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Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization
- clickety_clack 23d agoGiven that many of our current-day subterranean environments are also covered in art and strewn with drug paraphernalia, can we really say that it played a key role in the rise of the civilization?
- dyauspitr 23d agoYou can 100% say that European civilization was heavily, heavily influenced by the consumption of alcohol.
- Gualdrapo 23d agoWhat do you mean "was"?
- kekebo 23d agoSupposedly there was a time when drinking beer was often safer than drinking water from available sources, including for children. I guess there are levels
- onlypassingthru 23d agoThey didn't make Arnold a saint for nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_of_Soissons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_of_Soissons
- AngryData 23d agoA lot of it was weaker small beer though too, like 1-2%.
- dyauspitr 23d agoEach person was going through a gallon a day though, that’s still 4-5 standard drinks which is a crazy amount to drink all day everyday.
- mitxela 22d agoSpread throughout the day you wouldn't be more than half a standard drink deep at a time in terms of psychological effects. Terrible for your liver though.
- gchamonlive 23d agoAll you can really say is that negligence is corrosive to civilization, and maybe that drugs act as an amplifier of sorts for society's illnesses and qualities.
- boogieknite 23d agocould also say a corroded civilization makes vulnerable people feel bad and drugs make them feel good
- TimTheTinker 23d agodrugs have been making people feel good (and messing with their sense of motivation to behave responsibly) regardless of society's state
- AdamN 22d agoThat's focusing on low class drug use. Elite drug use leaves a very different trail and has a different impact.
- gchamonlive 22d agoRight, and the elites can deal with it them selves, they have money. They are definitely not directly responsible for the "subterranean environments covered in art and strewn with drug paraphernalia".
- theplumber 23d agoYeah, like this zombie civilisation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i2k7KQ5L5Jg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i2k7KQ5L5Jg I am not sure if you can say it’s raising or falling by their posture
- fhdkweig 23d agoMy spidy sense is tingling on this video. The related recommendations on the side include these videos: In particular it is the thumbnails that look identical. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6NeLNYCGo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6NeLNYCGo0 The Zombies Of America! (i have never seen anything like this..) by Frank van Dam. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snN0PNZVWNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snN0PNZVWNA Inside Philadelphia's Real Life Zombie Outbreak by Tyler Oliveira https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htZCX1Y0ZiA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htZCX1Y0ZiA THE ZOMBIES OF AMERICA (I'VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS) by Joe HaTTab
- sophacles 23d agoYeah, it's really gross that coffee cups are left all over the place. But yeah, rise in caffeine consumption in place of ethanol is thought to have enabled and fueled the enlightenment, and been a major factor in the industrial revolution.
- clickety_clack 23d agoI meant the graffiti and needles in tunnels and under bridges etc.
- sophacles 23d agoI know what you meant. But the words you used apply to my reply too. It's a reminder that any attempt at an objective definition of "drugs" includes alcohol and caffeine, and that there is a huge cultural component to "good drugs" and "bad drugs". In fact, coffee was considered one of the bad drugs by many cultures it when first introduced to them - including European culture.
- krispyfi 23d ago"If I couldn't, three times a day, be allowed to drink my little cup of coffee, in my anguish I will turn into a shriveled-up roast goat" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweigt_stille%2C_plaudert_nicht%2C_BWV_211 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweigt_stille%2C_plaudert_ni...
- adaml_623 22d agoCorrelation and causation... I think there might be multiple groups in play there
- klrefg 22d agoLook up how much the signatories of the constitutional convention drank the night before signing the constitution. Alcohol consumption remained massive during the 1800s by our standards, people just drank we more than we do and probably more than in the 1600s and 1700s because distilled alcohol became cheap and widespread while you only had access to beer and wine before that.
- go_elmo 22d agofun fact - "drug" - german "droge" originally means "dried plant" - e.g. herbs, teas etc
- baxtr 23d agoDidn’t mind-altering drugs like alcohol play a key role in the rise of any civilization?
- physicalecon 23d ago[dead]
- LoganDark 23d agoAlcohol is a poison, not a drug, but I also think so. I honestly wish mind-altering drugs were more accessible sometimes, mostly because of safety. Millions are killed by adulterants in their street drugs.
- nickff 23d agoAs the saying goes: “the dose makes the poison”. Many (perhaps most) drugs cause harm at the wrong dosage.
- embedding-shape 23d ago> Many (perhaps most) drugs cause harm at the wrong dosage. Not only drugs, almost everything is bad at the wrong dosage. Case in point: water.
- LoganDark 23d agoTonicity matters too. Deionized water will suck the ions right out of you. All the way to your death if you're so determined.
- quchen 23d agoDepending on your definition of poison of course, but at least for LSD and magic mushrooms, all that's known is a lower bound for their biological toxicity. For LSD IIRC it's somewhere in the 30mg (!) range, for mushrooms it's more than can comfortably fit a stomach. I'm afraid I don't have sources handy though. That said, the state of mind must be so wild that "is it poisonous in this specific/usual sense" is probably not the right thing to discuss.
- dyauspitr 23d agoSo if you take a lot of psychedelics you end up with a civilization that ritually murders 20,000 people every couple of months. Just imagine the power you could wield as a shaman with drugs like DMT and psilocybin it would look like a literal magic
- TFNA 23d agoAre you thinking of the Aztecs or Mayans thousands of kilometers away? Andean human sacrifice involved customs unable to provide that level of throughput.
- wartywhoa23 22d agoWhat kind of a psychedelic created a civilization that ritually murdered 80,000,000 people over the course of 6 years, or ~ 37,000 a day, in WWII?
- cindyllm 22d ago[dead]
- theturtletalks 23d agoI read many years ago that psychedelics are what lead to the formation of consciousness. And it’s supported by the fact that psychedelics are also a network like the brain is. And when taking them, your brain experiences plasticity and that’s what allows profound changes. A big part of our consciousness is the default mode network (which is a default of how we operate day to day, things we think about, etc). Psychedelics allow us to change that DMN, but may it have created it too?
- plufz 23d agoJust for clarification. The default mode network is what activates when we are at rest or ”not focused on the outside world”. Ie daydreaming and mind wandering, even if it also can be active during detailed thinking. It has also been shown to have negative correlation to networks in the brain associated with attention.
- titanomachy 23d ago> psychedelics are also a network like the brain is Sorry to be rude, but what the hell does that mean?
- theturtletalks 23d agoFungi grow as a vast interconnected network and can communicate to other fungi. Similarly to how the neurons in the brain communicate. In fact, when you take fungi, it tones down common neural pathways and allows new ones to form between new places.
- titanomachy 23d agoOk, but there are plenty of psychedelics that don't come from fungi.
- theturtletalks 23d agoTrue, but my point isn’t that. It’s that fungi operate as an interconnected network so it makes the connection between them, neural networks, and consciousness interesting.
- DUDE_LSD_LMAO 23d ago[flagged]
- LoganDark 23d agoGive me enough drugs and I'll create civilization too
- embedding-shape 23d ago> The work also benefits from recent research into the use of hallucinogens in treating mental illness, which has promoted broader acceptance of these substances. “There was long a feeling that drugs made you sick and addicted,” says José Capriles, an archaeologist at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) who excavates in Bolivia. “Today, there is a new openness,” he adds, which is freeing grant money and attracting graduate students. I'm really happy to hear things like this. The potential benefits (and drawbacks, of course) been evident to lots of us psychonauts for a long time, and finally the sentiment seems to have turned enough so some money can actually get into the research to see if these things can help us today via treatments. A real joy to see after so many decades of the failed war on drugs that influenced policies across the globe.
- GuB-42 23d agoThe problem with psychoactive drugs, as I understand it, is not the lack of positive results. There are plenty of well recognized cases. The problem is the the unpredictability, because there are plenty of catastrophic results too, and we don't really know why. We can't tell "in your case you should take this dose, the risks are quantified and acceptable, and this is what we should do if things go wrong". And it is not for the lack of trying. People tend to forget that LSD is a product of "big pharma" and they definitely tried to make a safe and effective treatment out of it, so that they could make money out of their patent. The "war on drugs" certainly didn't help, but research never really stopped, but we are struggling to turn these drugs into treatments that up to modern standards. And by the way, many controlled substances are used in mainstream medicine: heroin, fentanyl, amphetamines (incl. meth), cocaine, ketamine,...
- jareklupinski 23d ago> The problem is the the unpredictability, because there are plenty of catastrophic results too, and we don't really know why. i can think of a way to find out :) we'll have to take it in stages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trial
- Aurornis 23d ago
- slowin 23d agoIt's thought that a lot of the geometric designs in Indigenous pottery and architecture are directly influenced by hallucinogenic plants like datura. There's a really great YouTube channel called Desert Lore and he covers this topic in depth in this episode. It was really fascinating: https://youtu.be/Vp4JlUEnPTs?si=j8gH0WnHRpeo1BJu https://youtu.be/Vp4JlUEnPTs?si=j8gH0WnHRpeo1BJu
- zakki 23d agoThe top comment when I clicked it does not agree with the narrative: @rkozakand 10 months ago The so called "southwestern motif" is found wherever people weave. Our native rugs in the mountains of Ukraine use the exact same motif, only in different colors. It is a natural outgrowth of weaving techniques, which encourage triangles. We also have ancient pottery from what is called the Trypillian culture, which includes spirals and what you call 'zen tangle' motifs, which we call 'bezkonechnyk'. This pottery looks very similar to Southwest American pottery, even being executed in the same colors. I therefore doubt that they are as tied to specific plants as you think, although patterns repeat in nature, and maybe we have similar plants.
- slowin 23d agoHe actually talks about that in the video and compares and contrasts the weaving based patterns, nature based patterns and hallucinogenic patterns. The datura pattern being nature based.
- wartywhoa23 22d agoMore likely it's not the same protocol that served these different cultures those motifs, it's the same server sending the same data over different protocols.
- webern777 22d agoIt doesn't even make sense that geometric designs would be influenced by datura. I have read every trip report on Erowid in relation to tropanes. Art influenced by datura would look like Clive Barkers Hell Raiser. The trip reports are incredibly consistently dark because the person taking the substance is being poisoned. Not figuratively, literally. The more interesting thing if you look into it is how ayahuasca use might be a modern phenomena. Maybe a few hundred years old. Even more interesting is how there is a mindset that would not want this to be true and would never accept the evidence for it.
- 47484848 23d ago[dead]
- GMoromisato 23d agoI love Tom Standage’s book, A History of the World in Six Glasses. It talks about: beer (Mesopotamia), wine (Greece/Rome), spirits (Spanish colonization), tea (British colonization), coffee (world wars), and Coca-Cola (American empire). It’s amazingly coherent.
- theholygrail 22d ago[flagged]
- go_elmo 22d ago“This was a time of huge levels of creativity and competition,” he said. “If you didn’t innovate with the latest psychoactives, you were left behind.” Why does this sound familiar? Silicon Valley, microdosing, everyone trying to be creative in finding best applications for AI (more or less creative, I must flag here) Guess history repeats itself.
- lisp2240 22d agoPeople do drugs in abandoned buildings. In a few hundred years archaeologists will think the purpose of shopping malls was fentanyl.
- arjie 22d agoHaha that’s great. “Artificial General Intelligence arose from the streets of San Francisco ca. 2027 possibly due to the high use of opiates among the population. Scientists have found that many locals at the time (of the dominant natural species - Homo sapiens) would consume vast amounts of fentanyl on the city streets - an incredibly dangerous drug originally used at the time as painkiller - which might be the source of artificial intelligence.”
- pmarreck 22d agoI would love to know how many human conceptions were assisted by the more well-known mind-altering drug, alcohol.
- Ccecil 22d agoFunny you mention that... I know a local bar where there are 4 bartenders who have all been there over 25 years. Recently I started asking them "How many pregnancies do you suppose you have caused throughout your career?". The most common response was to laugh but all of them also said "I know of a few at least".
- mihaic 22d agoMy general gripe with results like this is that it seems to be interpreted in a biased way by the people that already use psychoactive drugs, who want to argue for them in the modern world. I do agree that drugs were often needed for people to ensure the hardships of civilization (alcohol is not just a disinfectant). My main problem though is that this is too often used as an argument to shove a bunch of drugs in the general population, when we maybe could achieve some better results by just improving society. The people that take psylocibin/mescalin/whatever always tell other how much it expanded their mind, yet often they seem just as narrow minded to me as they did before, just in a different way
- joquarky 22d agoTerrence McKenna had a theory that psychedelics jump started civilization by making us more open to cooperation.