In light of what’s been going on in Iran this past week, we thought this Persian Google translation of Dr. Leary’s “Declaration of Evolution” was rather timely.
If there’s any problem with the url above, try this one. (non-tinyurl version)
Here’s a link to the english version, the text of which we will also republish in this post.
When I asked Michael Horowitz, Tim’s Personal Archivist, about how he remembers Tim feeling about this particular work, he had this to say:
“Tim considered it “A manifesto for the psychedelic generation modeled on the Declaration of Independence” (TL Bibliography, p. 190).
It was published as the final chapter of his seminal collection, THE POLITICS OF ECSTASY (1968), and afterward, in periodical and pamphlet form. Tim preferred the term “evolution” until he was imprisoned and escaped in 1970, when he found “revolution” more suitable. But he reverted back to “evolution” when he began writing his Future History series, beginning with the monograph NEUROLOGIC, in 1973. He identified the emerging generation of scientifically-minded psychedelic activists as Evolutionary Agents or Change Agents, a concept recently adopted by members of both political parties (cf. Barack Obama).
The fact that this important text will now be available across the Middle East would have pleased Tim enormously. Getting his message out was what mattered most to him, especially when accomplished through the newest, most cutting-edge technology. (McLuhan’s statement, “the medium is the message,” was to Tim the most important concept in his lifetime as a communicator.)
Tim would be pleased by Twitter’s recent usage in Iran in helping democracy communicate its message to the masses (and back).”
Here’s the text of the entire document in english.
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==Declaration of evolution==================by Timothy Leary, PhD.=========== —————————————————————————–
When in the course of organic evolution it becomes obvious that a mutational process is inevitably dissolving the physical and neurological bonds which connect the members of one generation to the past and inevitably directing them to assume among the species of Earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them, a decent concern for the harmony of species requires that the causes of the mutation should be declared.
We hold these truths to be self evident:
That all species are created different but equal;
That they are endowed, each one, with certain inalienable rights;
That among them are Freedom to Live, Freedom to Grow, and Freedom to pursue Happiness in their own style;
That to protect these God-given rights, social structures naturally emerge, basing their authority on the principles of love of God and respect for all forms of life;
That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and harmony, it is the organic duty of the young members of that species to mutate, to drop out, to initiate a new social structure, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its power in such form as seems likely to produce the safety, happiness, and harmony of all sentient beings.
Genetic wisdom, indeed, suggests that social structures long established should not be discarded frivolous reasons and transient causes. The ecstasy of mutation is equally balanced by the pain. Accordingly all experience shows that members of a species are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, rather than to discard the forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, all pursuing invariably the same destructive goals, threaten the very fabric of organic life and the serene harmony of the planet, it is the right, it is the organic duty to drop out of such morbid covenants and to evolve new loving social structures.
Such has been the patient sufferance of the freedom-loving peoples of this earth, and such is now the necessity which constrains us to form new systems of government.
The history of the white, menopausal, mendacious men now ruling the planet earth is a history of repeated violation of the harmonious laws of nature, all having the direct object of establishing a tyranny of the materialistic aging over the gentle, the peace-loving, the young, the colored. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to the judgement of generations to come.
These old, white rulers have maintained a continuous war against other species of life, enslaving and destroying at whim fowl, fish, animals and spreading a lethal carpet of concrete and metal over the soft body of earth.
They have maintained as well a continual state of war among themselves and against the colored races, the freedom-loving, the gentle, the young. Genocide is their habit.
They have instituted artificial scarcities, denying peaceful folk the natural inheritance of earth’s abundance and God’s endowment.
They have glorified material values and degraded the spiritual.
They have claimed private, personal ownership of God’d land, driving by force of arms the gentle from passage on the earth.
In their greed they have erected artificial immigration and customs barriers, preventing the free movement of people.
In their lust for control they have set up systems of compulsory education to coerce the minds of the children and to destroy the wisdom and innocence of the playful young.
In their lust for power they have controlled all means of communication to prevent the free flow of ideas and to block loving exchanges among the gentle.
In their fear they have instituted great armies of secret police to spy upon the privacy of the pacific.
In their anger they have coerced the peaceful young against their will to join their armies and to wage murderous wars against the young and gentle of other countries.
In their greed they have made the manufacture and selling of weapons the basis of their economies.
For profit they have polluted the air, the rivers, the seas. In their impotence they have glorified murder, violence, and unnatural sex in their mass media.
In their aging greed they have set up an economic system which favors age over youth.
They have in every way attempted to impose a robot uniformity and to crush variety, individuality, and independence of thought.
In their greed, they have instituted political systems which perpetuate rule by the aging and force youth to choose between plastic conformity or despairing alienation.
They have invaded privacy by illegal search, unwarranted arrest, and contemptuous harassment.
They have enlisted an army of informers.
In their greed they sponsor the consumption of deadly tars and sugars and employ cruel and unusual punishment of the possession of life-giving alkaloids and acids. They never admit a mistake.
They unceasingly trumpet the virtue of greed and war. In their advertising and in their manipulation of information they make a fetish out of blatant falsity and pious self-enhancement.
Their obvious errors only stimulate them to greater error and noisier selfapproval. They are bores.
They hate beauty. They hate sex. They hate life.
We have warned them from time to time to their inequities and blindness.
We have addressed every available appeal to their withered sense of righteousness.
We have tried to make them laugh.
We have prophesied in detail the terror they are perpetuating. But they have been deaf to the weeping of the poor, the anguish of the colored, the rocking mockery of the young, the warnings of their poets. Worshipping only force and money, they listen only to force and money. But we shall no longer talk in these grim tongues.
We must therefore acquiesce to genetic necessity, detach ourselves from their uncaring madness and hold them henceforth as we hold the rest of God’s creatures in harmony, life brothers, in their excess, menaces to life.
We, therefore, God-loving, peace-loving, life-loving, fun-loving men and women, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the Universe for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the Authority of all sentient beings who seek gently to evolve on this planet, solemnly publish and declare that we are free and independent, and that we are absolved from all Allegiance to the United States Government and all governments controlled by the menopausal, and that grouping ourselves into tribes of like-minded fellows, we claim full power to live and move on the land, obtain sustenance with our own hands and minds in the style which seems sacred and holy to us, and to do all Acts and Things which independent Freemen and Freewomen may of right do without infringing on the same rights of other species and groups to do their own thing.
And for the support of this Declaration of Evolution with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, and serenely confident of the approval of generations to come, in whose name we speak, do we now mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.
