The Techbros vs. The Elders of the Earth

wrestling for the soul of the psychedelic movement

Peter Thiel is one of the largest investors in two of the pharmaceutical companies racing to corner the market on patented variants of psilocybin to market – Compass Pathfinder and ATAI Life Sciences. Sam Altman has invested millions of dollars in Journey Colab, a “moonshot” project focused on medical psychedelics.

In recent years, the resurgent psychedelic movement has been happy to accept the support and funding of Silicon Valley billionaires, assuming that their interest in these medicines was primarily rooted in a generally benevolent libertarianism. But now we are learning more about the political and social agenda Thiel, Altman, Musk, and others hope to implement — an embrace of eugenics and a move toward a neofeudalism in which democratic governments are replaced by networks of privately owned and controlled city-states. So we need to ask — what role do psychedelics play in this dystopian vision?

The links are not yet explicit, but I think there is much we can reasonably surmise.

Since its inception, capitalism has focused on trying to maximize the productivity of workers by any necessary and available means. Late capitalism is no exception — the only difference is that with material production either outsourced to poorer nations our automated, it is primarily interested in maximizing the intellectual and (carefully bounded) creative production of a small elite class of technicians and engineers. (Though, with the advent of artificial intelligence, their work will increasingly be automated too,)

In her brilliant essay, “In Praise of the Dancing Body,” Silvia Federici wrote:

“Mechanization—the turning of the body, male and female, into a machine—has been one of capitalism’s most relentless pursuits. [ . . .] I cannot here evoke all the ways in which the mechanization of body has occurred. Enough to say that the techniques of capture and domination have changed depending on the dominant labor regime and the machines that have been the model for the body. [ . . .] In our time, models for the body are the computer and the genetic code, crafting a dematerialized, dis-aggregated body, imagined as a conglomerate of cells and genes each with her own program, indifferent to the rest and to the good of the body as a whole.”

In the first iteration of the “information economy,” this led to an approach to the body based on “body hacking” — finding the techniques that could make an end-run around the body’s insistence on imposing its own limits on its exploitation, forcing it to push itself further and further. In Silicon Valley this manifested in a culture of endless consumption of energy drinks with higher and higher levels of caffeine content (caffeine being the quintessential drug of capitalism, up-regulating norepinephrine and adrenaline to push someone frantically toward meeting a single external goal,) and sleeping in your office —and in the embrace of mircrodosing psychedelics to jumpstart creativity.

As bodies and embodied minds begin experiencing the long term consequences of being in constant overdrive, depression and anxiety become near universal conditions. Just as military medicine exists not to heal people but to put troops back on the battlefield(*), our society’s response to these mental health crises is based on the imperative to make workers of all kinds more productive again — an imperative the workers themselves embrace because with the dissolution of what was left of an already meager social safety net, they need to work constantly in order to survive. Psychedelic medicines succeed in addressing depression, anxiety, addiction, and trauma where other therapies fail. But they have, from the point of view of the oligarchs, some unfortunate side effects — a tendency to increase empathy and decrease the willingness to accept authoritarian demands. The best way to minimize these side effects is to control not only the medicines themselves but the setting in which they are administered and the way in which the patient’s mindset is pre-calibrated by a therapist or guide. This allows a degree of control of what changes the mind made malleable by these medicines experiences.

As we move into the era of artificial intelligence, we shift into a model of networked minds operating to maximize the product of corporate entities that come to replace communities and nations. Since their inception, corporations have been egregores — non-corporeal entities given reality by the minds that collectively conjure them into being. As global information systems and global financial systems allow these entities to grow larger, they become stronger. They exercise their own spiritual, psychological, and emotional influence over those who participate in their functioning — including, and especially those who believe that they are in control of the corporation, whose delusions of grandeur grow and grow. This is accelerating exponentially with the emergence of AI — and the size of the material fortunes accumulated in the service of the creation of a seemingly limitless non-material world (which, in reality, is being fueled by its consumption of the water and minerals that all of life depends on.)

Serotonergic psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD increase a mind’s attunement to the flows of information in large self-organizing systems — be they the flows of sensation and emotion in bodies and communities and ecosystems or the flows of global capital. What system we attune to depends on where we direct our intention and attention. Privatizing control of set and setting by allowing access to psychedelics only in prescribed settings — be they clinics, churches, or spas — thus has the potential to give those in charge of the process a tremendous degree of control over what kind of world is being dreamed into being.

It all may sound hopeless — but we need to remember that the forces that seem to be taking control of this world only have as much control as we cede to them. And that there are forces far older and far more powerful than the ones that appear ascendant now.

The medicines we call psychedelic are ancient molecules, far older than humanity, neurotransmitters of a planetary consciousness. They evolved to facilitate the formation and experience of ecosystems and to bring the minds of its individual members into attunement with the whole. The mind of a planet or an ecosystem is akin to the mind of a god. As Stephen Harrod Buhner wrote in his final book, Becoming Vegetalista:

“We are not gods nor are we Elders of Earth. None of us are even as old or wise as the great trees or mountains of Earth. None of us can ever be the equal of the teachers who have taken us as apprentice.

“And lest you think otherwise, the great Elders of Earth take apprentices from among all our kindred species, just as they do human beings. We are not the only species to be so trained. We never have been. There is far more going on here than human beings will ever know. We are just part of the web, we are not the weaver.”

Humanity’s training has involved interventions from the Elders of the Earth at critical points in our experience. When the forms of pastoral agriculture that made changes to the land began to emerge in the late Neolithic, the communities involved in these practices encountered Psilocybe spp. mushrooms growing in greater abundance in the pastures they created, and, ingesting them, were reminded of their connection with the all of life. When city-stated began to rise, Claviceps purpurea, growing on stored grains, spoke to certain people and inspired them to create the pharmakon that initiated people into the mysteries of life and death. Claviceps purpurea made itself known to Albert Hoffman during the rise of fascism in Europe and in the prelude to the nuclear age. Ayahuasca became known to people from the global North at the time that our corporations began destroying the Amazon rainforest. I believe these same teachers are reaching to us again at another critical moment.

We cannot expect the culture we are trying to dismantle to enable its own destruction. Audre Lorde famously said “The master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house.” The technofascists want to make psychedelics into one of the master’s tools.

The ways of working with these medicines that are truly healing and liberatory cannot be commercialized and are not likely to ever be legalized.

Our (r)evolutionary work involves bringing the rhythms of our own lives back into alignment with the rhythms of the world. That begins with learning to listen first to our own beating hearts and then into the ways those hearts syncopate and entrain with the rest of life. The Elders of the Earth are willing to help us do this but only if we approach them with respect.

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* — This brings to mind a chilling thought that I cannot shake. During the war in Iraq, I heard accounts of opiates being used to get traumatized troops back onto the battlefield. There is speculation that low dose psychedelics could be used in a similar way without dulling the senses or slowing the responsiveness of troops. Some of the most beautiful potential psychedelic medicines have is around the healing of hearts shattered by war. But there is also the disturbing possibility that they could be used to try to make the members of military and paramilitary forces more resilient to trauma.