What if a pill can change your politics or religious beliefs?
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
"I walked in as an Irish, Catholic, Republican lawyer. I walked out still Irish, but everything else was gone."
[1] - For example, at about 18 minutes in to his interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YRzu8ar1ew
I've heard many personal accounts of single-dose MDMA transformations of an intensely powerful and lasting nature. One friend once compared it to the mystical idea of "walk-ins," souls that take over the bodies of people who have lost the will to live. This person said they walked into a club as one person, took MDMA, and walked out feeling as if a different soul now inhabited their body with an entirely different personality and emotional structure. The change was permanent. Luckily it was almost entirely positive. The "new person" was more sociable, compassionate, outgoing, and optimistic. The person who told me this story used MDMA only a few more times, and none of these subsequent uses produced anywhere near the same experience. It sounded like some kind of one-shot neurological rewiring.
The stuff I've heard about MDMA is far more dramatic and lasting than the transformative psychedelic stories about LSD, psilocybin, etc. that I've heard and read.
BTW I said the transformation is usually positive because while I haven't closely known anyone with a horror story I have seen a few from a distance. MDMA is not strongly physically addictive, but it can be psychologically so. The negative cases I've seen seem to involve the development of a psychological dependence causing heavy use. MDMA can be neurotoxic if taken repeatedly and heavily, and heavy long-term use can be very damaging.
It's a drug that I think could be beneficial if used with care but can be very dangerous to abuse. The radical transformation stories make me really wish it were studied more. We should really try to understand what the hell is going on there.
I had a similar experience with ketamine a month ago. At first I became detached from the situation I was in (severe accident) and was able to evaluate it analytically. Then I became even more detached (and I stopped getting meaningful signals from my senses) and I understood I was a being and my current self was one incarnation of that being. Then I saw all the choices I had made in my life and how they contributed to who this incarnation was and it gave me great insights and relief about my current life.
Sadly when I came to I lost a lot of the clarity. I think I'm still the same person I was mostly, the only striking difference is that I laugh a lot more and my laugh has changed. Also the idea of my own death has become comforting and soothing even though I don't really believe in reincarnation.
As mind blowing as you think that was, IMHO its nothing like the experience of candy-flipping...(MDMA+LSD)
Remember all things in moderation, I have lived to tell the tale, although I can't remember what tale I'm supposed to tell.
It feels like every time I tried a new drug, it helped me understand myself more. Don't understand me wrong, I don't take a lot of drugs. My experience is limited to one night on MDMA in Ibiza, one night on shrooms in Amsterdam and a whole lot of nights on weed.
I seem to suddenly understand everything about myself and the world when I smoke weed. It really puts me into the "Everything is connected and everything repeats itself"-mood, which I've heard from LSD trips. That all that's happening is supposed to happen, doesn't matter if it's objectively or subjectively bad or good right at that moment.
MDMA made me insanely happy about myself and my surroundings for an hour. It was like feeling pure joy and happiness for an hour straight. Although I took it in Ibiza, I spent the night listening to music on the couch in the AirBNB I had rented. I read that a lof of people feel depressive and blue for a couple of days after taking MDMA. For me, it was different - I felt content and insanely relaxed for a couple of days, but in a very good way. Still 100% in touch with the world, just happy. But that effect went away in an instant which I've really felt. Went from smiling and being happy back to normal. Not sad or depressed, just normal.
I have a huge admiration and respect for psychoactive drugs. I would never consider taking Heroin, Crystal Meth etc., but I would really like to try LSD and other substances. It also seems like THC helps me live with ADHD better than any official, legal pill.
All that being said, I don't really know how to handle drugs in the long run. I'm in my early twenties, so maybe it's normal to have a feeling of being lost and not knowing what I should really be doing with my life. I live in a nice apartment, earn good money, ride a beautiful motorbike and have a wonderful girlfriend. But except for my girlfriend, none of these things make me truly happy.
If I don't smoke weed for a long time, I seem to loose myself. But the same can be said for when I start smoking too much, too frequently. I don't even know what I'm trying to say, but reading your comment made me think about that topic :)
I disagree there. There isn't much that compares to a deep k-hole. Perhaps a DMT breakthrough experience. But LSD and MDMA doesn't compare*
* Assuming "normal" LSD dosage, if you are talking about eating a strip of tabs (1000ug) ok, then all bets are off, but at that level the MDMA isn't going to be able to do much
The problem is self-reporting as a good change means nothing here. What you really want to know is if the original person, knowing the full transformation, would prefer the outcome. You don't get that because the person making the self-report is the person that already underwent the change.
For example, if I had a pill that made you a serial killer, but nevertheless very good at it, enjoying it, and totally lacking empathy for your victims, you'd probably self-report as being happier too. But the you of today would be horrified.
If I held conservative Catholic views, that's probably what MDMA would seem like. I'd be happy with who I am with strong moral values, but there'd be this scary pill out there that could make me give all that up, destroying what meaning my life had previously. It's not much consolation that I'd later self-report it as a positive change.
Lobotomies used to be justified based on self-reported outcomes. Is there anything objectively different here?
This works for the lobotomy example as well, if they have their memories in tact from before. You can assume there's a decent chance you'd feel better if others with similar problems felt better, and you have to weigh that against fairly objective external changes which you might find abhorrent, fairly obvious in the case of a lobotomy.
Perhaps medical ethics should make a point that the type of changes you could experience should be outlined, but there's a general pattern that I think can be defined and understood enough for informed consent to be given or withheld. Like most medical treatments, it would get defined in terms of risks and probabilities rather than certainties. You risk coming out with weakened religious beliefs, etc.
If something change your values in a way that the old you would not accept, are you still you?
First there's a huge selection issue, many won't ever want to take it.
Since the drug has a strong effect you cannot easily design a placebo study - people would still know if they got a sugar pill or the real deal [0].
Anything that's a highly unusual experience is likely to be rated as significant.
Very hard to design a good study.
I believe the reported efficacy would greatly go down with increased availability. If alcohol was a mostly illegal schedule 1 drug in most of the world I could see similar narratives forming around it.
[0] btw I think that's a very underappreciated factor across all kinds of research. Even with regular medical drugs. Don't see it brought up too much.
"This scary pill out there that could make me give [strong values that I'm happy with] up, destroying what meaning my life had previously. It's not much consolation that I'd later self-report it as a positive change."
summarizes my thoughts about MDMA perfectly.
Conservatives aren't scared of change, they're scared that they themselves, and others around them, would come to fully accept it. The fear is that this completely invalidates their current worldview rendering existence meaningless. It's the fear of being wrong about life on an emotional level.
It's only applying to current political charged issues.
I think the biggest problem with how many people see MDMA and psychedelics is uncritically accepting the first things that come to mind after taking them, that feel oh-so-true, or that they "give" you insight. It's still you, you're not God, you just have a whole lot more feelings for a bit. (But, depending on what walls you have up intellectually or emotionally, having those feelings take them down for a bit can be very productive.)
Ibogaine is also a fascinating drug to look into. It’s frequently used as a treatment for heroin and other severe addictions. The trip is multiple hours long, and described as life-altering - many people describe vivid recollections of the worst moments of their lives, but stripped of the painful emotions associated with them. But the drug essentially interrupts the addiction cycle and requires those pathways inside your brain, with some pretty impressive rates of remission.
I knew a girl whose story was fairly unpleasant. However, given her trip report (its multi-day length, with paranoia and hallucinations in particular) I believe that was not pure MDMA, it probably contained Bromo-DragonFly (one of the most dangerous and longest-acting psychedelics) or something like that.
Sounds like PCP plus meth, DOB plus meth, or some other nasty combo. Making cheap nasty "disco biscuits" out of meth plus random thing is apparently pretty common. The meth could account for some of the paranoia and strung out feelings.
Gotta love prohibition and how it encourages the production of "bath tub hooch."
Because of that, if halve the users become more outgoing and halve the users less so, for a net improvement of zero, what you’ll hear still can usually be in what they self-report as a good way.
As an extreme thought experiment, if 99% of users become depressed reclusive hermits directly after use and the others feel hugely improved, all self-reports you hear will be positive.
(Though we have to control for how many new users entering the market, how many shut-ins it has already produced, etc. But looking at very rough data about MDMA use and depression prevalence per country, there's doesn't seem to be any correlation. For example Netherlands is at a constant 4% since 1990, but use went up from ~2.3% to 8.4% from 1997 to 2018. https://www.statista.com/statistics/632401/ecstasy-usage-in-... and https://ourworldindata.org/mental-health#depression )
I remember back in the days on a certain research chemicals subreddit where people were raving about the "borax combo" -- a mix of 4 or 5 substances that were indistinguishable from MDMA and had no crash like MDMA and the ingredients themselves were not known to be neurotoxic.
I think they just looked at the MDMA receptor affinity and just combined substances that would roughly match that receptor affinity.
Also as far as I know, MDMA is only neurotoxic because of it being processed by the liver and MDMA injected in pig or rat brain was not supposed to be neurotoxic.
The worst thing to do from what I've read is take more MDMA right after a dose wears off to try to prolong the high. That's where you get into neurotoxicity.
I recall a way around that (other than by just not taking MDMA at all, obviously) is to take an SSRI (like Prozac) at some point after rolling, which would bind to the reuptake transporters, preventing dopamine from doing so.
MDMA was by far the most profound personally, and has made me a happier person overall. I've never fallen back into my old ways of thinking and am much more comfortable with myself.
But the first time is the most helpful and profound - once can really be enough, though I can understand why someone would want to take it 1-2 times a year just to keep it fresh in their mind.
They just sort of boil everything off. You get down to the core of who you are, and realize that the anxiety you feel is either completely irrelevant and useless, or based on something you absolutely have control over.
The first time I tried both of them (not at the same time, obviously) was in my late 20's. I now know that I need a reset every 5-10 years, just to take stock in who I am and what I'm doing.
It really is phenomenal, the things your brain can do with a little help.
Ayahuasca is on my list, but I haven't been brave enough to do that, yet. Apparently it's more of a visceral, base high. I'm afraid that coming that close to killing my ego would be a bit too much.
A single MDMA experience broke me out of my shell. It's hard to describe how profoundly it changed my life.
See also the recent anti-trans panic, and rigid enforcement of gender roles and gender expression more generally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_Chapel_Experiment
I don't remember the experiment, I think it was on Radiolab, where something like 10 non religious people took LSD and 9 ended up becoming priests from the influence of their experience.
The idea of "God" and religion seem to arise more readily from experiences at the extremes of human consciousness. Whether it be trying to make sense of the chaos and death on one end or the unimaginable beauty and interconnectedness on the other.
Rigorous religious rituals and benevolent paternal overwatch can help bring comforting structure and an answer to "why?" to those living through hardship just as the idea of an omniscient watchmaker can help make sense of overwhelming, awe-inspiring realizations about the complexities of reality from a peak psychedelic experience.
Drugs change people. Personal experience, mostly negative.
I get that some people can smoke a joint every few weeks and not have an urge to over due it.
Probably 60% of extended family is hooked and either dead or living with a dead beat.
Whether someone is an addict or not is not about the addict's (or anyone's) opinion. Addiction and dependency are very well understood from a scientific viewpoint.
It's not only “some” people that don't overdo it. A very large percentage of the population has used marijuana and yet you don't see most people in the conditions you described.
I highly doubt the root problem of your 60% of extended family is drugs (assuming we're just talking about stuff like marijuana or psychedelics). If they feel like they need to relax all the time, maybe it's because they're subject to too much stress or are (maybe hereditarily) oversensitive to stressors, in which case they might need some help regardless of drug use.
One last thing (but the most important), psychedelics are decidedly NOT addictive (again, following scientific definitions). In addition to not causing an urge and immediately causing tolerance that lasts for weeks, they're very well-known for ending decades-long addictions and all sorts of negative behaviors (including overuse of marijuana!). At high enough doses, they are nothing like a typical marijuana high. You really have to experience it to understand just how deeply and positively they can change one's life. Ironically enough, they might be a great option for your family to try (under proper guidance) in order to get out of their situation.
What finally got her off drugs?
My parents started a custody battle to have her children taken away. That got her act together.
Her husband got clean after getting 2 strikes in a 3 strike state. 25 years for his next arrest.
My adopted daughter came to us because her biological mother wouldn’t get off drugs. Kept failing to pick her kids up from school.
The number of people I see that say "oh I just use it to relax" is quite high. It is a way to ignore what is in front of you and not have to deal with it. I understand the idea quite well.
What twists me on all of this is the blame shaming of people who say 'do not do that junk'. When they can clearly see the chaos these choices bring. Choices are made one at a time and little choices eventually turn into big nightmares or happy times. Not everyone ends up there. But many do. I know a decent number as well.
Then once lets say you get 'cleaned up'. You now have to re-learn how to cope with life. As the usage of whatever is how you used to do it. But that is no longer there. So it is quite an emotional roller coaster for everyone involved.
I don't mean to say that any substance is completely innocent: in fact, I believe that pretty much any action significant enough to have a positive result can be used in some way to create a negative one. Volatility is dangerous, and drugs often cause volatility. But total reductionism is going to get pushback.
IIRC, they are pretty sure that schizophrenia is a combination of genetics and situation. I'd not say that we need to be guided and supervised (as this would just keep the black market around), but rather better informed and more research on mental disorders. The vast majority of folks that do LSD don't wind up with schizophrenia, and IIRC you have to be predisposed to schizophrenia to develop it after LSD.
I'll note that it is pretty rare to develop schizophrenia later in life as well.
Source: Ex developed schizo-affective disorder, later being diagnosed as schizophrenia. He was in his early 20's when diagnosed, but showed symptoms well before that I could only recognize in hindsight. I've personally done LSD more than 35 times, but completely unsure of how many times that is and that doesn't include other hallucinogens I've done. I, personally, do not have schizophrenia and am 42.
Or perhaps being a latent schizophrenic, he was drawn to LSD/drugs in general. According to a study done in 2006[0] 90% of schizophrenics in the US used tobacco products in 2006, while only 20% of non-schizophrenic people did.
How do you explain this? It’s either “schizophrenic people use drugs at a higher rate” or “tobacco causes schizophrenia”. I’d bet heavily on the former.
I think there's two categories of drugs and it's harmful to ignore the distinction. I don't know enough about the specifics of all drugs to nail down the definitions precisely but a description will suffice. One category is "psychedelic", the other is opiate. Marijuana is a federal schedule 1 drug in the US, right next to heroin. If we don't train society to differentiate between these two then unsuspecting young people who experiment with marijuana illicitly will say "all those warnings were over something harmless. I'll try heroin next." The war on drugs is perpetuating weed as a gateway to more dangerous drugs. The THC and psilocybin family has its risks in the same way that alcohol and nicotine have their risks; the opiate and methamphetamine family should not be confused or taken lightly by anybody.
Was a really nice guy, seemed fully functional, yet he completely sank his business from whatever he was taking.
While, you write that you don't want to make assumptions, it sounds like you are already set in thinking there is just two issues.
There is much more than just the black and white world you created with "psychedelic" and "opiate."
Reading books changes people, just look at how many people credit "Atlas Shrugged" as the book that started their journey to become libertarian. Similarly, we see each and every day how effective is propaganda.
We see how hard it is to kill xenophobia, bigotry and other biases. But we also know how these develop, how people get radicalized by terrorist organizations. Yet the same thing happens albeit with a lower intensity and without a focused purpose when people watch/read/consume whatever the community/culture they are embedded in throws at them.
4chan changes people. QAnon changes people. The antivax hysteria changes people.
Psychedelic drugs change people, yet the opioid and crack epidemics were not about LSD, they are about an alcohol++. They are about legal painkillers, yet no one is really advocating banning painkillers.
But is this not yet another a worldview (literally, a "view" upon "the world") itself, but of a somewhat different sort? If you really think about it, how is it, literally, that you (seem to) ~know that "conservatives" "are" "so terrified" of taking drugs...and not just that they are, but also "why" they are?
Yes, I fully realize that you were "just" "making a generalization". But my curiosity is, what is this "making a generalization" thing that people do? Like, what is it really, when you boil it down to its actual implementation?
More generalized, to the broader world, how is it that (as one can observe every day, in extremely large quantities, in forum conversations on any platform):
[Person A] knows(!) what [Person B]/[Group B] [[thinks/believes/likes/hates/wants]/[did/does/will do (in the future)]/etc] (in general, or, specifically regarding: [Topic A]/[Topic B]/[Topic C]/[/etc])?
Again, they're "just" "generalizing". Fair enough- it's literally true, after all. But the interesting thing is, where does the foundational knowledge (facts?) contained within these generalizations come from? How can so many people know enough about the world and how it works such that they are able to accurately predict not only the the thoughts of other people (who are all simultaneously doing this same thing), but also past events and future events (including the massively complex chain of causation for each)?
If one was energetic, you could probably take this thought experiment a little deeper, encompassing the entirety of history and current world realtime events involving all persons and systems on the planet, where multi-dimensional recursion and paradoxes and what not would start to arise, and perhaps other interesting questions, like:
- How frequently (percentage of the day) do each of us engage in this activity?
- Might errors occasionally arise during this process (sometimes resulting in paradoxes, or explaining other paradoxes)?
- Might this activity have effects in the physical world?
- What is reality, really, if you sit down and think about it as hard as you can for a really long time (under a "normal" state, and when on 5 grams of mushrooms)? Is it as it seems? Is it as described on the telly? If it differs, where/how, and to what degree?
- Does any of this matter in the real world? Why or why not?
Humans are surely many orders of magnitude smarter than animals, but how is it (implemented) that they are so much smarter? So smart that they can read minds, predict the future, and even know(!) that which is unknown: what humanity itself (the sum of all peoples on the planet) is or is not capable of in the future (much of which depends on future scientific discoveries of that which is not known in the present)? How is all of this computation implemented?
lol, just kidding, this is all just one of those crazy "woo woo" ideas that came to mind on a mushroom trip one time. It's "just" chemicals, maaaaan (as anyone who has studied logic and epistemology would correctly conclude). Now that I think about it a bit more, conservatives actually are rather uptight folks, aren't they! I'm one of them, so I should know.
Conservatism believes, fundamentally, that existing institutions are necessary for promoting the general welfare. What conservatism fears is people looking for meaning in themselves, finding it and then withdrawing from the social institutions - leading to a general collapse. It links in very neatly with a world-view where meaning is to be found externally to the self.
It isn't anything to do with the fixedness or flexibility of moral truths. Conservativism as a philosophy can handle extreme morally flexible if the institutions require it to survive.
Religion is fine as long as it is theirs. A conservative christian generally isn't ok with conservative Islam, even though so many things are similar (women at home, no LGBTQ , etc). School is fine as long as it doesn't teach the wrong things. Other Christians are fine so long as they aren't OK with some things. And so on.
Yet, in general, institutions that force one to help pay for another's life aren't considered good, even though things like a healthy safety net (welfare system) promote the general welfare of peoples.
Lately liberalism has taken more extreme and authoritarian views (compelled speech, forced equality of outcomes, use of violence against opposition).
If this article is correct, I think we will see a shift of both parties to a more libertarian public face, even though the people in power will still want to retain their power (whether moral or economical) through authoritarian policies.
I think the article conflates liberal values with libertarian values, which is a common mistake to make if you don't know the subject and the history of the name (liberal vs classic liberal vs libertarian).
There's no magic pill for happiness or "rightthink" and assuming that one side (conservatives) are against drugs because it changes people is really wrong.
If you look at the history of the conservative party, you'd see they were very much progressive in moral and social issues.
And, in many cases, they still are.
It's dangerous to approach this topic at all, but I would sincerely argue that modern trans-activism is by far the most visible example of this dynamic today. This is anecdotal, of course, but the only enforcement of gender roles that I am personally exposed to comes from this community. If I don't believe in gender identity, and say so publicly, I am liable to lose friends. That strikes me as cultish and regressive.
What if your politics or religious beliefs are the result of conditioning (you were kept unaware of) carelessly (but effectively) designed to get you to behave in a fashion which benefits others much more than it does you?
What if conditioning is designed to shape someone in a society or circumstances which no longer exist, or if someone realizes that they would like to be part of a different society than they were conditioned for?
There are quite a few ways conditioning can go very wrong, and leave someone frozen in an exceptionally painful state, wedged halfway through a door so to speak, which is good for nobody. It seems like a tool to get them unstuck could be pretty valuable.
Point in case - USSR/satellites and restoring after the regime went down. The regime was working hard to remove the old conditioning and replace with the new conditioning. The communities did revert to the old ways in no time. Be it Catholicism in Poland, ethnic question in Baltic states, Tsarist Russia sentiments in Russia-proper, all sorts of separatists movements that were only silenced during the regime (Chechnya, Crimea ownership, Nagorno Karabach...). And capitalist/private property setup all around.
Also it’s not like "I" is not a social construction in the first place. So, how meaningful to distrust "them" makes sense about how "they" defraud "me" from what would be optimal for "me"?
I enjoyed it and I felt it improved my mood temporarily but I don't believe it changed me permanently in any way. As far as I can tell (which may not be that far), reading Chomsky as a teenager, Plato in college and Kant after that were much more significant events in terms of my political views.
For this reason, I would usually recommend mdma as a first drug experience since it has a similar liberating effect for many people but also makes you feel loved and at one with the world.
Or it might just have been me trying to do something about it, and it was all placebo. Regardless, I'm happy it worked.
It can be extremely introspective and eye opening but pretty much everything on LSD feels this way. Something you've thought of on it that seems so profound and deep can seem silly and naïve once you're sober again.
That being said, it obviously still can have a life changing effect on people. You pretty much just have to be willing to change as well - it depends on the person mostly.
Some people say they've strengthened their relationship with god (both Abrahemic and otherwise) after/while using LSD and others say that have become atheist after doing it.
I can relate a lot to this. I'd say my formative reads were:
- 1984 and Brave New World. The former should be mandatory reading for everyone, everywhere.
- The Bible. Going from "I was raised Christian" to "I'm gonna read this and ask myself if I really believe this stuff" (I do, but in general I deviate massively from mainstream evangelical Christianity).
- Dune. Yep, profoundly transformative. I'm bummed that some people I've recommend it to don't seem to have had the same experience as I had reading it.
Honestly, I never appreciated the irony at the time, I suppose because the people in 1984 weren't really encouraged to read about alternative political realities. But you're right. That was pretty ironic.
Not surprising. What do you remember? Probably mostly the stuff where your teacher knocked it out of the park and did their best work.
1984 is a cautionary tale about communism but it applies to authoritarianism in general. A very left leaning state is simply going to have less people equipped to teach this lesson well than a right leaning state. It's really, really hard to do a good job teaching something that is ideologically uncomfortable.
Say you have two english teachers, one grew up in the suburbs of NYC and one grew up in the Virginia panhandle. Who do you think has better odds of being able to knock a lesson about authoritarianism out of the park?
Education systems are the average of the people that make them up. If you grew up somewhere where the dangers of strong government was the local ideological blind spot you probably didn't get a good education on the dangers of big government. The kids growing up in the Virginia panhandle have blind spots in their education too, just different ones. Don't expect kids growing up in the plains state to get too good of an education on the Indian wars. Don't expect the kids in the bible belt to spend much time talking about evolution. Obviously there's always outliers but education is a product of the states that make the curriculum and the teachers who teach them.
This thing. There is nothing ideologically uncomfortable about 1984 for pretty much anyone in both NYC suburbs and Virginia.
You don't think a pool of people (mostly) from a big government state that's been big government for a long time (in retrospect I should have picked Boston as it's a far better example) are gonna have a harder time teaching about the dangers of the extremes of big government than a pool of people who's ancestors are known for untaxed booze and trying to leave the union? You don't think that when the (hypothetical average) teacher tries to provoke class discussion by asking about modern implications the teacher who grew up in the latter culture might be a little bit better at provoking a good discussion?
You are strawmanning both. For that matter, you are making Virginians into caricature and you are almost mocking American revolution.
At the margin, considering that Orwell was commited socialist, left has marginally better chance to interpret him right - but this take would be wrong too.
I honestly have no idea. I’m not really familiar with the difference between New York and Virginia. Anything on the far eastern edge of the USA is hard to distinguish in my mind since I’ve never been there and don’t know anyone from there.
1984 is not an anarchist dream that would teach that every single mandatory thing is bad. It is about dystopian totalitarian state, but that does not imply there is something ironic about mandatory school reading.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/fc-industrial-societ...
(TLDR: Marx aged like milk, Uncle Ted like wine.)
I'm reading Dune again at the moment. I think that when you read a book in your life is pretty important too. The cynic (and more knowledgeable, I suppose) me of today, would be more difficult to affect than the naive young of yesterday.
Especially 1984 is much more than just about surveillance technology which I think most people tend to be focused on.
Agree, without exaggeration it's the book that had the most impact on me.
> Brave New World
Read it when I was a teenager, I think I didn't get the point at the time.
> The Bible
I'm 100% atheist but I've considered reading the bible because it's culturally significant. But isn't just a bunch of boring and inconsistent tales? is there really anything to be learned from the bible?
I went to a school that taught ancient Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. With that came loads of bible passages to translate. Having grown up a non-believer (many people tried to literally "cure" that during my lifetime, I'm sure they'd be thrilled to know there is a simple drug I could take to make me normal) I can honestly say it's about what you'd expect from religious texts of those time periods. I found it less relatable than, say, Greek mythology.
What I found interesting is how many parts modern Christians habitually ignore, either because they'd be arrested if they'd follow them, or because those parts don't fit in with their personal beliefs. Of course, the entire corpus of text has also seen numerous redactions, in an effort to streamline it and make it more coherent (with mixed results).
Is it culturally significant? Honestly, I'm not sure. The Bible as an idea sure is, and certain famous passages are. But a given group's or individual's interpretation of it seems more informative, and that's often only losely based on those ancient texts.
Needless to say, I don't think there is anything in there to convince a non-believer of the existence of dieties, much less that one specific pantheon. And to be fair I don't think that's what the authors had in mind. It was probably intended as a shared folklore for groups that already strongly believe. Conversion, I suspect, comes through missionaries, not through the text.
The parts you describe are a history book. They are not meant to be normative to someone living in a modern Western Democratic context. They are background to explain a people, a time, and a discontinued form of government. Other more pertinent parts of the Bible (see the prophets or the epistles referring to The Law) make sense with that background available.
I also suspect there's some deeper truth buried in those laws about what happens if a community stays distinct, and how that can be enacted (clothing, food, calendar, etc.). And there's certainly a lot of history of the Hebrew people to describe what happens when distinction and noteriety happens, even through long periods of diaspora.
Finally, it's worth having some historical context. Considering the Israelites of the time to be unconscionable doesn't take into account what the typical society looked like in that time and place.
You could say the same thing about the Iliad or Aeneid, or the Arabian Nights, or pretty much any long-standing work of literature.
I'm not a Christian either, but I love the Bible - it's a book of great beauty and wisdom, and a foundation / moral guide for many of the world's great civilizations. If that isn't reason enough for you, then nothing will be.
"In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness."
Honestly, the Greek myths are better in that they weren't at least claiming those gods were omnibenevolent and stuff.
And, interpretations do not always have unanimous support for any given point in time. This kinda seems to apply to pretty much everything, not just The Bible.
Of course there are parts in the bible that do describe literal history, and those are still very important for context, but a lot of stories are very clearly not literal, and even in the middle ages, an important Christian thinker or cardinal (I forgot who it was and can't find the quote at the moment) said: if our interpretation of scripture conflicts with our observation of the world, then our interpretation must be wrong. He wasn't stoned or burned at the stake for that. And 2000 years ago, it certainly wasn't the Christians who were stoning people.
No, the "figurative interpretation", as you call it, has been with us for millennia. Biblical Literalism is only a fairly recent movement, and quite at odds with the bible, Christianity, and reality.
I suspect a non-trivial part of religion (that has been lost since we have broadly rejected it) is that it explicitly taught various types of humility, in various ways, and then also that from a more abstract/psychological perspective, the cognitive practice of conceptualizing an all powerful, all knowing God may have had beneficial psychological aspects with respect to moderating the (often dangerous) perception of omniscience, that seems to be an evolved and unavoidable consequence of human consciousness.
Evidence of this sense of omniscience can be seen everywhere on social media today: widespread self-perceptions of abilities to accurately read minds, predict the future, know everything (including the unknown/top-secret/undiscovered), solve infinitely complex problems with ease, etc. It's weird how this is so obvious, and makes complete logical sense, but encountering someone who does not outright and incredibly passionately reject this idea is incredibly rare. Perhaps this helps explain why religion is so common, always and everywhere - it is socially evolved and doggedly persistent, because it provides genuine superior fitness by offsetting some of the unseen negative aspects that hitched a ride on other evolved traits.
I blame the biblical literalism movement. I don't think there's anything else that has done quite as much damage to Christianity as the insistence that every part of the bible has to be taken as literally as possible. This movement is relatively recent; in the Middle Ages, bible scholars identified 4 levels of interpretation of the bible, of which the literal interpretation was only one, and generally the least important. After the Reformation, everybody had to be able to read the bible (generally a good thing), but that also meant everybody got to interpret it, and some people got a bit carried away.
When I was learning Japanese, I was told this story:
Hashi : chopsticks, edge, bridge
A young monk was studying at a temple, inside the temple ground there was a garden with a bridge to an island. The senior monk told the student that he was to not cross the bridge"Hashi wa dame". Every day the young monk studies and meditated but he was not reaching enlightenment. One day, he crossed the bridge and meditated and had a vision on the island. He then share his vision with the other monks and the senior monk said to him "I told you not to cross the bridge" and the young monk replied "Master, I thought you were telling me not to walk on the edge, I went down the middle."
Both stories are very anti-establishment in nature and teach us that in order to get what we desire we may have to look for loopholes.
Depending on what you mean by learn. If you are trying to understand Christianity, so might get a better idea but maybe not. From what I remember as a child going to church, each season would have a section of the bible that the pastor would pull from and there was not much variation on the theme from year to year. i.e. Easter being rebirth, pulling from Mathew, Mark and John.
But to say there is nothing to be learned is rather harsh, it does try and set out guiding principals and morals for people. From the old testament 10 commandments to the new testament "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". It has some nice poetry in it in places, it has some epic tales such as David and Goliath and it has some really crazy stuff such as Revelations.
The bible is not a single book; it's a collection of dozens of books written at very different times. Just reading it front-to-back is not a very productive way to read it. Genesis and Exodus are okay, but Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy are just dreadful.
The best place to start is the gospels, at the start of the NT. That gets you right to the heart of what Christianity is about, they're good stories, and there's quite a bit of wisdom in there. Absolutely worth reading.
If you want a philosophical treatise about the meaning of life, read Eclessiastes. The stories of David in the books of Samuel are exciting adventures as well as the most central part of the history of ancient Israel. It's also worth reading a couple of psalms (23 probably being the most famous) but if you read them all in one go, they might get a bit repetitive. And of course there's the erotic Song of Songs. For more adventure stories, Judges also has a couple of good ones.
Then 10 years ago (so in my 40's) I took it again at a bush rave. At the time I was in a deep clinical depression, regularly feeling suicidal, fighting alcoholism, it was a tough time. During the trip, I saw a vivid vision of a version of myself as I could be if I got my shit sorted out and sobered up. I really liked that vision/version of myself, and it stuck with me afterwards (unlike most of the stuff on acid trips).
That vision became my beacon. It took me another 5 years or so to work through the depression with therapy. I still struggle with the booze (but it's much, much more manageable now, and no psychotic episodes any more, yay!). But knowing that there was a "healed" version of me, and what that looked like, and that I could be that person. That was powerful. Literally the light at the end of the tunnel.
So yeah, that's my "hallucinogens helped my mental health" story :)
Congrats! I'm happy you're doing well :)
LSD and mushrooms are also similar in my experience but produces variable results
Many people that take psychedelics are already searching for something spiritual.
It makes me a little sad to see an article in Scientific American not doing due diligence.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I didn’t think about the impact it might have on the metaphysics opinions. Do you know some studies on this point?
Compared to that an increase in trait openness seems fairly innocuous to me.
Furthermore, my doctor prescribes me cortisone fairly often, but after that first time I decided it's not worth it. So I don't think anyone can be forced to take psychedelics.
It could be that it is very individual also perhaps your dosages were different. My dosages were fairly high and caused multiple unpleasant side effects but anger towards other people was not one of them.
Perhaps people could not be forced to take psychedelics but could be tricked to take them.
Other than that you are absolutely right. Drug effects depend on dosage and who is taking it.
Thing is anger and agressiveness are well known side effects of steroids, and in my opinion doctors are too quick to prescribe them. I feel there is a double standard with drugs, and issues that are found in, say, psychedelics seem to be non issues with other prescription or recreational drugs. But that is my opinion and I do not think is more valid than anyone else.
Honestly, I believe all drugs to be dangerous, and utmost caution should be taken when using, even with otc painkillers.
I am not necessarily for legalization, but definitely for decriminalization. I do not believe having psychedelics widely available for public consumption is necessarily a good idea (I carefully worded that sentence, please notice). Same goes for alcohol tho.
Steroids are known to increase aggression in some people: I've had them through an IV, which made me hallucinate, and then pills (prednisone) that made me miss sleep (once for inflamation, at a fairly high dose, and once for an allergy at a lower dose). The hallucinations were of an uncomfortable sort and not at all like what I'd get off of LSD or shrooms. None of these things are quite like the alters of MDMA. Similarly, none of the things I mentioned are like psychiatric drugs. Heck, some psychiatric drugs are for the same thing, but work better for one person than the other.
Heck, Tylenol (Paracet) has been shown to ease emotional pain.
Just because one thing is uncomfortable doesn't mean these others are worthless, nor does already having mind altering pills mean that there isn't room for the other ones.
pills replacing reality.. we aren't too far from that actualy.
I don't mean to repeat the canard of "conservatism is a mental illness" - as a whole, it's not. But there is a growing body of evidence suggesting a minor correlation between certain subsets of conservative thought and certain phobias. For example, people who tend to be conservative also tend to be more readily disgusted. If you make a pill that treats those phobias, then you are by definition also "treating" their politics, too; even if this is just by accident.
Nixon was smarter than we took credit for. Banning the drugs liberals and black people used wasn't just a way to get a bunch of quick and easy felony convictions on his political opponents, it was a way to arguably ban the promulgation of competing political views altogether. Certainly, his paranoia is something that could have been treated by the drugs he was banning.
The connection between disgust and conservatism likely only influences certain specific parts of the GOP tent. It can only explain why someone might spend ridiculous amounts of time complaining about, say, the fact that trans people exist. It wouldn't explain why someone would be opposed to, say, large government spending projects or feel like immigrants bring crime. We call all three of these "conservatism", but one is a technical complaint about how government should run, another is naked tribal otherism with no hint of disgust language, and and yet another is the "pineapple on pizza" meme as applied to whether or not a certain group of people should be allowed to exist.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21618.Forever_Peace
I would generally trust it if it persists after the actual pill wears off. This would suggest the pill has just helped you reveal something by stimulating the brain areas which had not enough power to understand that in their normal state.
By the way, I have noticed multiple occasions when alcoholic intoxication temporarily made generally liberal people far-right. I have even experienced that myself a couple of times when I was younger.
Of course, it has the terrifying possibility of mind control, but, from a philosophical point of view, it expose that our beliefs are biochem.
Maybe that insight would make us to take them less seriously. That could be a good thing, I think. Taking some edge of the political discussion.
The second part is the problematic one, not the first, right? After all, reading or watching videos could also permanently alter your opinion of the world.
In general, folks aren't going to forcibly administer this stuff to you. IF they do, they are generally either 1) bad friends or 2) The sorts of folks that have the power to torture you. Realistically, you choose to take it yourself. If I*m going to fundamentally change, I'd rather it be because of a positive thing I've chosen for myself, which includes hallucinogens.
That's interesting. I have to think about that, never realized before, but makes kind of sense to me. I read that one big effect of alcohol is due to deactivating inhibitions.
I'm quite lefty, and one main difference with people in the right of the political spectrum (I hope I'm not offending anyone with this) is that they want things to be clear. It's like they deeply dislike feelings of incertitude.
For instance: do I feel a nice feelings inside by displays of patriotism? Sure. But do I trust those feelings? Not at all. I will inhibit them because I don't see them as an accurate description of reality. Maybe with a few more beers I would be more patriotic.
Lots of people believe this in every side of every ideological conflict, and it's easy to do so since very few people understand others' beliefs really; they just understand simplified caricatures of those beliefs.
Anyway I'm not saying anything about "simpleness" but about feelings of certitude and answering the observation of the grandparent post.
Following this theory: It seems to me that we avoid incertitude when we have to act. We can not being subtle if we are in a crisis, so, maybe, it's the level of perceived thread what helps to determine your position in the political spectrum. I don't know, just thinking out loud.
What’s interesting is both the left and right are actually forming a unified belief system in younger people. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens over the next 50 years as demographic forces shift the political landscape. Politicians know how to be ideology flexible, the general public adds some real friction.
The right leaning parts of the internet are chock full of people making the exact same complaint about the left. Everyone always assumes the other side is one block when they're not.
A striking example is the libertarian party acts like a third axis drawing from both the republican and democratic voters, where the Green Party attracts almost exclusively from the Democrats. That represents a fundamental split in the left and a more fluid political makeup. The Green Party is tiny but actually had a significant impact on several elections.
Though this is mostly looking back, I don’t really follow recent politics that much.
PS: Personally, I vote more for the candidate than the party. A young and living George H. W. Bush for example would have easily gotten by vote last election over Hillary, but was never going to vote for Trump. It’s like both sides looked at their primary and thought, what’s the worst option?
Surely this is true. However, at the same time, many people's beliefs actually are simplified caricatures of what the doctrine they associate themselves with actually meant them to believe.
The problem I see with that is that the thing that you are using to "trust it" may have been altered by the pill itself, to make you "trust" whatever changes it made. It could be like Ken Thompson's Hack[1], but for brains.
On the other hand, that's how our brains work, regularly. We experience reality and our brains' chemistry changes.
A similar situation I can think of is: I have an accident and and I lose part of my brain mass as a result. The present me would definitively not "trust" whatever person results from that. But "me without those brain parts" might, or even like it. It has been observed that brain injuries can produce severe personality changes[2]
I must point out that a brain injury might feel more "drastic"; more similar to a "hardware change" in a computer than the pill one, which could feel like a "software update", of sorts. But a pill could very well kill a huge part of a brain (consider that cyanide could kill 100% of it).
[1] http://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
Possibly. Or maybe it just damaged the brain in an anosognosic irremediable fashion. How would you make the difference?
What if I like being staunchly conservative, and my very liberal spouse's homemade pizza has some mushrooms on it that I've never seen before? What if instead of an assassination, the next hard-right-wing President gets hit by a dart laced with psilocybin? What if someone finds a pill that makes you more approving of authoritarianism, and an authoritarian government makes taking that pill mandatory?
This is science fiction fodder, and yet it's all real. Can we please slow down? It's all coming at me too fast.
It would just make you attracted to a different group of people. That wouldn't be chaotic at all.
Quite simply, change happens.
This is not a bad thing. Change happens all the time. You can't be scared of it, or try to stop it, because it is inevitable. You can only embrace it.
But also, somewhat more rationally, taking a pill is a choice. Not everyone would take it, and certainly not enough people to significantly impact society in any way.
More people wind up with lovers that are their friends and/or equals instead of an object to be doted on.
But in all reality, people aren't going to simply stop pursuing people and you assume that a pill is going to reverse attraction instead of enhancing it. Bi- and pan-sexual are actual things. I know this from personal experience, and I didn't need a pill to figure this out. By your logic, though, I guess I'd be attracted to... no one?
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodResourceCenter/man-par...
This is not a good thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
I don't get why there's this stereotype of trans people being so fragile. All the trans people I know are stronger because of what they've been through.
Transgender people face many issues, sadly with debilitating psychological consequences for many individuals. This isn't because any of them are more fragile, everyone else would struggle just as much in their shoes. But the 'suffering breeds strength' narrative is a very romantic one.
Nothing special to trans here: by passing through the same hardships, different people might not get all stronger, some might just give up life all together. So only those who went stronger will meet.
I was trying to say that the comment isn't transphobic at all, and if people think stuff like this is the reason why trans people kill themselves then they're probably blind to the actual transphobia that happens in the world.
Also, I strongly believe that we shouldn't be restricting language out of fear of being offensive, because then people become too afraid to talk about important issues.
First, stimulants have a release schedule and are generally not a 24-hour thing. You wouldn't be able to sleep if they were. The effect depends on plasma concentration and varies during that interval. You might feel extremely focused at first, then energized but not especially focused, then a total drop in energy and focus when you hit the "down" part of the curve. Everyone's response is slightly different, however. I definitely think differently in the morning (after taking the pill) vs. at night. Sometimes I have an insight while relaxing in the evening that I write down and becomes my focus in the morning, when I'm better able to work.
Second, it's not easy to put into words but the focusing effect is different from the cross-topic creativity you're talking about. Amphetamine is like a really strong, long-lasting coffee without the negative side effects that would come from drinking pots of coffee at a time. Plenty of creative people drink regular portions of coffee. It lets you focus on your work without unwanted distractions. But by increasing working memory, stimulants actually increase the incidence of cross-domain insight, in my experience, because you're able to keep more concepts in mind while you're working.
I use a lot of caffeine, so if it’s comparable in terms of the “mental lane”, then I think it could put for me. The increased working memory leading to more connections sounds perfect.
Minus the jittery hands, racing heart, headache, and other issues even moderate coffee consumption causes for me.
But with the loss of appetite, constipation, and difficulty sleeping that coffee does to me too.
Definitely worth it on the balance. Being on medication is life changing, mostly for how capable it has made me in my personal life. I’m not the hot mess I used to be.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3880463/
This would be true even if the mechanism was "merely" an increase in focus. It turns out ADHD meds do more than that though, as they also improve working memory and mental stamina.
Many popular religions spend a great deal of time/energy getting others to join.
I wonder if that desire to proselytize is endemic to all powerful religious/spiritual experiences, or if it's just excited delirium in the case of psychedelics.
The reason psychonauts want others to take psychedelics is because they find it removes filters and mental heuristics and brings the mind to a fresh, inspirational view.
Have you taken psychedelics or read Michael Pollan's book? It's a wonderful experience, it's not delirium, which is an unfortunate medical condition.
Delirium was the wrong word, delusion was what I should have said.
cf: https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Delusion#Delusion_of_enlight...
> You can't force anyone to do it
And your mind immediately went to:
> Forcibly changing a person's mind
Mind elaborating a bit?
I reckon people who reason like this probably think "extremism" is some concretely defined thing rather than a subjective thing that depends on the culture, the time, and the place.
If they're not allowed to improve, then how are they to rejoin society again?
edit: wait, are you suggesting joining ISIS or the Aryan Brotherhood is just a subjective difference of opinion?
Extremism is a loaded word that has no real concrete meaning. Therefore, it can mean whatever the opinion makers want it to mean. And you can justify all sorts of abuse and torture with that sort of propaganda.
This game has been played many times in human history and it never ends well.
Murder, arson, kidnapping? Hate speech, harassment, cyberstalking?
Like in the 1940s, when we failed to take extremism seriously and 6+ million were killed?
I can find probably millions of people that would agree that they are in fact, extremists. In fact, the Nazis argued that Jews and Communists were evil. Of course, in Soviet Russia and China, the anti-communists were the extremists...and died by the tens of millions as a result.
To the extent that laws are actually broken, those crimes should be prosecuted.
Speech is a natural right and needs to be protected as such.
The U.S. went through the 40s all the while generally protecting the first amendment. The German Nazis went around torturing and bullying everyone who disagreed with them. Your proposal is closer to Nazism than anything I've heard of.
People should be allowed to say what they want, BUT - If anyone thinks that they have to say or think that jews/black people/woman are evil, less worth etc., they can fuck right off. In my opinion there's no justifiable reason whatsoever to be racist, xenophobic and the like.
It doesn't matter who's doing the disenfranchising if it's ubiquitous.
You seem to have read it a completely different way. Are you by chance worried about the second order effects? Perhaps that the existence of such a pill would increase the range of believes that people are ostracized for?
Many of them have bright futures. If anything, it's dystopian not to let them live their lives to the fullest extent.
Talk to them. Listen to how they got there. Show compassion.
https://www.ted.com/talks/christian_picciolini_my_descent_in...
Also, that doesn't scale. Getting someone a therapist costs a good amount of money, getting them on meds is dirt cheap. Convincing someone who doesn't trust you very much they should go see a therapist is going to be a very hard sell.
Maybe - maybe - if it were entirely voluntary, it could be okay. But I think you’ll find that convincing someone who doesn’t trust you very much they should take medication to change their minds is also going to be a very hard sell. People generally think they’re right, after all, otherwise they would have different beliefs.
And sorry but, frankly, advocating for literal chemical brainwashing because it's cheaper than therapy is sociopathic.
Imagine a would-be ideologically-motivated terrorist concocted a plot that would kill hundreds of people but he was arrested before he could harm anyone. In the course of the plot, he committed enough crimes that he will be put in a supermax prison for the rest of his life.
Is it more ethical to keep this person in a solitary confinement--allowed out of his cell only one hour a day--for the next forty years or give him the option of taking a pill that will make him stop wanting to murder people in the name of his ideology and instead put him on parole until it's clear the pill worked?
I'd argue offering the pill is far more humane than life in solitary confinement.
A tool like this obviously should not be used to "reform" people who are socially different (e.g. Alan Turing); the scenario I propose here is only applicable to people whose violent politics make them too dangerous to let out of prison.
First, it is very unlikely that a person who is so commited to some idea to be ideologically-motivated terrorist, would voluntarily accept pill that forces ideological change.
Second, there is already something similar. In some countries there is option for people that committed sexual crimes (e.g. chil rape) and have uncontrollable urges to accept chemical castration in order to get parole. It is generally viewed as human rights violation.