Terence McKenna at St. John the Divine's
Cathedral, Synod Hall, New York, April 25, 1996
Ideology is poisonous. It's not that there are good ideologies and
bad ideologies -- ALL ideology is poisonous. Because to have
an ideological position assumes that you understand the nature of reality. How
likely is that? How likely is that? And, in the Twentieth
Century, if we have not learned the bankruptcy of ideology, then I don't know
what it would take. We have on the Right the stunning example of German
National Socialism. We have on the Left the stunning example of Soviet
Communism. And then all the blathering and wasted time and... crap that went
on in all the spectrum in between.
This ties into a larger issue which I'm interested in -- and this is
another way of saying "ideology is bankrupt" -- [it] is, Culture Is
Not Your Friend. Culture is not your friend, no matter what your
culture is. And this is sort of not a Politically Correct thing to say,
because in the present ambience, (sort of, those who haven't gotten
the word) there's a lot of attention to recovering our ethnic roots and to
expressing our unique ethnicity, and so forth and so on -- I think that's
the beginning of understanding. But all terms that stress ethnicity are
words applied to groups of people. Have you ever noticed that? Have
you ever noticed that you're not a group of people, you're a person? So you
may be "Jewish", you may be "Black", you may be this, you
may be that but there is no obligation to take upon yourself the
generalized quality of these things, because the generalized qualities belong
to thousands of people examined at a time. If you misunderstand that
you become a caricature. You act out your ethnicity as a caricature.
So culture is not your friend, ideology is not your friend... Who's your
friend? Well, to my mind, the felt presence of immediate experience
is the surest dimension, the surest guide that you can possibly have. The felt
presence of immediate experience. Feeling is primary. All rationalization and
intellectualization and analysis is secondary, and comes out of culture. No
matter what your culture is, it has answers. Cultures thinks up answers. So a
child asks its mother a question, like, "Where do we go when we
die?" or, "Why does Daddy go to work?" Cultural answers are
always provided, but nobody knows the real answers to these questions
-- that's outside of culture. So coming to terms and fully expressing
your culture is like a stage in development. And then beyond that
lies the aspiration of the felt presence of immediate experience, and its
implications. It's a very hard thing to deal with and to do when you are
poisoned with ideology. And ideologies are very difficult to deconstruct and
rid yourself of through a simple talking therapy of some sort, through simply trying
to work it out. The best antidote for ideology is to raise the intensity
of the felt presence of experience to such excruciating levels that it simply vaporizes
ideological illusion. And this is what psychedelics are for, I think. And it
also explains (if you've ever wondered) the incredible phobia of these things
on the part of the establishment, the incredibly deep alarm that these things
trigger in people.
You know, "Tim Leary once said of LSD, it's "a compound that occasionally
causes psychotic behavior in people who don't take it." ...That's how powerful
these things are! And the reason is, they are a direct challenge to the myth of
the tribe - whatever the myth is: Fascist, Democrat, Socialist,
Communist -- everybody can get together on the idea that psychedelics are
somehow dangerous and antisocial and pose some kind of threat to the body
politic. That's because all these ideologies, from the psychedelic point of
view, are seen in all their limitations and foolishness, and their historical
assumptions and their naivetè writ large across them. Ideology is a
fool's game. Or it's a scoundrel's game. Because scoundrels use ideology to
control fools. And nobody wants to be caught in that situation.