Free trade—don’t let anybody kid you: free trade is a license to peddle crap everywhere. That’s what free trade is about. Trade (in physical items manufactured out of the body of the Earth) should be made as difficult and expensive as possible. The piling up of material goods (what I call consumer object fetishism) is the force that is destroying this planet—not only where it is actively practiced (here, for example), but throughout the world where people yearn to practice it, because the images being beamed down to them from MTV tell them that without a three-car garage, without a sunken bathtub, without a sailboat you are nothin’. And the fact of the matter is: there isn’t enough glass, metal, and plastic in the near surface of this planet to deliver a middle-class lifestyle to all the people who have now been sold on that particular style.
I really believe that capitalism can be saved—or at least partially reconstructed to serve human needs. Materialism cannot. It cannot. Because there is not enough matter around for us to fabricate it into our toys without drowning ourselves in the toxic byproducts of that historical effort.
Environmental restoration: another area where tiny pilot projects are held up in such a fashion to give people permission to think: “Well, that’s under control, at least. We don’t have to worry about that.” Most of the restoration programs that you hear about are in fact cosmetic efforts designed to divert your attention from some greater horror being perpetuated somewhere else.
Hydrogen is the direction in which we should be moving. And the people who have studied it have put in place all kinds of technological schemes for bringing it to us. But the problem is that those who are already peddling natural gas and petroleum byproducts are not interested in this scheme. Their loyalty, then, in not to the species or to the planet, but the bottom line. In any civilized society, putting the bottom line ahead of civilization and planet would be a hanging offense—but not here.
We need to deconstruct product fetishism. We need to, through the media, establish the idea that a zen-like spareness is the highest expression of social consciousness when it comes to interior decorating, the building of country houses, and so forth and so on. Deconstruct product fetishism so that the Kikuyu or the Yanomamo become the paragons of behavior in terms of relating to material existence. We do not need to sell our souls to junk and then inherit a ruined planet. It makes no sense at all.
The great stabilizing and illuminating force in the lives of archaic people is their vegetable connection to the Gaian mind; their ability to—experientially, not abstract reasoning like I’ve been doing here—to experientially feel the planet, our mother: its needs, its tensions, where it is in pain. They do this through the ingestion of psychoactive plants. They did this through the ingestion of psychoactive plants for 50,000 to 100,000 years before the excrementally-brained, monotheist, agriculturialist faction arose.
The greatest gift of the vegetable mind to the human order is the psychedelic experience—because it allows the dissolution of boundaries, and it is going to be necessary to dissolve those boundaries in order to coordinate the metamorphosis of the human world. We have to have a vision. I don’t mean a plan, I don’t mean an agenda. I mean: a vision. And the vision comes from above. It comes from… call it the unconscious, call it the Gaian mind, call it the Great Spirit. It doesn’t come out of committee meetings and the data gathered by statistical analysis. We lack, at the highest level—not you and not me, but at the controlling level—we lack a vision. The best leaders among us are no more than crisis managers attempting to manage us past an apocalypse that they are coming to believe is inevitable. That isn’t good enough.
We represent the cutting edge of novelty in the biological world. Our self-reflective consciousness is our great glory. It also opens for us a dimension of moral responsibility unknown to the rest of the denizens of nature. Part of our Promethean and godlike aspiration to the control of nature is the concomitant obligation to care for nature and to feel nature.
We are but atoms in that Gaian mind. If we do not follow its purpose, we have no purpose. Who do we think we are? Western science is 600 years old. Human beings have been on this planet two million years. Life—1.4 billion years. There is an enormous wisdom in biology, and we must become able to tap into that, articulate it, and then activate it. We are the crowning achievement of the evolutionary process. Let’s not betray it. Let’s make it the ascent to angelic being that is, I am sure, the intention of the Gaian mind and all the rest of the life with which we share this planet.