Monday, December 22, 2008

Industrial Capitalism vs. Techno Democracy

"[Industrial] capitalism is as anti-human philosophy as you can possibly conceive. They try to tell you that capitalism and democracy are not at variance. Actually, the whole Marxist, Leninist, Socialist thing was a side dish. The real life and death struggle is between capitalism and democracy. Democracy says, 'everybody has an innate worth that must be honored.' Capitalism says, 'those who die with the most toys wins.' You cannot reconcile these two things; but nobody wants to talk about this [because] we're still having the party over the fall of communism."

"I'm not anti-capitalist; I think capitalism needs to severe its connection to materialism. This is again why virtual reality is interesting. You sell things made of LIGHT, not made of beryllium, metal, brass, steel and wood but light. We've got all the light we need, but we have to stop making things out of STUFF, or we're not going to be around to tell the tale."

-- Terrence McKenna

Personally, I'm not a sold-out McKenna groupie, but he certainly does a peerless job of specifying many fundamental components of our current socio-enviro-econo-political environment. It's this unvarnished assessment of What is the Actual Current Situation that we cannot fail to understand, in order to build a Resilient, Adaptable, and Sustainable conversational economy, moving forward.