 Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question. What does it mean to be human and alive? Because the greatest curse in the history of humanity, a curse that goes back to the dawn of awareness, is cultural myopia. The idea that my world is a real world and everybody else is a failed attempt at being me. My point is that cultural myopia is not just a curse of humanity, but it's one horrific trait of humanity that in a multicultural, pluralistic, interconnected world we can no longer indulge. As if literally all of the glory of the rainforest and the natural wealth, the natural capital of the forest was just sort of being put into a grinder and ground out to produce money, you know? Let me ask you a question. What's the formula of photosynthesis? Carbon dioxide and water sparked by photons of light creates carbohydrate and releases oxygen. But you could easily graduate not just from this undergraduate university but from law school, from business school without knowing the formula of life. How can we possibly get people to understand the profundity of biological relationships, the profundity of ecological connections, the interdependence of life itself if they are utterly scientifically illiterate? We accept that someone can be fully educated who has not the slightest idea of anything to do with biology. Think about that. That's really what the whole wrap of development is. The whole development paradigm is questionable. I mean, genocide, the physical extermination of the people is universally condemned. Ethnocide, the destruction of a people's way of life is knowing not condemned. It's embraced in many quarters as appropriate development policy. Pastoral nomads or hunters and gatherers don't fit the image of the nation-state and therefore they have to be eliminated. Something just think of it. Half the languages of the world that were spoken the day you were born are not being taught to children which means they're on the road to extinction. To lose half the languages in a generation is to literally lose half of humanity's collective knowledge. Every fortnight some elder passes away and carries with them into the grave the last syllables of an ancient time. You know, if God's all powerful why does he allow evil to exist in the universe? Lord Krishna said to thicken the plot. Cultural appropriation ranges from stealing the Elgin marbles, you know, from Greece to an ongoing serious epidemic of marketing of rare treasures through illicit smuggling, you know, rings which should be heavily policed and heavily condemned. I mean, the thing that we forget is that this incredible social transformation women in a generation going from the kitchen to the boardroom people of color from the woodshed to the White House gay people, men and women from the closet to the altar school children talking of biodiversity the biosphere of Gaia people beginning to abandon traditional patriarchal religion for the subtle nuances of the Dharma in Buddhism which is one of the fastest growing religions in the West the fact that we really are seeing the earth in almost metaphysical terms as a living entity all of the things from above that I mentioned are profoundly threatening to someone who isn't prepared to accept them but I took psychedelics and I'm proud to say that I wouldn't write the way I write I wouldn't think the way I think I wouldn't have understood the nature of cultural relativism as an anthropologist I wouldn't treat women the way I do our parents used to say, don't take these things you'll never come back the same that was a whole bloody point, right and so the fact that the genies out of the bottle ain't going back and the tsunami of social change and transformation and spiritual growth and reinvention of our entire sense of ourselves on the planet it's rolling forward and you know get out of the way if you're not prepared because it'll drown you if you're not prepared to float upon it you know, Facebook, Twitter I mean six, basically six billionaires in Silicon Valley have within their hands the ability to protect or frankly destroy democratic traditions that have developed in such a powerful way but always on by definition a fragile foundation and so everybody you know who uses cocaine has a blood of Colombian people on their hands Wow, that's going to be a wild book, yeah