http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkoAGlr3KUg (the last YouTube link)
History Is a Metamorphosis Process [Terence McKenna]
Okay?
Our unhappy, addicted, ego-driven condition has become, not simply the source of our own unhappiness (that was bad enough) but now it's the source of great discomfort and dislocation for all life and human society on the planet. We are out of control. We are basically severely addicted to things and cannot stop ourselves and we know (or, we should know) that there is not enough petroleum and heavy metal in the planet to give all the thing-addicts all the things that we know they must have in order to be happy.
Well, I feel conflicted. I mean, this stuff is all true, but I've seen enough spirit-science videos to expect this to go terribly wrong.
BTW, I hope the irony of posting this on YouTube isn't lost on you all.
BTW2, the bolding is me trying to match the speaker. He emphasized "things" pretty heavily to make sure people understood that it was being used as a specific noun.
We have spread this intellectual virus from pole to pole. [list of countries] Everybody wants kids. Everybody wants the pause that refreshes. [Huh?] What are we going to do about this? Well, so far, there's no plan to deal with this at all!
Okay, now it just goes through a no-voice-montage of smoggy cities, junkyards, and ... wait, what?
(((... to keep the human mind entertained so that you don't get in the way by doing too much thinking and noticing that both sides of international conflict are funded by the same people.)))
This is a clip from a radio or TV program or something, being played in the background, and at first I thought it was just there for effect, but it's distinct enough to hear and you don't pick something like this by accident. Is this going to go conspiracy-mode?
I tried to reflect the "ambient" sound of the recording with echo brackets. Go ahead and fight me. Anyway, that clip ends and we're back to the narrator.
No one of us, I think, can imagine that history could go on for another thousand years.
Not with the constant barrage of narrowly-averted crises, no. But I'm not convinced that the media's portrayal of current events as a series of narrow misses from world-ending disaster is accurate. My only question is whether the reporters themselves believe that things are as bad as they make out.
Seriously, there's no way we'd have survived the last 20 years if they'd been right.
I mean, what would it look like at the current rate of population growth, spread of epidemic disease, rate of invention, connectivity, depletion of resources, the atmosphere. It is impossible to conceive of another thousand years of human history. History, then, is ending.
YOUR LOGICAL FALLACY IS: Personal Incredulity.
To your credit, slowing down the population growth would probably be wise. Any ideas on how to make it happen?
History is a kind of gestation process. It's a kind of metamorphosis. It's an episode in the life of a species.
You're as bad as the Singularity nuts on LessWrong.
If you think of the simple example of metamorphosis, that of a caterpillar -> butterfly, we all know that there is an intermediate resting stage where the caterpillar is for all intents and purposes dissolved and reconstituted into an entirely different kind of organism, with different physical structers, different body, different way of breathing, wings, a different kind of feeding aparatus. This is what is happening to us: it is a pupation stage. It begins with naked monkeys, and ends with a human-machine planet-gurgling interphase capable of releasing the energies that light the stars, and it lasts about 15-20,000 years and during that period the entire process hangs in the balance. It's a period of high risk, like a butterfly in a cocoon or a child in the womb. It's a gestation process, in which one form of life is being changed into another.
... okay. I'm actually relieved. I was afraid this would turn into an anti-JewFinancial Sector rant, but it mostly just seems to be new-age philosophy.
Vague, unfalsifiable, environmentalist pseudoscience is a relief. FSTDT gets some real doozies, doesn't it?
If we should fumble the ball, if we are to fail, the magnitude of the tragedy will be immense. It is not inevitable that we should fail. There are ideas, personalities, personalities that, if honestly explored and implemented, could rescue the human enterprise from the disgrace that hovers over us. We don't want this to end in a toxified garbage pit ruled by Nazis. Which is, you know, the way that we may well be headed.
Alright, now I know what's in that video. Kind of a letdown compared to the typical Spirit Science video, but I can see why Spirit Science would like it.
