Michael Pollan: prediction

Transcript context

…Doesn’t that also mean they’re not radical? If they’re not going to fight Nixon’s wars, maybe they’re not going to fight other wars either. They’re not going to fight civil wars. They’re not going to fight as much for social justice. Is it part of a new bread-and-circuses equilibrium? It could be. “Does it depoliticize people?” would be an interesting question. You can ask that of all contemplative practice. People who meditate become Buddhists, who become so enlightened that they’re less dissatisfied with the world as it is. I think that’s a risk definitely of contemplative practices of all kinds. But going back to the political question, too, the other issue is the attitude toward the environment. He [Carhart-Harris] has done a study — you can tell me, better than I can judge, whether it has any merit or weight — measuring something called nature relatedness, which is a scale that psychologists use. How much do you feel a part of nature or stand apart from it? Before and after psychedelics, nature relatedness scores go up. I think what might be going on is that the kinds of powerful connections that people feel, whether to other people, love, or to nature, on psychedelics may be the result of the lowering of ego defenses that wall us off from other people. That’s why I do think that, to the extent our big problems, in my view, are the environmental crisis and tribalism right now. Psychedelics, the experience of it, the anecdotal reports of it, and some of this light science about it suggest that they address both those things, which I think is interesting and may explain why there is such interest in it right now. I also am very alert to the possibility that psychedelic experience is completely constructed and that in the ’60s, because of other things that were going on, it tended to increase anti-authoritarian feeling. It’s equally plausible to me that these drugs could be brainwashing agents. That was certainly how Charlie Manson used them. He used them to keep his posse in line. I don’t know exactly how or what he told them. The CIA thought it could be a mind-control agent for a long time. The fundamental fact that these drugs are so suggestible in their effects, that set and setting so heavily influence the experience, if you took it in the context of a cult, if you took it in the context of someone trying to change your thinking, it might work. So it increases the power of those who control the context and the environment perhaps.…

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