You can’t have revolutionary thought or significant growth-outside-the-system without people thinking that you are a bit off. What madness lives within that mind? Why would you think that way? Norms are the norms but the norms are not necessarily correct, nor immutable, and to go against them is to stand out, to risk a reputation of having lost one’s marbles, of being out of touch with reality.
We exist as autonomous chemical systems and our lives, our desires, are chemical responses. Our eyes take in light but our brain makes sense of the signal. We are so used to our eyes working in a way we call “normally” but the workings of our eyes are not without variation. In a dark room, the flash of light leaves imprints of a vision-seen, ghostly trails lingering.. where? The brain’s interpretation of optical receptors?
We trust optics and the physics are pretty straightforward. But real systems are not point-masses nor pure lenses nor textbook diagrams and problems.
Imagine staring at a picture. It’s in focus. There are flowers and textures. You are sober. This is reality. After taking some psychedelics you look at the same picture. Patterns are moving. Layers of optical planes dance and shift over one another, fighting for focus, trying to align. Your eyes are taking in the same light but the chemical plant of your brain is interpreting those signals differently. This is also reality. We are our nervous systems and the interpretation of stimuli collected by our senses.
Chemical reactions in our senses tell the chemical reactions in our brains that we like the taste of food, the touch of skin on skin, the enthusiasm of sports victory, and the piece of art on the wall. People get a bump from caffeine. People take the edge off with alcohol. Eating an apple puts chemicals into our bodies to trigger what we consider healthy or happy responses. Everything we do, everything we are, is chemicals.
Nicotine, big pharma, alcohol, and grocery produce, these chemicals are acceptable. But some chemicals are off limits, for some reason at someone’s discretion. Yes psychedelics, I’m looking at you… chemicals that change our brains temporarily, but let us change our spirits permanently. Thankfully that acceptance and perception is changing, but in the end, it’s all cause and effect; biology dictated by chemistry, with chemical and physical input. Chemical meets chemical and something happens.
Viewed this way, the concept of right and wrong becomes a bit tougher, and morality gets a bit gray. An atom is agnostic from morality. Two atoms are agnostic from morality. At some point, a collection of atoms become something different, suddenly subject to the human condition and social contract. And it’s not just that something is alive. We don’t subject flowers to morality or social contracts, nor do we to animals. Are humans really a special unique class of living entities?
It’s kind of wild how many of the most enlightened people also seem the most disconnected from accepted social reality. Realizing and accepting that we are just a collection of sentient atoms, that all rules are fabricated, that all thoughts are actually chemicals, some people choose to live with some level of concern for other people’s rights, out of respect for the social contract, but without concern for what society says things should be.
If we all have the right to the pursuit of Liberty and happiness we also get to choose what shape that takes. Do you want to paint your grass blue? Nobody is stopping you. Enjoy your toenail collection, if that’s what does it for you. Engage consensually with other humans in music, art, touch, and passion. What you do on your own is up to you, but the ways you engage with others follow an implied social contract.
But what is the social contract? They are implied rules or guidelines that we have made up to coexist as humans, nothing else. These aren’t even tangible physical things. They are thoughts living in brains, words written in books, but the essence of the meaning itself is intangible, a thought collective made up by humans.
We talk about the time of day, the age of people. We measure these in seconds, minutes, days, and years. As a physicist, I believe in the property of time but all of the units that we use are made up. We have arbitrarily determined what a second is, that we call something a second at all. Our year is the length of time it takes to go around the Sun and yet we talk about years within the scope of the universe as if that same unit of measurement means anything to some alien culture, on a different planet orbiting a different star. If they measured years the same way, as an orbit, we would certainly have different definitions of what one revolution of a given home star would be.
So we measure a year, two, a decade. We arbitrarily assign numbers which we also created based on an arbitrary 10-count system because we have ten fingers. Days of the week, months, time of day, all arbitrary. And while quantities of time, as abstract concepts, do exist, the measurement is arbitrary. You can drive at age 16, drink at 21. These are imaginary lines in the sand, chosen because they approximately work. An invisible line on the side of someone’s farm denotes their property, some number of feet from some other landmark. Arbitrary. These work within Earth and our social contract but none of these measurements are Universal in definition, even if the abstract concept of how wide something is, how old something else is, how much something weighs, exists equally in different parts of space.
It’s a trick to find the balance of a functional working of the social contract and freedom from conditioned thought. We have to get along, to coexist on an economic system of supply and demand. Out in the world, we have some expectations placed on us about who we are and how we might fit into society but in the end, we are all stories of our own design. If you want to self-describe as a space wizard and decorate your house with charms and mushrooms, nobody is stopping you. It’s hard to challenge all of the thought patterns we have grown up with. All of those are made up. All of them are learned. Some of them can be unlearned and that is up to you.