Faith & Spirit Quote by Stewart Brand

Brand’s line lands like a dare dressed up as a commandment: if desire sparks, treat it not as a private flicker but as marching orders. The provocation is the point. He yokes the most intimate, modern thing (a “fantasy”) to the oldest sources of authority (“God and nature”), turning libido into a kind of moral technology. The joke is that it’s not really a joke. It’s the Whole Earth ethos in miniature: ideas are tools; impulses are prototypes; you don’t debate them to death, you build.

The specific intent reads as anti-repression and anti-rumination. Brand is allergic to spectatorship. In his universe, a compelling vision isn’t meant to be admired, it’s meant to be tested. “Right away” is the accelerant, a swipe at the comfortable habit of calling everything “interesting” and then doing nothing. It’s a deliberately reckless compression of “follow your curiosity” into “act on your arousal,” collapsing intellectual and erotic energy into the same fuel source.

Subtext: permission, and pressure. It flatters the listener as someone whose instincts are trustworthy, even sacred. It also smuggles in a cultural script associated with late-’60s liberation and early Silicon Valley: authenticity equals immediacy; hesitation equals bad faith. The danger is baked into the bravado. Invoking “obligation” can bulldoze reflection, consent, and consequence - the very things that separate a generative experiment from a self-justifying impulse. That tension is what makes the line stick: it’s a manifesto for agency that also exposes how easily “nature” becomes an alibi.