Thread - Nostr Hypermedia

The 1970s did more than change money, it changed our relationship with consciousness and connection too. With Nixon’s Controlled Substances Act in 1970, psychedelics were pushed into Schedule I and research was driven underground. A movement that questioned authority, perception and inner freedom was treated as a threat. The following year, the dollar was taken off the gold standard. People were severed from intuition and money was severed from energy. These actions explain so much about where we are now. A society drowning in debt, mental distress, disconnection and permanent war, while still pretending these things are separate problems. Hunter S. Thompson captured the comedown in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The great wave of the 1960s had broken and rolled back, leaving behind the sense that something alive had been interrupted before it could fully reveal what it was reaching for. The response to this rupture has taken two different forms. One asks us to look inward and untangle the unconscious patterns running our lives. The other asks us to look outward and question the monetary system governing the world. This demands that we stop outsourcing reality. Illusion, awakening, fear, resistance and the difficulty of seeing clearly in a world built on managed perception. Maybe the decline did not begin when money lost its anchor. Maybe it began when society declared war on the tools that help people see the cage. I wrote this Forbes piece in 2024 and the connection between psychedelic therapy, bitcoin and sovereignty feels even more relevant now.

Forbes

The Converging Interest Between Psychedelic Therapy And Bitcoin

In a time of financial instability and mental health concerns, discussions centered on bitcoin and psychedelic research are converging.

@Sourcenode 💕 View quoted note →

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Replies (3)

The Bird DC@bitcoinveterans.org 2 weeks ago

Then alot of the people who were part of that movement seemed to have forgotten it and push hard for govt. growth as they aged.

BitLo bitlo.21m@iris.to 2 weeks ago

“This is bat country!”

easterntraveler easterntraveler@nostr-check.me 5 days ago

You make strong arguments in a beautiful way and I’m hooked, I want to read more from you, but you frame causalities in a way that leaves out important details. 1. Nixon may have driven psychedelic research underground, but not personal experience and inner discovery; I have many North American friends (Canadian, American, and Mexican) who all grew up in a rich and intense psychedelic culture, from the 70s till the 90s. This is specially true for the Mexican ones, a country where shamanic culture is incredibly strong. 2. You talk about the gold standard and the removal of energy from money; this is true to a certain extent, yet it’s not even the most critical thing: the working class was not freer before Nixon than after him, it has never been free, the means of production have never left the hands of the few nor have the rich classes allowed the workers to have access to freedom and real decision-making. A real aspect of Nixon’s gold standard change is the greater monetary flexibility gained and the enabling of much larger trade deficits; a realization of a far more efficient and sophisticated form of capitalism. It’s not a matter of money and energy, but of money-making rails that have become more obscure and unattainable for the working class—to put it in cypherpunk terms, making money has become more centralized and expensive than ever before. And it is true that Nixon destroyed an important aspect of money, but it is also true that he did the western world a service, if anything, by giving a hard lesson to the people about the meaninglessness of money and lack of inherent real value. In a way, Nixon destroyed the illusion of money being worth something real. The obsessive focus on money blinds people and derails us from seeing that real freedom lies not in chasing stores of value or shiny rocks, but in owning means of production and property.