507 lines
25 KiB
Plaintext
507 lines
25 KiB
Plaintext
(C) 1987 Rolling Stone Magazine
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
T I M O T H Y L E A R Y
|
||
|
||
|
||
Interview taken from the Twentieth Anniversary Issue of
|
||
Rolling Stone Magazine
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
ROLLING STONE: As the former so-called LSD guru, what do you
|
||
think of Nancy Reagan's advice on drugs--"Just say no"?
|
||
|
||
TIMOTHY LEARY: Our kids should be better mannered than that! We
|
||
should tell them, "Just say, 'No, thank you.'" Any blanket
|
||
"Just say no" is a negative approach to life, which is
|
||
typical of the Reagan administration.
|
||
|
||
RS: So you disagree with the huge antidrug campaign?
|
||
|
||
TL: I'm totally opposed to nonadults using any drug. However,
|
||
the use of drugs by kids should be easily handled in a
|
||
family in which there is trust and communication. The
|
||
fact that kids in the ghetto use drugs is viewed the
|
||
wrong way. The problem is not the drugs; the problem is
|
||
the ghetto families where there are no models, there is no
|
||
communication, no education.
|
||
|
||
RS: So it's okay to tell children to say, "No, thank you." How
|
||
about the rest of us?
|
||
|
||
TL: Shall break the news? Adult Americans are supposed to make
|
||
their own decisions about personal matters. I am
|
||
constitutionally opposed to government prohibitions against
|
||
my using any drug I want to. Addicts pose a different
|
||
problem. They are, by definition, sick people. If you
|
||
love an alcoholic or a druggie or a gun freak, intervene.
|
||
People who abuse drugs or booze or money or guns should be
|
||
prevented from acting irresponsibly. But ninety percent
|
||
of adults can and do use drugs prudently and efficiently.
|
||
|
||
RS: How do you feel about urine testing?
|
||
|
||
TL: I have no problems with testing people who operate dangerous
|
||
machinery or who run nuclear plants. I don't want the
|
||
pilot of my plane hallucinating. But intelligent
|
||
individuals are not going to work for companies that would
|
||
force them to do demeaning things like pee in a bottle.
|
||
God knows what they would want next.
|
||
|
||
TL: There is a strong taboo discouraging experimentation with the
|
||
human brain. Before the Renaissance, there was a strong
|
||
religious taboo against discovering how the body worked.
|
||
This held back progress in medicine and biology for
|
||
centuries. Today a similar challenge faces the human
|
||
species. We must learn how the brain works. That's what
|
||
we were doing at Harvard and Millbrook during the 1960s.
|
||
The psychedelic movement was a mind-exploration movement.
|
||
None of us really understood what was happening when we
|
||
took psychedelic drugs, because we had to use the mystical
|
||
language of the past--Hindu terms like satori and samhadi,
|
||
occult terms like illumination and transcendental. We
|
||
didn't have the scientific metaphors to understand what we
|
||
were discovering.
|
||
|
||
RS: And we do now?
|
||
|
||
TL: Yup. We had to have a personal-computer movement to help us
|
||
understand the brain. You see, we can only understand our
|
||
inner workings in terms of the external, mechanical or
|
||
technological models that we build. We never understood
|
||
the circulation of the blood until we had hydraulic
|
||
systems moving water around. We didn't understand
|
||
metabolism until we had mastered thermodynamics with the
|
||
steam engine and understood how coal and oil produce power
|
||
and energy. Only then could we figure out how
|
||
carbohydrates and proteins work. Coming from an
|
||
industrial, mechanical culture, how could we possibly
|
||
understand the brain? Until recently we thought the brain
|
||
was a machine like a big telephone system. This is a
|
||
completely inadequate metaphor. The psychedelic-drug
|
||
movement of the Sixties and the personal-computer movement
|
||
of the Eighties are inner and outer reflections of each
|
||
other. You simply cannot understand psychedelic drugs,
|
||
which activate the brain, unless you understand something
|
||
about computers. It is no accident that many of the
|
||
people in the computer movement had experimented with LSD.
|
||
|
||
RS: And what was learned?
|
||
|
||
TL: Every person who took acid has his or her own story to tell.
|
||
That's the beautiful things about it. Certainly there is
|
||
no one who had an experience with LSD who didn't have an
|
||
unforgettable, overwhelming experience.
|
||
|
||
RS: How do computers help our inner exploration?
|
||
|
||
TL: Computers help us understand how our brains process
|
||
information. For example, as a psychologist, I was taught
|
||
that the synapse, where two nerve endings exchange
|
||
information, was a sort of on-off switching device. That
|
||
is not true at all. At the synapse there are millions of
|
||
quantum signals, like an enormous television screen.
|
||
There is probably more complex information exchanged
|
||
between one synapse and another than in most computer
|
||
programs. But I have to have an understanding of
|
||
computers to be able to say that. There is a wonderful
|
||
paradox here: we can only navigate outside as well as we
|
||
can navigate within. What happened in the Sixties was
|
||
that we did a lot of inner tripping, but we lacked the
|
||
cybernetic-language technology to express and map and
|
||
chart what we were experiencing.
|
||
|
||
RS: Do you miss the Sixties?
|
||
|
||
TL: Not really, though I must say it was a fantastic age of
|
||
exploration. We had that old-time 1492 Columbus fever.
|
||
We sensed that we were brain explorers. We intuitively
|
||
used metaphors of travel--"tripping," "coming down," "head
|
||
pilots," "guiding voyagers." The metaphor "turning on"
|
||
relates to activating the television set and booting up
|
||
the computer.
|
||
|
||
RS: These days, the drugs in vogue are not mind exploring. What
|
||
does that say about the time?
|
||
|
||
TL: The drugs that are popular today--cocaine, pills, ecstasy,
|
||
Venus, Eve--tend to alter mood rather than expand
|
||
consciousness. They can be instructive and fun if handled
|
||
prudently. But we still have to learn how to communicate
|
||
what we experience. Let's be frank: there will be new,
|
||
improved drugs and wave of internal explorations.
|
||
|
||
RS: With what end?
|
||
|
||
TL: It is a genetic imperative to explore the brain. Why?
|
||
Because it's there. If you are carrying around in you
|
||
head 100 billion mainframe computers, you just have to get
|
||
in there and learn how to operate them. There is nothing
|
||
in the outside universe that isn't mirrored and duplicated
|
||
inside your brain.
|
||
|
||
RS: Do you feel a kindred spirit with the people who are
|
||
identified with the drug movement, such as Richard
|
||
Alpert--a.k.a. Ram Dass--and novelist and Merry Prankster
|
||
leader Ken Kesey?
|
||
|
||
TL: Sure, although we all evolved so differently. Richard talks
|
||
about going back to the source, which means going back to
|
||
the past. For many good reasons, Richard committed
|
||
himself to an extremely archaic Hindu orthodoxy. But it's
|
||
a peaceful philosophy of caring and charity. Richard was
|
||
the Mother Teresa of the psychedelic movement. You can't
|
||
knock that. But Ram Dass ain't gonna blow your mind open
|
||
with new revelations, and he ain't gonna encourage you to
|
||
storm the gates of the info-space heaven with cybernetic
|
||
brainware.
|
||
|
||
RS: What about Ken Kesey?
|
||
|
||
TL: Ken Kesey and his wife, Faye, are real Western heroes.
|
||
Mythic ranchers. Frontier people. Oregon Trail folk.
|
||
Salt of the good earth. Rugged-individualist people you
|
||
can depend on in a crunch.
|
||
|
||
RS: How about others associated with that period? Abbie Hoffman?
|
||
|
||
TL: Abbie Hoffman is a wonderful legend. The most radical,
|
||
eloquent, rabble-rousing agitator of our time.
|
||
|
||
RS: Jerry Rubin?
|
||
|
||
TL: Jerry's your basic YMHA director, a likable young executive.
|
||
Jerry is a liberal conformist. He could just as well have
|
||
been a young liberal Republican. He's certainly not your
|
||
new Aristotle or Plato.
|
||
|
||
RS: What was his role then?
|
||
|
||
TL: He had his own Holy Grail quest. He certainly was out there
|
||
in the front lines. And he has a certain organizational
|
||
charm, which I admire. If you're looking for a veterans-
|
||
of-the-Sixties consensus here, I'd guess that ninety
|
||
percent of the people who were involved in the psychedelic
|
||
brain-discovery movement would tell you that LSD paved the
|
||
way for most of the cultural events of the last two
|
||
decades--ecology, New Age, Shirley MacLaine, the born-
|
||
again personal-religion stuff, the peace movement, the
|
||
personal-fitness craze, pop art, personal-computer
|
||
hacking, MTV, BLADE RUNNER, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE and the
|
||
cybernetic Eighties.
|
||
|
||
RS: Cybernetic?
|
||
|
||
TL: I think each decade in the roaring twentieth century has
|
||
produced new technologies and art forms for personalizing
|
||
and popularizing electronic, light-speed quantum energies
|
||
Since 1900 our society of factory workers and farmers has
|
||
been transformed into an information-age culture totally
|
||
committed to flashing realities on screens. Americans
|
||
spend more time looking at television monitors than they
|
||
do gazing into the eyes of family and friends. Power,
|
||
politics and culture are determined by who controls the
|
||
screens.
|
||
|
||
RS: How does this affect you?
|
||
|
||
TL: I follow the trends of evolution. I go with the electron
|
||
flow. I see myself as a quintessential American, just
|
||
going along for the ride.
|
||
|
||
RS: Quintessential? You?
|
||
|
||
TL: Hey, I'm sixty-seven years old. I have actively experienced
|
||
seven decades of accelerated change. I've surfed each of
|
||
the waves of the twentieth century with reasonable success
|
||
and an amount of fun. In the Forties, I was in the army
|
||
for five years and in school on the GI bill for five
|
||
years. What could be more apple pie? In the Fifties, I
|
||
was a button-down young professor with kids, a suburban
|
||
house, drinking martinis. In the Sixties, I dutifully,
|
||
diligently turned on, tuned in and, God knows, dropped
|
||
out. What was the alternative? Turn off, tune out,
|
||
blindly conform?
|
||
The Seventies was the decade of the political prisoner.
|
||
Nixon threw the dissenters in jail. I was the first one
|
||
to go into prison: January 1970. Then, after Watergate,
|
||
it was the Nixon gang's turn. In the next six years, I
|
||
watched my federal pursurers join me: the attorney
|
||
general, John Mitchell; Haldeman and Ehrlichman; Gordon
|
||
Liddy. Now, in the Eighties, how can you avoid the
|
||
computer revolution?
|
||
|
||
RS: Can you describe your work in the computer field?
|
||
|
||
TL: My work involves cybernetic psychology--the personalization
|
||
amd popularization of quantum mechanics. Packaging and
|
||
communicating thoughts at light speeds. Putting
|
||
electronic appliances in the hands of individuals. First
|
||
we had the telephone, then radio, movies, television. Now
|
||
we have computers, video players, compact discs, home-
|
||
editing appliances. It's still just the beginning. In
|
||
the next five years we're gonna design you an inexpensive
|
||
electronic facility for you living room. You'll be able
|
||
to move information and images around your screen in
|
||
whatever way you want. Now, that's revolutionary.
|
||
|
||
RS: In what ways?
|
||
|
||
TL: In the twenty-first century, whoever controls the screen
|
||
controls consciousness, information and thought. The
|
||
screen is a mirror of your mind, get it? If you are
|
||
passively watching screens, you are getting programed.
|
||
If you are editing your own screen, you are in control of
|
||
your mind. George Orwell had it wrong. He was too
|
||
optimistic. He wrote in 1984 that Big Brother would watch
|
||
us from screens on the walls of our living rooms or
|
||
bedrooms. But that is nothing. You could always duck out
|
||
of sight. The current horror is that Americans
|
||
voluntarily stick their amoeboid faces toward the screen
|
||
six or seven hours a day and suck up information that Big
|
||
Brother is putting there. Here is the key to our future:
|
||
We can and will control our own screens. We are designing
|
||
software that will empower you to produce and direct your
|
||
own mind movies, your own prime-time shows.
|
||
|
||
RS: And how will it affect us?
|
||
|
||
TL: This will create a new model of human being, the cybernetic
|
||
person. A new movement is emerging. It's something like
|
||
the beatniks of the Fifties of the hippies of the Sixties.
|
||
It's called cyberpunk. The concept comes from William
|
||
Gibson's book NEUROMANCER. Cyberpunks are individuals who
|
||
have the intelligence and the courage to access and use
|
||
high-quantum technology for their own purposes and their
|
||
own modes of communication.
|
||
|
||
RS: For example?
|
||
|
||
TL: In the movie WARGAMES the kid is a video hotshot. At school,
|
||
the authoritarian, smug teacher gives him a hard time. He
|
||
goes to the principal's office, gets the computer code and
|
||
goes home and changes his grade. He ends up using his
|
||
cyber skills to match wits with the Pentagon computers.
|
||
Another example of cyberpunk was the young man from
|
||
Hamburg, Mathias Rust, who piloted a small Cessna through
|
||
the electronic nets and defense systems of the Russians
|
||
and landed in Red Square. Why? Not for the CIA, nor for
|
||
the German army, but for his own fucking pleasure. He is
|
||
a classic cyberpunk. Charles Lindburg, the Lone Eagle,
|
||
was another. Stanley Kubrick. Jann Weaver. Steve Jobs.
|
||
I could go on.
|
||
|
||
RS: And they symbolize what?
|
||
|
||
TL: Taking control of the future ourselves. Ignoring the old-
|
||
time institutions and archaic politics. You don't
|
||
organize in old-time political groups to get involved in
|
||
campaigns for political office. You don't get involved in
|
||
the old struggle for or against Big Brother. You pilot
|
||
out to the frontier and navigate a new life. "Cyber"
|
||
comes from the Greek word for "pilot." Once you declare
|
||
you independence in your mind, you're home free.
|
||
As more and more people become free agents, or cyber pilots,
|
||
it's gonna make an enormous difference. When we get just
|
||
ten percent of the people operating this way, it will
|
||
change the system, because they are the smartest ten
|
||
percent. Star Wars, for example, cannot operate if ten
|
||
percent of the computer techies think for themselves. To
|
||
run a modern society you depend upon skilled, innovative
|
||
quantum intelligence. These are exactly the people who
|
||
are not going to become vassals to an economic or
|
||
political organization.
|
||
In his book NEUROMANCER, Gibson spells out a sociology for
|
||
the twenty-first century that makes a lot of sense. The
|
||
world is controlled by international global combines based
|
||
in Japan, Germany, Switzerland. Nationalism is down. The
|
||
multinationals won't allow war to break out; they can't
|
||
let the Russians bomb America, because they own most of
|
||
America. And it's an amazingly free world. The
|
||
international combines don't care about your lifestyle.
|
||
They just want us all to be consumers with individual
|
||
options. They're not like the Islamic fundamentalists or
|
||
the Reagan right-wingers or the communist moralists. They
|
||
don't care what your sex life is. They don't care what
|
||
drugs you take, as long as you consume. So there are
|
||
going to be enormous free markets operating according to
|
||
the laws of supply and demand--the basic form of
|
||
democracy.
|
||
|
||
RS: Who is most threatened by this idea?
|
||
|
||
TL: The nationalists and the religious people. Their power will
|
||
be greatly diminished.
|
||
|
||
RS: And what will happen in the political arena?
|
||
|
||
TL: Politics are going to change in the next two or six years,
|
||
when the baby-boom generation comes of age. The baby
|
||
boomers, born 1946 to 1964, are now between the ages of
|
||
forty-one and twenty-three. The 1988 election is the
|
||
first in which every baby boomer will be over twenty-one.
|
||
The older ones are going to be running for office. That
|
||
means in 1988, and certainly in 1992, the baby boomers,
|
||
the Summer of Love kids, will take over. This generation
|
||
is 76 million strong. They'll be in the position of the
|
||
shark in the swimming pool, the polar bear in the small
|
||
igloo. They can do whatever they fuckin' want.
|
||
|
||
RS: Yet young people today seem more conservative than ever.
|
||
|
||
TL: I don't think the old terms like "liberal" or "conservative"
|
||
make much sense. They are individualists--skeptical, even
|
||
cynical, about partisan politics. They've seen their
|
||
ideals dashed with Vietnam, Watergate, Iranscam. These
|
||
veterans of the Sixties are tough cookies.
|
||
|
||
RS: But how long will it take to get this technology into the
|
||
hands of more people?
|
||
|
||
TL: Good point. I can only repeat that the personalization and
|
||
popularization of high technology is the key.
|
||
Popularization means cybernetic appliances in the hands of
|
||
the people. It is not just the personal computer. It's
|
||
any electronic technology that allows you to change your
|
||
screen. With the new tape-editing appliances, you can
|
||
become the director and producer of what you and your
|
||
family see. You can combine educational programs with
|
||
entertainment, create collages with your own X-rated home
|
||
movies and bits you taped off CNN news.
|
||
|
||
RS: So we won't be dependant on outside programmers for all our
|
||
entertainment and information.
|
||
|
||
TL: Exactly. Don't forget these media programmers want absolute
|
||
control over our minds. When it's on my screen, I'll
|
||
decide how it plays. The first time I got turned on to
|
||
the new cyber-pilot idea was in a video arcade. I watched
|
||
my grandchildren moving rockets around on the screens.
|
||
Well, if you can do what with blips, you can do it with
|
||
ideas.
|
||
|
||
RS: People like Jerry Falwell and Ed Meese probably wouldn't be
|
||
too happy with your cyber-pilot concept. Are you
|
||
concerned about the regressive trends represented by
|
||
Falwell and the Meese commission?
|
||
|
||
TL: They must be scorned and ridiculed. Still, when you think
|
||
about it, the Meese commission doesn't really hurt self-
|
||
directed Americans very much. It stirs up a lot of
|
||
excitement. If 7-Eleven won't sell me PLAYBOY, I'll just
|
||
go to another store down the block. The poverty thing is
|
||
what hurts: people in the underclass deprived of
|
||
information, discouraged from learning cybernetic skills.
|
||
|
||
RS: How do you propose we combat that?
|
||
|
||
TL: My company, Futique--that's the opposite of "antique"--has
|
||
joined up with Activision to produce software programs
|
||
that are so inexpensive and attractive that ghetto kids
|
||
can quickly pick up the new language of screens and icons.
|
||
More and more of the cybernetic equipment will become
|
||
available. It will filter into all homes eventually, just
|
||
like television.
|
||
|
||
RS: You speak to many college audiences. What do you find out
|
||
there?
|
||
|
||
TL: We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history.
|
||
They are a hundred times better educated than their
|
||
grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has
|
||
never been such an open-mined group. The problem is that
|
||
no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain
|
||
dressed up with nowhere to go.
|
||
|
||
RS: What do they expect when they come to see Tim Leary?
|
||
|
||
TL: The average college student doesn't know who I am. They
|
||
weren't even born in l'ete d'amour. But word gets around.
|
||
The rumor is that I'm someone vaguely counterculture and
|
||
highly controversial.
|
||
|
||
RS: What are you trying to communicate to them?
|
||
|
||
TL: This is the golden age of intelligence. Instead of E=MC^2,
|
||
it's I=MC^2, where "I" is information. According to this
|
||
formula, the aim is to activate your mind, awaken new
|
||
ideas, improve your communication skills. Pilot your
|
||
life. Smarten up.
|
||
|
||
RS: And are the college kids responding?
|
||
|
||
TL: I sense that a lot of college kids envy the Sixties. They
|
||
feel they have missed something. Today there's not the
|
||
excitement and the feeling of change, the feeling of
|
||
engagement, that existed then. So they tend to respond
|
||
with enthusiasm to common-sense proposals for personal
|
||
change.
|
||
|
||
RS: It's ironic that the Sixties are viewed so fondly when many
|
||
emerged from that period completely disillusioned.
|
||
|
||
TL: It depends on your viewpoint. The so-called Sixties actually
|
||
started in 1967, when the oldest baby boomer became
|
||
twenty-one. The Summer of Love was a coming-of-age party.
|
||
It was triggered symbolically by the Beatles' SGT. PEPPER
|
||
album, which changed rock & roll into a new and powerful
|
||
cultural form. There had been preparations for it in
|
||
jazz, in the beatniks, in Elvis Presley, in the rhythm &
|
||
blues stuff, people like Ray Charles. And the early
|
||
elitist drug stuff, Ken Kensey and our group at Harvard.
|
||
But the signal went global with SGT. PEPPER. Every year
|
||
after 1967 produced another public eruption: the 1968
|
||
Chicago riots; Woodstock in 1969; Kent State in 1970. I
|
||
think the Sixties peaked in 1976 when we elected a hippie-
|
||
dippy, Howdy Doody guy named Jimmy Carter as president.
|
||
Carter was quoting Bob Dylan and talking about peace and
|
||
love and civil rights and human rights. How strange that
|
||
seems today!
|
||
The spirit of the Summer of Love in America ended with a thud
|
||
in 1980 when we elected Nancy Reagan as commander in
|
||
chief. But it rippled out globally. It surfaces whenever
|
||
young people get rid of the old World War II generals.
|
||
Spain after Franco started its summer of freedom.
|
||
Portugal. Brazil when the colonels got the boot.
|
||
Argentina. The Phillippines. What's happening in South
|
||
Korea right now looks familiar, doesn't it? College kids
|
||
and civilians in shirt sleeves standing up to the helmeted
|
||
national guard? Shades of Kent State? And now, exactly
|
||
twenty years later, the Summer of Love is hitting Russia.
|
||
Glasnost! Openess! Punk-rock clubs in Moscow! Gorby
|
||
singing "Give Peace a Chance"! Mrs. Gorby quoting
|
||
Lennon--John, not Vladimir Ilyich--to Yoko Ono!
|
||
|
||
RS: Isn't the Reagan administration out of step with all this?
|
||
|
||
TL: It doesn't matter. It cannot stop the evolutionary wave.
|
||
When it is time for the human species to activate their
|
||
new brain circuits, it's gonna happen. Nothing is going
|
||
to stop it! There is no way you can pass laws against the
|
||
relentless increase in human intelligence. The evolution
|
||
of precise technology is so seductive. There's no way you
|
||
can stop individuals from exploring their brains and using
|
||
the new cybernetic-knowledge appliances.
|
||
|
||
RS: In the meantime?
|
||
|
||
TL: The old game goes on. It is the genetic duty of the power
|
||
holders to in every way discourage change in the gene
|
||
pool. This means that those of us who are wired to change
|
||
have to be really smart and really tough. If we can't
|
||
prevail over turkeys like Meese and Falwell, then fuck it,
|
||
we don't deserve to get into the future. If we can't
|
||
outmaneuver vacuous four-letter robots like Bush and Bork
|
||
and Kemp and Dole, then we better go back to school and
|
||
smarten up. We are dealing with moral-mental pygmies
|
||
here. We can navigate around Ollie North's 600-ship navy
|
||
[smiles broadly]. They don't have a chance.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Interview by David Sheff
|
||
|
||
Supplied by IllumiNet BBS (404) 377-1141 300/1200 bps
|
||
|
||
|