I'd say people are pretty much talking animals. Not to discount language and what it entails, of course. If I had thoughts like you describe, I think I'd be more worried about the belief that I should consider animals (and only animals!) as something that's always dangerous and cunning. In my experience animals, especially mammals, have very similar emotional systems to mine, and that makes it pretty easy to have an empathetic relationship. A relationship with a pet won't be super intellectual, but who wants that anyway?
Its like it makes you actually feel nihilist rather than just think nihilistic. Or something like that.
Drugs used to have institutional usage. They used to be distributed by armies, take part on religious practices, have explicitly regulated import quotas to keep the population "calm".
We have nothing like that today.
Srsly? Where have you been hiding? Where is this place where wars are not being fought?
Honestly, that's terrifying. I mean all the anti-drug stuff parents and schools try to scare us with and this tops it.
This is actually going out of denial, and really just seeing ourselves just the way we are. Agreed, we have a pretty fucked up side of us, but also a true potential for love and sharing.
These 2 sides are mixed, in conflict, and ever-evolving, but really, they are us. It may appear terrifying, but really, when you see it, it has a freeing and peaceful quality to it, because you just "know" that this is true.
I didn't interpret the post as "I was feeling barely containable violence then" but more of a "I became aware of the barely contained violence that me/humans have under the surface". As in, a change of judgement on his current and past condition, rather than a new emotion.
It mostly shows things that usually stay in the unconscious part of our mind. It is more like a lens than a seed.
Of course Barely being able to contain violence is concerning, but let's face it, it is a daily struggle for a LOT of humans. Our good intentions dp not always weigh up when for example we are starving to death. Anger, greed or hatred, are some of our common struggles, but most of the time they stay hidden in our subconscious, bc we do not like to see ourselves as persons able to perpetrate violence.
But only when we see it (it requires honesty, not necessarily lsd xD) and we resolve to work on it, can we really grow.
https://mbird.com/literature/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-on-the-l...
Except the way he came to that reealization was through spending a good while in the gulag instead of tripping balls. Pick your poison.
We are all capable of terrible things, in the wrong circumstance. We just don’t like to admit it.
Wisdom comes when feeling who you are, not having some distant idea about who you are
Could be wrong, but that's what jumped out at me.
I also see life in superstructures. Stand on a skyscraper rooftop deck and look down at the city. The city is alive. The roads are its arteries, the people its lifeblood.
It makes perfect sense to me if someone took acid, saw the fundamental weaknesses of human consciousness, and then jumped to the conclusion that people had to be ruled by their superiors because there would always be inferiors that had to be kept in their place. That's one possible conclusion to draw, particularly if you seek a hardcore rationalist perspective where everything can be created through self-will and rational thought, and there's nothing else.
I wouldn't draw that conclusion, but that's because I've studied chaos theory and artificial intelligence and the way evolution draws on diversity of population to surface useful traits out of a seething, unpredictable gene pool. As such, I can't look at the concept of 'inferiors' in the same way: to me, rationalist hierarchical systems mean 'local maximum, unable to further progress'. In short, a serious problem rather than a desirable state.
Could you get chaos theory just out of taking acid? Could you interpret evolutionary mechanics? I don't think taking acid will give you fundamentals like that. What it's gonna do is shake up what you already have, and this can lead to very interesting reformulations, but it's not giving you anything that you don't already, in some sense, have.
Even when we compete, we cooperate on an enormous scale [0]
[0] https://fee.org/media/33856/i-pencil-final-proof-for-website...
Evidence of their giant puppy nature:
My question is how do you define conservative? What you are describing is the raw nature of man, the shadow, the animal behind the smile.
We are all animals but it is mans unique ability to transcend the animal world by having the will, to act, or even suppress mans raw individualistic animal desire often to better fit socially defined rules by the local tribe.
I'm not sure how you drawing the borders between the left and right paradigm. Can you share more
I was influenced by some recent research like this when I spoke: https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/novemb...
> Specifically, the studies by Jost and his colleagues, including Michael Strupp-Levitsky, who conducted the work as an NYU undergraduate and is now a doctoral candidate at Long Island University-Brooklyn, showed that those moral foundations known to be more appealing to liberals than conservatives—specifically, fairness and harm avoidance—are linked to empathic motivation, whereas the moral foundations that are more appealing to conservatives than to liberals —such as ingroup loyalty and deference to authority—are not.
Loss of empathy, perhaps. Something in that vein. Man, I really am making a great case against acid, aren't I? I did rediscover empathy. I think I learned a thing or two of value in the process. And I don't feel that it actually fundamentally threatened my sanity, for what it's worth. But I guess I got what I was looking for. I won't be repeating it any time soon.
Anecdotally, my strong psychedelic trip dissolved a bunch of illusions for me. Including several that I had used to justify the value and importance of human life itself. I managed to retrieve or reconstruct them after, but I honestly felt completely out of it for days after. Seeing other humans the same way I feel when I look at a pig or a wolf. A large, possibly dangerous animal, with no real intelligence behind its eyes, only cunning. And I saw a capacity for all manner of evil in myself only barely contained. I wouldn't be half-surprised if some of that experience made me more conservative in a few ways. Who knows.