I saw a fascinating tweet by BloomTech CEO Austen Allred the other day that stirred up a lot of thoughts here.
“Of the Silicon Valley founders I know who went on some of the psychedelic self-discovery trips, almost 100% quit their jobs as CEO within a year,” Allred said, adding, “Could be random anecdotes, but be careful with that stuff.”
Allred tweeted this in response to writer Ashlee Vance sharing that he’d been told by a venture capitalist, “We’ve lost several really good founders to ayahuasca. They came back and just didn’t care about much anymore.”
There’s some very useful information in those words. They reveal a lot about the insane mess our species finds itself in in today’s world, and provide insight into how we might find our way out.
Capitalism or more accurately Neoliberalism is only successful due to competitive free markets, which encourages the ruthless pursuit of wealth extraction and resource acquisition.
It is not possible to succeed in “capitalism” without harming others, as you are required to extract the labor or value from those who are disadvantaged in order to enrich oneself. So in other words you convince the working class through persuasion to give you more than you give them.
This by definition is mental illness. Mental illness being thoughts or behaviors that harms oneself or others.
The fact that this isn’t widely accepted will be what we look back on as barbarism, much like we look back at history and wonder how those of the past could live such ways.