9/25/05

Projection of Power and Paranoia

That's what happens when you hang out with middle aged folks and absorb arthritic pain through conversational osmosis - you get too cynical too fast. I need fellow foolish youth to prop up my dreams and delusions so I may at least have some fun with them while I can.

Although it might have been nice if Hitler'd had a jaded older friend. "Trust me Adolf, in thirteen years this 'thousand year reich' will be a joke - why don't you take up painting again? Europe is a continent, not a canvas."

I told Finch she was right about the drugs burning me out - while trying very hard to come down from a heavy acid trip.

Some people burn out. For some people, drugs lead to dead ends. These people, and the others around them, are naturally phobic of and hostile to drugs, the notion of drugs, the philosophical/natural justification for their use, altering consciousness, to the predictable point of lumping all drugs together - even damning weed. After all, there are those scientists, and even laymen anecdotalists, who say that THC has been known to trigger schizophrenia and cause schizophrenic-like states in even clean fresh healthy culture-bound minds, people who "have it together". And you did have that nasty paranoid trip last time you smoked a joint didn't you? C'mon, let's face it - the stuff is evil.

Well this is the attitude of either the majority, or has become so through a wealthy and powerful minority's shrill propaganda, so we find ourselves in a culture psychotically suppressive of our sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes just plain weird choices. Hell, we're humans, evolved but we took our monkey curiosity along for the ride. We'll smoke anything once, and if we find our memories of the trip lacking, we might smoke it twice, for the deja-thread.

So this pastiche of opinionated hallucination we call society tries, on a global scale, to sanction certain states of consciousness and ban the rest. And a few of us more curious members lobby, lazily, for cognitive liberty. But the suppression is an expected reaction in this human race, given the power of the places we face in those altered states.

It's just like racism's raison d'etre. I can't justify cognitive tyranny by the self-dubbed "sane" majority, and neither can I justify the hatred of brown-skinned people. But as ugly and horrific as they are, those things are not formless confounding evils inflicted upon us by a purely malevolent, inscrutable devil squished into the end of a definable dichotomy. No, they're predictable symptoms of this natural phenomenon we call humanity. The logical end of domesticated primates, or at least a stage. Earth the Monkey had it all figured out. He graphed it with a stick on the jungle floor.

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