Thread by @owenbroadcast

its my own view of course, but that isnt why. the process just doesnt work the way he hypothesized it to. honestly, i did it. i took normal people to art spaces and to the woods and gave them acid and they eventually go back to being the same or just become more “how they are”.

https://twitter.com/Glasneth/status/1442417329162231811

i was thinking about timothy leary recently because someone brought up terrence mckenna, and i kind of view them as a one two step process. they were both ultimately wrong for different reasons, i dont even really hold it against them personally, they just didnt have the data.

its easy to imagine being a certain type of person and taking acid and then thinking, wow, we just need everyone to take this. but that didnt work, and whats mostly interesting for me about the space is that you still have people acting like this massive experiment never happened

im in a somewhat unique position as a lay person to have certain data, because (unfortunately) i was in a position to take totally normal (to use the parlance) not “turned on” people and give them acid, if they wanted, in a variety of situations, and then observe the effects.

for some people, there is “an effect”, but it usually wears off. i think the main, more interesting, thing that leary-ism and that worldview failed to anticipate is that there is a large portion of people for whom psychedelics are purely a sensory “cool” experience and thats it.

if youre around a large group of people that do psys, u know often it becomes: we should listen to some music. wow this music is crazy. lets look at something. wow, that looks crazy. lets touch something with a weird texture, wow thats crazy. what if we eat candy. wow thats crazy

basically the hypothesis that it magically gets people tuned into something higher isnt true and thats why his general operation failed. on the other side, people often just become more of what they already are. maybe they just didnt have the data but, thats usually what happens.

in my mind you can kind of place terrence mckenna after this. i used to be kind of a devotee of him to be honest, id like to do a thread on it sometime, but he realized the “we just need everyone to do this” hypothesis was false, so he reworked it slightly.

his idea and model was creating a dense core of intellectual and artistic individuals who would do it and then that dense core would radiate out and cause the transformation rather than the substance itself. well, this doesnt really work either, but for different reasons.

so i actually view myself as being downstream from both of these guys in a way. i can imagine being either of them, to be honest, im just later in time and i can look back and say, wow yeah, neither of these models worked, they dont play out, we have some errors in here.

the interesting thing for me is that people act like none of this ever happened. most people into psychedelics or promoting them just pretend all this never happened and adopt the same hypotheses basically. i suspect that in some way its intrinsic to the substance.

will do a thread sometime on terrence mckenna because hes definitely the person with the worldview i adopted the most at that time, i was [really really] into it, and as i realized he was wrong about a few specific things (not mentioned here), thats what led me “out of it”.

just worth noting as i think most people would imagine, from my view, that i like, hate these guys or something, but its not like that. im just in the future + have more data than them. its like trying to build a flying machine: some stuff sounded plausible but it just didnt work