This is a video version of a lecture that Timothy Leary used to give near the end of his life. Leary is of course best known as an acid guru from the 1960s and as rival of G. Gordon Liddy and President Richard Nixon. However he was also an intelligent man with a serious education in psychology and a lot of ideas about the way things work. This video gives a pretty good overview of his philosophy. The video is a kaleidoscope of colors and flashing images supplied by Retinalogic. Despite the hallucinatory visuals this video is not about drug use. In order to understand this video you really need to understand the context in which it was made. Leary is echoing French theorists such as Gilles Deleuze in saying that life has too many rules and that we need to let go of the rules in favor of chaos. What he means by chaos is basically what anarchists mean when they use anarchy in positive way. There was a lot of this kind of talk in the 1990s due to the popularization of the internet which was seen as a kind of leaderless utopia for the exchange of knowledge and experience which was also concurrent to the unprecedented interest in multiculturalism. Lastly there was also some pop science reporting in the mainstream media about chaos theory which often showed fractal imagery as shorthand for finding patterns in the universe or order out of chaos. This video makes much use of fractals and global imagery (i.e.- showing native dancers then showing cars driving). This is done to de-program the viewer because he who controls the eyeball controls the brain.

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Documentary