AGainst the Wind

These substances (alcohol, caffeine, anti-depressants) are valued because of the way they alter consciousness. But what all these altered states of consciousness have in common is that none of them contradict or conflict with the basic state of consciousness valued by our society, which I would call the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness, which is good for mundane aspects of science. It's good for the prosecution of warfare, it's good for commerce, it's good for politics, but I think everybody realizes that the promise of a society over-monopolistically based on this state of consciousness has proved hollow. And that this model is no longer working - that it's broken in every possible sense that a model can be broken. And urgently we need to find something which can replace it.