Sublime

BE RUTHLESS TO THE THINGS THAT DON’T MATTER

I view most psychedelic experiences as potentially misleading. Psychedelics do not guarantee wisdom or a clear recognition of the selfless nature of consciousness. They merely guarantee that the contents of consciousness will change.

How can we make sense of these gradations of moral responsibility when brains and their background influences are in every case, and to exactly the same degree, the real cause of a woman’s death?

And the fact that our choices depend on prior causes does not mean that they don’t matter.

A model of this thought pattern, one which ends inevitably in the normalization of extremely problematic views, is author Sam Harris’s 2017 reanimation of the IQ race wars that began with the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994. That book’s authors, psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, argue that intelligence

Whatever their conscious motives, these men cannot know why they are as they are. Nor can we account for why we are not like them.