Civilization: Is it worth it?

[Intro] Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna.

[00:00:18] Dennis McKenna: All right, so Dr. Christopher Ryan is an astute observer, commentator, and fellow experiencer of the human condition.

Unlike most of us, his insights into the existential human situation undermine conventional wisdom and are often profoundly unsettling. This approach is reflected in his bestselling book, “Sex at Dawn”, published in 2010, which calls into question nearly everything we think we understand about human sexuality. His latest book, “Civilized to Death, the price of progress”, takes on the very notion of civilization and what he terms the narrative of perpetual progress. From the book’s description, most of us can feel that something’s off. Balmy December days, face to face conversation replaced with screen to screen zomboidism, a world of constant war, a political system in disarray. We hear some lies so frequently that they begin to feel like facts. Civilization is human’s greatest accomplishment. Progress is undeniable. We’re lucky to be alive here and now.

Well, maybe we are and maybe we aren’t. “Civilized to Death…” counters the idea that progress is inherently good, arguing that the progress defining our age may be analogous to an advancing disease.

The ideas Chris Ryan unpacks in this book have reframed much of what I assume to be true about civilization and the evolution of our species. It has been a most unsettling experience as much as it has been edifying, stimulating and enlightening. Chris, we are delighted to welcome you to the Brainforest podcast.

[00:02:19] Chris Ryan: Thank you. Thank you. I’m very happy to be here.

[00:02:22] Dennis McKenna: Thank you. Well, there is so much to talk about. I have my cocktail party civilized to death sheet seat in front of me. But I think the..uh

Well, I guess the best way to do is to ask you why were you motivated to write this book, and what are you hoping people are going to learn from it? Because I found a great deal to learn myself. As I said, the introduction has challenged many of my assumptions about practically everything about the human situation.

[00:03:02] Chris Ryan: Well, when I was working on “Sex at Dawn”, which is sort of a similar book, looking at the prehistory of human sexual evolution, I realized I can’t talk about sexuality because sexuality is so intrinsic to human experience. I can’t speak about it without speaking about the context within which sexual behavior occurs. So we need to talk about not only intimate relationships between sexual partners, but parenthood and how power is configured in hunter gatherer groups that our ancestors lived in for hundreds of thousands of years.

Nutrition and health and all these sort of aspects of what I call and others have called the neo Hobbesian paradigm. Right? Thomas Hobbes very famously said that before the advent of the state, human life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. And the more I was researching, both in my doctoral dissertation and in “Sex at Dawn”, all these different aspects of human life before the advent of the state, the more convinced I was that Hobbes was wrong on every point.

Solitary? No. These people lived in intimate communities, extremely intertwined and dependent upon one another. Cooperative, egalitarian, women and children were held in the same esteem as men, by and large in hunter gatherer groups.

So, certainly not solitary. Poor.. Well, poverty is a relative concept, right? You’re only poor if your neighbor has more than you, and also if you have enough, then you don’t feel poor. And one anthropologist who studied hunter gatherers, an Israeli anthropologist, she said that hunter gatherers are interesting because although they have virtually nothing in terms of material possessions, they go through life acting rich. They act as if they have no concern at all for tomorrow. And where are we going to find food, they’re not saving for a rainy day? There’s none of that kind of scarcity based behavior. Whereas modern humans, who in material terms are incredibly wealthy, act upon the assumption that there’s never enough. So we’re constantly hoarding, constantly worried about tomorrow, can I retire? What if I get sick? What if this happens? What if that happens?

So certainly not solitary, not poor, nasty, brutish. Well, there’s all sorts of interesting data about the fact that war didn’t really occur until the advent of agriculture, because before the advent of agriculture, there’s nothing really worth fighting over. If nobody has anything, what are you going to take? What are you going to risk your life to take?

[00:06:09] Dennis McKenna: Besides which, everyone shares everything, right?

[00:06:12] Chris Ryan: Exactly, right.

[00:06:13] Dennis McKenna: It’s more collective culture, right?

[00:06:16] Chris Ryan: And in fact, what you see, even outside of your group, what you see is traditions of incredible hospitality, some of which persist to this day in places like Afghanistan and very remote places. If you walk into a village in a place like that, there’s a frenzy to make you feel welcome, to give you the best food and a place to sleep. And people take care of strangers, they don’t attack and kill strangers. So all these assumptions, and then short, of course, everyone thinks hunter gatherers died at 30 or 35 years of age, and we’ve doubled the human lifespan, which is one of the most intensely propagated pieces of false propaganda that I can point to. In fact, hunter gatherers live into their 70s, typically, and the idea that people were old at 30 or 35 is purely based upon the statistical misunderstanding of average lifespan at birth. It’s true that many children died before they reached ten years of age in hunter gatherer groups? That’s true. No avoiding it. And so if you take everyone who’s ever born and look at how at the age of death and average it out, you get about 30 or 35. But that doesn’t mean that anyone was ever old at 30 or 35. Right? So that’s nonsense.

Anyway, so I sort of was seeing how this vision of prehistory was so politicized and distorted and the average person, or even medical doctors, I taught in a med school in Spain, and every year I had to explain to these med students, like, no, we have not doubled the human lifespan. That hasn’t happened.

And so in “Sex at Dawn”, in the middle of the book, I folded in a few chapters, very brief. Politics, economics, violence, and these things, just sort of the way you give a dog a pill, right? I thought, everybody’s going to be interested in the sex stuff, but this is a little dry and not as interesting, so I’ll just slip it in there and they won’t notice. And I ended up getting a lot of emails from people, including book agents, who said that stuff was really interesting. The sex stuff was interesting, but I’d like to know more about the politics and the parenting and the childbirth, and how did they deal with elderly people who couldn’t keep up with the group? How do they deal with someone who’s got a terminal illness? And how do they conceive of religious ideas and life after death and all these other aspects of our hunter gatherer past, when “Sex at Dawn” hit and suddenly I had some leverage as a writer, and I could pretty much pitch whatever I wanted for my next book.

I had a couple of ideas. I had an interesting conversation with a literary agent, and I had a follow up to “Sex at Dawn” that was very much about sexuality and the sort of conflict between our innate sexual appetites and the world we live in and the demands of modernity and all that.

And I had this other idea for this more comprehensive look at prehistory.

But I thought, maybe down the line, I’ll get to that. Anyway, I told him about the ideas and he said, well, look, if you write another book about sex, you’re going to be the sex guy. That’s going to be your career, right? And if you want that, great. But if you write another big idea book like the one you’re talking about, that eventually became civilized to death, he said, then you could be a big idea guy, and then you could write about whatever, and your career would probably be much more interesting. I thought that was good advice. It was not welcome because it’s a much bigger project than the other book would have been. And it took a lot out of me to write this book.

But I think he was right.

[00:10:42] Dennis McKenna: I think it’s an excellent book.

We have so many assumptions, some of which are outlined in here, in the cheat sheet. We start with this basic premise that civilization is superior, and therefore, it’s a superior institution, and therefore we must be superior because we invented it. But what your book makes clear is, not so fast that the forager cultures, nomadic cultures, actually did. They did live like rich people in a sense. They had everything they needed. They were not preoccupied with material possessions because they carried everything around, and they had such tight knit social networks that that was the strength. Everyone looked after each other, the way that children were raised, completely different than the sort of often authoritarian approach we have, the way that women are treated, much more egalitarian in these cultures. So what I gathered from your book, among many other things, is that there was a point about 12, 13 thousand years ago when there was catastrophic climate change and on a global scale. And that was the invention of civilization, in a sense, as climate resources began to run out and people became preoccupied with accumulation of things, mostly food, initially. How are we going to stave off starvation when the abundant resources that these other earlier cultures lived in, those are now threatened. So civilization was kind of a bargain that we had to make, or at least we thought we had to make, to ensure the survival of our species. But in some ways, it was a devil’s bargain, because we had to sacrifice so much. What we had before in order to come up with these civilized solutions or this civilization. And many of the problems that civilization, the medical breakthroughs, technological breakthroughs, those sorts of things are all seen as part of progress, but in fact, they were forced upon us by civilization in a certain way.

Civilization created the problems, many of these problems, of shortages and so on, inequality. And it’s been a trap ever since. I mean, we can’t just back out of it.

We’ve been forced into this.

And in the process of doing that, we’ve invented technologies that enable us to proliferate like crazy on the planet. And that’s a big problem, that there are so many people now and so dependent on the infrastructures like industrial agriculture and this sort of thing just to keep us alive, that we can’t just step back and say one day, well, gee, this isn’t working for us, let’s all become foragers.

That may be the ideal life. And that may be closer to how people are meant to live. But what do you do in this situation where we stand now? Is there any way we can’t return to a foraging type civilized culture? It’s not even a civilization.

What is our existential choice at this point in history, which history itself being an invention of civilization?

[00:15:01] Chris Ryan: Yeah, well, I think that obviously you’re right. There’s no going back to the garden, as it were.

But I think there’s a lot of value in understanding the context in which our species evolved. And I mean that both physiologically and culturally, as far as hunter gatherers go, because understanding the sort of default setting of human psychology, of human sexuality, of human nutrition, of how much activity we need, our bodies have expectations that have been built into us over hundreds of thousands of years.

And so those expectations, when they’re thwarted because of a mismatch between our evolved predispositions and the availability of the society that we happen to live in, we suffer. We suffer stress, and that manifests physiologically, psychologically, sexual dysfunction all sorts of ways, digestive problems.

And a lot of people are blaming themselves. A lot of people feel guilty that they’re not happy. If you live in the best possible time in the history of humanity, as many people proclaim, then why are you unhappy? You must be lazy. There’s something wrong with you.

And both of the books, “Sex at Dawn” and “Civilized to Death”, both of those books were motivated by a desire to bring comfort to people who don’t understand why they’re suffering and to show them that it’s not your personal inadequacy. It’s not a problem necessarily in your marriage that you sometimes are attracted to people other than your partner. This is related to “Sex at Dawn” more and anytime there’s a mismatch between what your body and your psychology expect and what it actually receives, then you have problems. And so I think we’re seeing a recognition of this in many aspects of life right now in your area. The sort of recognition of the need and the sort of incredible healing potential of psychotropic plants, of trance states induced by dance, by chanting. It doesn’t necessarily have to be plant induced, but the sort of innate predisposition for these sorts of states and the healing potential of them is built into us. Similarly, in diet, people are looking at Paleo diet. What did our ancestors eat? How much fiber did they need? And exercise? Right? Daniel Lieberman at Harvard has written several books about the evolved human body. How much movement do we need? Is it really 10,000 steps? Do we need to run? Can we walk? Can we dance? So these things are built into us, and a lot of people say, well, we’re not animals.

We’re evolved, we’re civilized. But just because you’re civilized doesn’t mean your body doesn’t need the same nutritional input that human bodies did 10,000 years ago and how it deals with energy and fat storage and all these things.

[00:18:37] Dennis McKenna: It seems to me that civilization has alienated us from our own body as well as alienated us from the environment. We’ve set up all sorts of barriers between us and nature. I mean, I think the profound existential crisis of our age is the fact that we’re so out of sync with nature, we’re so out of touch with nature, and we’ve sacrificed nature. We put screens, literally sometimes screens, between us and the rest of the natural world, and it seems like that’s something we’ve sacrificed. And when it comes to psychedelics, psychedelics are very interesting. We both know for multiple reasons. But one of the things that seems characteristic of psychedelics in people’s revelations is people often have insights about how we are estranged from nature and how that’s fundamentally at the base of a lot of societal problems and also individual problems. People are starved for nature.

An interesting thing, psychedelics are nothing new.

Psychedelics are thousands and thousands of years old, and they’ve been giving us those messages for that long.

And yet maybe before civilization, maybe the message was different. They didn’t need to propagate those messages because we did live in the natural world and we were harmonious with the natural world. And then as we moved into civilization, psychedelics, I think of them as coevolutionary partners with us, and they have a message to propagate. And the message has always really been the same, this idea of symbiosis with the natural world.

And as we got away from that, the message became sort of more and more strike, and more and more hysterical. You monkeys need to wake up. Look what you’re doing. Look at what you’re doing to the planets.

And that’s true. And more and more people are listening now, but it’s almost like, yeah, I wish we’d known this 100,000 years ago. Maybe we wouldn’t have made these mistakes. So now here we are, something that kept coming up for me when I was reading your book. I’m sometimes associated with the Stoned Ape Theory and the idea that symbiosis, particularly, especially, and probably exclusively with mushrooms, may be something that goes way back, like even a couple of millions of years back, because we know that in the North Sahara, where these different hominin species coevolved, we know that it was climatically very different than it is now. It was much wetter. There were cattle in that. There was regular rainy seasons. It was an ecology where mushrooms had to be there. The fossil evidence for cattle is there, hominids and so on. So I’ve often, in my wraps, I’ve sort of said the gift that mushrooms, this symbiosis gave to us was the ability to visualize an internal reality, make what I call the reality hallucination. This association between symbol, sound and image, which is very much involved with synesthesia. So, in a nutshell, we don’t want to get off so much on my theories, but the idea that mushrooms taught us language, and language enabled us to invent culture, which we generally view as a positive thing. But maybe it was not. Maybe this was not a blessing, but a curse. I mean, did the mushrooms lead us down the wrong path 13,000 years ago?

[00:23:10] Chris Ryan: Yeah. There’s a lovely book called “The Spell of the Sensuous”. Have you heard of this book?

[00:23:16] Dennis McKenna: No, what is it called?

[00:23:18] Chris Ryan: The spell of the sensuous?

[00:23:20] Dennis McKenna: I have not heard of it.

[00:23:22] Chris Ryan: I forget the author, but it’s really interesting. He argues that the invention of language estranged us from a direct relationship to the objective world around us, because we symbolized. Now we create symbols for everything, right?

Whether it’s spoken language or even more extremely written language with little marks on a paper. That means dog. And so you generalize about dog and you lose your connection to specific dogs, right? Because now it’s all a platonic ideal of dogness, because everything becomes generalized.

I’m butchering his argument. But basically it aligns with what you were just saying, which is this idea that as we…

I hate the term. Invented it. I use it, everyone uses it. But no one sat down and invented language, right? Or agriculture, or some tinkerer in a garage somewhere didn’t come up with agriculture. It’s an emergent property that arose given certain circumstances. But, yeah, I think you’re right. I think there’s a lot to look into there. And it’s interesting. All religious traditions, spiritual traditions, basically are different paths to immediate experience, right? Sort of a pre Homo sapien sapien experience. Be here now.

Quiet the monkey mind.

[00:24:54] Dennis McKenna: And they’ve been modified in the organized religion. The last thing they want anyone to have is a direct experience of the divine.

[00:25:07] Chris Ryan: There’s that. Yeah, I just mean in terms of meditation, prayer, there’s a sort of centering of the self and focusing away from the daily life kind of thing. Right. But to sort of return to your question, which I think is the fundamental question, really, what do we do with this? A part of it, as I was saying, was motivated by the feeling that having this knowledge will relieve some suffering. And that in itself is very valuable. But on a further practical level, I do think there are things that we can do to modify our lives in ways that mimic or resonate with these ancestral habits.

In the book I talk about the experience of going to a zoo in Bukatingi, Sumatra, and seeing the animals sitting in these cages, concrete cages, just bored to death, literally, versus going to the San Diego zoo where a lot of care was taken to kind of create an environment, albeit artificial, but that replicated as much as possible the environment in which these animals evolved.

And so I think we can do that for our own species, right? We’re the only species that designs its own zoos and then goes and lives in them.

[00:26:46] Dennis McKenna: I think that was one of the big insights of your book that really resonated with me. I mean, at the end of the book you say, well, look, we’ve created a situation for ourselves. We’re going to live in a zoo. We may as well get used to it. Let’s make it a nice zoo, one that is compatible with basic human values. We could redesign the zoo in some ways. What concerns me, and ideally we could be able to do that, but what I’m concerned with, basically, is that would work. You could redesign the whole terrestrial environment and our place in it. If there were something like a billion people, or maybe a couple of billion people, the earth could easily support that number of people, 8 billion. It gets very problematic because then you’re forced to rely on these extractive industries, massive agricultural complexes and technology to keep the whole thing going. And at the same time all we have to do is turn on the tv. We don’t have to turn on the tv. Look outside. If you’re in certain places, look at everything that’s happening. I mean, nature is this thing about climate change. It’s not that it’s coming, it’s here, we’re living through it and it’s getting worse. And I think nature is pissed off to a certain extent.

The depressing sort of, but inevitable part of this seems to be we can’t support 8 billion people. So about 6 billion of us need to die. One way or another.

[00:28:56] Chris Ryan:  We will. We need to cut birth rates, which is happening in the development…

[00:29:03] Dennis McKenna: Which can happen. Is it happening fast enough? 

[00:29:06] Chris Ryan: Yeah. Is anything happening fast enough? 

[00:29:08] Dennis McKenna: No, it’s not, obviously, but yeah.

And then of course there’s the cataclysmic events that either natural or man made, like nuclear war, and that will certainly cut down on the population. It would be good if we could somehow achieve consciousness enough. This idea of reducing birth weights, I mean, birth rates, if every woman could agree, could in her own mind, or if there could be agreement among women that they’ll not have more than one child in a couple of generations, that could cause a demographic collapse. But the Chinese tried to impose this and it didn’t work. It’s got to come from the people that make the children, and that’s the women. And if it comes from their hearts and their spirits, then it’s possible. But you can’t declare that people can only have one child. I mean, it just won’t work.

[00:30:19] Chris Ryan: But I think, as always, how you frame the issue or the perspective from which you view an issue, determines what you see. So often I feel that the world is spinning out of control and circling the drain, as some of my doctor friends say.

But another way of looking at it, on my more hopeful days, is that a lot of the sort of grand historical trends are coming together in interesting ways.

AI, for example, artificial intelligence is in the news suddenly in the last few months, and that appears to be a big deal because of the threat to labor markets, right? The threat. Everything’s becoming automated. Jobs are going away and self driving trucks. Trucking is the major number one employer in something like 15/20 states. What’s going to happen when there are no truck drivers?

Lots of labor disruption. At the same time, if we had any kind of wise government, which obviously seems further away than ever, but if there were wise government joined with this massive labor disruption and we arrived at a point where we agree that a minimum basic income is necessary because there just aren’t jobs, right? But the society is creating incredible wealth and we’re creating more wealth than ever. It’s just badly distributed, right? So whether through revolution or wisdom or however we get there, if we could get to a place where we all agreed, like, okay, we’re going to have to distribute the money. People have a right to a basic, decent level of income just because they exist.

And we’re going to incentivize people not to have kids because one of the major reasons that people have kids is to have someone to take care of them in their old age, right? I mean, around the world that’s the main reason. So if there’s a global basic income and we say, look, if you don’t have kids, you’re guaranteed through life you’re going to get $2,000 a month in local currency, whatever it is.

If you do have kids, you’ll get $1,800 a month. If you have one kid, if you have two kids, you get $1,600 a month and so on. Incentivizes. So you’re not saying you can only have one kid. There’s no enforcement.

If you don’t have kids, you get a little bit more money.

That combined with security through old age, I think most people probably wouldn’t have kids if they didn’t have the economic incentive. And another thing I think can be very helpful is if we, and this relates to the whole hunter gatherer paradigm, if we’re more living in communities with more interaction and egalitarianism and cooperation.

For example, myself and my partner, neither one of us wants to have kids, but we really like kids. So if we were in a place with friends, and our friends have kids, we’d be more than happy to take care of those kids for a week. You guys go on vacation, enjoy yourselves. Your kids will hang with us. They know us. They’ve known us since they were born. You trust us. It’s not like hiring somebody you don’t know, that kind of thing, this sort of increased cooperation, which often happens due to crises, could be a great blessing in disguise. If the economic collapse forces people to take care of each other, that could be the best thing that ever happened to us.

[00:34:16] Dennis McKenna: Indeed. That’s very interesting.

As we all know, there are incredible dysfunctions and deficiencies in the way children are raised, treated, all of this.

But it seems like in order, like a society that is capable of saying things like everyone deserves a livable income, children deserve to be looked after and not suppressed. And all of these things that seem to people like you and me, who are probably kind of a liberal left leaning bent, there are great factions and people, now, I think, a lot of it is fear based, but the stance that, well, if you don’t work, then you’re not worth anything and you don’t deserve support. You’re just a lazy bum. Better, you should not get any of the benefits society has, or children are monsters if we don’t impose discipline on them, if we don’t bend them, usually to our notion of what is religious and moral and so on. And you have only to look at religions to realize how immoral they are by and large. I mean, the history of Christianity in the new world is all the illustration you need, and there’s plenty more where that came from. I mean, institutional religions have no moral authority in the world that I can see. They squandered it if they ever did have it.

So how do you arrive at that kind of consensus based, compassion based social structure?

And what, do we get rid of all the conservatives and then the rest of us live happily ever after? I’m sure they’re saying the same things about us.

[00:36:31] Chris Ryan: Well, you know how writing books, you’ve written books yourself, and you go into writing a book thinking you know what you’re going to say, but then you come upon things in your research that change the book, right?

One of the most interesting things I came upon while I was researching “Civilized to Death” was the discipline of disaster sociology, which I hadn’t even heard of. And so this is people who study human behavior in disasters, right? And so we have the sort of popularized notion that, and this is very hobbesian, without the state looking after us and keeping us in check, we turn into chimpanzees and rip each other’s faces off and just go crazy and rape and pillage and the rest of it, right. And so we have sort of mythological celebrations of this notion in the form of “Lord of the Flies”, right, which every kid is forced to read. These kids are on an island, suddenly there’s no authority figure, they start stomping on each other and breaking each other’s glasses and tormenting the fat kid, and it’s just a dog eat dog world.

Well, disaster sociologists have looked at how people behave in disasters, and what they found is exactly the opposite of the propaganda that we’ve all been subjected to. That in fact, when people are desperate and afraid, they reach out to each other and help each other. Not just family, not just people that they know, strangers.

This is our nature. This comes from hundreds of thousands of years, as we were saying earlier, of offering hospitality to strangers, because you never know when you’re going to be the stranger, right? There’s this beautiful expression. My ex partner Casilda told me she grew up in Mozambique, and at one point she said: Oh, when I was a kid, we used to say the best place to store extra food is in your friend’s stomach.

[00:38:43] Dennis McKenna: I remember that from a book. And that’s exactly right, yeah.

[00:38:48] Chris Ryan: So beautiful, isn’t it?

When your refrigeration goes out, even if it’s 2023, your food is going to rot. So you better have a big cookout and invite all your friends over because otherwise you’re just going to throw it all away. So, there are structural imperatives that make generosity the optimal approach to life. And those imperatives kick in when the sort of civilizational superstructure falls apart, whether it’s because of earthquakes or wars or disasters of whatever sort. And so I remember there was an interview. I got most of this information from a book called “Paradise built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnet, which is just a beautiful, fantastic book. And she interviewed the man who sort of founded disaster sociology. And his background was that in World War II, he was hired by the US military to study how the German population responded to bombing campaigns. Like the bombing of Dresden, right? No military significance at all. We firebombed Dresden, destroying this incredible medieval city to break the will of the German people, right? So that they would give up. And what he found was, it didn’t break their will. We killed millions. But they just said, fuck you, America. We’re going to fight even harder. We’re going to deal with even more, like what’s happening now in Ukraine. Their will is not being broken by these bombs. So he founded this. After World War II, he founded this discipline, spent his entire career studying this. And at the end, he was retired. And she interviewed him. Rebecca Solnet interviewed him. And he said, you know, at the end of my career, I’ve come to the conclusion that people who live through disasters remember those days as the best days of their lives because they felt they had a purpose. They felt connected to their neighbors and their community. There was meaning in their lives. He said, I’ve come to the conclusion that the real disaster is normal life.

[00:41:00] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, that’s incredible. That’s exactly right. That’s one of several things, actually, that I took away from your book that left me, the term is cautiously optimistic, right. That maybe there are solutions. But how do we mature enough? I mean, we are so fractious as a species, and the political divides and the religious divides and everything else. How can we…?

I mean, we need a rapid way to mature rapidly to expand our perspective. Maybe psychedelics are part of this. I mean, a lot of people say, well, psychedelics will save the world. Well, maybe they can be part of the solution. I don’t think they’re going to save the world. They could certainly be an important part of it because of their ability to shift people’s perspectives and to really let people look at a situation from outside their usual reference frame.

I think that’s the promise of psychedelics, both therapeutically and in terms of essentially helping us be better humans, helping us learn how to be better humans, more compassionate toward each other. But how can we implement that?

How do we get the world to wake up to this on a global scale? To say, the reason you’re so afraid is that you’re afraid that you’re not going to have enough to eat, you won’t have medical care, you won’t have these things.

A lot of this division in our society is basically fear based. How can we get to a collective consensus where we implement compassion and we implement empathy among our fellow beings? And that becomes the narrative, rather than I have to dominate you, because if I don’t, you’ll take everything I have.

[00:43:24] Chris Ryan: I think, and I don’t know whether you want to call this an optimistic vision or pessimistic vision, but I think we’re going to get there through disaster.

[00:43:35] Dennis McKenna: Through disaster. Okay.

[00:43:36] Chris Ryan: I think that’s the only way to get there, because when the game is functioning, people follow the rules and generally do what they’re told to do. And what we’re told to do, unfortunately, is to be suspicious of strangers, know, take care of ourselves, know everyone else on their own. And as you say, if you don’t work, and this is very much an american perspective, by the way. If you go someplace like Denmark or Sweden or Finland, the idea that everyone deserves a life of dignity and sufficiency is not outlandish, we’re on a fringe as far as this sort of hyper capitalist, individualist perspective.

But, yeah, I think, as you said, as we speak right now, right. July 18th, temperature records are being set in Europe, in the Southwest, us in Africa, in the Middle East.

Floods like people have never seen before, happening in the Northeast.

Just tornadoes and all sorts of the biggest fire in canadian history is happening.

The shit is hitting the fan.

[00:44:52] Dennis McKenna: That’s true.

[00:44:53] Chris Ryan: So that’s negative in the sense that we’re all afraid of it, but it’s positive in the sense that we all knew this was coming. It’s here. What are we going to do about it? And what has our species done in the past to deal with challenges? What we do is we take care of each other. That’s what we’re best at. We’re not stronger than chimps. We’re not faster than cheetahs.

What do we do? What are we good at? We cooperate. We take care of each other. So I’m certainly not wishing for disaster, but I do think that we are facing disaster in every different realm. As you were saying, institutions are collapsing from within, whether it’s the church or the supreme Court or the Congress.

Nobody trusts any institution anymore. So the whole thing is falling apart. And the question is, is it going to turn into a mad Max movie or Lord of the fly scenario? Or are we going to follow historical precedent and prehistorical precedent and get together and take care of each other and help raise each other’s kids and share the car and share the big house, the McMansion with mom, dad and a spoiled, miserable kid. You can have five families living in there.

It’s interesting, I read a lot about civilizational collapse when I was researching this book. And every civilization that’s ever existed has collapsed. So the idea that we are somehow going to avoid that is nonsensical.

And they all follow the same life cycles. You see the same thing happen, whether it’s the Mayans or the Romans or the Sumerians or the same things happen over and over again. And the thing is we look at that and we say, oh my God, civilizational collapse must be horrible. It must be absolutely devastating to live through. But that’s because the histories are written by the elites.

The average person probably lives better after the collapse than before the collapse.

And that’s something we need to keep in mind.

Bill Gates isn’t going to like it when everything falls apart, but for the rest of us it might actually be an improvement.

[00:47:22] Dennis McKenna: Well, yeah, that’s very interesting. So disasters, which are now inevitable, I would say, and you point this out in your book, you talk about how every civilization we know has collapsed. Eventually they collapse. What’s different about this one is it’s a global situation.

So the whole shooting match is going to go down and it’s going to go down in a very spectacular way and probably a very environmentally destructive way.

But it may be that this is the trial by fire that we need to get through and to some sort of post historical, more different kinds of social structure. I think that all of the political institutions and religious institutions, which is understandable because they grew out of civilization, but their priorities are their own priorities, not necessarily to foster this collective awakening that is necessary.

Again, in that sense, psychedelics are potentially useful, but we can’t deploy them fast enough and not enough people are taking them.

I think that they are very useful. But as we used to say about our retreats, the real work begins on the plane home.

[00:49:02] Chris Ryan: And that’s the bit with psychedelics.

[00:49:04] Dennis McKenna: You can have these insights. What do you do with that? How do you change your behavior? How do you propagate that? How do you make that work in the real world?

These insights that you gain, which are trivial, and yet they sound trivial, nonetheless, they’re true. We are all one. That kind of thing. Yes, love is all there is. Yes, all that’s important. How do we take those from abstractions or insights into actual practice? And that’s the tricky part. No matter what happens, we’re in for some rough times ahead.

[00:49:46] Chris Ryan: Yeah, but I think the cliché about the chinese word for crisis and opportunity is the same. I don’t even know if that’s true. I’ve just heard it so many times.

But certainly every crisis is an opportunity. And when you have multiple crises converging the way we do now, environmental, political, health, everything seems to be falling apart. I think it presents us with a huge opportunity to revolutionize our experience.

Certainly, I don’t envision massive social change on a grand scale. What I envision is the system falling apart enough that it frees us up to do things that have been prohibited up till now. Like I mentioned, what’s stopping three or four families from sharing a big house? Well, zoning laws, that’s what’s stopping them.

But if the value of real estate collapses to the point where whatever municipality or owner has that house is going to be happy, if anyone’s paying rent, if anyone’s living in it, then the zoning laws change, and there’s more flexibility, right? Like, lots of places, you’re not allowed to have chickens in your yard, or you’re not even allowed to hang your laundry outside. You have to have a dryer. It seems ridiculous, right? But as environmental crises propagate, as hunger, income inequality propagates, maybe those laws change and like, hey, enough people are starving. Let’s let them have chickens in their yards, right? We have to adjust to this. So that’s what I’m hoping. I’m hoping that as the pillars of civilization weaken and start to topple a little bit, it opens up more flexibility for people to do what they need to do to take care of each other, whether it’s growing food, having animals.

[00:51:57] Dennis McKenna: But can institutional transformation happen fast enough?

That’s the thing. I mean, if you look at the climate situation, they’re talking ten years kind of at the outside. Can we pivot, adjust, and deal with this in that amount of time? I mean, it seems like we’re in a race. We either wake up or everything is fucked up and it can’t be saved. I don’t know.

It’s a question of how rapidly you talk about the changes in zoning laws. And you’re absolutely right. But these are inventions of civilization. As I look at Vancouver, where i live, you know, half an hour away from Vancouver, what’s happening with the housing situation there?

This kind of thing is happening. They’re taking these big old victorian houses and turning them into single family units and that sort of thing. It’s not happening fast enough. And can you imagine the pushback on all this?

The problem is that it’s very hard to get consensus about what should be done.

[00:53:24] Chris Ryan: Yeah, well, I think about when I was living in Barcelona, my wife Cassilda, who I told you grew up in Mozambique, she’s a medical doctor, and she’s a beautiful spirit. And one day I came home, I was out doing something. I came home and she had this giant pot of curry that she had made, like, just huge. And it was just the two of us living in the apartment. And she said, I want to take this… When I was walking home today, I went through the park and there were these homeless people down there, these guys from Africa that do this incredible trek across Africa, and then they get across the Mediterranean and hundreds of them die every year. And boats go down.

She stopped and was talking with them, and they’re really nice guys. And she said, I want to take this pot of curry down there and feed everybody. And of course, we went down, and within 20 minutes, the police came and said, what are you doing? Where’s your permit?

You’re not a restaurant. How do we know this is? And I was like, these guys are homeless. These dudes just came here across the sahara. They’re not worried about our…

But that’s the kind of thing where when everything’s sort of humming along more or less normally, that’s what happens.

But imagine if the power goes out for a week, there aren’t going to be any cops down at the park telling you you can’t feed people.

[00:55:01] Dennis McKenna: No, they’re going to have their own problems. Yeah. I’ve often wondered. A few years ago, maybe 10, 15 years ago now, there were episodes in the summer where large cities lost power. There were blackouts, right? For like a few days. And I thought, well, a few days, everybody’s coming together, but a few weeks, they’re going to be cannibals in the streets, man.

If it comes to that. Because we depend so much on this infrastructure, just from my own personal point of view, if it weren’t for the Internet, I could not survive.

I have medical devices. I have all of these things. We depend on so much of this technology, once you are trapped in that relationship, you can’t really get out of it.

I can’t change my health status so that I don’t need blood pressure medications, for example. Now I need them. They are a necessity.

And to get that pill every morning, there are manufacturing, distribution infrastructures, as well as all the research that went into it. Civilization supports that.

If I were a foraging person in one of those societies, I would probably not have high blood pressure because I’d have a better diet.

And even if I did, I would rely on local knowledge and not these artifacts of the pharmaceutical industry. So we’ve sold out in some ways. In a lot of ways, we’ve sold out is not the right term, but outsourced a lot of the elements of our well being to entities that are not within. They’re not under our control.

We are subservient to them. The medical system, the media system, all of these things. So I don’t know what the answer is. I guess no one really does.

[00:57:28] Chris Ryan: No, I don’t think so. Do you remember this story I told in the book of the Scottish guy who was going to take the balloon trip in Sonoma?

[00:57:39] Dennis McKenna: Yes, absolutely.

That’s very close analogy to where we are, right?

[00:57:46] Chris Ryan: Yeah. When I read that, I think I was working on the book and I read that story, and briefly for listeners, it was a tourist who was visiting a winery with his wife in Sonoma county in northern California. And they wanted to go in a hot air balloon over the vineyard at dawn. And they were out in the parking lot and the balloon crew was setting up one of the balloons, and the balloon was about half full, and a breeze came in and the crew was sort of struggling holding the basket, and there were some guide ropes tied down, but the balloon was sort of moving too much. And this guy who was like, I think he was a personal trainer or something, he was a fit young dude. He jumped in to help the balloon crew, and just then the breeze, gust of breeze came and the balloon broke. The ropes broke free and started to lift off the ground. And all the professional guys immediately let go. But this Scottish dude held on, and the balloon rose up in the sky, and he held on and held on and held on until it was 200, 300ft up. And he fell.

And the sheriff who was interviewed in the story said, we don’t know why he hung on. And I thought, of course we know why he hung on. Any of us would have hung on. Those guys. They were trained to let go the minute their feet left the ground. They knew to let go because they’d been trained, but a normal person would hang on because you would think, well, if I let go now, I’m going to fall 10ft and I might twist my ankle. So I’m going to hang on because the balloon is probably going to come down, but the balloon doesn’t come down. And that’s, to me, when people say, well, we invented civilization, we didn’t invent civilization, we just grabbed onto something that we thought was a good idea at the moment. And as you say, it’s just been ratcheting up ever since until we’re totally dependent upon it and we have a totally unsustainable global population. So we’re definitely painted ourselves back into this corner.

But I don’t think it’s intentional, right? I don’t think anyone ever sat down and said, well, if we do this, we’ll have more leisure time and we can invent art or whatever.

[01:00:21] Dennis McKenna: In that sense it’s not an invention, it’s the accumulation of various responses to different challenges.

And it all gets to be kind of a schmazzle eventually.

[01:00:37] Chris Ryan: Schmazzle.

[01:00:41] Dennis McKenna: In a lot of ways, we are that person that couldn’t let go.

But maybe that’s the take home lesson here. We have to be more like the professionals who knew when to let go and this guy who, for whatever reason, decided to hang on for dear life and lost his life. So maybe that’s the juncture our species is at. We are at a turning point where we have to realistically assess the sacrifices we need to make. We need to learn to let go.

And everybody’s so invested and clinging to whatever it is they’re clinging to. It’s very hard to let go. So we somehow need to distance ourselves from that. We have to have a more species, I guess, oriented perspective and less individually oriented. So I don’t know. Well, Chris, it’s been a wonderful conversation. I think we could go on all afternoon.

It’s been great talking to you and I hope we can do it again sometime.

[01:01:57] Chris Ryan: Yeah, I would love to.

[01:01:59] Dennis McKenna: Is there any parting thought that you want to be sure to mention before we know?

[01:02:08] Chris Ryan: I think when I’m looking for a positive note to end on, one thing I often think about is the story told by Robert Sapolski. I’m sure you’re familiar with his work. He’s a neuroscientist at Stanford. Primatologist, fascinating guy, published lots of books.

He’s been studying the same baboon troop in Kenya for probably 30 years now. Since he was in grad school, and he goes back every year. And baboons are nasty. They’re very hierarchical, very abusive to females and young, and they’re a nasty piece of work.

And he went back one year, and he saw that they’d built a hotel near this troop that he studies, and there was a dump behind the hotel, and the troop took over the dump, and the people at the hotel threw out some meat that was tainted with tuberculosis.

And what happened was the high status males ate that meat, and they all died.

And in the absence of those high status males, the troop adopted a much more relaxed, live and let live approach to life.

And he thought, well, that’s not going to last long, because males from other troops will come in and take over, and there won’t be anyone to defend these females and lower ranking males. But in fact, what happened next year, he went back. He saw that there were new males in the troop, but they had adopted the relaxed lifestyle that they encountered when they came to the troop.

And so this has persisted for over a decade now. This is a very unusual troup of baboons that’s very peaceful relative to normal baboon behavior.

So the takeaway from that is that if we can establish a culture that has values that are actually pro wellness and supportive of these values that I think most people hold innately, there is power in that, that can override other considerations.

So cultural change can happen very rapidly, and it can be very lasting.

[01:04:43] Dennis McKenna: Well, on that note, we’ll conclude.

I thank you very much. Your book is a lot of food for thought, and this conversation will add to that. So I urge everyone to buy this book, “Civilized to Death, the price of Progress” by Chris Ryan. It’s a wonderful book.

It’ll open your eyes, it’ll make you think, and it certainly reframed for me the way I think about civilization and just about everything else. So thank you so much for coming on.

[01:05:25] Chris Ryan: Oh, thank you, Dennis. It’s been a real pleasure.

[01:05:28] Dennis McKenna: All right, have a good day. I’ll let you know when we’re posted.

[01:05:32] Chris Ryan: Okay. And once you get this thing up and running, let me know, and I can have you on my podcast to help spread the word, okay?

[01:05:41] Dennis McKenna: Yes, absolutely.

[01:05:54] Chris Ryan: Thank you for listening to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna.

[01:05:59] Outro: Find us online at McKenna Academy.