m convinced that reality is a tinker toy set that we can learn to take apart and put together in completely different ways.
You know, before they were called “psychedelics,” they were called “consciousness-expanding drugs.” Well, if there’s any possibility that that’s true, let’s put our best people on it. Because consciousness is what we’re dying for. We don’t have enough of it. We can’t feed the hungry, we can’t manage a global economy, we can’t hold down guerrilla warfare, we can’t cure AIDS—we need to get smart. And if this stuff has anything to do with getting smart on any level, even for one in a thousand of those who use it, pour it on! We can’t stand around like a bunch of nitwits just watching the planet burn down around us.
There are dominator societies and there are partnership societies. And gender has nothing to do with it. We can entirely overcome the bullshit about gender in talking about cultural forms. It’s dominator versus partnership.