Stealing Fire

One of the most fascinating aspects of Silicon Valley is the counterculture that encourages boldness, adventurism and crossing the yellow line. It is not audacious to believe that both Kerouac and Elon Musk felt moved by this force to embark on their own adventures, as diametrically opposed as they may be to each other.

Stealing Fire is a book of adventure, which evokes one of the new frontiers that technology now faces: the quest for self and our ability to create extraordinary states of consciousness, certainly with the use of technology and above all with the firm belief that no taboo can be turned back.

The book is quite fascinating, as much for what it teaches us directly on the subject, the accessible summary of the vanguard of what we know about our brain functioning, genetics, psychedelic substances like LSD or MDMA, etc., as for what it shows about the culture of Silicon Valley and more broadly about the American culture. Can we imagine in France that American officers of the NATO staff could meet for days at Burning Man, the 21st century version of Woodstock, to think about the future of their military strategy? It is this audacity that is fascinating in this book; a candid capacity to envisage everything as possible, which reminds us how much our fear of failure is here in Europe, of a paralyzing power, whether it is a question of undertaking or of reforming our institutions.

At times, the author's technophilic faith is a bit annoying, so much so that the certainties regarding what science often qualifies as hypotheses (such as the essential role of the prefrontal lobe in the regulation of complex reasoning, for example) are handled with an absence of precaution that one could criticize. Or to imply that the rituals of the Amerindian civilizations were only a large part of superstition packaging a practice to be isolated for better recycling. One finds there the biases of an author like Yuval Harari, to such an extent that one clearly sees a form of tribal link, both being among the most adulated authors in Silicon Valley.

As is often the case, there is a kind of religious aspect to this type of work which, if one accepts not to pay attention to it, reveals a work of quality, rather well documented and which has little to do with what one could read on this subject on this side of the Atlantic.

But finally, the biggest reproach that one could make to this book is to marginalize the processes of trance and transcendence that exist in the Western spiritual tradition as well as in the animist traditions, particularly those coming from the shamanic culture. While the author mentions the latter on several occasions, I generally find it in less than favorable terms, as if reductionist science had finally gotten the better of these superstitions. One would invite the author to read works such as "the cosmic snake" by Jeremie Gordin