When we aggregate socially, there’s something like a collective cultural vision that we’re living in, breathing in, dressing in all the time, and it keeps us from flipping out, basically, into the undigested pre-linguistic chaos of the who-knows-what right around the corner.
Technology is like the visible condensation of language. And so what this process of neurological activity driven by psilocybin (or driven by whatever) seems to be about is the excretion of ideas. Most animal forms lay an egg, spin a web, dig a hole. We have put in place some kind of omni-adaptable design process, where they had a single gene for behavior—or a set of genes. And so, then, what we do is: we make ideas. And this process has become more and more accelerated over time, because one idea synergizes another. And we’ve essentially migrated inside a realm of ideas, much in the same way that the social insects migrated into a pheromonal social structure. And we’re living now inside these ideas. I mean, some of them are physical ideas (like automobiles and subways), but most of them are ideological constructs like filial obligation, monogamy, capitalism, shamanism. There’s no moral judgment on this, this is just what we do.
The complete sequencing of the human genome and the ability to completely manipulate the palette of genetic material in order to redesign ourselves out of history? This is possible. This is now within reach. I mean, we could conceive of a future where, somehow, we did something with ourselves that left us unrecognizable to ourselves.
Could we create a planet where every eye that looked out at that world was a conscious eye with a thinking, judging mind behind it, from sea slug to squirrel monkey, somebody you once knew?
Ahead of us this technology process has a foreseeable end. You can imagine the tool. You know, the final tool: a union of human intentionality and spirit as matter.
It’s going to be playing itself to pieces. In other words, it’s going to look like the end of the world. More and more it is looking like the end of the world. But the metaphor that seems to have the heart-thing in it, and to put it across to people, is to say that it’s like a birth. If you had never seen someone give birth, and you came around a corner and were confronted with this phenomenon, it reeks of medical emergency. There’s moaning and groaning, and blood is being shed, and people are thrashing around. So then you would conclude there was a problem. It would take a real leap of faith to embrace this as a wonderful occasion and a great natural step forward. And that’s the planetary situation that we’re in. I mean, we’re in the birth canal of a new ontological order for mankind, and the cheerful amniotic oceans of a planetary past with an endless frontier and endless exploitable resources and mineral wealth and all that, that’s all gone now. Now the walls are closing in. We’re suffocating, we’re strangling, and we’re being massaged toward—we don’t know what. The end of the world is all anybody can think. Well, imagine a fetus trying to anticipate his future career as stockbroker or Indian chief from the point of view of the birth canal. It just means that this phase of the career of intelligence on this planet is closing. Why shouldn’t it be brief? It has been so brief all along. Processes have been happening faster and faster. Why should we have supposed that we would be exempt from this rule of accelerating process?