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Comment by moviewise | Hacker News Reader

Duke: “We’re all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the ’60s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America, selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all those people who took him seriously—all those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy peace and understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped create. A generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the acid culture: the desperate assumption that somebody, or at least some force, is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.“ From:

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)

https://moviewise.substack.com/p/movies-that-are-frightening

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Required co-quote:

"There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.…

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Heck yes. Defeatism is not the point. It's hard & complicated & requires a lot of work. But giving up, shrugging, lying down, letting short lived pleasure rule us was not HST's point.

And Learny himself wanted us to push on. This software saw itself as a toolkit for observing where we are/were and where we ought head.

I would back down from calling it inevitability. The dark conservative clutching forces could overtake hope & growth & possibility, consign our shared fate to shitty sad ruin. Both Leary & HST seemed to be co-aligned though, in believing that a vibrant spirit, aware, with some basic shit at it in the world, could go far, could, if conditions allowed, have potential to make a real difference. Whether we believe that opportunity is open widely & wish to support that, or think that chance is rare & special & only some have it within- it's a self fulfilling prophecy that dictates whether we opt to let & support humanity's chance, or whether we insist it's only a few, whether we dont bother to support & aid one another.

There's a kind of ever-dawning Gaianism I see in both TL & HST. Both require embracing a bigger humanity. Neither is prestined-both rely on consciousness, on deciding, on tuning out to the what is, and becoming consciously a part of what will be. Feom another comment talking about 1968 Leary's The Cyber Punk The Individual As Pilot:

> He gives a definition of cyberpunks in the first sentence (people who use all available data input to think for themselves https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32612648

As I've said yet again elsewhere in these comments, a huge part of this all is finding & deciding what we each are & ought become. Cybernetics we see very closely resembling the controller model of systems like kubernetes.

It's interesting to draw a parallel between the popularization of acid by Leary and the popularization of the Internet by many. John Lilly experimented with hallucinogens, but knew that a lot of preparation was in order.

    sed 's/acid/Internet/'

in Duke's quote. People just flock to the Internet and are immersing themselves in it as their reality, without a full understanding of the long term consequences.

Alternate reality is alternate reality, man.

> Duke

I sometimes wonder if Gonzo was an alter ego all along, to pin the bad stuff on.

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