Do psychedelics make you liberal? Not always

https://psychedelicsociety.org.uk/news/bw06yvjnvblq47vwoocv5owchiyf8b

by VieEnCode • 5 years ago

58 75 5 years ago

psychedelicsociety.org.uk

retrac2• 5 years ago

An interesting review. I'm surprised they only mention MKUltra in passing. It actually was the first example that popped into my mind. This is more joke than serious argument, but not entirely. The CIA wasn't just dosing innocent citizen victims. They were dosing themselves with LSD at the time, too. The water cooler was a prank attested to in several places. If acid had the effects it allegedly does, then the CIA should have been a decidedly different place to work in the 1960s than it was.

Anecdotally, my strong psychedelic trip dissolved a bunch of illusions for me. Including several that I had used to justify the value and importance of human life itself. I managed to retrieve or reconstruct them after, but I honestly felt completely out of it for days after. Seeing other humans the same way I feel when I look at a pig or a wolf. A large, possibly dangerous animal, with no real intelligence behind its eyes, only cunning. And I saw a capacity for all manner of evil in myself only barely contained. I wouldn't be half-surprised if some of that experience made me more conservative in a few ways. Who knows.

pope_meat• 5 years ago

Perhaps it might be worth examining your views on animals some more, while your perspective isn't uncommon, it might be worth analyzing it somewhat, as there are also a lot of people who look at a pig or a wolf and have a very different experience. It's always good to understand yourself more, and hallucinogens are a heck of a tool to do that, if you can sort out the root of the issue. I suspect you might have stopped a bit short of the root cause (fear/uncertainty towards non-humans)

Could be wrong, but that's what jumped out at me.

mkr-hn• 5 years ago

Same here. I see a wolf and see a giant puppy.

Evidence of their giant puppy nature:

https://twitter.com/nywolforg/status/1434488985066299395

https://twitter.com/nywolforg/status/1433949290485985280

somehnacct3757• 5 years ago

Yeah I have a similar experience to GP, a normalization of life value across species. But for me it manifests as a greater respect for life forms I normally take for granted, rather than a loss of respect for human life. I have trouble breaking branches off trees, pulling weeds, killing mosquitos after a trip. I still feel uneasy about it but have justifications to help.

I also see life in superstructures. Stand on a skyscraper rooftop deck and look down at the city. The city is alive. The roads are its arteries, the people its lifeblood.

Applejinx2• 5 years ago

I think it's quite possible to look at a wolf and see a creature with more powerful social dynamics and civilizedness than that of the human, by nature. Pack animals cooperate in ways that isolated predators don't, and as humans we live in a sort of strange halfway zone, neither fully pack animals nor fully individual predators. We get a little bit of everything.

It makes perfect sense to me if someone took acid, saw the fundamental weaknesses of human consciousness, and then jumped to the conclusion that people had to be ruled by their superiors because there would always be inferiors that had to be kept in their place. That's one possible conclusion to draw, particularly if you seek a hardcore rationalist perspective where everything can be created through self-will and rational thought, and there's nothing else.

I wouldn't draw that conclusion, but that's because I've studied chaos theory and artificial intelligence and the way evolution draws on diversity of population to surface useful traits out of a seething, unpredictable gene pool. As such, I can't look at the concept of 'inferiors' in the same way: to me, rationalist hierarchical systems mean 'local maximum, unable to further progress'. In short, a serious problem rather than a desirable state.

Could you get chaos theory just out of taking acid? Could you interpret evolutionary mechanics? I don't think taking acid will give you fundamentals like that. What it's gonna do is shake up what you already have, and this can lead to very interesting reformulations, but it's not giving you anything that you don't already, in some sense, have.

deertick1• 5 years ago

Agreed. For at least some people, there is something deeply, deeply wicked about acid. I can't put my finger exactly on it but I always felt that it changed your perceptions in such a way that made you feel like you were being enlightened and embracing universal love while at the same time making you capable of justifying enormous evil.

Its like it makes you actually feel nihilist rather than just think nihilistic. Or something like that.

ParanoidShroom• 5 years ago

Would it be fair to say it makes you more 'radical'?

marcosdumay3• 5 years ago

Every time I read somebody describing their experience with something I wonder if the reduced drug usage is one of the lead causes of the lack of warmongering we got since the late 20th century.

giantg24• 5 years ago

"Including several that I had used to justify the value and importance of human life itself. ... And I saw a capacity for all manner of evil in myself only barely contained."

Honestly, that's terrifying. I mean all the anti-drug stuff parents and schools try to scare us with and this tops it.

read_if_gay_3• 5 years ago

That realization is not unique to drugs. If this scares you stay away from reading Solzhenitsyn.

louis___4• 5 years ago

Honestly, as someone who took that kind of substances, this is not terrifying.

This is actually going out of denial, and really just seeing ourselves just the way we are. Agreed, we have a pretty fucked up side of us, but also a true potential for love and sharing.

These 2 sides are mixed, in conflict, and ever-evolving, but really, they are us. It may appear terrifying, but really, when you see it, it has a freeing and peaceful quality to it, because you just "know" that this is true.

BoHerfIIIJrEsq• 5 years ago

Hmm, but isn't it the beginning of wisdom? Will a person be motivated to cultivate themselves to be good if they really have no inkling about their capacity to do evil and harm?

amanaplanacanal• 5 years ago

Honestly seeing what you have blocked out of your consciousness about yourself is the essence of shadow work as described by Jung.

We are all capable of terrible things, in the wrong circumstance. We just don’t like to admit it.

godmode2019• 5 years ago

I enjoyed reading the second paragraph, I understand what you are describing. You have a way with words.

My question is how do you define conservative? What you are describing is the raw nature of man, the shadow, the animal behind the smile.

We are all animals but it is mans unique ability to transcend the animal world by having the will, to act, or even suppress mans raw individualistic animal desire often to better fit socially defined rules by the local tribe.

I'm not sure how you drawing the borders between the left and right paradigm. Can you share more

retrac2• 5 years ago

Conservative not so much in the political sense of who I might vote for. I meant in a psychological sense. More reactive to perceived threats, less trusting, more guarded.

I was influenced by some recent research like this when I spoke: https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/novemb...

Specifically, the studies by Jost and his colleagues, including Michael Strupp-Levitsky, who conducted the work as an NYU undergraduate and is now a doctoral candidate at Long Island University-Brooklyn, showed that those moral foundations known to be more appealing to liberals than conservatives—specifically, fairness and harm avoidance—are linked to empathic motivation, whereas the moral foundations that are more appealing to conservatives than to liberals —such as ingroup loyalty and deference to authority—are not.

Loss of empathy, perhaps. Something in that vein. Man, I really am making a great case against acid, aren't I? I did rediscover empathy. I think I learned a thing or two of value in the process. And I don't feel that it actually fundamentally threatened my sanity, for what it's worth. But I guess I got what I was looking for. I won't be repeating it any time soon.

dmos62• 5 years ago

Seeing other humans the same way I feel when I look at a pig or a wolf. A large, possibly dangerous animal, with no real intelligence behind its eyes, only cunning.

I'd say people are pretty much talking animals. Not to discount language and what it entails, of course. If I had thoughts like you describe, I think I'd be more worried about the belief that I should consider animals (and only animals!) as something that's always dangerous and cunning. In my experience animals, especially mammals, have very similar emotional systems to mine, and that makes it pretty easy to have an empathetic relationship. A relationship with a pet won't be super intellectual, but who wants that anyway?

timbit42• 5 years ago

Some do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3njWjIimd4

digitcatphd• 5 years ago

This is a good analysis that justifies the science behind psychedelics of increasing connections in the brain of experiences that already are present, rather than arriving at some ultimate truth, confused to be occultist justified by a lack of understanding of this science.

Cthulhu_• 5 years ago

And sometimes, it turns you into a fish. https://www.stilldrinking.org/the-episode-part-1

(also available in book form, recommended)

oxymoran• 5 years ago

It’s stupid to frame this on the political spectrum. Psychedelics most certainly open your mind and your heart. But if you happen to be deluded into believing in a mass child trafficking conspiracy orchestrated by Democrats, your heart is going to be open to these hypothetical trafficked children while demonizing the other party.

boredumb• 5 years ago

I think someone is deluded but it's probably not the straw men you're chasing after.

mehphp• 5 years ago

I'm curious if you could elaborate.

Applejinx2• 5 years ago

This. You're not going to get anything that you don't already have. It's going to reformulate what's already there, perhaps for good, perhaps for ill. You're shaking the etch-a-sketch and gazing in awe at the clean field of possible art and creativity. It'll be still you drawing the new lines, though.

hunterb123• 5 years ago

There are and were mass child trafficking rings though. Epstein, Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton were all involved, a girl in court said they were both on pedo island, Bill with 2 girls, she was with Prince Andrew. I'm sure there were Republicans involved too, but does that matter? It's no conspiracy.

tnjm• 5 years ago

Dismaying to see lazy stereotypes about contemporary Amazonian shamanism regurgitated -- without evidence -- in the article. "Slightly less violent" than the Aztec empire?

I couldn't find out whether the author has actually spent time with tribal people in the Amazon, but it's hard to credit.

VieEnCode• 5 years ago

I agree that citing evidence/sources to back up the quite damning assertions made on that point would have improved it.

Can I ask what you feel he gets most wrong here, and what did he miss?

fasteddie31003• 5 years ago

What a silly idea that taking a substance that makes new connections in your brain would pigeonhole you political beliefs to being liberal. If anything it has lead me to believe that most people label themselves with political ideology because it is very hard to think for themselves. Many people need a political ideology as a crutch to see the word through and to feel a sense of tribalism within a community.

premium_env• 5 years ago

In the UK we often use liberal to mean anti-authoritarian, rather than in the sense American's use it to cover a broader set of economic structures, social beliefs and the level of government interference in the market and everyday life.

So while yes, I would agree that it would be strange to associate tripping with a singular political ideology in one sense, it could also follow that the experience is associated with a dissolution of boundaries that would tend to push people toward a political ideologies more associated with equal rights (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2021.6075...) for instance.

oytis• 5 years ago

I am surprised neither Ernst Jünger nor traditionalist movement are mentioned.

roody15• 5 years ago

As a youth I did quite a bit of LSD and magic mushrooms. I think that in general many college age people dabbling in psychedelics are likely left leaning to begin with. As people get older they tend to be a bit more conservative.

In high doses I experienced a breakdown of self or ego and in this state you do see an interesting connectivity to everything. In some sense you see your brain actively participating to create the “reality” we live in. This experience is frightening in some ways as you can generate people that do not exist and carry on a conversation… you see the power behind the human brain and it’s ability to transform energy vibrations into the world we perceive normally. Breaking down and reconstructing the patterns we use to navigate our environment is truly awe inspiring (and terrifying).

The experiences from my point of view really have nothing to with broad outlines of liberal or conservative viewpoints.

schwartzworld• 5 years ago

Fun fact: Ann Coulter is a self-proclaimed DeadHead.

slfnflctd• 5 years ago

That is decidedly not a fun fact for me. But I have indeed met a few Dead fans who are pretty much the opposite of hippies. The lyric "saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac" comes to mind. I guess musical taste doesn't necessarily pull culture with it any more than psychedelics do.

DonHopkins2• 5 years ago

Hunter S Thompson was certainly critical of the 1960s counterculture movement, and he loved his guns and LSD, but I'm not sure I would classify him as conservative.

tokai• 5 years ago

Apparently he liked the Industrial Workers of the World. That would disqualify anyone from the conservative label (and maybe even the liberal label too).

DonHopkins2• 5 years ago

And he was extremely anti-fascist, so that would certainly disqualify him from being a conservative in America today.

https://mashable.com/article/freak-kingdom-hunter-s-thompson

Fear and Loathing in 2018: How Hunter S. Thompson would vote today
A new book reclaims the gonzo writer as a fascist fighter.

I hope that means he was "a fighter of fascists", not "a fighter who's fascist". ;)

denton-scratch3• 5 years ago

The IWW (The "Wobblies") are an anarchist trades-union movement. I mean left-anarchist - not right-wing libertarian. In my experience, wobblies are not consistent with any kind of "conservative" label. The IWW is pretty much a minority movement, and nobody's going to join it if they have conservative leanings. The IWW doesn't have a problem with entryists.

scythe• 5 years ago

Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempts to disarm the people must be stopped, by force if necessary

- Karl Marx

SturgeonsLaw• 5 years ago

Thompson was very outspoken about his hatred of Nixon, so yep it would be mistaken to call him a conservative. He was attached to McGovern's campaign [0] as a journalist, although he would not really fall into the liberal Democrat camp either. He definitely had a streak of the 60's style mistrust of the establishment.

Perhaps left-libertarianism would be the most apt description.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_on_the_Campa...

luckylion• 5 years ago

Anecdotes, but I've dabbled a bit with psychedelic drugs, and I'm fairly conservative. The only one I personally know (and who's done much more than me) is much further right than me.

I don't think it's just selection bias. I know more people on the left than on the right, but none of the liberals/progressives I know do anything beyond smoking weed (and even those get fewer and fewer, but I attribute that to age).

motohagiography• 5 years ago

The premise that they should is bizarre, especially since people report quasi-religious experiences on some psychedelics. If there were a link between these experiences and passivity, an external locus of control, and even nihilism, I think that would be more plausible. Even though the experiences can also create an individual sense of purpose and belief that would frustrate broader totalitarian aims as well. Psychedlics aren't on a team.

I've become sympathetic to stories of how frantically the CIA seemed to pursue the psychedelic/mind-control link, as they were in a war for their civilization against an evil that by the mid-70's, had used mass psychological techniques to subvert and derail more nations and kill more people around the world than the third reich and fascism had managed combined, just by infecting the social fabrics of families, religions, and their nations. Psychedelics would have represented the possibility of a literal "Red" pill that had the effect of demoralizing people and causing them to interpret the world through the lens of secular materialism, victimhood, mass hysteria, and ultimately permanent struggle for its own sake. The risk of that being accelerated with chemistry would have been an emergency level threat.

The radical life transformations people reported after using psychedelics at the time when they were rare and new would have been viewed as a way to mentally destablize target populations, unmoor them from the tangible and real experiences of their culture, and subvert and subordinate them to into the alien ideology.

This cold-war era thinking and propaganda may be the source of the belief that psychedlics lead inevitably to political liberalism. Further, official anti-drug efforts were promptly co-opted by the soviets as perfect straw men of manufactured reactionaries (like trolls keeping targets engaged and in a cycle of outrage), to reinforce the popular narrative of a false consciousness, and further destabilize the western order.

That psychedlics make one politically liberal is a stupid belief, but one whose origins have a plausible link to events in recent history.

dav_Oz2• 5 years ago

Psychedelics are highly dependent on set/setting, there is no inherent quality in them to open you up for a specific worldview. From a systems/information theory view they reliably induce significantly more possible "states" in your brain than most people are capable to enable on their own, to the measurable effect that the entropy rises in your brain. Once your OS gets back into its highly coherent frontal lobe dominant default state (technical term: Default Mode Network) you are able to reflect on it enabling you to penetrate your highly functional rigidity.

So, I am using the terms "functional", "rigidity" and "coherent" in a system-theoretical way ranging phenotypically from neurotic, OCD to depression on the "negative" spectrum and in composing "highly ordered" music, producing math proofs ... on a "positive" spectrum. Another more simplified dichotomy borrowed from our industrial age would be "productive" and "unproductive".

In the context of the CIA it highly induces paranoid/magical thinking and the feedback loop to the rigid thinking gets disrupted in a uncontrolled way and then "stuck", the new default is the famous "paranoid cold warrior" in which truth is an approximation to infinitely paranoid. One could argue that this indeed is a possible definition of truth, albeit very wicked.

HKH22• 5 years ago

I don't quite follow the last paragraph. How does the feedback loop to the rigid thinking get disrupted?

dav_Oz2• 5 years ago

Sorry, I should have mentioned some resources:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.0002...

What I meant is a possibly unprocessed psychedelic experience which you are unable to integrate in your ordinary state of mind (DMN) and which leads to increased susceptibility to paranoid/magical thinking, kind of "leaking".

HKH22• 5 years ago

Psychedelics play around with absolutist thinking.

You can hold absolutist thinking of any political persuasion.

Atlas667• 5 years ago

Interesting article. I've never thought about psychedelics as an ideological tool, only as a brain stimulating tool.

Because of that the view on Psychedelic culture is subject to the psychedelic market. And right now that market is mostly underground so we get an uncommercial and fringe view on the culture. The usual ¨connection with everything¨ and transcendental idealist world views, but also the more paranoid and schizoid POVs. Which are all a reflection of common worldviews that already exist everywhere. Psychs just intensify that in people.

Psychs are only a chemical, there is no ideological component to its effects, only those brought by the user itself. The ideological inclinations of a person that consumes psychs are determined by that persons ideological upbringing, knowledge and mental stability. Its only media, education and their mental health. Which are all factors of material reality.

Some things are Transcendental idealism is brought on by religious ideas of other worlds that permeate much of the social fabric. Spirituality comes from religious ideas as well and from philosophical ideas of harmony (most with a heavily ideological background). Paranoia and persecution by the fundamental lack of knowledge and power a common person has over how their society operates and the exploitative nature of our society. Conservativism and elitism by our right wing media (even liberalism is right wing). Lack of mental health by shitty upbringing and lack of mental health support. Mix it all together in an intense, mind bending and mostly subjective or illogical experience and you can get people ranging anywhere from drug addict to bus stop Jesus to casual ¨i need to get my life together¨ guy all the way to Elon Musk kinds.

Maybe do an ideological analysis on class, media, education and mental health and you might get closer to understanding the outcomes of psychedelic mindsets.

jvanderbot• 5 years ago

Openness is correlated with drug use and left leaning tenencies.

anm89• 5 years ago

I have lived in digital nomad destinations for many years that tend to have huge populations of the burning man/ new age spirituality crowd, a vast majority of which use psychedelics in my experience.

I would say this group is maybe 80-90% self identified liberal but they also deviate from the norms of that group more than other sub populations IMO.

The biggest example is that there are a huge number of anti vaxxers in that group and a lot of them are loosely conspiracy theorist.

denton-scratch3• 5 years ago

LSD is obviously associated with hippies; and hippiedom is and always has been conservative and conformist.

Hippies have always judged others by their appearance and attire; short hair is square. "Never trust anyone over 30".

Being uptight and tripping don't go particularly well together; so it's assumed that uptight people don't trip much. I suspect that's largely true; but not all authoritarian conservatives are uptight.

Many left-wing socialists are socially very conservative, and opposed to any psychedelics stronger than pot. Being a liberal trip-head is not cognate with being left-wing. The old hippie "free love" ethic was pretty sexist and paternalistic.

The hippie ethic is an individualist ethic. I'm not sure what "liberalism" means nowadays; USAians seem to use the word to mean something like "socialism", except that the word "socialism" has been a swear-word in US politics ever since I was a child. Perhaps we could contrast "individualism" with "collectivism", instead of putting all the weight on the word "socialism"?

Do psychedelics make you liberal? Not always

Related Stories