Bad Gateway

Psychedelic Technofascists and the Death of Democracy

“Protect your spirit, because you are in the place where spirits get eaten." -- John Trudell

I have spent decades warning of the horrors we would witness in the time when the fever dream of our species began to peak. (And I have been far from alone in this.) But I did not fully anticipate the nature of the forces ascendant in the United States right now — especially the way in which a handful of technofascists would align themselves with Christian Nationalists in order to get their hands on the levers of power.

On the public stage, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman appear to be rivals. And, in some sense, they are. Their shared ideology insists that power is a zero sum game. But ultimately, they are pursuing the same agenda on many levels, all in the name of personal triumph. On the technological level, they are part of the push toward forms of artificial intelligence that would consume the body of the world at an alarming rate in the attempt to create a simulacrum they at some level believe to be superior to reality. On a political level, they are unapologetic about their disdain for democracy, believing that the masses are not intelligent enough to be trusted with decision making. Each is deeply influenced by Curtis Yarvin’s vision of a world in which governments are replaced by privately run city-states ruled by “great men” something the Trump administration is considering allowing to begin with the creation of privately chartered “freedom cities” on land now owned by the federal government. They advocate eugenics — and believe themselves to be genetically and culturally superior — which is where they find strange common ground with elements of the religious right.

They also share an affinity for psychedelics that forces many of us who have worked deeply with these medicines to question what we thought we understood about their interaction with the human mind.

. . . A pause to comment on my terminology here. I use the word “psychedelics” quite deliberately. It means “mind potentiating.” I am quite wary of the word “entheogen” — its etymology suggests that it is generating rather than revealing sacredness, causing divinity to arise within an individual rather than helping a person become aware of the divinity within everything. Rather than merely being a bit of sloppy wordcraft, I think the coining and the rise of the word entheogen reflects a fundamental philosophical error in much of contemporary psychedelic culture. The psychedelic plants and fungi I work with suggest the term “panentheodelic,” but I think that only reflects what happens when we are in right relation with them.

Stephen Buhner, who devoted his life to following the vision one he received from of the “Elders of the Earth” who gave rise to these medicines, favored the term serotonergic neurognostics.

Neurognostic refers to the way in which these medicines bring us into direct contact with the neurobiology of consciousness — and if we work with them deeply enough into its ancient provenance, far, far older than humanity.

Serotonergic refers to the fact that LSD, DMT, psilocybin, and serotonin are all tryptamine alkaloids. Since early in the history of life on Earth, they have played a role in the generating complex webs of filaments that give rise to consciousness — be those webs mycelial, rhizomatic, mycorrhizal, or neural — and modulating the flows of information across them.

This may come as a surprise to those who are used to thinking of serotonin as a “mood-regulating compound” — but it begins to make sense when we consider that a mood is a gestalt impression of the sensations and emotions a person is experiencing within their body which is not separate from the body of the world. As levels of serotonin and serotonergic compounds rise, a person becomes more and more aware of what is happening within and without, and begins to attune to complex flows of information. And meanwhile their brain is restructuring its architecture of consciousness to accommodate this experience.

Here lies the rub. As I wrote in an earlier essay:

“When a mind is being repatterned, what that mind is focused on is essential. For most of the history of our species, ecosystems, human communities, and the living world itself were the only sufficiently complex systems for a human mind to imprint on when working with psychedelics. Now, however, global markets and global technological systems have gained sufficient complexity to pull a mind in a malleable state into attunement and a certain kind of empathy with the flows of information within them.”

So the intention with which one engages these medicines becomes more important than it ever was before in human history. Contemporary research shows that when someone engages serotonergic neurognostics with an openness to the experience of “oceanic boundlessness” — to letting go of all assumptions and identities and personal agendas — they tend to induce a deeper compassion for all of life and a rejection of authoritarian ideas. But not all approach the medicines with this intention.

I discussed this with Stephen, who was very worried about the rise of a new fascism. In one e-mail to me, he wrote:

“When it comes to techbros and neurognostics, well, they are using it to obtain power of one sort or another. The expand brain function by altering gating channels and then being able to see connections that most people do not. But they have never experienced an Elder of Earth, millions of years older than them, reaching out and taking hold of their eyes and pointing them in the direction of the great ocean of being and what occurs there. They have never experienced the overwhelming experience of how tiny and unimportant human beings are in the scheme of things. And for whatever reason they are unable to tell the difference between the good and everything else. You might say that some behaviors serve the life essence and many do not. And it takes time to discern the difference."

Discerning and naming that difference between what serves the life essence and what does not is essential to navigating these times. We have ceded control of our economy, our culture, and our government to those who care nothing for the fate of others — much less for the fate fate of the web of life itself. Yes, in the long view, life on Earth will survive, but whether our species will and how many other species will be destroyed is very much dependent on the decisions we make collectively right now. Letting those who value only their own lives and fortunes make those decisions for us is utter folly.

The techbros’ idea of power is the ability to fulfill their personal desires without restriction. Their approach to the Elders of the Earth is like that of someone who goes to a martial arts master seeking to learn how to inflict maximum violence — and refusing to pay attention to any of the spiritual discipline the master is attempting to teach. Because of this there is a strong likelihood that they are courting their own destruction — but history and myth tell us that when the edifices the mighty built crumble, the poor are often crushed beneath the rubble.

In Ireland before the Norman invasion, when a leader abused the people and the land, he would be brought down by poets prophesying against him. The strength of the prophecy arose from its truth. And the poets understood that the art of prophecy lay in listening to the voices of the wind and the birds and the trees, seeing the patterns in the clouds and in the stars, and scrying on water and flame. The art of poetry lay in using sound and rhythm to help people remember in their blood and in their bones that their true loyalty belonged with the rivers and the stones and the ancestors and the descendants — and not with one who betrayed them.

In more recent history, the last time fascism threatened the world, there was an organized magickal response to it. Particularly instructive to us is the work that Dion Fortune did in England, having people across the country meditate at particular times on particular images in order to awaken the soul of the nation. I talk about this often with my friend Caroline Casey. And always our conversations come to the conclusion that we need to take it a layer deeper — instead of attuning with and awakening the soul of the nation, we need to attune with and awaken the living spirit of the land.

But first we must turn to the Elders of the Earth — those ancient beings who dreamed life into being, and ask us to help them remember who we are, who they dreamed us to be, and how to weave ourselves back into the world without beginning and without end. The rest will emerge from that devotion.