“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge — even to ourselves — that we’ve been so credulous.”
– Carl Sagan

Legal marijuana will transform human consciousness by helping growing numbers of pot fans notice, accept, and understand how Homo sapiens have been bamboozling one another for ages.

The bamboozles started with primitive ancestors who grew addicted to the dopamine-induced survival behaviors they shared with chimpanzees. Abraham Maslow called them deficiency needs (d-needs) for food, sex, safety/power, acceptance/approval/attention, and esteem/status.

Our more recent forebears indulged their inherited dopamine cravings by figuring out how to trigger the powerful neurotransmitter with drugs, gadgets, diversions, ideologies, and money. Then the clever rascals wove webs of self-deceptions into layers of denials that made it possible to pretend irrational, inane, and insane behaviors were normal, acceptable, and even admirable.

The bamboozles continue because we’re all born and indoctrinated into addictive societies where powerful addicts control the institutions defining moralities, legalities, and addictions. With the inmates running the asylum the most common, destructive, and aggressive addicts (who trigger dopamine with power, status, and money) get away with wreaking havoc while waging failed drug wars against harmless addicts.

In a nutshell…

Thanks to intellectually challenged ancestors, everything we do or don’t do can be explained by neurocentrism, a behavioral model that links all beliefs and behaviors to maintaining dopamine flow.

Neurocentrism explains why heliocentrism took so long to go from ignored to absurd to obvious. For 16th century peasants the concept of the earth orbiting a sun was too abstract to fathom and too threatening to their safety/approval needs to consider. For the intelligentsia, heliocentrism was too obvious to disprove yet too threatening to their power, positions, and status to allow.

The experts who ignored Copernicus and attacked Galileo didn’t care about religion, science, scriptures, reason, justice, or truth. They were safety, power, approval, and status addicts protecting dopamine flow by rejecting evidence that threatened a sacred bamboozle — geocentrism.

Centuries later, neurocentrism explains why neurocentrism is taking so long to make the leap from ignored to absurd to obvious. Until then, neurocritics will continue rejecting any evidence of a modern bamboozle — the conceit that behavior is too complicated to explain in terms of neurotransmitters.

Honesty and legal THC

Pot heads are, by and large, the most honest and least defensive of all drug addicts. They don’t ascribe lofty ideals to a smelly habit or try to deny why they smoke a weed. As a bonus, THC is an effective mind-opening drug.

Honest addicts are free to understand neurocentrism because honesty doesn’t threaten dopamine flow by threatening safety, acceptance, approval, or esteem. The more honest the addict, the more sense neurocentrism makes. Conversely, the less honest the addict, the more close-minded the individual, the more abstract, absurd, incomprehensible, or offensive neurocentrism sounds.

Dishonest addicts are not interested in any information that threatens dopamine flow. Especially information that debunks deceptions, lowers esteem, and keeps them from feeding addictive cravings.

With a little help from legal hemp, honest pot heads will expose a bamboozle that dishonest addicts rely on to deny debilitating addictions to d-needs, gambling, and money. As the current paradigm crumbles, dishonest addicts will no longer get away with looking down from an undeserved moral high ground.

Once the genie’s out of the bottle, former dishonest addicts will join honest addicts who are asking and answering transformational questions.

• If everything comes down to triggering dopamine squirts in my brain, does it make sense to continue wasting time on destructive, expensive, unhealthy behaviors I don’t really enjoy?
• Do I want to continue being a voluntary slave to a neurotransmitter that keeps me craving food, sex, safety, power, acceptance, approval, attention, status, money, and/or drugs?
• Why am I allowing marketers to push my dopamine buttons and manipulate choices that are making me unhappy?
• What can be done to stop the unnecessary destruction of environments, economies, and lives by out-of-control power, money, and status addicts who only care about one thing — scoring dopamine squirts in their brains?

In time, the honesty of THC will Transform Human Consciousness and the greatest bamboozle in history will go up in smoke!