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Terence McKenna

INTERVIEW BY GRACIE & ZARKOV

[INTRO]

 M2: Why did you write Food of the Gods ?

TM: I felt if I could change the frame of the argument and get drugs
insinuated into a scenario of human origins, then I would cast doubt
on the whole paradigm of Western Civilization, in the same way that
realizing that we came from monkeys did a great deal to re-set the
dials in the 19th Century Victorian mind. If you could convince people
that drugs were responsible for the emergence of large brain size and
language, then you could completely re-cast the argument from:
"Drugs are alien, invasive and distorting to human nature" to: "Drugs
are natural, ancient and responsible for human nature". So it was
consciously propaganda, although I believe all that and I believe it's
going to be hard to knock down.

M2: Who is your target audience?

TM: The target audience will be the converted first of all, but my hope
is that the engines of public relations and publicity will move it much
more into the mainstream. The 18-25 year old group that is
drug-friendly but has no rationale except that it's a good time. This
book is what I want every co-ed next Fall to be carrying to Anthro 101
to beard the professor with. 

You've heard me talk about meme wars, and how, if we could have a
level playing field, these ideas would do very well. The theory I'm
putting forth_to disprove it you would have to get your feet wet and
get stoned. Anybody who doesn't want to do that should rule
themselves off the case. So that presents academic types with a real
problem. 

M2: If you're going to challenge the conclusions you must come to
grips with the empirical facts of being high. 

TM: That's right. It's not a metaphysical argument, or an emotional
plea; it's an argument on their own terms. Can they do better? What
was happening? 

I think we should look at the impact of diet and realize that what you
eat changes the parameters of the environment that is selecting you.
I found no discussion of the impact of diet on human evolution, and
yet at the very moment that the great [primate] evolutionary leaps
were being made, there was a transformation of the diet towards
omnivorousness-meat-eating, predation-away from the fructarian
original state. 

I'm not saying that civilization fucked up what was otherwise a
naturally-occurring politically correct situation. There was a period
when, because of the presence of psilocybin in the diet, the natural
tendency to male dominance hierarchies was interrupted.  It was in
that moment that community values, altruism, language, long-term
planning, awareness of cause and effect, all the things that distinguish
us were established. Then, as the mushroom became less available due
to climatological factors, after 15,000 years of this human-mushroom
quasi-symbiosis, the old dominance hierarchy hard-wiring re- asserted
itself in the ancient Middle East with the invention of agriculture, the
need to become sedentary in order to carry out agriculture, the need
to defend surplus, the establishment of kingship. These are a
re-assertion of an older pattern that had been interrupted by a factor
in the diet which basically made people mellow.

M2: Did that interruption occur throughout the entire human
genome, or are there areas which would have been outside the
mushroom Garden?

TM: People have been migrating out of Africa during each
interglacial. I think the mushroom was having an effect in Africa over
the last three million years, but what really kicked the process into
high gear was that during the last interglacial, true pastoralism
evolved. All previous migrations out of Africa were the migrations of
hunter/gatherers.  The migration that began at the melting of the last
glaciation about 18,000 years ago, were the first herders out of Africa.
It's the cattle/human /mushroom triad that reinforces the partnership,
non-dominant, orgiastic style. 

I talk in the book about how apparently at a certain point in the
evolution of human cognition, cause removed from effect became
something that people noticed. At the very moment that men were
realizing that the consequences of sex were children 9 months later,
women were realizing that the consequences of tossing trash onto
middens was food availability in those very spots 12 months later.
This ability to correlate a cause with a delayed effect indicates a
certain level of neurological processing that sets the stage for the
suppression of orgy. Because the suppression of orgy is linked to a
concern for male paternity. Before you know that sex leads to
children, all children are the tribe's children.  Women know who their
children are, but for men, children are group resources. Once you put
the male paternity thing together, the notion of ownership soon
follows. The idea is that psilocybin is an egolytic compound, that
orgies every new and full moon, everybody screwing in a heap, makes
it impossible to form these notions of my women, my children, my
weapons, my food, and so forth.

M2: What do you mean by the term ego? 

TM: I'm assuming a Jungian vocabulary. The ego is not the self. The
ego is a nexus of strategies for short-term gain at the expense of group
values and even long-term personal gain. 

M2: If for the North African herders the primate hierarchical
programs were broken down by mushrooms, would it be correct to
say that the European Paleolithic hunters on the edge of the ice sheet
@20,000 B.C. would still have the primate hierarchical programs
because they had no access to mushrooms?

TM: Right. Basically, this mellowness was an African style, and it
could only sustain itself as long as there was a plentiful supply of
mushrooms and a religious institution that insisted on it being used.

Here's the scenario: You have this climax Edenic partnership society
based on orgies and mushrooms and herding, and the drying
continues. The mushroom becomes less plentiful. It becomes localized.
It becomes seasonal. The mushroom festivals become further and
further apart. Eventually this is recognized; there is an anxiety to
preserve the mushroom. The obvious strategy then is to put it into
honey. But honey itself has the capacity to turn into a psycho-active
substance, mead, a crude alcohol. So what begins as a mushroom cult,
through a sincere effort to preserve the mushroom cult, turns into a
mead cult a few thousand years later. Because the mushrooms are
spread thinner and thinner, and the honey is more and more the focus.
But look at the consequences of an alcohol cult. Alcohol lowers
sensitivity to social cueing while it increases a false sense of verbal
facility. So, it sets the stage for boorish behavior. From that comes the
suppression of women as part of this bronze-tipped spear/grain
surplus/city-building kingship/standing armies/turf-defending
mentality that we find in the so-called proto-civilizations.

M2: OK, we've had first-hand experience with the tryptamine
linguistic phenomena, so your language acquisition hypothesis is
certainly as plausible as any other theory, more so, since it can point
to a mechanism. Otherwise you have to take on faith that some
miracle happened to create self-reflection and linguistic capabilities. 


What evidence is there for the orgiastic, cooperator model? Certainly
the ecological catastrophe when the last glaciers retreated made war
a survival skill. In Northern Europe when all the game was hunted
out, the skilled hunters started hunting the people on the other side of
the hill. In the MIddle Esast it was agriculture and grain surplus, as
you say. So why hierarchy and violence become successful strategies
is very clear. What is the evidence for the Edenic partnership model,
and is such an extreme position necessary for your theory?

TM: Well, the evidence is two-fold: first of all, the kind of attitudes
you find in African nomadic herders today; for instance, the only time
anybody ever offered me his wife was when when I stayed with the
Masai. Good hospitality dictates that the youngest wife spend the
night with the guest.

M2: But these are wives owned by a particular husband.

TM: That's right. But still there is clearly a different attitude toward
these women. They are not exclusively accessed by the husband. [no,
he can hand them around to other men-is this a partnership mode of
behavior? -G] 

The other thing is the great horned Goddess, found throughout
Paleolithic history_why horned? Cattle are the key, because cattle
establish the presence of the mushroom. Cattle-based nomadism and
horse- mounted nomadism are absolutely antithetical, because
horse-mounted nomadism is based on an economy of plunder.
Cattle-based nomadism is based on establishing a stable environment
that is moving over a large area.

M2: Does that necessitate a partnership society as opposed to any
other kind of social organization? It's the black and white dichotomy
we're having trouble with.

TM: Well, it probably was not as black and white as I paint it because
there must have been residual carry-over from this early level of
primate programming. That's why I think a key feature is the
mushroom religion and the frequency of these practices. Because I
think the ego will begin to form in the personality very quickly in the
absence of psilocybin.  You have to keep re-inoculating yourself
against what is essentially an anti-social idea in those contexts. It's
amazing to me that the male love of nookie would stand aside for the
male love of property and dominance. That orgies were ever
suppressed shows how strongly that must have been felt. They said, "A
good time is fine, but the really important thing is to control women
and property."

M2: There are two things that I would disagree with there. You
assume that men make all the sexual decisions, not taking into account
how much women choose their mates, even in a hierarchical society.
And I'm not sure I see the direct connection between psilocybin use
and orgiastic sexuality .

TM: Psilocybin creates arousal. So in a society exempt of Christian
paranoia this group arousal would just naturally turn into orgy. If
you're getting people together at every new and full moon and getting
them loaded, they're going to fuck.

M2: OK, but why in orgies?

TM: Basically, because it's a boundary-dissolving stimulant. It would
be interesting to give chimpanzees mushrooms and see whether they
go into the corner of their cage and turn their faces away or whether
they all jump each other. 

M2: Is there a dosage issue here also?

TM: Well, there's a series of ascending doses. At very low doses you
get measurable increases in visual acuity. This is the foot in the door
from which all other consequences flow. Because that will select
against non-psilocybin using members of the population, because they
are less successful at hunting, less successful at feeding their offspring
and bringing them to reproductive age. So on the next level you get
arousal and sexual activity: a second factor selecting against non-using
members of the population because they are fucking less, presumably. 

M2: But at visionary doses you don't want to do anything but watch.

TM: At visionary doses you become subject to glossolalia and
language-forming activities.  It's possible to imagine all three of these
things happening to a single individual in a single afternoon. You take
it at 4:00pm. In the first hour, you kill an antelope that you have
keenly observed; in the next hour you eat it with your mate and have
great sex; and following that you're swept away by a psychedelic
experience. That's a little extreme, but you can see how this could be
happening on all levels. 

M2: There's still a leap of faith in your description of the cultural
complex. As psychedelic pagans in a long-term, sexually open,
partnership relationship, we're close to your audience in many
respects. But the discussion about dominator and partnership cultures
reads like dogmatic preaching about good vs. bad cultures. 

 TM: Well, not good cultures and bad, but adaptive and mal-adaptive.
Pastoral nomadism is clearly a viable, open-ended strategy. [until you
overgraze the grasslands and the desert advances -G.] The dominator
thing can't be run for more than 3 or 4,000 years before you are where
we are: with limited resources, aggression carried beyond any
reasonable level_It may be dogmatic_

M2: What is the dominator thing? Why not use existing terminology:
authoritarianism, uptightness, sexual repression, totalitarianism,
violence, etc. I guess that reading the book it's very hard for me to
understand how I distinguish between Joe Stalin and John Kennedy.

TM: I think by this theory these guys are comrades-in-arms. 

M2: That's where I have a problem. What have we done right in the
last 10,000 years, as opposed to what is wrong and should be thrown
away?

TM: Well, the answer is very little, consciously. It's almost as though
we have designed culture as a suicide machine of some sort.

M2: Would you include Galileo, Locke, Voltaire and Jefferson in
that?

TM: Yes and no. It depends on the frame. In the European
Enlightenment, these are the heroes. But the Enlightenment is a
necessary response to medievalism and the Christian eschaton. So
there has been progress, but always within the terms of the dominator
culture. There's always been a fifth column, or a critical community
or an underground.  But notice how hard it is to push this agenda
forward. You couldn't get people to sign on to the Bill of Rights right
now.  

M2: You couldn't get people to sign on to the Bill of Rights the first
time. It was pushed through by an intellectual ?lite. 

TM: Who were probably homosexuals, and therefore infected with
this unconscious feminizing element. 

M2: So the Bill of Rights is not an artifact of dominator culture but
a resistance to it?

TM: Freeing slaves, the universal rights of man are feminist attitudes.
So is anything that erodes the idea that the king at the center of the
mandala city is the absolute arbiter of what should happen. 

 The fall away from the Edenic state in Africa didn't end at Sumer or
Greece or Rome or Paris in the 1760's. It's still going on. So we're still
losing touch even as we're reaching out to gain touch again. I think
that the endpoint of male dominance is not even fascism but Naziism,
where there's a racial element as well. Fascism, the only authentic
political philosophy adumbrated in the 20th Century, is the greatest
distance from what we're trying to get to. I think society will definitely
embrace fascism if it feels threatened by a return to Gaianic style. 

M2: You're talking in terms of we and it and society. What happens
to the individual? There is a difference between Napoleon and John
Stuart Mill. But your book bashes Western Civilization without
making clear which concepts are the "ideals of a democratic society
going forward into the future", and which are characteristic of a
dominator culture. 

TM: I guess the difference that we're uncovering here is that it sounds
like you think it's 50/50, and I'm saying 95% of it was bunk. [We think
99% of human history was horrifying, but that key ideas and concepts
were developed that are absolutely necessary to bail us out, including
the scientific empirical foundation for Terence's ideas-G&Z] I think
that anything that went on under the aegis of monotheism is horseshit.


M2: Most definitely. However, you point out that the polytheistic
Hindus have a more feminist religion, yet in terms of the individual
behavior of individual people towards women in that society_I sure
won't sign up for that gig.

TM: Well, their problem is not monotheism. There's more than one
way to fuck yourself up. Their problem is essentially a phonetic
alphabet. The phonetic alphabet empowers a distancing and an
abstracting from natural phenomena that is probably equal in power
to what happens in monotheism. It's just that in the case of the West,
we got a full dose of both. There are non-phonetic ways to create
sophisticated data bases_the Chinese_

M2: Is the high Chinese culture a partnership society?

TM: More so than the West. If you look at the structure of Chinese
marriage in the Tang dynasty, there's definitely male dominance, but
on the other hand, shadow institutions were created to mitigate that
dominance that we would never tolerate in the West. For instance,
concubinage was tolerated in China, but the price paid for it was the
right of inheritance of the primary wife and her control of the
household. So there were trade-offs. 

M2: Would it be fair to say that the biochemical matrix in which any
human culture swims is shiftable by ideas, by ingestibles-food or
drugs-and that there is a shifting center?

TM: Yeah, and it's not randomly driven. A lot of this stuff is dictated
by the vicissitudes of botany. The fact that the European continent
was so poor in boundary-dissolving hallucinogens allowed the
phonetic alphabet and the city-building kingship style to never really
be challenged [except in 1600, 1789, 1848, 1918, 1991?-Z]. 

The Maya, for example, are a different situation. They clearly had to
accommodate to living in tropical rain forests replete with
hallucinogenic drugs. They were still able to organize slave labor and
have kingship and warfare. But the very baroque, ritual nature of
it_the way that Venus regulated their warfare up until the collapse of
the Proto-Classic phase_meant that other factors were mitigating these
tendencies. And I'm sure that it was probably the dependency of the
?lite on hallucinogens. The level of adornment in these vase paintings
indicates to me that the ?lite was probably homosexual in style and
thereby feminized. And there are many powerful women in the lineage
of the Mayan royalty. 

All of these societies that have arisen in the context of what we call
civilization are not models for what we want to do. It's an incredibly
radical rejection to say everything from Sumer, essentially all of
history, is a mistake. History itself is a mistake. The archaic revival, if
carried out to any degree at all, would mark the most radical
reconstruction of civilization that's ever taken place.

M2: Do you propose giving up science and technology and the few
accomplishments of history? Would you would be happiest going back
to being a Paleolithic pastoralist?

TM: No, I think it's a forward escape. With 3-5 billion people on the
earth we are not going to return to pastoral herding on the plains of
anywhere. What can we take from that model and preserve? 

My idea of the perfect future is: The scene opens on a world that
appears totally primitive. People are naked, people are orgiastic,
people are nomadic. But when they close their eyes there are menus
hanging in space. Culture has been internalized. Culture is supposed
to be internalized. All this talk about virtual reality_people don't seem
to notice_this is a virtual reality. These are all ideas_ideas that have
been forced into matter so that we could live in a reconstruction of our
imagination. And de-constructing these virtual realities in which we
live is the only way to get back to some sort of baseline of what it is to
be human. And then you can carry culture with you. Culture was
never meant to be materially realized. Culture is an intellectual object
like a philosophy or a belief system. 

M2: The ultimate Platonistic statement there. 

TM: Well, it's an attractor around which we orbit.

M2: Let's just concede that we disagree about anthropology and
history. But we both agree we're in a mess. How do we go forward
from here? We have 5 to 7 billion human beings; we have a stable
high-tech culture; the optimistic projection is that there will be 12 to
15 billion human beings in 2050. How do we get from here to there?
How many people get to go?

TM: I was challenged by someone who said, "Well, you're always
talking to these mushrooms. Why don't you ask them how to save the
world?" The next time I was stoned I asked, "How can we save the
world?" And the mushroom said, "Each woman should bear only one
natural child." It didn't hesitate for a moment. 

If every woman were to have but one natural child, the population of
the earth would drop by 50% in the next 45 years. Without warfare,
without migration, without artificially created epidemic diseases, or
relocation and horror on a massive scale. Now, someone will say, "But
how are you going to convince women in Bangladesh to limit their
reproductive activity?" Good point, but a woman who has a child in
Malibu_that child will have 800 to 1000 times more negative impact
on resources than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh. We're crazy
to preach limited reproduction to women in the Third World when, if
you convert one woman in Malibu to the idea of not having a child,
it's like converting 1000 women in the back streets of Dakka. Now,
this woman in Malibu is very probably college-educated, completely
media-sophisticated, and open to all the arguments and styles of
persuasion to which we are familiar. In other words, she's the easy
person to convince. She doesn't argue that she is Hindu or Catholic
and can't go along with it.

M2: Forty years from now you've got North American and European
population decreasing. I still don't see how you have Asia's
population decreasing.

TM: Well, in South East Asia, if they expect to maintain the
newly-emerging higher standard of living, they must educate their
people, and with that process of education is going to come a natural
reluctance to have children.

M2: Then your argument, and my argument as a developmental
capitalist, is essentially the same.

TM: Why is this not being preached everywhere? It's because nobody
has figured out how you make a buck in a situation of retreating
demographics.

M2: The drive to reproduce-socio-biologically entrained in the
wetware-is generally reinforced by most social belief systems,
economic theories, religions, etc.  Isn't it time to re-think our
relationship with our unconscious drive to reproduce?

TM: One of the things that fascinates me about this idea of one
woman/one child is that here's a plan to save the world, the
implementation of which would rest in the hands of women. Women
have been squawking that they are powerless, they are imprisoned
within a set of male dominator conceptions that make it impossible for
them to do anything.  [Some of us haven't, like the Mondo
matriarchy-G] You could go to a woman on the Upper East Side of
Manhattan and say, "How would you like to have more leisure time? 
How would you like to increase your income? And how would you
like to move to the forefront of political heroism by these acts?"
Finally we have a solution which simultaneously appeals to people's
most venal drives, and the political consequences of it are correct. 

M2: I would have agreed with that 20 years ago. Propagandizing for
one or fewer children would certainly help women, who have had to
swim upstream against social pressure; social pressures which are
more powerful in poor and traditional societies.  Right now,
increasing affluence reduces fertility.  As long as they have
contraceptive techniques and they don't have authorities like the
Catholic Church or their parents or their husbands blocking
them_they will be receptive to your propaganda, and not just in the
First World. If it weren't for the traditions forbidding frank and
scientifically accurate talk about sex, you could broadcast this
message-not only to educated and affluent women, but illiterate and
poor ones, too-everyone reachable by what, in the book, you call the
TV drug.

TM: Well, you have capitalism and the Church and tradition generally
all mitigating against this. These things have to be consciously
denounced. Hitler was an amateur at the creation of human
misery_compared to the role that the Catholic Church is playing. 

M2: What do you mean by capitalism?

TM: Well, capitalism requires consumers. In a retreating demographic
situation it's hard to see_every capitalist wants to expand his market
share. How can he do this if there are fewer and fewer consumers? 

M2: The Economist and the Wall Street Journal suggest that smaller
families with higher standards of living are the only way to save the
world, and that is good for business. 

TM: But they don't conclude how small the family should be. What
is currently thought by people who don't think much about it is that
it's good to have two children. No one who is ecologically sensitive
wants to have three or four, so if you explain to them that two is no
longer politically correct. . . 

So, women taking control, having only one child, then a
de-materialism of culture.  And somehow capitalism, if it's truly the
system under which we are all going to live, has to carry out a
complete critique of its premises, and we have to learn how to sell
something other than objects. 

M2: That's happening.

TM: I think it's happening. I am not a catastrophist at all. I think that
the trends are in place to create the kind of world that we can all put
up with. But it will be, consciously or unconsciously, a neo-Archaic
world. It's going to be nomadic; it's going to de-emphasize material
culture; it's going to be erotically permissive; it's going to
de-emphasize having large numbers of children. I don't think I'm
discovering the answers.

M2: That's our vision of a more perfect future, too, at least on this
planet.

TM: This is why virtual reality, hokey and bizarre as it is, is
interesting, because what it clearly is, is an effort to sell something
which is nothing. With virtual reality, if you want to live in the Frank
Lloyd Wright Waterfall House, it's $895 off the shelf.

M2: And Disneyland is ecologically less destructive than having
people trekking all over the wilderness all over the planet. 

TM: I think that capitalism should be intelligent enough to
de-materialize itself. I mean, capitalism is not necessarily a
materialistic theory, it's just that on the crude level of culture the only
thing you can sell are things. 

M2: During this current recession, companies selling high-tech things
are doing very badly. Companies selling high-tech concepts are doing
very well. There's definitely a move towards selling abstract
embodiments of ideas_call them intellectual property processes_ 21st
Century capitalism.

TM: Virtual reality, if perfected, would allow the energy of capitalism
to flow entirely into this virtual realm. Then if people wanted to live
in outrageously gaudy and over-done environments, at least let them
be virtual.

M2: Going back to Dakka, where they're still selling women into
slavery_you have to reach at least a late 19th Century North
American level of development before the propaganda you're talking
about is going to work. You have to get that far out of traditional
culture.

TM: To do this you have to back away from the male dominant
paradigm of military defense. Why is no one saying, "Let's negotiate
an international agreement that no army shall be more than 200,000
men."? Then no one can claim threat, and armies all over the world
can be reduced, but to a level such that they can still carry out a fair
defense if necessary. 

M2: What about radical Islam, my favorite 21st Century military
problem?

TM: Radical Islam could be unplugged by putting in place a set of
international agreements of such strength that we can say, "Have any
kind of government you want.  But when you start building weapons
of mass destruction, the cops will come knocking on your door to take
them away." 

M2: You'd be surprised how many of your ideas are getting currency
in The Economist. 

TM: Europe is way out front on all this. The United States is
essentially in a reactionary stance. We are passionately
anti-internationalist, and we have a dream of world dominance that
is inapporpriately 19th Century. 

M2:  What practical steps would you suggest to convince the people
and the government of democracies such as the United States to
legalize drugs?

TM: Well, I laid out a 10-point program in the book. If people are
informed of the facts, that's all that has to be done. Facts such as the
true dangers of heroin relative to alcohol.  The true facts concerning
government connivance in promoting sugar, alcohol, tobacco and
caffeine over other drugs. 

M2: The relative harmlessness of the psychedelics in a social context_

TM: Yeah. Basically, we're living inside a reality created by master
propagandists. The media is too much a tool of the Establishment.
More so than ever in my lifetime. I hope my book and some of the
other things going on in society will break this down. Statistics such
as that the United States is the number one builder of prisons and
incarcerator of people in the world-people should have that in their
faces every day. When the myth of the danger of drugs becomes too
expensive to support, it will be abandoned and tossed away. Part of
the problem is that people are easily manipulated and led because they
have no information to base any resistance on. The word 'drug' has
been so totally corrupted by the forces in control that you can't even
have a rational discussion with people. So if the playing field were
leveled-and I think circumstances are leveling the playing field-
solutions will come.