"A meme has gotten loose on this planet, that is the social equivalent of cancer, in my opinion. What it is, is capitalism. Capitalism does not serve human beings, it serves itself in the same way that cancer serves itself. What I mean by this, is that it fetishizes objects. It tries to tell you that certain objects will make you happy if you can possess them. You work very hard to possess them, but then you’re not happy. At the same time, it’s raising these expectations in the hearts and minds of millions and millions of millions of people it knows it can’t deliver to. If you cut all the rain forests and dug all the metals, you couldn’t deliver the middle class American lifestyle to the population of the planet, and the effort to do so would wreck the entire ecological system. Capitalism either has to transform itself from within, because no human being or institution can oppose it, or there has to come some force from the outside which will break it down. I don’t know what it could be, unless it would be a revulsion over the cost of practicing what capitalism is.
This is the job for the media. The media has basically whored itself to the capitalistic agenda, and knows no way out. The media in the naive era, before all this stuff was figured out, was here to educate and inform the citizens so that rational decisions could be made. That’s not what it’s about now. Now, it’s to distort, manipulate, delude, and mislead.
What is needed is a rediscovery of inner wealth. This is again the psychedelic thing. The reason people fetishize objects is that they have no accessible dimension of inner worth. They feel worthless without the Ferrari and the quisinart and whatever this object is they’re into.
Once you take psychedelics, you discover this is shabby stuff compared to the inner wealth of your own imagination. But unless you know that, you will always want after that stuff. My hope is, and it seems to accompany psychedelic use, there will be less interest in material possessions.
People who take psychedelics make and lose money in a considerably more relaxed fashion than people who don’t."
~ Terrence McKenna
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