Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.]
“What’s interesting is the difference, or the counter-ballast, between the dialogue of doom and the voices of hope, and the innovators of hope for the future. And it’s something that you could refer to almost as like a great crescendo.”
“I think that in this year of 2011 and heading into the auspicious year of 2012 and 2013 and beyond we are in the great crescendo of humanity.”
“I think in a sense it’s the dialogue, it is the control of the dialogue that is the problem here. It’s the battle of the airwaves. It’s the people we didn’t nominate to talk back to us and tell us what our culture is and what our future is and what our politics are. That is the problem. That’s the primary problem.”
“There can’t just be protests, it can’t be like the Sixties. You can’t be just against. You have to find out what you are for, not just what you are against. That’s the key to getting through the Crescendo.
“To some extent, the future is being made around us.”
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Bruce Damer’s Web site
Submit a question for the Global Trialogue
‘Fall & Winter’ is a documentary that explores the origins of our global crisis in order to better understand the catastrophic transition we have now entered.
Breaking Convention: A Multidisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness
Planet Radio London: The voice of the Dopetribe
Amazing.
Bruce cheers me up. I think in an earlier time (before i heard him on the psychedelic salon) I would have scoffed at some of these ideas, but listening here he presents his visionary ideas in a rational supported way that I can imagine working. I’m stoked for Fall Winter.
Lorenzo should get more of these un-cut interviews from the people at Fall Winter.
Amazing podcast. Thanks to everyone.
I LOVED this conversation! What a beautiful way to look at our future. So often I feel overwhelmed and even desperate in this age of negative news and information inundation but this conversation reminded me that there is growth and beauty all around.
So my eldest daughter is in her first year of highschool. Her teachers, while well-intentioned, seem to be very keen on doom and gloom. One teacher in particular has had them studying dystopias. Why 14-year-olds are not being shown the wonder and majesty of this earth is not within my understanding. Anyway, she had to create a subculture. I had just been listening to this podcast and was sharing with her some of the highlights. So her subculture was “The radical optimists” and she wrote a paper on this fictitious subculture comprised of women in the middle east and homosexuals around the world who are celebrating the betterment of their daily lives.
I also wanted to address the one child policy. I agree we must do something, something voluntary and positive. I have three kids and have been treated with absolute contempt in some left-wing circles for that fact. And this is not the solution. I chose to have more than one child even knowing the pressures on the planet, but from my experience of isolation in my Western (Canadian) culture, I knew siblings could cushion that tremendous weight of isolation and the stress it brings. My children benefit hugely from having siblings and the care, patience and consideration they have had to learn from that. They know they are not the centre of attention. And this is not an easy time to be raising children. In fact it seems absurd most days. Families are so busy and there is little to no interaction between neighbors, no children playing in unstructured ways in the parks or streets, no adults interacting with children unless they are paid to do so and usually paid to teach them something. So I have a lot of gratitude and respect for people who are parenting and raising one child or more in this fast-paced world.
What I propose instead is a different way of raising any child, a single child or not. I would love to see a future where children are cherished and interacted with by many, many adults, where they return to playing unsupervised within the context that any adult would intervene for their protection should the need arise and where unstructured time re-enters all of our lives. I have seen this when I lived in Ghana and it changed my life. Children were referred to as son or daughter by all and indeed acted that way. They could approach any adult for help and the adults felt a sense of obligation to all those children. Within this paradigm I imagine those of us who do not want the responsibility of having our own children could still experience the joy of relationship with children and the lessons one learns in humility and patience that come from caring for children. Parents would have support and children’s lives would be richer. And this need not just be children, but anyone along their own trajectory of development could be met where they are by others who could offer guidance and support in the absence of guilt and shame.
Thank-you so much for all your hard work Lorenzo!
Beef has been taken off the land and it was a horrible choice. Properly rotated pasture is healthy for all, read “The Shear Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer” by Joel Saladin.
Hydroponics are to energy intensive especially with the import of ferts. but worms are cheep.
If canal street was pedestrianized enough Hogs could be raised in a multi-function Savannah (were there was once black top) I foresee enough Bacon to feed the police and enough fruit and nuts to feed the puffs.
Ah but Fox News and many of the talking heads radio shows are only on the air because of the 1980s change to the rules that watered down the licensing reg that you “couldnt lie on the air”. Fox was recently denied a license in Canada for that reason, they were deemed to make it a corporate practice to distort and lie on the air and could not qualify to get a license in the Great White North.
So it used to be about regulating organizations and their messages that actively work against the public good. There are many such media organizations actively distorting news, defaming people etc, to serve corporate interests. They definitely are acting against the public interest and under the old rules would face shame, sanction, suits and fines.
But those were the old days, and one could argue better days for sanity in broadcast media.
A government that has the power to ban Fox News because it is not good for me, is one that will have the power to ban Psychedelic Salon for the same reason. The way to fight lies is by shining the light of truth, it is not through censorship.
Yeah, very positive, though I also stumbled over the food cells; what’s more, I just can’t get my head around the one-child-policy thing. I would agree that population needs to get down quickly, but growing up without siblings leaves you (at least slightly – I know what I’m talking about ;-)) psychologically deficient; to counterbalance this we’d need a return to a more tribal mode of everyday life, and boy are we far from that!
Ah well, in the end I think it’s not only our decision how many souls incarnate anyway, though Bruce would probably disagree here :-).
As always, thanks for your work, Lorenzo!
Love
Martin MS
I just wanted to point out, 55 minutes into the podcast I almost puked. The most disgusting sound of drinking I have ever heard in my life was drilled into my brain.
excellent podcast- I am so happy that you are just getting warmed up for round two lorenzo! Just wanted to say thanks again for your work!
Mr. Damer should not poo poo conspiracy. I strongly suggest they he listen to Mark Passio’s pod casts at
http://www.whatonearthishappening.com/
Yes indeed Alex, and in fact I am convinced that it is the media that is giving us an untruthful and frankly often very destructive view of ourselves and our world. That combined with the “500 troublemakers”, those individuals who are responsible for stirring the pot in a bad way, and you have a tight grip on society. Break that grip and we will have come a long way. Perhaps I should treat that in a Part 3 of this series? What do you think, do you have a particular thing you would like me to cover or question Alex? That would go into the pot of the Global Trialogue.
It really was uplifting to hear a personal account of traveling to other countries, like Pakistan, and that it is the sense I always got: that they were just everyday people, like we are, and that the propaganda about “radical Islam” is just bullshit in the US-conventional view; in a general sense.
Also it really made sence when you (Bruce) talked about the younger generations being unified by current technology in ALL countries. That will be our saving grace I think – the youth.
What we see as ideological conflict seems to be simply the residue of a 20th Century prejudices…and it will fade as time goes by.
I found this podcast to be very optimistic. THANK YOU!
Thanks Lorenzo, glad to have u back, ive been a fan of the salon for 2 years now and anticipate each new podcast with excitement as they are all uplifting and interesting, tysm!
Great comment, Jonah. And to clarify Bruce’s position on food, my impression is that he is talking very long range and about areas of the Earth where growing food in the ground all year round isn’t possible. For what it’s worth, Bruce has a HUGE garden in which he and his neighbors grow a significant amount of their own food. During Spring and Summer he spends as much time outside in his garden as he does in cyberspace. So I think that the two of you are definitely on the same page.
I want to say that I really love this podcast, it has really helped to shape and define me philosophically and ideologically. I’ve listened to just about all of the archived stuff (i only came upon the podcast maybe 2 years ago) and have revisited several of the podcasts several times (i’m an especially big fan of the evolutionary mind trialogues).
That being said, I did enjoy this latest offering from Bruce Damer though I do differ with him a little bit about the food issue. I think Bruce jumps the gun a little bit with the food growing scenarios. Food should, as long as it is possible, be grown in the ground, in my opinion. There is something missing from the hydroponic foods and food grown in other ways, Gaia (if I may use that term to denote the kind of ‘soul’ of the earth and what it imparts to its fruits) has only an indirect hand in the creation of these ‘extraterrestrial’ (not from space, just not grown in the earth, or, terra) food stuffs. In that I feel the food is less whole, and therefore not as nurturing as something which HAS been grown in the ground.
Bruce probably would think along the same lines and I’m sure he’s speaking from a position where we’re at our last resorts, but I would urge that effort be put more into making the earth more arable and getting the population down (which he obviously talks about in this podcast) so that mother can support us the way she did up until very recently. Obviously, worst case scenario, we’ll do it the way Bruce is talking about in this podcast and it will be the next best thing to getting food directly from Gaia, but I think to immediately jump to that is a mistake.
On another, somewhat related, note, I agree with Bruce about the need for us to control our birth rate. It is true that the populations of some Western countries are actually experiencing very low or negative population growth right now, but it is being heavily outweighed by countries like India and other poorer countries in the third world (post-industrial countries being a root cause of that, read Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael for a full report on how that works. Basically, the more food we send to starving countries, the more they reproduce because the collective consciousness recognizes more resources present than there actually is). On a very shallow level at least some responsibility of many, if not most, problems that post-literate, post-industrial societies experience is laid on the fact that there are just too damn many of us. What if we had a moratorium on reproduction for just one or two years? Obviously it would not be illegal to reproduce or anything, just less socially acceptable for a period of time, to, as Bruce says, take a little pressure of the system.
Well that’s about all I have without writing a dissertation in a comment field. Sorry for the disconnectedness and rambling, just wanted to get that out and maybe see what other people have to say either in agreement or opposition. Thanks!
wow this podcast is so positive and optimistic that it completely fliped my day upside down! Just what I needed to hear during a pesomistc day at work!
Thanks Lorenzo and Thankyou Bruce
Thank you Lorenzo…for everything and mostly for being who you are.
I think Galen and Bruce should win “Best Dressed” in the psychedelic community. 🙂 Love to them and you, Lorenzo!