rawjeev's randoms

Rebecca Solnit 

In my last book, I argue that the transformation of ideas, beliefs, and values is so profound it amounts to the dismantling of a civilization and its replacement (by one that I like much better and that scares the socks off those who want to perpetuate straight white Christian male hegemony and find that to do that they have to get more and more extreme including in how they distort the facts around science and nature and reality themselves). Here's three essays I've just come across demonstrating that we are rethinking nature itself -- and since nature has been for centuries a touchstone for what is legitimate, normal, meant to be, etc. the definition of nature is crucial for everything, from how we understand sex and gender to how we think about economics and society. Huzzah! Links in captions to screenshots.

Willow Schenwar writes, "Excluding insects, 33 percent of all animal species are predominately hermaphroditic. Some of these animals start out as one sex and change to another. Clownfish are an iconic example: They begin their lives as male and have the ability to transform their bodies to become female when the alpha female of their social group leaves or dies. Other fish, such as wrasses, exhibit this same sequential hermaphrodism, but in the other direction. Many invertebrates—such as worms and snails—possess the reproductive structures of both sexes at the same time. Some species have more than two sexes; splitgill mushrooms have over 23,000 different sexes, or mating types."

Rowan Hooper writes about his excellent new book, "In my new book Togetherness, I make the case that symbiosis – which means “living together” – has been neglected in our explanation of biology and ecology. It’s not just that I think it’s a shame that its significance has been unappreciated; it’s that recognising symbiosis is vital to help us understand who we are and how we came to be. Complex life – all those things you see around you – exists only because of a deep form of cellular symbiosis, and all plants rely on symbiosis to grow and to produce all the food we eat. But this isn’t widely recognised. Since before Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, and even more so afterwards, we have emphasised the role of competition in the evolution of life, fuelled by the idea of nature being “red in tooth and claw”. What I didn’t expect to find when researching my book is that the growing understanding of this togetherness, and the way it forces us to look at the world anew, is helping to demystify one of the greatest and oldest questions in science: how did life begin? The picture that is coming into view is set to reshape our definition of what life is – and inform the search for alien life."

The Guardian. UN backs historic climate crisis ruling, despite US attempts to stop resolution

The US, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia – some of the highest oil-producing nations and major greenhouse gas emitters – opposed the measure

Bright Simons in The Ideas Letter. The Social Edge of Intelligence

AI doesn’t really “think.” Rather, it remembers how we thought together. And we’re about to stop giving it anything worth remembering.

Via Kottke Dot Org

But joy without grounding becomes escape. And spirit without embodiment becomes disconnection. Some lose themselves chasing one peak after another, living from party to party, moment to moment, mistaking stimulation for fulfillment.

Others retreat so deeply into the spiritual that life itself becomes something to transcend rather than inhabit. Both paths, when taken to extremes, drift away from wholeness.

We were not placed here solely to dissolve into the divine. And we were not placed here merely to indulge the senses We were placed here to walk the line between the two. To dance in the world without becoming lost in it. To touch the sacred without floating away from the human experience.

The soul does not grow only in silence and stillness, it grows in contrast. It grows in laughter after grief, in clarity after chaos, in wisdom earned through lived experience. Celebration teaches presence. Spirit teaches meaning. One without the other is incomplete.

Balance is not moderation for its own sake, it is mastery. It is knowing when to surrender to the night and when to sit with the quiet. When to lose yourself in rhythm, and when to return inward and listen. When to enjoy the feast, and when to fast.

This is the middle path. The narrow bridge. The place where heaven and earth meet inside the human being.

Zuvluguu

We all roll with our fingers crossed.”

What animist and psychedelic cultures see

Animist and psychedelic traditions share a few core perceptions:

-Consciousness is everywhere (people, animals, plants, land, ancestors)

-The self is porous, not sealed

-Relationship > domination

-Spirit and matter are not separate

When you experience the world this way, owning another human feels like:

-owning a river

-owning the wind

-owning a dream

It violates how reality is felt, not just how it’s explained. Psychedelics dissolve hierarchy.

Psychedelic states reliably:

-Dissolve ego boundaries

-Collapse rigid categories (“us vs them”)

-Produce empathy across species and identities

-Reveal intelligence and agency in others

In those states, the idea of: “This being exists for my use”…doesn’t survive contact. That’s why psychedelic initiation rites tend to produce elders, healers, and stewards, not conquerors.

Examples from around the World

Amazonian Indigenous peoples

-Humans seen as participants in a living forest

-Plants and animals have teachers and spirits

-Captives were usually adopted or ritually integrated, not enslaved

-Exploitation of people mirrored exploitation of nature, both taboo

Logic: If the forest is alive, so are the people. You don’t own relatives.

San / Bushmen (southern Africa)

San people

-Trance dance used to enter non-ordinary states

-Radical egalitarianism

-Status hoarding discouraged through social leveling

-No slavery, no permanent hierarchy

Logic: Power is dangerous unless constantly dissolved.

Aboriginal Australians

-Land is conscious and ancestral

-Humans are custodians, not owners

-Kinship systems include non-humans

-Captives absorbed into kin networks

Logic: You can’t own someone when no one owns anything.

Pre-imperial Andean cultures

Andean Indigenous cultures

-Reciprocity (ayni) central to life

-Psychedelic plant use (San Pedro cactus)

-Labor was communal and rotational, not owned

-Even the Inca used corvée labor, not chattel slavery

Logic: Obligation flows both ways — exploitation breaks cosmic balance.

Early Indo-European shamanic cultures

Proto-Indo-European societies

-Ecstatic rituals, trance, ancestor veneration

-Slavery increases after these cultures become stratified and imperial

-As shamanism fades → hierarchy rises → slavery appears

Pattern: When mystical consciousness collapses, domination rushes in.

Why slavery can’t stabilize in these cultures

Slavery requires four psychological conditions:

1. Clear boundary between “human” and “less-than-human”

2. Stable ego identity

3. Abstract ownership concepts

4. Distance from consequences

Animist + psychedelic cultures destroy all four:

-Boundaries blur

-Ego dissolves

-Ownership is suspect

1Consequences are felt (spiritually, communally, ecologically)

So slavery doesn’t “make sense” long enough to institutionalize.

Why empires suppress psychedelics

This is not accidental.

As societies centralize:

-Mystics become threats

-Psychedelics get outlawed

-Animism becomes “primitive”

-Hierarchies harden

Because domination requires numbness, not insight.

Empires need:

-Predictable labor

-Replaceable bodies

-Obedience over revelation

Psychedelic consciousness is antithetical to that.

The deeper takeaway

Slavery didn’t emerge because humans lacked intelligence.

It emerged when humans:

-Lost embodied empathy

-Abstracted reality

-Replaced relationship with control

-Silenced altered states that reveal interconnection

Which means something important for now:

The return of psychedelic and animist ways of seeing isn’t regression, it’s recovery.

A remembering of a mode of consciousness where:

-Exploitation feels wrong before it’s argued

-Freedom is sensed, not legislated