Do psychedelics make you liberal? Not always

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

(also available in book form, recommended)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Psychedelics play around with absolutist thinking.

You can hold absolutist thinking of any political persuasion.

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).

Openness is correlated with drug use and left leaning tenencies.

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.

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"?

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.