I found McKenna's talk "comforting". Like Nikita, over the years I have listened almost randomly to Terrence's critique of the political establishment, of the church and of the role vested interests play in setting the public agenda. And again, I find myself enlightened and delighted to reconnect with what I consider to be the main agenda for our baby-boom generation, the role of consciousness in defining our horizons. Thank-you, Glenn for keeping our "eye on the ball".
Lower education, too. Talk to home schooling parents about (the free) Khan Academy on YouTube. Teachers unions with their shibboleth of "social justice" can't cut the mustard, so they call for the abolition of testing.
Oh, well, like it or not, creative destruction is inevitable. Things have gone too far, and modern technology is too perfect a fit.
Glenn called it 100% when he said this is "apocalyptic talk." McKenna's whole shtick was that we're approaching what he called "the strange attractor" or "hyper-dimensional object at the end of time." The idea was to put the mainstream view of the history of the universe on its head, and to say that we're being pulled into something incomprehensible that awaits in the future, rather than living out the consequences of something incomprehensible (the Big Bang) that happened in the past. He saw the apocalyptic myths present in most cultures as intuitions about this state of affairs. He even went so far as to predict that we would encounter this strange attractor in 2012 (which was such an outlandish claim that I often feel that part of its function was to make sure that people didn't take him too seriously—he had great humor about it).
But when it comes to conspiracy theories and the "personification of forces that are perhaps very impersonal," I think, in this case, it was just a provocative, playful way to state his point. (The point being that the protest movements of the 60s benefited from the kind of higher education he had received, and that the consequent commercialization of higher ed was a part of a backlash against that counterculture.)
"...And this to me is the clue to understanding something that is personally fascinating to me. It revolves around why people believe such weird things.
(Laughter.)
And why, either as a consequence of the approach of the millennium, or the breakdown of traditional values, or the density of electromagnetic radiation, or for some reason, a balkanization of epistemology is taking place.
And what I mean by that is there is no longer a commonality of understanding.
I mean, for some people, quantum physics provides the answers. Their next-door neighbor may look to the channeling of arch-angels with equal fervor. I mean, if this is not a balkanization of epistemology, I don't know what it is.
It is accompanied by a related phenomenon, which is: technology, or the historical momentum of things, is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey mind cannot find a simple story, a simple creation myth (or redemption myth), to lay over the crazy contradictory patchwork of profane techno-consumerist, post-McLuhanist, electronic pre-apocalyptic existence.
And so into that dimension of anxiety, created by this inability to parse reality, rushes a bewildering variety of squirrely notions…
(Laughter.)
Epistemological cartoons, if you will.
And conspiracy theory, in my humble opinion — I'm somewhat immune to paranoia, so those of you who aren't, you know, gaze in wonder…
(Laughter.)
Conspiracy theory is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality.
I mean, isn't it so simple to believe that things are run by the Grays, and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them, and we can solve our technological problems? Or isn't it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything, or the Communist Party, or the Catholic Church, or the Masons?
Well, these are epistemological cartoons. It's kindergarten stuff in the art of amateur historiography.
I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying. That the real truth that dares not speak itself is that no-one is in control.
(Laughter.)
Absolutely no one. You know, you don't understand Monica, you don't understand Netanyahu? It's because nobody is in control.
This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos.
Now, there may be entities seeking control — the World Bank, the Communist Party, the rich, somebody other — but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself. Because this process that is underway will take the control freak by the short and curly and throw them against the wall.
Dec 29, 2021·edited Dec 29, 2021Liked by Nikita Petrov
The thing neither McKenna nor Prof. Loury mentioned is the massive *expansion* of the university-going portion of each generation from the pre-WWII generations through the boomers and descending down to today. As late as 1940, only about 6% of the population had four or more years of college education. By 1970 that had doubled to about 11%, and has increased in a fairly linear manner until today we're bumping up against 37-38% of the population. Under those conditions - going from being able to cherry-pick the far right tail of talent, interest, aptitude, dedication in academic matters, to having to take the whole top third of the distribution - it would be almost inconceivable for curricula and the social role of a college education to *not* radically change. In fact, having people pouring into the streets with all sorts of weird ideas just after a massive increase in the spread of high-intellectual concepts already has a precedent - the exact same thing happened when the bible got translated into the vulgar and promulgated via the printing press during the beginning of the Reformation! Look into the early protestant sects - all sorts of WILDLY crazy beliefs started running around, because suddenly people had the chance to interpret important texts themselves, without any social framework to guide that interpretation other than already-mature interpretive traditions demanding adherence rather than providing support.
For the record there was a mushroom trip involved in some recent writing of mine on Orwell. McWhorter should write a book about how this is the practice of a new religion. The 60s will be remembered for the music and the drugs. Don’t take it so seriously.
Dec 29, 2021·edited Dec 29, 2021Liked by Nikita Petrov
McKenna is not only wrong, he's wrong in a self-serving kind of way. The 60s counterculture was not "suppressed," it split in two, with one faction selling out and becoming the "me" generation of the 70s and 80s, and the other colonizing academia. The fruits of both factions are now before us. And the "professionalization" of higher education is the inevitable result of the rent seeking of the academic class, both financial and ideological, that was ushered in by McKenna and his ilk. The only way academia can get normie parents and their kids to shell out the insane amounts of money it now requires to get a bachelor's degree -- amounts that McKenna could not even fathom when he received the benefits of a highly subsidized, high quality public education in the UC system in the 60s -- *and* to require those kids to sit through hours of highly ideological "education" in the humanities and social sciences to boot, is to promise them a return on investment in the form of both employability and social status. To clutch his pearls and exclaim that this was done at the expense of the lower middle class is the height of irony -- the entire point of an elite American education is to be able to look down on the lower middle class! And the obscurantist nature of that education -- the jargon and the doctrines and the isms -- is a very visible means of displaying that lofty status, even if your BA in postcolonial studies or gender studies or what have you only qualifies you to work low-level service jobs that don't even pay as well as a plumber or electrician or carpenter. The "police state" McKenna decries is really cancel culture, the policing by the educational/journalistic/artistic elite of the rest of us.
And his claim that studying Locke, Hume, Plato, etc. makes people "ungovernable" is laughable. As if the college students of the 1960s were the first people to ever read these authors. It is so, so, SO narcissistic.
Sorry for the rant, but whinging counterculture boomers are a trigger for me. We are living in the increasingly dysfunctional world they have created, after they inherited the most prosperous and liberal society the world has ever seen.
Pretty excited for this! I’ve been a Terrence McKenna fan since the early 90’s. It’s great to see you digging into something a bit different and TMK was a wildly creative thinker.
I found McKenna's talk "comforting". Like Nikita, over the years I have listened almost randomly to Terrence's critique of the political establishment, of the church and of the role vested interests play in setting the public agenda. And again, I find myself enlightened and delighted to reconnect with what I consider to be the main agenda for our baby-boom generation, the role of consciousness in defining our horizons. Thank-you, Glenn for keeping our "eye on the ball".
The universities have set the table for a good old-fashioned dose of creative destruction.
Hilariously bloated. Overpriced. Inefficient. Crassly political. Dissatisfied customers.
Lower education, too. Talk to home schooling parents about (the free) Khan Academy on YouTube. Teachers unions with their shibboleth of "social justice" can't cut the mustard, so they call for the abolition of testing.
Oh, well, like it or not, creative destruction is inevitable. Things have gone too far, and modern technology is too perfect a fit.
A couple of side notes:
Glenn called it 100% when he said this is "apocalyptic talk." McKenna's whole shtick was that we're approaching what he called "the strange attractor" or "hyper-dimensional object at the end of time." The idea was to put the mainstream view of the history of the universe on its head, and to say that we're being pulled into something incomprehensible that awaits in the future, rather than living out the consequences of something incomprehensible (the Big Bang) that happened in the past. He saw the apocalyptic myths present in most cultures as intuitions about this state of affairs. He even went so far as to predict that we would encounter this strange attractor in 2012 (which was such an outlandish claim that I often feel that part of its function was to make sure that people didn't take him too seriously—he had great humor about it).
But when it comes to conspiracy theories and the "personification of forces that are perhaps very impersonal," I think, in this case, it was just a provocative, playful way to state his point. (The point being that the protest movements of the 60s benefited from the kind of higher education he had received, and that the consequent commercialization of higher ed was a part of a backlash against that counterculture.)
The reason I say this is McKenna often made fun of conspiracy theories and maintained that "no-one is in control." I recently posted a transcript on that from one of his talks over at Psychopolitica: https://psychopolitica.substack.com/p/a-bewildering-variety-of-squirrely
The relevant bit:
"...And this to me is the clue to understanding something that is personally fascinating to me. It revolves around why people believe such weird things.
(Laughter.)
And why, either as a consequence of the approach of the millennium, or the breakdown of traditional values, or the density of electromagnetic radiation, or for some reason, a balkanization of epistemology is taking place.
And what I mean by that is there is no longer a commonality of understanding.
I mean, for some people, quantum physics provides the answers. Their next-door neighbor may look to the channeling of arch-angels with equal fervor. I mean, if this is not a balkanization of epistemology, I don't know what it is.
It is accompanied by a related phenomenon, which is: technology, or the historical momentum of things, is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey mind cannot find a simple story, a simple creation myth (or redemption myth), to lay over the crazy contradictory patchwork of profane techno-consumerist, post-McLuhanist, electronic pre-apocalyptic existence.
And so into that dimension of anxiety, created by this inability to parse reality, rushes a bewildering variety of squirrely notions…
(Laughter.)
Epistemological cartoons, if you will.
And conspiracy theory, in my humble opinion — I'm somewhat immune to paranoia, so those of you who aren't, you know, gaze in wonder…
(Laughter.)
Conspiracy theory is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality.
I mean, isn't it so simple to believe that things are run by the Grays, and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them, and we can solve our technological problems? Or isn't it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything, or the Communist Party, or the Catholic Church, or the Masons?
Well, these are epistemological cartoons. It's kindergarten stuff in the art of amateur historiography.
I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying. That the real truth that dares not speak itself is that no-one is in control.
(Laughter.)
Absolutely no one. You know, you don't understand Monica, you don't understand Netanyahu? It's because nobody is in control.
This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos.
Now, there may be entities seeking control — the World Bank, the Communist Party, the rich, somebody other — but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself. Because this process that is underway will take the control freak by the short and curly and throw them against the wall.
(Laughter.)
It's like trying to control a dream, you see."
The thing neither McKenna nor Prof. Loury mentioned is the massive *expansion* of the university-going portion of each generation from the pre-WWII generations through the boomers and descending down to today. As late as 1940, only about 6% of the population had four or more years of college education. By 1970 that had doubled to about 11%, and has increased in a fairly linear manner until today we're bumping up against 37-38% of the population. Under those conditions - going from being able to cherry-pick the far right tail of talent, interest, aptitude, dedication in academic matters, to having to take the whole top third of the distribution - it would be almost inconceivable for curricula and the social role of a college education to *not* radically change. In fact, having people pouring into the streets with all sorts of weird ideas just after a massive increase in the spread of high-intellectual concepts already has a precedent - the exact same thing happened when the bible got translated into the vulgar and promulgated via the printing press during the beginning of the Reformation! Look into the early protestant sects - all sorts of WILDLY crazy beliefs started running around, because suddenly people had the chance to interpret important texts themselves, without any social framework to guide that interpretation other than already-mature interpretive traditions demanding adherence rather than providing support.
For the record there was a mushroom trip involved in some recent writing of mine on Orwell. McWhorter should write a book about how this is the practice of a new religion. The 60s will be remembered for the music and the drugs. Don’t take it so seriously.
McKenna is not only wrong, he's wrong in a self-serving kind of way. The 60s counterculture was not "suppressed," it split in two, with one faction selling out and becoming the "me" generation of the 70s and 80s, and the other colonizing academia. The fruits of both factions are now before us. And the "professionalization" of higher education is the inevitable result of the rent seeking of the academic class, both financial and ideological, that was ushered in by McKenna and his ilk. The only way academia can get normie parents and their kids to shell out the insane amounts of money it now requires to get a bachelor's degree -- amounts that McKenna could not even fathom when he received the benefits of a highly subsidized, high quality public education in the UC system in the 60s -- *and* to require those kids to sit through hours of highly ideological "education" in the humanities and social sciences to boot, is to promise them a return on investment in the form of both employability and social status. To clutch his pearls and exclaim that this was done at the expense of the lower middle class is the height of irony -- the entire point of an elite American education is to be able to look down on the lower middle class! And the obscurantist nature of that education -- the jargon and the doctrines and the isms -- is a very visible means of displaying that lofty status, even if your BA in postcolonial studies or gender studies or what have you only qualifies you to work low-level service jobs that don't even pay as well as a plumber or electrician or carpenter. The "police state" McKenna decries is really cancel culture, the policing by the educational/journalistic/artistic elite of the rest of us.
And his claim that studying Locke, Hume, Plato, etc. makes people "ungovernable" is laughable. As if the college students of the 1960s were the first people to ever read these authors. It is so, so, SO narcissistic.
Sorry for the rant, but whinging counterculture boomers are a trigger for me. We are living in the increasingly dysfunctional world they have created, after they inherited the most prosperous and liberal society the world has ever seen.
Pretty excited for this! I’ve been a Terrence McKenna fan since the early 90’s. It’s great to see you digging into something a bit different and TMK was a wildly creative thinker.