It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding. - Terence McKenna

For some reason, a balkanization of epistemology is taking place. And what I mean by that is: there is no longer a commonality of understanding. I mean, for some people, quantum physics provides the answers. Their next door neighbors may look to the channeling of archangels with equal fervor. … It is accompanied by a related phenomenon, which is that technology, or the historical momentum of things, is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey mind cannot find a simple story—a simple creation myth or redemption myth to lay over the crazy contradictory patchwork of profane techno-consumerist post-McLuhanist electronic pre-apocalyptics existence. And so, into that dimension of anxiety created by this inability to parse reality, rushes a bewildering variety of squirrelly notions: epistemological cartoons, if you will. … Conspiracy theory, in my humble opinion … is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality. I mean, isn't it so simple to believe that things are run by the greys, and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them, and then we can solve our technological problems? Or isn't it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything, or the Communist Party, or the Catholic Church, or the Masons. Well, these are epistemological cartoons, you know, it is kindergarten in the art of amateur historiography. I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying: that the real truth, that dare not speak itself, is that no one is in control, absolutely no one. … Nobody is in control. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. Now, there may be entities seeking control—the World Bank, the Communist Party, the rich, the somebody-or-others—but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself. … Because this process which is underway will take the control-freak by the short and curly and throw them against the wall. It's like trying to control a dream, you see. The global destiny of the species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream.

Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.

From a historical point of view, restricting the availability of addictive substances must be seen as a peculiarly perverse example of Calvinist dominator thought - a system in which the sinner is to be punished in this world by being transformed into an exploitable, of his cash, by the criminal/governmental combine that provides the addicitve substances. The image is more horrifying than that of the serpent that devours itself - it is once again the Dionysian image of the mother who devours her children, the image of a house divided against itself.