The Declaration of Evolution
by Dr. Timothy Leary, Ph.D.
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 for 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's 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
self?approval.
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. Worshiping
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.
