Psychedelics challenge the post-Enlightenment project of "rational" adulthood. Western civilization has a deep myth: the myth of necessary order - a yoking of rationality, order, and progress together into what forms the basis for modernity. Psychedelics cannot have intrinsic value outside of rationality, so, they must either be accepted on the basis of rationality and order or face rejection. We express this using the rational basis of improved mental health. The contradiction of course is obvious; psychedelics provide us with profoundly irrational experiences that don't obviously fit into our cultural value system.
The point is that western civilization values rationality, order, and progress in a self-justifying way. The values that our culture provides to us form a feedback cycle of myth and virtue. Every argument that assumes this basis, reinforces its truth.
"Order is obviously preferable to chaos", is one of many subjective perspectives. Why should it hold more truth than "Plurality of perspectives are obviously preferable to the fragility of one perspective for the sake of objectivity"? The apparatuses of the state[1] all rely on the same cultural myth and promote it in a way that crowds out all possible alternatives. Thus the myth of necessary order has become synonymous with reality.
Like all deeply rooted cultural myths, this is something that's going to appear obviously true which coincidentally serves as a way of shielding it from honest critique. If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that questioning foundational myths feels like a cultural violation. René Girard’s theory holds; when a community is anxious or unstable, it lashes out most viciously at people who somehow threaten its central, but unspoken, truths or anxieties. The greater the received response that a cultural axiom obviously true; the more certain I am that it reflects a core cultural myth than any semblance of reality.
1. See Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 1970.
The sheer existence of established and (partially) self-reinforcing sets of cultural standards doesn't strike me as a good basis to explore the fundamental complement of it all, or to describe it altogether as something assuredly misleading and "bad". This should be especially apparent if you've ever tried creating something that is self-justifying (it's usually a hard, valuable, and sought after effort).
Put differently, while an idea being established and self-justifying doesn't necessarily mean it's exclusive in these traits and should be bolted in, sure, an idea being fringe also doesn't necessarily mean it's unjustly fringe at all, or that it's being unfairly discriminated against. To claim so without evidence is little more than conspiratorial thinking and self-victimization.
It further sounds really quite self-serving to paint e.g. me as some misguided sheep part of some malicious cabal for this. It's a little more than just a variation on the all too common ill faith ways of argumentation; mixing in the semantic specifics of psychedelic experiences, name dropping people, movements, and quotes, and deferring to a "specific" culture's particularities serves at most as a distraction from this.
It's a joke. People often have conspiracy theories about Big Pharma trying to prevent access to novel drugs that could disrupt their cash cows. The parent was jokingly talking about "Big Reality" as an imaginary group of people who hate to see "reality" disrupted by psychedelic experiences.
When someone has a profound psychedelic experience that shows them the arbitrary nature of many social constructs, or reveals possibilities for consciousness that mainstream science doesn't acknowledge... that's genuinely disruptive to systems built on those constructs.
The resistance is real, systematic, and rational (from the perspective of maintaining current power arrangements). Not a joke.
For those who don't remember what it was like when LSD was still legal, this is an accurate synopsis of what could be observed as it quickly was prohibited to the max degree and categorized along with truly more toxic dangerous drugs like opiates. When things like opiates had been recognized for their potentially devastating effects for thousands of years, while psychedelics were still experimental substances.
Realistically an entire new agency (DEA) was chartered to enforce the new regulations, and the greatest threats were those thought to disrupt an "ordained" vision of reality that was not to include the kind of experimentation which made clinical evaluation possible.
Rapidly, before the most thorough experiments could be conducted which would have more accurately informed the established pharma regulation process.
Rather it was superstition that was included in the new regulations, and the enforcement agency was mustered to fight to preserve more superstition than should ever be allowed.
This really really stands the test of time, and if kelsey did not personally observe this phenomenon, it's even more amazing than it appears on the surface.
I'm only 40 years old, so no. I came of age in the midst of the DARE era. I just read a lot of philosophy and sociology[1] and synthesize them. It's always strange that HN seems to slightly favor philosophy, but tends to see sociology highly unfavorably.
It's not difficult to draw a line between social reproduction and drug policy; what's difficult is to convince people that it exists.
1. Specifically social ontology, various constructivist texts, and frame analysis.
Could you explain what you mean by that? Who are the proponents of “big reality”? How do they fight against its disruption?
Psychedelics challenge the post-Enlightenment project of "rational" adulthood. Western civilization has a deep myth: the myth of necessary order - a yoking of rationality, order, and progress together into what forms the basis for modernity. Psychedelics cannot have intrinsic value outside of rationality, so, they must either be accepted on the basis of rationality and order or face rejection. We express this using the rational basis of improved mental health. The contradiction of course is obvious; psychedelics provide us with profoundly irrational experiences that don't obviously fit into our cultural value system.
The point is that western civilization values rationality, order, and progress in a self-justifying way. The values that our culture provides to us form a feedback cycle of myth and virtue. Every argument that assumes this basis, reinforces its truth.
"Order is obviously preferable to chaos", is one of many subjective perspectives. Why should it hold more truth than "Plurality of perspectives are obviously preferable to the fragility of one perspective for the sake of objectivity"? The apparatuses of the state[1] all rely on the same cultural myth and promote it in a way that crowds out all possible alternatives. Thus the myth of necessary order has become synonymous with reality.
Like all deeply rooted cultural myths, this is something that's going to appear obviously true which coincidentally serves as a way of shielding it from honest critique. If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that questioning foundational myths feels like a cultural violation. René Girard’s theory holds; when a community is anxious or unstable, it lashes out most viciously at people who somehow threaten its central, but unspoken, truths or anxieties. The greater the received response that a cultural axiom obviously true; the more certain I am that it reflects a core cultural myth than any semblance of reality.
1. See Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 1970.
The sheer existence of established and (partially) self-reinforcing sets of cultural standards doesn't strike me as a good basis to explore the fundamental complement of it all, or to describe it altogether as something assuredly misleading and "bad". This should be especially apparent if you've ever tried creating something that is self-justifying (it's usually a hard, valuable, and sought after effort).
Put differently, while an idea being established and self-justifying doesn't necessarily mean it's exclusive in these traits and should be bolted in, sure, an idea being fringe also doesn't necessarily mean it's unjustly fringe at all, or that it's being unfairly discriminated against. To claim so without evidence is little more than conspiratorial thinking and self-victimization.
It further sounds really quite self-serving to paint e.g. me as some misguided sheep part of some malicious cabal for this. It's a little more than just a variation on the all too common ill faith ways of argumentation; mixing in the semantic specifics of psychedelic experiences, name dropping people, movements, and quotes, and deferring to a "specific" culture's particularities serves at most as a distraction from this.
8 replies →
It's a joke. People often have conspiracy theories about Big Pharma trying to prevent access to novel drugs that could disrupt their cash cows. The parent was jokingly talking about "Big Reality" as an imaginary group of people who hate to see "reality" disrupted by psychedelic experiences.
When someone has a profound psychedelic experience that shows them the arbitrary nature of many social constructs, or reveals possibilities for consciousness that mainstream science doesn't acknowledge... that's genuinely disruptive to systems built on those constructs.
The resistance is real, systematic, and rational (from the perspective of maintaining current power arrangements). Not a joke.
3 replies →
I took it as being a joke in the way "the matrix" was "a movie"
That’s an amazing sentence…
For those who don't remember what it was like when LSD was still legal, this is an accurate synopsis of what could be observed as it quickly was prohibited to the max degree and categorized along with truly more toxic dangerous drugs like opiates. When things like opiates had been recognized for their potentially devastating effects for thousands of years, while psychedelics were still experimental substances.
Realistically an entire new agency (DEA) was chartered to enforce the new regulations, and the greatest threats were those thought to disrupt an "ordained" vision of reality that was not to include the kind of experimentation which made clinical evaluation possible.
Rapidly, before the most thorough experiments could be conducted which would have more accurately informed the established pharma regulation process.
Rather it was superstition that was included in the new regulations, and the enforcement agency was mustered to fight to preserve more superstition than should ever be allowed.
This really really stands the test of time, and if kelsey did not personally observe this phenomenon, it's even more amazing than it appears on the surface.
I'm only 40 years old, so no. I came of age in the midst of the DARE era. I just read a lot of philosophy and sociology[1] and synthesize them. It's always strange that HN seems to slightly favor philosophy, but tends to see sociology highly unfavorably.
It's not difficult to draw a line between social reproduction and drug policy; what's difficult is to convince people that it exists.
1. Specifically social ontology, various constructivist texts, and frame analysis.