During Conspirituality 173, psychedelics researcher Neşe Devenot mentioned a paper on right-wing psychedelia she co-authored with fellow Psymposia member, Brian Pace. We were discussing the misperception that psychedelics skew progressive, such as the longstanding myth that psilocybin or LSD will, by their very essence, make you more compassionate, caring, and open-minded.
Devenot and Pace begin with the assumption that psychedelics bias political beliefs toward liberalism. They then deconstruct the myth. As they note, we have to grapple with “the many historical and contemporary cases of psychedelic users who remained authoritarian in their views after taking psychedelics or became radicalized after extensive experience with them.”
That list is a doozy; I list some highlights below.
I understand the impulse to associate the psychedelic experience with progressive ideologies. But that’s also because of my surroundings when I started taking them in the mid-nineties. I lived on one of the most racially-diverse college campuses in the nation: the now-defunct Livingston College. (The campus remains; the college has just been absorbed by Rutgers University.)
Rutgers was steeped in progressive politics at the time. I took psychedelics with a range of people with similarly progressive values, so it makes sense that I would associate these substances with our shared viewpoints. When you’re with a group of people intent on molding the world into a more diverse and caring place, psychedelics can certainly seem to inspire its inevitability.
Yet they also do the same for bigots, misogynists, and racists.
Set and setting
As the authors point out, the “set and setting”—the mindset and social environment one is in while under the influence of psychedelics—is integral to the experience. If I had taken psychedelics at a fundamentalist college, chances are my existential outlook would have skewed authoritarian. A more constricted, preordained world would have emerged in my thoughts.
This is because, as psychiatrist Stanislov Grof said, psychedelics act as nonspecific amplifiers of unconscious drives.
These substances function as unspecific amplifiers that increase the energetic niveau in the psyche and make the deep unconscious dynamics available for conscious processing. This unique property of psychedelics makes it possible to study psychological undercurrents that govern our experiences and behaviors to a depth that cannot be matched by any other methods and tools available in modern mainstream science.
Since psychedelics are largely tethered to the social movements of the late sixties in our cultural imagination, the assumption that they promote civil rights, climate justice, and feminism makes sense. Yet other groups ingest psychedelics, as the paper highlights. These groups also feel that their worldview is verified by the cosmos.
Part of the issue is the media’s repeating of the liberal psychedelia myth based on two small studies that showed a reduction in authoritarian impulses. The first found recreational usage of LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, or ayahuasca produces fewer authoritarian beliefs than users of cocaine and alcohol; the second, that taking psilocybin for depression treatment reduces authoritarian feelings. While important, neither study was especially robust, especially the latter, which included only 14 participants.
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