Buy some ZOOM or LIFT (two names for the same caffeine-
high stimulant) at a Health Food Store. (This gives a close
approximation of the effects of illegal cocaine.) When you are
Zooming or Lifted and your mind is racing, find a victim and explain
the universe to him or her, until they are able to escape you.
What you experience in this “speed rap” is what the head of
the compulsive Rationalist is always like. This is the verbal
circuit gone wild and totally oblivious to information coming in
on any other circuit. It explains why most people cannot stand
Rationalists. “Speed” drugs evidently trigger neuro-transmitters
characteristic of the verbal centers of the left cortex.
In the Trobrian islands, when a woman wants a divorce—this is before the Christian missionaries got in, when Malinowski studied them—when a woman wants a divorce she puts her husband’s shoes outside the door. That means he’s not allowed in. If he wants the marriage to continue, his parents go and talk to her parents and try to negotiate a second trial. Now, if you try that in California today, you get lawyers involved, and judges and the whole goddamn government bureaucracy. Things are much more complicated just because of the size, and the a inexorable growth of power wherever it’s allowed to grow.
Also tribal groups tend to have what anthropologists call an animalistic view, which is a view that everything is alive. Nobody has that view in our society except for people who have done a lot of acid.
