sammalloy

> I think a lot of people were increasingly on edge before the pandemic, and the isolation really didn't help them with their mental health.

This is my take as well. I personally viewed it as a challenge and a stress test for my own mental health, and tried my best to make life easier for myself and others. I suppose I was lucky, as my life didn’t change and I didn’t stop working. As an introvert, it felt like a holiday of sorts, with less car noise and more clean air days to enjoy. I’m not going to lie, I felt like the guy in the Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last", and made great inroads with my reading list. I think the people who faired worse were extroverts who weren’t all that comfortable with being alone, isolated, or limited by where they could go and do, and were faced with existential issues that they had never really confronted before.

Didn’t they break the krokodil story in the mid-2010s? That coverage was some of the best footage I’ve ever seen. I think they also did that crazy shoot about the drug that turns people in clubs and bars into zombies in South America and allows the perps to control their victims like puppets. The drug in question also wipes the memory of the victims so they can’t report the crime. That was one of the scariest videos ever made. It really had an impact on me and I think I lost my faith in humanity for about a year after I saw it.

That was true of indigenous people all over the world who were forced to learn English to trade. It doesn’t change the fact that English went global because of colonization, not because of trade. The trading happened because of colonization. This is the subject of numerous studies. William Cronon’s "Changes in the Land" documents exactly this scenario with the indigenous population of New England and painstakingly recounts how colonization led to trade, decade by decade, century by century. Your argument makes zero sense and is one of the strangest claims I’ve ever seen. The Māori of New Zealand primarily learned to read and write English not from trade, but from Christian settlements. (Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand) Christian missionaries were the leading edge and primary agents of European colonialism. Attributing the wide adoption of the English language to trade is historical revisionism on a grand scale.

> English as we know it today came to be exported to other parts of the world through British colonisation…The efforts of English-speaking Christian missionaries have resulted in English becoming a second language for many other groups.

National Library of New Zealand:

"During the period of colonization…Maori were banned from speaking their native language in public places including schools, and forced to speak the foreign language of English…Maori were deprived…of their language, but also of the dimensions of culture and history inherent in language customers and worldview."

This only changed in the 1970s.

Why do you think an irreversible binomial employed as a thought-terminating cliché in the form of an argumentum ergo decedo is an appropriate response?

What a strange hill to die on. English is the colonial language, and its global success was singularly due to imperialist hegemony. This is taught at the university system level and is in every textbook on the subject. I love a good myth about capitalism just as much as the next exploited worker, but attributing the success of English to trade is equivalent to teaching children myths about Thanksgiving and Washington chopping down a cherry tree.

> who have come to use English for one reason or another

Pretty sure that singular reason was colonialism.

There is no evidence for any neurochemical basis, as my follow up post later in the thread explains. It’s purely in the realm of psychedelic lore, anecdotal observation, and weak psychological surveys on testing participants. In other words, it is fringe science. There is simply no way to test for it nor to prove these stories are anything other than stories. The point is that these are examples of the Platonic forms and archetypes found not just in the experiences themselves, but also in the types of substances that are used. You may want to check out Shanon’s book "Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience" which goes to great lengths to document these archetypes. In this instance, Shanon is arguing that ayahuasca has the form of the "jungle", and the user will see snakes, jaguars, vines, etc. as part of this experience. He and others argue that this is embedded into the drug as a form of information, but there’s no way to substantiate this or any other claim using the scientific method. Narby made similar claims, and was widely ridiculed for them. Previously, and many decades before, Leary, Watts, and many others argued that the roots of religious forms and symbols could be found within the drug itself. Watts gives an exceptionally illustrative description of how Hinduism, the world’s oldest religion, seemed to be encoded in the experience.

This all came together as something called the entheogenic hypothesis. It is often used to explain the connection between the evolution of religion and the purported sacraments that may have been used in formal rites. The Eleusinian Mysteries is often referenced as an example. Campbell’s formulation of the "Hero’s journey" is very often seen as a general archetype for the user of these substances in its synthesis of comparative literature (which features these forms as archetypes) and mythology which also translates to religion itself. In Campbell’s formulation, the "boon" that is brought back from the hero, is overlayed and represented in the entheogenic hypothesis as the very informational content that the psychonaut is able to retrieve from the experiences. McKenna often interpreted this as the "logos" but in a more secular context. Lilly and others heard distinct voices giving them instructions. Shanon and others revisited the Abrahamic stories and posited that these voices giving people instructions were equivalent to what ancient people imagined as the voice of god. Still others, like Julian Jaynes, interpreted this idea in a secular way, seeing it more as a story that explains our transition from partial to full consciousness. More recently, the writers of Westworld took a lot of these ideas and applied them to AI, in an attempt to explain how consciousness could eventually emerge again as AGI.

The problem is most people read "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" (line 3) and neglect line 46: "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough."