Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Alex M. Vikoulov

Quote by Alex M. Vikoulov

“As shortcuts to spiritual and transcendent experiences, psychedelics played an important role in human evolution and galvanized pre-historic ritualistic cultures. In modern times, banning psychedelic drugs has proven to be counterproductive. Just as banning sexual activity does not stop sexual desire, outlawing psychedelic drugs does nothing to suppress the innate human urge for transcendental experiences. Besides, prohibition rarely works as we saw with alcohol or marijuana. Despite their classification and the legal hurdles around working with Schedule I substances in the U.S., psychedelics have undergone something of a renaissance among researchers, and for good reason.”

Quote by Alex M. Vikoulov

Book:The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence
Create image

Work

The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Alex M. Vikoulov

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Alex M. Vikoulov. more

You May Also Like

“What pushed you to be political? I’ve always been interested in politics, but when I first got out of college I just wanted to have fun and do non-political work. What happened was the Bush vs Gore election and the Supreme Court [decision]. That was the event that really shocked me into starting to do political cartoons. It was just so outrageous at the time. Then 9/11 and the Iraq War. I prefer doing a mix of straightforward political cartoons and more cultural cartoons about trends and facial hair and things like that. Now I feel silly doing a strip about beards. Maybe things will calm down and I can go back to doing cartoons about facial hair. As time went on and politics became more and more dire, that’s what really sent me down that path. Also I started picking up more and more clients that are explicitly political, like dailykos and The Progressive Magazine and once in a while The Nation will run a cartoon. That pushed me in a more political direction as well. (Interview with Comicsbeat)”

PoliticsIraq War9 11CartoonsPolitical CartoonsBush V Gore
Author:Jen Sorensen
Create image

“Q: What do you think will be the future of your field? There’s too much pessimism about the future for political cartooning. I think the future’s very bright. You see more and more sites like Politico that aggressively deploy cartoons on the homepage. I think the media is becoming increasingly visual… and increasingly made to match our shrinking attention spans. The business model for cartooning is going through a rough transition now, but in the long run the thing we cartoonists do—-deliver simple-minded political messages in short easily digestible bites—-is the direction the media in general is heading. We’re living in a media landscape that seems to get more infantile and politically simple-minded all the time—-look at the huge popularity of Glenn Beck…and I saw someplace recently that Jon Stewart is now the most trusted man in America. The clowns seem to be taking over the circus. This may be bad for governance, but it can only be good news for cartoonists. The interesting part will be what the platforms are going to be, cell phones, iPads, the iChip in my forehead, whatever it is, I’m sure the combination of visual metaphor and incisive humor you find in good cartoons will adapt and evolve and really thrive in the future. (Interview with Washington City Paper)”

FutureVisual ArtCartoonsPolitical CartoonsCartooningJon StewartGlenn Beck
Author:Matt Wuerker
Create image

“A parallel comparison helps to capture the similarities between existentialism (especially Nietzsche's) and Daoism (especially Zhuangzi's). Both discover the practical pointlessness of universal or absolute meaning (purpose). Nietzsche, from his perspective as a disappointed Christian yearning for absolute, transcendent, dependence on God, experiences this awareness with existentialist angst, a sensation of looking off a cliff into a bottomless abyss. The angst is caused by the vertigo impulse, the fear we will jump or drop off our perch into that nothingness. Zhuangzi, from his Daoist sense of the constraint of conventional authority, does not think of any cliff as a reference point. If the abyss is bottomless, then there is no such thing as falling. The cliff and Zhuangzi are both floating free. Leaving the cliff and entering the abyss is weightlessness―free flight―not falling. From his relativistic perspective, the cliff is floating away. Zhuangzi's reaction is not "Oh no!" but "Whee!”

PhilosophyNihilismNietzscheZhuangzi
Book:A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation
Create image