This interview with Joe Bageant comes from episode 149 of the C-Realm Podcast and was ably and kindly transcribed by Carol B.KMO: You are listening to the C-Realm podcast. I am your host, KMO, and I’m joined here in the C-Realm by Joe Bageant. He is the author of a book called ‘Deer Hunting with Jesus’ and he is also somebody with one foot in our so-called industrialized First World, and another foot in a happier, more relaxed, and more peaceful so-called Third World, or what Albert Bates calls the Two-Thirds World.
Joe Bageant, welcome to the C-Realm podcast.
Joe: Well, hello, KMO. Good to be here.
KMO: And Joe, you are in the United States right now, but it’s not a place where you spend a lot of time. You spend most of your time in Belize, is that right?
Joe: Yes, it works out to about seven or eight months a year. It varies. I never get more than three or four in a row, because the book business, for one thing, brings you back. If you’re writing about America, you get a perspective from being outside of it, but you also have to be there with the people you’re writing about. So it’s a little of both, but I consider myself a resident of Belize, because I’m traveling a lot when I’m here.
KMO: Right. So when you’re here in the States, you’re all over the place, but when you’re in Belize, you’ve actually got some roots.
Joe: To the degree that I care about roots anymore. I don’t really care much to own anything. I don’t own property there or anything. I build cabanas for other people, the people that live in the various areas there, and they own them. They have a place for their kids to grow up and expand, or sometimes they rent them to tourists, and then when I come back, I rent from them. So I really gave up on home ownership. I didn’t want to do it anymore, especially not in the Third World. I don’t want to own their property. There’s free medical care; I pay for mine. I’m not there to rip anybody off. I’m just there to try to learn to be a human being.
KMO: Well, that’s an admirable goal. You know, I remember reading something from John Perry Barlow a few years ago back, where he had just spent a length of time in Brazil, and he had the social psychological vibe of Brazil, and he got on a plane and he came back to the U.S. (and this was shortly after 9/11). He went from this open, happy, balanced, psychological, social energy to the security and the regimented order of Customs, as you come into the U.S. by plane, and I know you’ve been through that recently. If you would, say a little bit about that, just what it feels like.
Joe: Well, I’m in a little bit of a unique position, since I’ve chosen to see the world as the rest of the world sees it, and not as Americans necessarily, the great hallucination we live under here. So coming back frequently like that makes me see, oh, I can see the hardening, the tension in the air; harden, and slack, and harden. So, you know, we all went to the United States shoeless, with proper supplication to the Fatherland.
But I can feel it in the air, and it’s not just the airports. Airports are horrible places anyway. But just someone who I’ve seen six months ago, even my wife, you can see the various anxieties, tensions, different shapes and flavors of it that vary over the year as what I call the Hologram broadcasts its message of fear and insecurity. It’s not subtle, but it’s subtle to Americans. They can’t perceive the capitalist atmosphere that they’re bathed in. They’re broadcast the signal directly to their brain all day long in every sign. Not just advertising: the lifestyle, the thin commercial veneer over everything, shiny and plastic and all.
You can’t see it. It’s like if you ask the goldfish the main characteristic of its environment, it would never say “water,” and that’s the way people are in America. They have no idea how their consciousness has been mutated by a hundred years of capitalism and the last thirty years of intense technology applied to that. So I believe that there’s these kind of collective neurological shifts that you can tell, and it’s not just me. Everybody I know, particularly the gringos, who understand the United States and lived here, and grew up here. We all say, “What did you feel?” And we’re all in agreement. We may have different terms for it, but we can feel the change in the atmosphere.
KMO: You mention the goldfish in the bowl, and I’m thinking of the old saw about the frog in the pan of water that’s heating up to boil and if that frog were to jump out, or if you were boiling two frogs, and one frog jumped out for a bit and then jumped back in. The other frog, he’s used to it; he’s acclimatized. The frog that got to step out for a bit, he’s really going to notice it: “Man, it’s pretty hot in here.”
Joe: [Laughs] Or he’s just going to watch in horror. That’s what I feel I’m doing half the time. I do a lot of speaking at universities, unions, socialist organizations, theological institutions, and that sort of thing. What’s interesting is most of them get it. They just don’t have a language to describe what’s going on. I get a lot of email. I say I’ve got the easiest job in the world: I just look around, say what I’m pretty sure everybody’s thinking, and everybody goes “Brilliant, brilliant!” It’s already there. They’re recognizing themselves. Other than the craftsman part of it, it’s a very easy job.
The first and very best editor I had, almost forty years ago, said “Joe, never be a mile ahead of the public. You only need to be a quarter of an inch, so they’ll recognize in themselves what you’re talking about.” You know what I mean, having some advanced theories and stuff. That doesn’t help anybody communicate with each other and look at their situation. So I use fairly plain language and it’s sort of an Emperor’s New Clothes thing. I’m not always right, by any means, but at least I cause a discussion of things people don’t talk about, the real atmosphere they live in, or the way they feel when they go to bed, or the hopelessness of the commute, or the self that deals with the world.
KMO: Joe, when I read your most recent blog post, which is a compilation of a few talks that you’ve given at universities recently, you used a phrase that I thought would make a great episode title, and that’s the “Stockholm syndrome of the soul.” If you would, say a bit more about that, and say a bit more about what you call the Hologram.
When I did the book, I had to tie it together. The book is about why working class people vote against their own interests, and I didn’t want to write a political book, I wanted to write a human book about people I knew and grew up with. But at the end, I had to tie it together someway, and why would anybody behave this way, against their own interests. So I discussed what I call the American Hologram. It’s a self-referential bubble. The people inside of it are directly wired, particularly to television and movies and media. It’s like a snow globe, and a bloody war killing children and disemboweling people, and hundreds of thousands of dead, is reduced to “our boys” and the flag, and America, a place of church spires, and freedom, and opportunity. The Hologram gives us that message as if we were inside a snow globe and the only thing we have to refer to is the language and the images that we’re fed, practically directly to the brain stem, from all of our media. It’s a uniform message, there’s really no big evil guy controlling it. We manifest it in ourselves.
A good example: I saw this ad for an electric car, driving along in front of wheat fields, Rocky Mountains in the background. In the clouds, a faint American flag is waving. The message is, of course, go green, buy a car with a poisonous battery. It’s very American, it’s patriotic. The flag is in the sky. God approves. We’re bombarded by this stuff, and we don’t think anything of it. I tell you what, it goes right past logic, and right past critical thinking, no matter what anybody says. It goes right past it, because those images get stamped there, the same way that they did when we were an upright hominid, glancing around the savanna land for fear. Anyway, these images, these sounds, this veneer of commerciality over everything, everything comes covered with clear plastic, and we live inside this holographic world that is nothing like the other two-thirds of the world. It certainly isn’t connected with nature.
The system that we’ve created, which is a malignant system, you’d have to call it malignant when you look at it in the total perspective. Here we are, six percent of the world. We use 36% of its resources. I count water and air, by the way. Most of those counts don’t do that. But everybody is a willing prisoner. That’s why I say it’s a Stockholm syndrome of the soul. They’re willing prisoners, they identify with their captors. Capitalism is an extractive process. It’s a faceless machine that exists for one reason: to extract from you production and profit. Most people have been reduced to a market demographic. They’re consumers, they’re not citizens. In no way are they citizens. No matter how active they are within the system, the system is the problem. But they’re prisoners of it, they don’t even see that it owns their souls, that the very things they see as solutions, they’re also part of it. “Buy green,” do this. Capitalism co-opts everything and offers it as a product, a consumer identity, and so on. So that’s why I say they’re prisoners, willing prisoners of their captors. They totally identify.
For instance, the bailout of the banks: “We cannot live without corporations. Corporations feed us. Corporations give us health. Corporations give us transportation. We cannot let them die. We cannot let the banks die.” So just like the Egyptians making their offerings, or the Aztecs stocked the temples, we get the bailouts, the extracted sweat of the people is offered up to preserve the vast corporations. As soul prisoners, they will not die if the corporations die, but they believe they will. The evidence around them tells them, “Oh, I will die if the banks fail. The world as I know it will disappear.” No, six percent of the world will have their ass up the crick real quick, but the rest of the world is not as affected. If the banks go broke in the Third World, gee, what else is new? Yes, it causes a lot of pain and inconvenience, but life is full of pain and inconvenience.
KMO: And just the building pressure of trying to keep up with the system that we have created for ourselves here. People think of it as comfort and security, but to me, it’s just constant stress and constant anxiety, and irritation with myself for continuing to put up with it when I know I could pack up a backpack and hitchhike down to Mexico if I didn’t have a car, or couldn’t afford a couple hundred bucks for a plane ticket, and live a different life.
Joe: One of the biggest criticisms of some of the things I write about the Third World is that they think that I’m presenting another version of Rousseau’s Noble Savage. By no means am I doing that. I have to shake scorpions out of my shoes. We have the tommygoff, which is a kind of fer-de-lance, we have food insecurity, a nice way of saying babies don’t get enough to eat. We have plenty of things, I’m in no way saying the people are better. My god, I’ve had things stolen from me, I’ve been ripped off, I’ve had people lie to me. It’s the world, it’s just ordinary human beings.
But when I look at the natural order of things, there is a connectivity in families. I tend to live with one family down there. All the boys want to be like their father. When was the last time you ever saw that? The extended family and clan, there’s a connectivity of flesh and spirit. Hey, they do stupid things, just like anybody else, but they love one another deeply, and they’re there for each other. I feel like I see, to some degree at least, what the community of man is, before it’s fully monetized and fully financialized. Now they’re going that way fast. It’s not like I live in this perfect little world by the beach. Jesus Christ, they eat candy bars for breakfast. So it’s not that. It’s to see that family and community can exist in a large connected web. That’s what I get out of it. I’m in it for the human stuff. The ecological things, there’s nothing I can do about those things except best practices myself. Try to find right actions. Hey, look, I smoke, I drink rum for Christ’s sake. But that’s what I’m interested in.
Some people perceive it as somewhat spiritual or religious; two words which have also been co-opted and commodified; but I see it as sort of a connectivity between selves, human beings, the little inner bead of awareness. That’s the part I’m interested in. How do we transcend?
Look what’s coming. We know what’s coming, Jesus Christ, whatever message you get here, the whole world knows it. It’s on the front page of the Australian papers every day, “Global warming.” Every day! Here, it never even makes it to the front, because the Hologram feeds us the illusion, oh man, what’s really important, what Michele Obama wore. We say this. Look at the bombing and the killing in Gaza, and look what we have produced. Jesus! Obama said something wrong about the handicapped. This makes the front page, while our weapons murder people in Gaza. Listening to Al Jazeera at night, that’s the only media. I get to spend five or six months without any media. But I do for an hour listen to Al Jazeera at night on my little yellow National Geographic radio in the cabana.
KMO: You know I had a guest on a few weeks ago. His name’s Charles Eisenstein.
Joe: I love Charles!
KMO: Something Charles says, what you just said reminded me of it, is every news story about celebrities and sports carries with it a subliminal message that “You can afford to care about this. There is nothing more important going on. There is nothing more deserving of your attention than this trivial nonsense about celebrities and who’s doing who and who’s breaking up with who, and sports.” And that just seems to be what you’re calling the Hologram doing what it does best.
Joe: Yes, the Hologram, which is both corporate and media and a lot of other things, I always say it regulates our neurological seasons. It’s election time, time for passions and voting. It’s Christmas, time to shop. (It’s always time to shop.) Time to make war. National consciousness, I still see it as having neurological seasons. When everybody is afraid in the wake of 9/11. What is that? It’s almost like a chemical season of the mind. Everybody’s feeling the same way, they’re all down there in the reptilian brain, thinking about survival, anger, and war. Particularly, television and media, they regulate these things, they are the regulator in the United States. They’re what people know about the world they live in and that they’re looking at. They don’t know what you see, what you understand on ayahuasca (or) on a lonely fishing boat out in the Caribbean. They’ll never know. In that sense, they live inside of a horribly mechanistic... You know, the Matrix looks more true to me every day.
KMO: You’re listening to the C-Realm podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and I’m speaking with Joe Bageant, and the title of his book might not clue you into the fact that he has definitely got his finger on the pulse of a number of topics that we cover here on the C-Realm, and just before the break there, Joe mentioned ayahuasca. And, Joe, I talk to a lot of people, some of them speak openly about psychedelics and their experiences with them, but I also speak to a lot of people who have a straight, respectable line that they make their living by presenting and articulating to the world, and they don’t have anything publicly to say about psychedelics, but off the record, when we’re just chatting they tell me how important psychedelics have been to their development as conscious human beings, and I know, just reading your blog, that you’re a lot more out in the open about that than a lot of the people who have those valuable experiences in their past, but who know that to speak of them openly would cost them in terms of credibility and access and whatnot. I’d like to just invite you to share a little bit about what you think psychedelics might have in store for us in terms of transforming consciousness, and if there’s any role for them to play in getting us out of this boiling pan of water.
Joe: I’ve never made any bones about it. LSD, along with Buddhism and psychology, but particularly LSD was the great awakening for me. I was a rural kid, living in a small town, and I’d read about it when I was in the ninth grade and wanted some. I read about it in Life magazine, this terrifying drug, and I’d never even smoked a cigarette in my life, and I wanted some.
It finally came along from Johns Hopkins. A friend of mine, who was being treated for his homosexuality with LSD; man, we continued his treatment as long as we could possibly could push it. It was legal. It was the first three years I took it, it was legal. But it was different then because it was all about set and setting. The only things we had to go by were the good Mr. Leary’s research, and think what you want about him, I believe he was a Galileo of human consciousness. Generally, it would be in a darkened setting, with a candle or Buddhas or tapestries. Nobody was dropping acid on the back of a motorcycle, for Christ’s sake. It was not considered a party drug yet.
Everybody had read Huxley, everybody had read Siddhartha, everybody had read the Bardo Thodol, the Book of the Dead, so there was a community, a consciousness community, that was around. The book ‘Storming Heaven;’ it’s about LSD. Every community had a few stragglers, and San Francisco, a metropolitan area had large numbers of them, larger numbers of them. From the very first time I took it, at once I saw the world, and I saw how malleable reality was. And when it was done, I sat and cried, because I knew life could be this good. I knew there was more meaning there, that there was more to be felt and lived and known and to be. So nothing was ever the same after that.
Because I had applied myself, like so many other people, not because it was LSD, same way with ayahuasca until very recently, I had a big refrigerator full of it. Now I haven’t taken it in years, but there seems to be a lot of interest in it. [Laughs] The expansion of consciousness, you have to call it that. Realizing how malleable and that reality is a consensus agreement between people. You could also agree on something else, [something other] than capitalism and brutal commuting and murdering each other psychologically for jobs. It’s possible to agree on something else, and maybe that’s why I like the Third World in my later years. It’s that they have agreed on something else.
I personally think it was one of the greatest threats to the system. My god, the Republicans spent $30 million dollars to do things like the Heritage Foundation erasing the 60s. It was a terrible threat, because here you had this generation, this baby boom post-war generation that was the best-fed, best-educated, had every reason to be optimistic, I mean we really believed we were going to win. Now people are told today that we were naïve and it was all just bell bottoms, pot smoke, and beads. Well that’s just not so. There was a core of very dedicated people who essentially, you have to call it spiritual. I’m not some old fart saying “Oh, that Generation X and Y, no good.” I’m not saying that because that's who comes when I talk, and that’s who’s been buying the book.
But, having said that, the generation that came of age from about 1962 to 1970 was the last text-based generation; their foundational knowledge was based on reading. There’s a very good book by a guy named Phil Beidler, who teaches down at Auburn University in Alabama. Ex-Vietnam vet, wonderful guy, brilliant. I think his PhD is in English. He wrote a book called ‘What We Read – Scriptures for a Generation.’ It’s about the last text-based generation, as opposed to the image-based, digital generation. And you look at this list of books, and go “My god, we all had that in common.” This huge list of books that they all read, whether it was Chairman Mao, or Siddhartha, or ‘Be Here Now,’ or R.D. Laing, a lot of these people, psychologist Jung. We read that as a matter of course because text was where we got our knowledge. All of it put together constitutes a little constellation or a mobile of points that refer to each other, and make an intellectual life, a moral life that’s worthwhile, as opposed to the Hologram where all its parts relate to a commercial message about production of the state.
But anyway, that generation was very well-equipped, so the tide of optimism was just huge. It wasn’t all the war in Vietnam. The war in Vietnam was like the war now, but it wasn’t the catalyst. Everybody wants to politicize everything. Yes, yes, yes, yes, there were demonstrations, yes, yes. But the main thing going on was that a generation was becoming consciousness mutants, and in a good way, believing an optimistic, hopeful message of creativity, love, and peace that was a direct threat to the military-industrial complex that was built up particularly during World War II.
People forget that the peace movement is 150 years old, and it was at its peak then. Right after World War II, 67% of Americans wanted all nuclear weapons to be under the control of the UN. I think it was over half wanted a one-world government. One-world government! That scared the living hell out of the production masters who just came out of World War II with five times the industrial capability. They weren’t about to give up that complex. They started making Kelvinators, tv sets, and so on, and with the same machinery. You need more people to work, women in the work force, and all that. This all threatened that, the affluent poor. A thousand people on the streets in Boulder, hanging out, making love, looking at the stars, saying “Hey, this is pretty good, I don’t think I’m really going to go buy a house and a Cadillac.” This stuff was threatening.
KMO: You know, the Controlled Substances Act that scheduled drugs into Schedule 1, Schedule 2, Schedule 3, Schedule 1 being “high potential for abuse, no medical applications,” which includes marijuana. It does include Tabernanthe iboga. Who in 1972 had heard of Tabernanthe iboga? It just astounds me that that drug, at the beginning of what we now call the Drug War, that plant, was classified as a hard drug with a high potential for abuse. Who was doing it? Somebody had a very specific agenda in terms of what they wanted to limit, in terms of conscious states that people can access. They knew that was a key. Wow, who was behind that? I don’t want to get conspiratorial here, but that just boggles me.
Joe: Well, two things come to mind there. One, Tim Leary used to say - one time he spun a globe around, in the particular household we had a world globe that we kept our dope in. [Laughs] (I’ve written about this in an essay somewhere). He said, “The world isn’t different colors like this map because the soil is a different color. This globe is different colors because different pieces of turf are ruled by upright territorial hominid gangsters that are in control of it. Right now, there’s a struggle going on for the consciousness of the planet between the insectoid malice suspicion of Asia, the authoritarian police court of the Soviet Union, and the American self-realization movement. And if we don’t win this thing, it’s over for the consciousness of the planet. If we do not win, realize ourselves, bring ourselves into actualization and realization on the face of the earth, because everything happens here, the wave breaks here first, fastest, and hardest. Every good thing that societies can be, and every horrible thing they can come to, we see here before us.” I always tell people, the reason you hated George Bush is because it’s the face of America revealed. And the reason the world really is disgusted with us is because of what they see is their future in us. And so the struggle for consciousness is vastly facilitated by financialization of the globe; capital can be leveraged from Rome or Lisbon or New York. It doesn’t matter. Boundaries don’t matter, the financial mobsters, as it were, the elites can leverage things around the world. Boundaries don’t make any difference any more. Their ability to affect consciousness, they simply affect the needs hierarchy, that affects our consciousness, as they leverage the needs hierarchy, and control the medium of exchange, it affects us. If I get up tomorrow morning, and I’m homeless, I’m damned right affected. [Laughs]
As far as the conspiracy stuff, well, of course, but I’m just not a big fan of conspiracy theories for two reasons. One, an elite bunch of people, no matter what country they’re in, no matter what financial or industrial institution they’re a part of, they don’t have to conspire if their goal is the same. They don’t have to know each other. So that’s one of the things that bothers me. It’s also a tendency of Americans to want to name bad guys. If the whole damn system is rotten, and you’re looking for the guy that’s doing it, there’s no one guy. It Are Us. And the other part of the conspiracy thing that really bothers me is, well, I think you find the answer by looking right up what’s in front of your nose. It’s too easy to go flitting off about the Bilderburgers and all that stuff. If human beings don’t participate, it doesn’t exist.
If people didn’t pay their taxes this year, believe me, that’s a revolution. Boy, they can’t put a million people in prison, what are they going to do? They wouldn’t any way. They'd try to keep it quiet that nobody was paying. That would wreck everything. It would stop the whole machine. But, again the Stockholm syndrome of the soul, “What happens if I don’t pay my taxes?” Well, I don’t know, I pay mine because my fear is great of these people, of the institutions; the people are just little gears in it, demonizing even George Bush, he’s just an idiot, just an idiot that reflects us. Just because you voted the other way. I worked on the Obama campaign, but I don’t kid myself, it’s a televised popularity contest, and television put him there. Why not Dennis Kucinich? It’s no crime to be four feet tall. We have to look at it for what it is, and why we make the choices we do.
KMO: That’s a question I put to a lot of guests. If we just apply Occam’s Razor, if we look at the needs of big organizations, and if we look at the structure of our corporations and our economic system and whatnot, then the behavior of the Hologram is explainable without any malicious intent on the part of a small group of elites. Occam’s Razor would have us just eliminate the small group of scheming elites because their participation is not necessary to get the effects that we see, and yet at the same time, I think you’ve put your finger on it. If we do look to the Bilderburgers, if we do look to whomever as the villains, then that excuses our participation in the larger scheme, which is not one that we say we agree with, it’s not one we say we want, but it’s one that we perpetuate just by our acquiescence.
Joe: Brilliantly put, KMO. Brilliantly put. Clear, clean, direct. What can you say after that? That’s exactly it, except that if you don’t own your soul and you don’t own your mind; it takes effort, effort to possess your own consciousness.
Capitalism is successful around the world because it’s easy. It takes no active participation, just consuming. Consuming is not only easy, it’s hardwired it into us, when we were that hominid that had to struggle each day for food, (although we didn’t, not as much as we do now, but anyway). It’s easy, it’s passive, you don’t even have to be literate, you don’t have to think, all you have to do is consume.
The Third World’s the same way. I help people indirectly, I don’t do anything directly because I don’t want to be the rich white guy. We got people farming and we got sanitation and we got children’s health going in some places. We have shelter and homes and food and kitchens. You know what they want? Money. They want money. Money. Everybody wants money. The whole world is monetized; they want money. Well, of course, you can do a great deal of good simply by, “There you go, you got two new houses on your property.” They’re gonna be used, they’ve got a warm place to shit, a place to raise their kids. But the world is so monetized. It’s so thorough. Because it’s easy, because it’s easy.
KMO: And the places where every aspect of life hasn’t been monetized, the people there, they are plugged into the Hologram. You know, I’ve been in shacks in Peru that had hardened dirt floors, and a thatched roof, and they had a television in there. They see how they’re supposed to be living, how they think they’re supposed to be living, and they want it.
Joe: Yup, or what’s more desirable. Now the place I choose to spend my time, hey, it’s a Third World country, but most people have a television. People have microwaves, and cheap Chinese washing machines made out of plastic (they’re really just buckets that bounce up and down, but they look like what they saw on television). People go for that stuff. So their consciousness is commoditized - almost as much as any American in some ways - the younger generation. At the same time, I find great solace there. For one thing, we have certain celebrations, young people and old people dancing and singing and drumming together. The connectivity is still there. You’re not undesirable because you’re old, and you’re not stupid because you’re young. Those things are underneath all the junk.
I’m perfectly happy for a collapse, an economic collapse, in America. It pains me greatly though what that means for the Third World. When the Chinese bid a higher price for the world’s rice, we don’t have rice for a month. If they go for beans, we don’t get beans or flour or whatever. You just don’t run out and solve that problem. That puts pressure on the Mayans who grow vegetables, therefore vegetables become expensive. It’s because they’re commoditized and they’re buying their food. They no longer raise it and they no longer catch it in the sea. It’s almost not an option anymore, because the fish are dying or gone. The land that was once agricultural land is owned by resorts and things like that. But that commoditization of consciousness is everywhere. It may be irreversible in many of the places I go; I’m sure it’s irreversible. The world doesn’t go backward. I really believe there’ll be a die-back before we reach sustainability.
KMO: Well, Joe, you probably don’t realize it, but you mentioned in passing three or four different regular themes on the C-Realm podcast, and I’m tempted to pursue them all but I’m going to back up a little bit. Let’s just talk about the First World, the Second World, and the Third World, because we are conditioned to believe that we live in the First World. In fact, when I’m talking on this show, a phrase that just rolls right off my tongue is “Here in the industrialized First World.” We know what the First World is, we know what the Third World is, but what is this "Second World?" It doesn’t really seem to be something that anybody ever talks about.
Joe: Of course, I contend we’re a Second World nation. In the first place, of course there’s only one world, but I don’t adhere to political correctness very much; it’s liberal fascism.
We are a Second World nation by that terminology that people think, even if they don’t say it politically. We don’t have health care; we don’t have free health care. We don’t have free education. We don’t have mass transportation, lots of things. Belize, Third World country that it is, we do have free health care, to the degree that it can even be purchased or found or bought. We have a very corrupt government, that steals everything, but still we have free health care. We have mass transportation. It might be old school buses, but there’s only one car for 150 people, for Christ’s sake, how are they getting around? Bicycles and buses and stuff. Social Security at age 60. The priorities are there.
If a Third World nation can do this, what is America that we don’t have those things? At the very best, we’re a Second World nation with a layer of glossy plastic and advertising over everything. Like I was saying in the essay, just because everything there is covered by a thin layer of tropical grunge, Americans are afraid of that. They want their sanitized world, so they see fear and danger, they think these black people are gonna rob ‘em.
As far as that First, Second, and Third World, we all know there’s only one world of flesh, blood, chlorophyll, air, and oxygen. There’s only one world and the various territorial hallucinations. I don’t worry about them anymore. I’m not going to convince anybody of this stuff. I just walk around in it, and I feel a little bit sorry, and yet there’s enough of the old stoner hippie to see a weird cosmic humor - the Buddhist expression, “the cosmic laugh of horror.” To see that every joke has a victim, and in this case, it’s Man. That’s the cool thing about getting older, like Studs Turkel said, you get to where you can babble and everybody says “Well, he’s just an old fart,” and you can get away with murder.
KMO: You know, Joe as you say, you think you’re not convincing anybody, but what you do is articulate what a lot of people already feel and think, just a bit better than they could themselves, and when they hear that they really resonate with it, and they think “Yeah, yeah!” I think James Kunstler does the same thing. His schtick is just how awful it is to live here in the land of happy motoring, and suburbs, and he can articulate it a bit better than most of the people who already think that.
There are several different vectors into the C-Realm. One is through the Psychedelic Salon, which is another podcast. It’s older; it’s got a bigger audience than mine, and the person who runs that is a guy named Lorenzo. He’s got a prominent link on his site to mine, and he has for a couple of years now, and it brings in a lot of people. A lot of people also come in through the Peak Oil vector, and those people generally don’t have much truck whatsoever with psychedelics, or even any desire to hear anything about it. Yet in 2007, when I was down in Iquitos for the annual shamanism conference down there, and going out to various curanderos’ places to drink ayahuasca, I was with a C-Realm listener and his mother. They had come in through the Peak Oil vector, and they had never heard of ayahuasca before they tuned in to the C-Realm podcast. Just a few months later, they were in South America in a dark tambo with a bunch of other gringo spiritual searchers drinking ayahuasca, and listening to some shaman shake his rattle and sing his icaros. People are convincible; people do change their minds.
Joe: Boy, you hit on a lot of bases there all at one time. The ayahuasca churches, the União do Vegetal, a lot of stuff that comes to America through Latin Americans emigrating here, legally or illegally. That’s a very fast growing church. I don’t think anybody understands the church using ayahuasca. Of course, you know more about this than I do, I just eat the stuff. [Laughs] Not anymore, not too much anymore. It’s kind of like Kesey said, you get the message, hang up the phone.
But it’s a very fast growing thing in America. You can’t have that many people whose consciousness has shifted without it affecting a lot of things at a grassroots level. To have seen is to have seen. You’re never the same, especially when you seek out seeing, like those people who travel a vast distance there to do it. In the first place, they were not passive, they were taking the action, the trajectory of their intelligence and insight they established when they took the first step forward to have an expanded consciousness, to be willing to let the dead skin, the old skin die. They took the first step, the ayahuasca just happens to be the lubricant.
People don’t get it about drugs; we’ve been told so much crap. We all know that there are drugs that show us the malleable nature of reality, the larger, greater reality. You get the ultimate message. The most liberating truth I ever got was that universe does not care - but but but - the universe does not care - but but but. My own insignificance. My own insignificance. Meaninglessness. That I’m not unique.
There’s a baby being born right now that’ll experience every emotion I ever had. Some Egyptian mummy once experienced it. To not be with the self so much, to me, that’s the answer. The consumption stops. I don’t give a damn if I own anything. When I’m down there, I have two pair of shorts, four t-shirts, two pair of flip flops (there’s the dress flip flops for funerals [laughs]), and a couple guitars, and my laptop. That’s it. And I go, “Wow, the whole damn world works just fine.” I do TV contracts and book contracts, and here I do interviews all over the world. What the hell did I ever think I needed all that shit in the United States for? My lord, what a hallucination that was. Just maintaining it, just owning it. Who owned what? It’s like some little crab with this huge shell of cars and clothes and guitars and radios and houses stuck to ‘em. Ayahuasca can make you perceive that instantly.
KMO: That brings me back to the question, what role do you think that has in the larger transition in consciousness that’s needed? Because the ayahuasca churches that mix Christianity with shamanistic indigenous plant-based practices have received two ringing endorsements from the U.S. Supreme Court; one for the UDV and one for the Santo Daime. It’s legally protected here in the U.S. What do you see as the potential there? Or as a possibility?
Joe: Human beings, they have their spiritual experience, understanding, and growth, but we have this A B cause and effect thing, “If, then, therefore” kind of logic that something’s got to come out of it that’s either positive or negative. How about people just really living a deeper life? If we’re going to go around and guess or project what their effect will be. Looking to see what somebody else’s effect is is a way of not having your own. What do you do in this moment? What do you do when you look into the face of this person? What do you do in service to humanity? If humanity is at stake, and humanity is doing so many things wrong, and humanity is a viral thing on the planet that I’m sure Mother Nature will mop up one way or another. If you don’t look at yourself, just look at yourself and just do that every minute, every day, what is the right action here?
I like the Third World because right action is easy to do. If a child is hungry or has tapeworms, it’s very easy to take direct action. If I’m hungry, I cook some beans. This business of looking to large mega-systems and trying to understand them, I think that’s the thing I’m just about giving up on, because understanding a larger mega-system, mega-thinking, mega-programming, quantum thinking, things that even ayahuasca enables you to do, or education enables you to do. It doesn’t do a damn thing, really, unless you do something yourself.
Give up things. Give it away, give it up. My family was not in love with me when I said I’m gonna live on $6,000 a year like the rest of the planet and give away the book money. They figured the old man had flipped out. And yeah I had, but I flipped into a better space, because I was sick of commuting. I was sick of working for publications about war. I was sick of being part of the problem. Sick of all the things that owned me, I didn’t own them. And so that’s what I do, as soon as I get a big check, I spend it right away. Do something good with it, because if I don’t, if I hang onto it, I’ll buy sickness. I’ll be right down there at the music store buying another guitar, or buying a pair of leather shoes I don’t really need, because I’m conditioned to consume. I was telling my wife, “How was it, back in the United States eighteen hours before I had bought something I didn’t need?”
KMO: What was that?
Joe: It was an electronic gizmo for my computer. I didn’t need that, it just makes it more fun. Well, who gives a shit? You don’t need that! Oh, this is so convenient, this is handy, and I got home and went, “Hell, I’ve been functioning for fifteen years without it. Why did I think I needed that?”
KMO: Well, I absolutely hate to say this, Joe, but we have reached the end of the time available for this conversation, but I very much enjoyed it. I’m sure the listeners will as well. So, thank you very much for appearing on the C-Realm podcast.
Joe: Thanks, KMO, I appreciate the invitation. Every now and then you get one of these shows where you don’t even hold back. In America, you can’t say stuff. In Australia, I said "fuck" on the radio, then I said, “I’m so sorry.” They said “Hey, we don’t have an FCC,” and I finished the talk.
KMO: [Laughs] Well. Actually, I do beep out the profanity just because some of these shows do get played on the radio.
Joe: No, no, no, I’m not saying, don’t. I’m just a redneck, and that’s a form of punctuation for us. [Laughs]
Take care. Bye bye.
,” and I was trying to figure out what it is people are going to most need, or most need to learn about, when they are making this transition in the coming years between the era of petroleum that has been going on for a century or more and the post-petroleum era. And it is kind of like shifting from your savings account, in this case the fossil fuel savings account that was accumulated over a hundred million years, to a current checking account which is based on income in the form of solar energy striking the planet every day. And it is a significantly different kind of lifestyle, living on your income, than it is living on such a massive pile of savings.
. You can hear the audio presentation in episodes 20 and 21 of the C-Realm Podcast.
. He has a chapter in those books on tribute payments, and debt is something that he would define as a tribute payment: it is a payment made by somebody who has no liquid capital to somebody who does have liquid capital and it seems … Well, I’ll divulge a little personal information here. I worked for Amazon.com early on in the late nineties, from the mid- to late nineties and I got really excellent stock options and that was my first job out of grad school. And I didn’t know a lot about money so I spent the next decade just having a good time and spending money and not really making money; and certainly not setting up my own tribute systems so that people without money would have to pay me tribute for years on end. I ran out of money, found myself in deep debt, and I had been out of the job market for a decade, and now I am 38, about to turn 39 and I’m really just starting to create a career for myself for the first time. I am in deep debt to credit card companies, and I would very much like that jubilee.
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