Joe Rogan - Psychedelics Make Ideologies Insignificant

That is a really interesting breakdown that maybe that is one of the big mistakes we're making in our culture. When people point to the problems that we have in this country, one of the problems we have is our inability to connect with each other or to recognize that we're all sharing this space and time together and instead wanting to uphold our own religious or ideological ideas as being the only one way to get going, the only one way to get through. One of the things that I've found with these psychedelic experiences, it really makes ideologies seem if not preposterous, at the very least insignificant in comparison to human experiences. Absolutely. The experience of camaraderie and friendship and love. You realize like, oh, this is what's important. This is what it's really about. Not enforcing your ideas or pushing them on other people and forcing people to behave the way you behave, but instead love. And think about religious ideas which cause so much division, so much chaos, so much hatred, so much fear, so much suspicion in the world today. Is it really what we want to do as human beings? Simply to accept a package of ideas that were believed in by our ancestors, to accept them whole without question as absolute fact, which we regard as such authoritative fact that in some cases we're willing to be deeply unpleasant to people who hold different views or perhaps even kill them. We've had this recent event in Sri Lanka, primarily a religiously motivated terrorist event. It happens all over the world. People feel so convinced that the inherited package of ideas that they had nothing to do with creating and that they have never questioned, they're so convinced that those ideas are right that in extreme cases they're actually prepared to kill other human beings who hold different ideas. Are they so insecure in their own beliefs that they're prepared to go to that level of actually murdering another human being who holds it? They're so threatened by the other beliefs that other human beings hold. So it's an abnegation of our responsibility as human beings. We should be questioning things. We should not be accepting packages of ideas intact, fully formed, and using them to drive the way we behave towards one another. That was part of the human story, but we need to move on from that. It's a very dangerous situation in a very complex modern world with billions of human beings on the planet to have these kind of energies being generated where certain groups of people are saying, we are absolutely right and you are absolutely wrong. We are superior. You are inferior. This is a very, very dangerous path that we're on and it needs to be changed. Personally, I know this is not a comment that will go down well with many people, but I am strongly opposed to nationalism. I don't see any virtue in nationalism. It is an accident of birth, which nation you were born in. It was nothing that you did for your own merit. You didn't earn that. You were born by accident in a particular nation. Why should we automatically feel that other people who were born by accident in that particular nation have something special in common with us and that we together are a group who are much more important than other groups of people? I've been privileged to spend my life traveling around the world, living with communities all over the world. One thing that really comes across to me strongly, it should be a cliché and yet it's not, is that we are all one family, that humans are intimately interconnected all around the world, that you can go to the remotest area of the Amazon jungle and find the same hopes, the same fears, the same dreams that we have in industrialized cities shared by the hunter-gatherers in the middle of the Amazon. Our similarities as human beings and what we share in common at the emotional level and the level of love and at the level of heart are far more important than our differences that are defined by the nation or the political group in which we grew up in. And when I say I'm against nationalism, I need also to make clear that does not mean, and I hope I'm not taken out of context by others who are listening to this, that does not mean I'm in favor of world government. I detest governments. That's another thing we need to grow out of. We don't need governments anymore. If we have them, they should have a very minimal role in our society. I think it's possible for the human race to relate as one family without leaders and governments who are exploiting the worst aspects of our character, the lowest common denominator of our society, deliberately encouraging fears and hatreds and suspicions. What responsible leaders should be doing is encouraging love and unity and their failure to do that, in my view, disqualifies them from the leadership role entirely. And that's why I've often said I would not, I would like to see a situation in which no head of state can be appointed to that position unless he or she has first had 12 sessions of ayahuasca. That would be the condition. Don't even bother applying for the job if you haven't done this. And we have to be there while you have it. And we have to be, we want to see that you're drinking every drop. And we want an experienced shaman present who's really going to guide you through the journey. And I suspect that that would be a transformative experience for many of our political class and that they would start to question why they do what they do, why they exploit fears in order to magnify their own position. They'd start to question that and to wonder about a different destiny for humanity. But that's a dream. I guess it's not going to happen. It's very, very, very well said.