Psychedelics and Politics

A fellow named Marcel (X: @anarchyinblack) has written an article (part of a series!) about American right-wing psychedelic drug use:

Gang Weed Conservatism I: Charles Taylor and the World of Pure Imagination

And LSD is dangerous.

It is dangerous because it promotes the idea that reality is something to be manipulated rather than accepted. This notion can seriously cripple one’s coping abilities, although I would still argue that both alcohol and TV advertising do that more persuasively than LSD. And of course, if you’re lightly sprung, it can leave you nuts.

But LSD is not illegal because it endangers your sanity. LSD is illegal because it endangers Control. Worse, it makes authority seem funny. But laugh at authority in America and you will know risk. LSD is illegal primarily because it threatens the dominant American culture, the culture of Control. (John Perry Barlow, Liberty and LSD.)

This is the part I would focus on, not a “spiritual revelation” but the notion that reality is malleable, perhaps in the sense that Lord Sankey describes Canada’s constitution as as “living tree:”

The British North America Act planted in Canada a living tree capable of growth and expansion within its natural limits. (Henrietta Muir Edwards and others (Appeal No. 121 of 1928) v The Attorney General of Canada (Canada) [1929] UKPC 86 (18 October 1929))

In the same sense, human beings have a constitution that is capable of growth and expansion within its natural limits. But who, or what, defines those natural limits? Further, it is clear to anyone who thinks about it that humans are also subject to artificial limits. This, I think, is where a certain sort of person becomes frustrated at the discussion. A speed limit, for example, a municipal law, to use the technical term, is an artificial limit. To naturalize this limit is to neutralize its interrogation and to neutralize its modification through whatever processes humans have to modify these limits—not as some “spiritual process” per se, but more akin to what Chief Dan George describes:

Oh, Great Spirit! Give me back the courage of the olden Chiefs. Let me wrestle with my surroundings. Let me once again, live in harmony with my environment. Let me humbly accept this new culture and through it rise up and go on. (Chief Dan George, My Heart Soars, p. 92.)

Under industrialism, one is not supposed to wrestle with one’s surroundings. One is supposed to accept one’s place within the industrial society, as prescribed by a mechanism larger than any one person, for which no individual is responsible. It is not even a clique, cult or aristocracy that is responsible. A favourite alt-right theme is the control of mass media to censor certain questions, to control the destiny of the people against their own rational collective interest. There are suggestions as to who really controls the Television, the Social Media, the Newspapers and Radio (in the olden days).

But one of the things we all control is the media we consume. We are not like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, forced to watch media while our eyeballs are held open. Perhaps we are during infancy, under control of parents, teachers and other authorities. This, I think, is where psychedelics can be helpful, but also, as Barlow says, harmful if you are “lightly sprung.” In Philosophy of Science, I give a fairly loose account of science, as opposed to value theory:

The “first step of wisdom” is to distinguish bodies by “marks imprinted upon them by nature.” There are, in this sense, no marks of greatness, except in the sense that one body might be larger than another; there is no abstract, metaphysical Greatness, no spirit: “amidst the greatest apparent confusion, the greatest order is visible.”

We can, therefore, distinguish two types of bodies: those visible and invisible. The speed limit, for example, is an invisible body, for, even if we see it inscribed upon a sign, “LIMIT 50 M/H,” the limit itself is not visible. You can, of course, say that over time the observation of an object can lead to an objective description of its velocity, but the limit itself, that is nothing you can see, all you can say is that you heard about it. And one can say that this is a trite distinction, not even worth discussing, but I don’t think this is the case.

Many entities are things we hear about, rather than see. Take the University, or the Degree. A University is a corporation, and a degree is a life-estate in the University, that is, at least, how they are understood in English law. A city, a municipality, these are also things you hear about, their limits being defined by signs akin to speed limits. On one side of the sign, the corporation or municipality can tell you to cut your grass: on the other side it cannot. As I said above, this sort of talk is frustrating to some people, and this is part of, I think, why they think psychedelics make you “stupid.” Only a stupid person would argue that the limits of a city are something you “hear about” rather than something you see. After all, the sign post is right there!

This brings me to my more general point about Dr. Marcel’s ultimate thesis, if I may call it such:

What these people crave is delusion. They have to talk themselves into incredibly convoluted postmodern explanations for why things that they know to be false aren't false because they don't want to believe in real life. In real life, they are losing on every front. They are even losing the battles in their own churches. (Gang Weed Conservatism I: Charles Taylor and the World of Pure Imagination)

I am hard-pressed to see why the speed limit, or the municipal limit is not just as much a delusion as whatever private demons, ghosts or apparitions people “see” and then “talk about” (hearing their own self-talk, talking to others) after using psychedelics. My experience is that the people who are capable of entertaining the argument I have laid down about the speed limit, the limits of municipal “entities” generally do not have those sorts of trips. But the people who, like Dr. Marcel, they tend, in my experience, to believe they are “in the United States of America,” or, without poking too much fun at him. Dr. Marcel puts “PhD” in his Twitter bio. Of course, he is not a frog like myself, he is out there, presumably with his real face, name, and one of the titles he has obtained from a corporation. He is very proud of his estate.

My criticism of his point of view, if I have understood it correctly, is that he wants to suggest these private hallucinations are somehow a disconnection from reality, but these very much larger delusions, which are imposed upon people via a system of mechanical reproduction and socialization and repression that rivals anything these drugs could hope to achieve, is somehow more legitimate. I am content to say they’re both sort of legitimate, in the sense that people experience them. The person who believes he is a Doctor of Philosophy because the Chancellor of his University said “I admit you to the degree of doctor of philosophy,” that is an experience he has had, and he is proud of it, and he wants to share it. I think it is basically the same for all experiences that we “hear about” or “see” in the sense of the psychedelic experience.

We can then go further and do an economic analysis of the utility of such experiences: it is probably more useful to have a shared delusion than a private one, especially if the shared delusion leads to conferences, teaching opportunities, dollar bills, etc. That could not be doubted. But this is depersonalizing, because it treats the person, as industrial society is wont to do, as a cog in a pre-existing machine. The machine is the collective activity of billions of individuals, and psychedelics, for many people (many of whom cannot talk about it for all sorts of reasons, including losing access to the United States of America, citizens have right of return, not everyone.), enable them to wrestle just a bit more with that machine, to trim the tree of our shared “we heard about it” reality a bit more, or at least to try to trim it.

This model of the collective action of industrial society is similar to the collective activity of the neurons and other tissues that compose the human brain. This article is not a scientific review of the physiological effect of psychedelic materials, but there are many, and they vary with the substance. They are not entirely negative, either. But consider St. Timothy:

"Acid is not for every brain - only the healthy, happy, wholesome, handsome, hopeful, humorous, high-velocity should seek these experiences. This elitism is totally self-determined. Unless you are self-confident, self-directed, self-selected, please abstain." St. Timothy