... I'm sifting through the incessent flux of novelty on the internet. I wanted to find out a little more about Terence McKenna, who I mentioned in a paper I wrote on Synesthesia. He argued that drug induced synesthesia (experiences where one sense modality causes a perception in another -- like tasting words or seeing sounds) is resposible for the development of language.
Though, I found his conclusion unlikely since the
statistics I found (admittedly they weren't collected very scientifically) showed only 54.1% of the survey respondents who took psychedlic drugs experienced any kind of synesthesia, and of those people less experienced any kind of "language inducing form" (sounds to shapes) that our anestors would have needed to experience frequently. If only a similar percentages of our ancestors had the same experience, why can nearly 100% of us use language? He also fails to explain why our ancestors wouldn't have developed Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD), which wouldn't have been a set of adaptive behaviors.
This quote is from
rotten.com's library article on Terence McKenna, that cites him saying it in an essay that they didn't name and I couldn't find.
We wouldn't be here if it weren't for psychedelic drugs. In terms of the role of psilocybin in human evolution on the grasslands of Africa, people not on drugs were behind the curve. The fact is that, in terms of human evolution, people not on psychedelics are not fully human. They've fallen to a lower state, where they're easily programmed, boundary defined, obsessed by sexual possessiveness which is transferred into fetishism and object obsession. We don't want too many citizens asking where the power and the money really goes. Informed by psychedelics, people might stop saluting. 'Take your political party, your job, whatever, and shove it.'
Terence McKenna is a perfect example of everything that was wrong with the 60's.
I've never done any psychedelic drug in my entire life, and I've spent a very significant portion of it wondering where the money and power is going. I'd imagine the same was true for Terence before he started taking drugs.
( My mad money and power analysis skillz ) The 60's have left modern young progessives like me with the nearly intractable problem of trying to seperate the good sane ideas popularized in that era from the insanity they were entangled with at the same time. The legacy of the 60's is what causes the naive romanticism in so much of our culture for pathological people and behaviors. It's why the left can't get its shit together to effectively organize. It's why moderates have every right to call us the "looney left," because there's plenty of lunatics in the left (though to be fair, there's plenty of lunatics in the far right too -- yes, I'm talking to you
Alex Jones).
Look, everybody -- let's stop this cult-like hero worship of people like Terence McKenna (and Abbie Hoffman, and Hunter S. Thompson -- physcially healthy people who commit suicide aren't heros no matter how much you liked their books) who are really just a slightly less meglomanical then
Jim Jones.
( The political is personal. ) Or maybe if you asked a simpler question like: "Hey, why are we so focused on sex, and less on what we can do to help poor single mothers?" The honest answer would be: "Because that's the kind of work that won't get us a lot of attention. So we're not as interested in doing that as we are in intellectualizing our histrionic relationships in a way that places blame for the problems they cause on society (hence, why it's so imperative we collectively shun you if you suggest otherwise) instead of taking responsibility for them. We've decided to co-opt social justice movements to do this. In this way, not only can we marginalize the effect of social justice movements world wide, but we can also get a lot of attention doing it!"
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