The point is valid: the difference between survival and wipe-out in a physical crisis is nearly always a matter of conditioned reflexes.

It's all in the reflexes.

Luck is a very thin wire between survival and disaster, and not many people can keep their balance on it.

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

I don't think that my kind of journalism has ever been universally popular. It's lonely out here.

All the blood is drained out of democracy - it dies - when only half the population votes.