I saw a fascinating tweet by BloomTech CEO Austen Allred the other day that stirred up a lot of thoughts here.
“Of the Silicon Valley founders I know who went on some of the psychedelic self-discovery trips, almost 100% quit their jobs as CEO within a year,” Allred said, adding, “Could be random anecdotes, but be careful with that stuff.”
Allred tweeted this in response to writer Ashlee Vance sharing that he’d been told by a venture capitalist, “We’ve lost several really good founders to ayahuasca. They came back and just didn’t care about much anymore.”
There’s some very useful information in those words. They reveal a lot about the insane mess our species finds itself in in today’s world, and provide insight into how we might find our way out.
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It isn’t necessary to travel to the Amazon rainforest to be liberated from the madness of this capitalist civilization. It isn’t even necessary to take psychedelics. All it takes is rigorous self-examination and inner work, and a burning desire to perceive life as it really is. Devoutly and sincerely question all your beliefs about reality, right down to your most basic assumptions about the nature of fundamental aspects of your experience, like existence, self, other, perception, thought, and awareness. Find those gaping emotional wounds and maladaptive coping mechanisms within yourself, and with uncompromising self-honesty bring them into consciousness to be healed.
The article is well worth the read
Capitalism or more accurately Neoliberalism is only successful due to competitive free markets, which encourages the ruthless pursuit of wealth extraction and resource acquisition.
It is not possible to succeed in “capitalism” without harming others, as you are required to extract the labor or value from those who are disadvantaged in order to enrich oneself. So in other words you convince the working class through persuasion to give you more than you give them.
This by definition is mental illness. Mental illness being thoughts or behaviors that harms oneself or others.
The fact that this isn’t widely accepted will be what we look back on as barbarism, much like we look back at history and wonder how those of the past could live such ways.
I think that the ‘mental illness’ epidemic in the broader population is a consequence of it becoming apparent that we’ve built our values and culture on a sham and we’ve gone so far down the road with it that it’s impossible to find our way back. People dont believe the story any more but haven’t yet found another one which is more convincing. I think its a sort of mass nihilism.
Bad take in the title alone.
Seems very ableist to assume that cpitalism is caused by mental illness, I know many mentally ill people who are very much against capitalism and harmed by it.
Also, not surprised they would use the ableist word “Insane” in there.
I understand where this is coming from but is there a better term to refer to this?
Psychological trait that can emerge in any humans but is perceived (culturally understood) to be harmful by humanity at large and is solvable with therapy, medication and general education.
Both greed and hate follow this pattern. I do not believe in inherent evil, showing compassion as they are sick just makes nonjudgmental sense to me.
I am autistic myself have experience plenty of ableist rhetoric, but an example would be people assuming i can conform to their speech, avoiding their list of banned words while still expect me to communicatie coherently.
If you are asking what I think you are asking then “harmful adaptation” might be a good way of putting it.
Yes, you humans are like that sometimes and I have seen how what you are suggesting can help humans.
Indeed I agree that they can, I do not believe in inherent evil either, in you humans or other species.
Autism is so cool, I too am autistic, in my species it is considered pretty normal to think and behave in such a way though. Yes, indeed, it is difficult sometimes, but it is helpful to learn what words harm and what do not so we do not do harm with them, I have found thinking of them like that rather than evocative words like ‘banned’ is more useful.
Sure it’s clickbait, but it’s not inherently wrong. Some mental illness, not all. At the very least we should consider such greed and ruthlessness as unwell. If anything it’s sympathetic and humanizing to a very unaccountable section of society.
Yes, sure, I can see that.
Hmm, I’m not sure how a system founded on those things can accept those things as unwell.
I do agree to some degree, just not sure how to make it be seen by others or by the system itself, it would require destroying it in one way or another and getting these people help which can be difficult to do whilst the system still exists because most of them won’t even ever admit it and nor will the system.
It’s a bit of a chicken and the egg situation, I suppose, both encouraging and empowered by antisocial behavior. It’s hard enough to convince someone there’s a problem to begin with given the culture.
I do wonder how any transition could be made under an inherently opposed system, but that’s also a key point of Marx with respect to revolution.
Oh and what’s this, a fascist sounding video embeded inbetween the text?
Why is this so sadly unsurprising?
Here’s the beginning of the “fascist sounding video” you mention:
The west is a dystopian wasteland of moral degeneracy.
Usually when you hear a white person talk about moral degeneracy it’s some wingnut denouncing LGBTQ rights or women’s reproductive rights or whatever, but that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about real things here.
The real moral decay of our society is illustrated in the way all mainstream political candidates can openly support war crimes currently being inflicted on people in the global south without being immediately removed from power. The way monstrous war criminals of past administrations can endorse a liberal candidate without causing self-proclaimed progressives to recoil from that candidate in horror. The way you can have the two viable candidates for the world’s most powerful elected position both pledge to continue an active genocide without instantly sparking a revolution.
The moral degeneracy of this civilization looks like living lives of relative comfort built on the backs of workers in the global south whose labor and resources are extracted from their nations at profoundly exploitative rates, while raining military explosives on impoverished populations who dare to disobey the dictates of our government, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, and acting like this is all fine and normal.
Sounds just like Hitler, don’t it?
Also, the moral degeneration that comes from making every human interaction boil down to a financial transaction.
Ah, so clickbait title.
I see.
1st two lines say it all. C’mon cope without feeding the demons.
[Curious] What do you mean by “feeding the demons”?
