[HN Gopher] Do psychedelics make you liberal? Not always
___________________________________________________________________
Do psychedelics make you liberal? Not always
Author : VieEnCode
Score : 46 points
Date : 2021-09-04 13:46 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (psychedelicsociety.org.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (psychedelicsociety.org.uk)
| roody15 wrote:
| 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.
| retrac wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "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_ wrote:
| That realization is not unique to drugs. If this scares you
| stay away from reading Solzhenitsyn.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| There's a difference between coming to that point of view
| by reason, willingly, and being dragged to it by a
| substance, unreasoningly.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| True, some trips can get more deeply philosophiocal than
| you are comfortable with, but typically no matter what
| corner of philosophy you think yourself into, greater
| minds have been there and done that. For me for example
| it sparked some interest in reading Nietzsche.
| louis___ wrote:
| Try using reason to explain the taste of an apple to
| someone who has never tasted it.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Knowing that one has a capacity to commit violence isn't
| the concerning part. The "barely contained" part is.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| Yeah, Solzhenitsyn has that too. Here's a famous excerpt.
|
| https://mbird.com/literature/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-on-
| the-l...
|
| Except the way he came to that reealization was through
| spending a good while in the gulag instead of tripping
| balls. Pick your poison.
| louis___ wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| _Barely_ being able to contain violence should be
| concerning. It 's one thing just to know you are capable of
| violence, it's entirely different if you are struggling to
| control it.
| kace91 wrote:
| I think you misread op (either that or I did).
|
| I didn't interpret the post as "I was feeling barely
| containable violence then" but more of a "I became aware
| of the barely contained violence that me/humans have
| under the surface". As in, a change of judgement on his
| current and past condition, rather than a new emotion.
| louis___ wrote:
| LSD alone does not create any violence, it does not bring
| any evil into your mind from the outside.
|
| It mostly shows things that usually stay in the
| unconscious part of our mind. It is more like a lens than
| a seed.
|
| Of course Barely being able to contain violence is
| concerning, but let's face it, it is a daily struggle for
| a LOT of humans. Our good intentions dp not always weigh
| up when for example we are starving to death. Anger,
| greed or hatred, are some of our common struggles, but
| most of the time they stay hidden in our subconscious, bc
| we do not like to see ourselves as persons able to
| perpetrate violence.
|
| But only when we see it (it requires honesty, not
| necessarily lsd xD) and we resolve to work on it, can we
| really grow.
| BoHerfIIIJrEsq wrote:
| 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?
| giantg2 wrote:
| It's not an issue with the knowing part, but with the
| _barely_ containing part.
| louis___ wrote:
| _barely_ here embodies imo the difference between knowing
| theoretically "yeah I can do some bad sometimes", and
| really feeling it in your guts, or your heart, rather
| than your head.
|
| Wisdom comes when feeling who you are, not having some
| distant idea about who you are
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| 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.
| deertick1 wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| lead or lead lead?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis
| ParanoidShroom wrote:
| Would it be fair to say it makes you more 'radical'?
| blululu wrote:
| Your mileage will almost certainly vary. It changes people
| in interesting and unpredictable ways. Sometimes for the
| better sometimes for the worse. I know people who became
| much more grounded through their use of psychedelics.
| Others much less so.
| ipnon wrote:
| Some changes are predictable. For instance most people
| will stop abusing drugs after strong psilocybin trips.
| See the work of Rolland Griffiths.
| blululu wrote:
| Most but not all. The opposite trend is less common but
| totally possible from personal observations. saying that
| a psychiatric procedure will result in specific changes
| would be stretching the truth from probably to
| necessarily. The first result I found in Google related
| to Griffiths is here:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31084460/ They are doing
| an anonymous online self selected reports and they find a
| strong effect but also 17% do not appear to exhibit the
| trend.
| ipnon wrote:
| For some perspective, this is the current state of the
| art pharmacological treatment for substance abuse
| disorder, as in no other available treatment has a
| stronger effect.
| ipnon wrote:
| It makes the standard 9 to 5, hour long commute, and retire
| at 65 shtick unpalatable, but we in the West live in a
| radical society where you can already smoke pot, drive fast
| cars, play loud music, not start a family, and so on. Part
| of that is attributable to us living in a post-psychedelic
| world.
| godmode2019 wrote:
| 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
| retrac wrote:
| 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.
| pope_meat wrote:
| 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.
| Applejinx wrote:
| 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.
| FredPret wrote:
| Wolves cooperate more than humans?
|
| Even when we compete, we cooperate on an enormous scale [0]
|
| [0] https://fee.org/media/33856/i-pencil-final-proof-for-
| website...
| mkr-hn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dmos62 wrote:
| > 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?
| schwartzworld wrote:
| Fun fact: Ann Coulter is a self-proclaimed DeadHead.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| 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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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.
| scythe wrote:
| >Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered;
| any attempts to disarm the people must be stopped, by force if
| necessary
|
| - Karl Marx
| tokai wrote:
| Apparently he liked the Industrial Workers of the World. That
| would disqualify anyone from the conservative label (and maybe
| even the liberal label too).
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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". ;)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| And sometimes, it turns you into a fish.
| https://www.stilldrinking.org/the-episode-part-1
|
| (also available in book form, recommended)
| dav_Oz wrote:
| 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.
| HKH2 wrote:
| I don't quite follow the last paragraph. How does the feedback
| loop to the rigid thinking get disrupted?
| dav_Oz wrote:
| 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".
| Atlas667 wrote:
| 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.
| aahyesthe wrote:
| Aah yes, human sacrifice, the most common policy of the right,
| and trump supporters.
|
| Clearly because these ancients did human sacrifice, they are not
| liberals..
|
| /s
| digitcatphd wrote:
| 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.
| oxymoran wrote:
| 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.
| Applejinx wrote:
| 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.
| boredumb wrote:
| I think someone is deluded but it's probably not the straw men
| you're chasing after.
| mehphp wrote:
| I'm curious if you could elaborate.
| FredPret wrote:
| A tiny number of very fringe people believe the Democrats-
| abduct-kids thing
| trypietry wrote:
| Based on the ubiquitousness of certain memes, I think
| there are more than you believe. Unless all the posts on
| qanoncasualties and hermancainaward are fictional.
| ykevinator3 wrote:
| Peace and hate man
| luckylion wrote:
| 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).
| 1680168l wrote:
| But they do make you stupid.
| tnjm wrote:
| 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.
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| motohagiography wrote:
| 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.
| oytis wrote:
| I am surprised neither Ernst Junger nor traditionalist movement
| are mentioned.
| HKH2 wrote:
| Psychedelics play around with absolutist thinking.
|
| You can hold absolutist thinking of any political persuasion.
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