Notes on Psychedelic Nihilism

When everything is a game, it's possible you might get played

"The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish." - Terence McKenna

"Once the fiction of one 'reality' dies as a concept, and the operational fact of 'realities' (plural) becomes generally recognised, we might all discover that human beings can actually live together without constantly making war over who has the 'real reality'." - Robert Anton Wilson

The world's most powerful technologists enjoy psychedelic drugs. Many of them cite psychedelic drugs as the agents of their lives' most powerful experiences.

Sam Altman describes himself as formerly being a "very anxious, unhappy person" before a weekend retreat "significantly changed" his mindset. Elon Musk likewise described that "[t]here are times when I have sort of a... negative chemical state in my brain, like depression I guess, and ketamine is helpful for getting one out of the negative frame of mind." The Wall Street Journal reported that psychedelic drugs often provide a means for technologists to cope with immense investor pressure and the weight of market volatility.

Buoyed by their treatments, Elon Musk and Sam Altman have enchanted technology and their narcissistic roles in history with a mysticism likely borne of revelatory personal experiences. When Sam Altman first went to Burning Man, he saw a vision of a possible post-AGI utopia. Or consider Musk’s ideal of "extending the light of consciousness to the stars" through the SpaceX programme, which is receiving new government contracts amid an unprecedented decimation of public projects. Psychologists have speculated that Musk's erratic recent behaviour stems from his self-described bipolar disorder - potentially exacerbated by psychedelic use. Musk and many Silicon Valley captains hold to ‘simulation theory’, in which the base of reality itself is questioned and gamified - like a DMT trip, which Musk has cited in his X posts.

The tech industry likewise runs on a narrative that AI is merely revealing or passively promoting a natural "weirdness" or malleability in reality, in which AI acceleration is inevitable and evolutionary. In fact, this instability is being deliberately engineered.

Valley founders warn of the existential risks of AI, yet double down on their investments while resisting regulation and cutting back on safety protocols. Christian Angermayer claims to care about mental health while advocating space colonies for elites. Mark Zuckerberg models himself and names his daughters after Roman emperors while claiming to democratise connection. They project personas of business genius while struggling to make profit and losing billions on terrible ideas like the Metaverse. They claim rigid atheism while suggesting they're building gods. They claim to hold to strong worldviews while ‘kissing the ring’ and subverting their corporate cultures in mere weeks. They wield enormous personal power and are proud of it, yet defer to a vague technological determinism in which their actions are relegated as passive. The modern psychedelic ideology, in line with broader wellness culture, encourages a detachment to a supposed ‘spiritual’ state within oneself, through which we can be ‘resilient’ to the smashing waters of our lives and history.

Yet psychedelic ideology’s core pluralism, in which anything may be induced and options are endless, also eats away at the core grammar and meaning of the existential.

The ideological shapeshifting consummates a psychedelic cultural logic that is co-evolving with digital media. Trump is the psychedelic President par excellence. His manipulation of reality echoes the inheritance of media pranks and surrealist tactics once confined to the counterculture. His clownish performance art, his reality-bending pronouncements, his ability to generate simultaneous realities - all mirror the psychedelic premise that everything is theatre. He can simultaneously be Epstein's "closest friend" and defender of children against trafficking. He can call for ethnic cleansing in Gaza from a bombing he supported while claiming to do it for humanitarian reasons.

Steve Bannon claimed that “what's on MSNBC right now is more real than what's happening in real life".

"Everything is media. Media is the message, and Trump understands that," he added.

All this creates a form of brinkmanship with the capacity of language itself. What is obvious to one's own eyes and ears is denied. The result is a refractory exhaustion in which violent uprising or total numbness becomes the main energetic response.

‘How TF is this real?’ is part of the point

We’re shocked out of pedestrian consciousness yet uncertain of where to go. An alternative is quickly sold.

Devenot and Pace’s study of ‘right-wing psychedelia’ evidences a broad range of interconnections between the political right and the drug culture. Jordan Peterson’s neo-traditionalism, QAnon and chasing the ‘White Rabbit’ - even neo-Nazi elements of the environmental movement. Curtis Yarvin has compared the reading of his blog Unqualified Reservations - a reportedly fundamental influence on the present administration - to the ‘red pill’ of a DMT trip. Yarvin writes:

There is no such thing as a gentle introduction to UR. It's like talking about a ‘mild DMT trip.’ If it was mild, it wasn't DMT. UR is a strange blog: its goal is to cure your brain. We've all seen The Matrix. We know about red pills. Many claim to sell them. You can go, for example, to any bookstore, and ask the guy behind the counter for some Noam Chomsky. What you'll get is blue pills soaked in Red #3.

This spirit of contingency connects to a loss of language and a prioritisation of the intuitive. Deep research and wrestling with policy are discouraged; a ‘vibe shift’ is celebrated instead. Psychedelia has never done well with literature. The act of writing is too laborious and extrinsic. Better to surrender the self and let the Vibe wash over you.

Psychedelics have long retained a countercultural ‘cool’, a ‘hipness’, while being sampled by the world’s most powerful people. Here, they exemplify the true character of counterculture: the replacement of one elite by another self-promotional counter-elite, nowadays dominated by contrarianism and the New Age, and thence to the neo-fascism of MAGA.

As well as enchanting a transhumanist ethos, the techno-psychedelic ideology has been further enabled by the Buddhist Modernist worldview popularised by Sam Harris. Here, the mind is a machine pliable with a tool. You can de-centre from your thoughts and see that neither you, nor any defined object, really exists. It is all just stuff and energy that can be captured and commodified in data and moved around according to one's goals. The contradiction is telling: there is no self, yet ‘the space of consciousness’ is primary; free will is an illusion, yet we can and should optimise our conscious experience through Randian ambition; all is material, yet consciousness is mystified and can’t be reduced to physical explanation; our perceptions can’t be trusted, but fundamental moral questions can be mapped into scans of pleasure points in the brain. Everything is simultaneously meaningful and meaningless, real and unreal, material and immaterial.

This aligns perfectly with the logic of digital capitalism. The self is both dissolved and stretched into a privatised steppe filled with overwhelming surfeits of choice and possibility. The internet, as an ever-expanding rhizome of data, becomes an extension of the psychedelic state: constantly shifting, unstable, and hyper-stimulating. Traditional cultures might use psychedelics to reinforce collective meaning. But the Western experience thereby encourages an escalated interiorisation of the self - an expanded sense of ‘checking out’ through withdrawal and a ‘hip’ suspicion of the outside and ‘banal’ political.

From a theological perspective, the modern fascination with psychedelics echoes ancient patterns of idolatry. The idol, as described in Isaiah, is empty - "a thing of naught"- yet is still imbued with an uncanny power in the minds of its worshippers. Psychedelics function in a similar manner: simultaneously exalted as agents of transformation, perhaps with an ‘agenda’ of their own, yet ultimately recognised as mere ‘tools’. Every aspect of the experience is culturally encoded. The visions people experience are shaped by cultural forces of expectation. As Henry Flynt wrote of the 1960s, the social psychology of the "Great Psychedelic Craze" proved far more powerful than any individual's unmediated drug experience.

Double standards arise. As noted by the critic Chaim Wigder, the strategy for handling "bad trips" typically involves convincing the subject that any disturbing social realities they may glimpse are mere hallucinations - while the “good trip” may involve a ‘revealing’ of fundamental truths.

The Western mind on psychedelics projects the ‘two-world’ mythology from our intellectual inheritance. There is the world of the sober and the rational, and the world revealed by the drugs. Upon seeing the value of this criminalised para-normal realm, a pipeline is formed towards the conspiratorial and the para-political. Such is not bad in itself: I have defended the role of conspiracy theory in psychedelic culture.

But conspiracy is also weaponised, and bones are thrown to distract the dogs. The most para-normal quality of the current government is not the hiddenness of its agendas. Rather, it is the sheer shoulder-shrugged obviousness with which its corruption is pursued.

One of the central insights from media theorists like Marshall McLuhan is that new technologies do not simply add to the cultural landscape but fundamentally transform it. What was once conceived as 'God' collapses into a Spiritually Efficient Experience - marketable, sellable, and reducible to its utility. Yet if psychedelics possess an 'agenda' or 'spirit' as a technology, it is to convey that playful yet nihilistic mood of radical contingency. As 'non-specific amplifiers', they promise that anything is possible. The Experience emerges from a principle of 'causal indifference' - where the trigger matters less than the Experience itself, which becomes increasingly dissolute as psychedelic culture mainstreams and diversifies. Such an approach opens a vast conceptual space for increasingly efficient technologies: newer and better psychedelic compounds, virtual reality, brain-computer interfaces, and neural stimulation technologies, all promising euphoria and mystical states.

‘Causal indifference’ combines with a dogmatic agnosticism. All spiritual experiences are flattened into a horizontal plane of perception where phenomena are judged purely by their "results." Musk, for instance, is open to the possibility of God but does not claim to know. This leaves a worldview in which transcendence, ethics, and meaning are evaluated through a pragmatic utility - a metric that likewise defaults to socially dominant modes like productivity and wealth.

By being so pliable, with a 'liberating' lack of attachment to traditional dogma, psychedelic drugs and their Western container then become like any ‘tool’ - a willing servant of elites, who trip out well-protected with their retreats and guides and integration coaches, and enchanter of their doctrines. What becomes venerated is not just the experience, but the very capacity for reality manipulation itself. Bob Jesse, a former Oracle executive who helped spark the modern psychedelic renaissance, explicitly frames this goal as "restructuring" religion by making the psychedelic experience "more available."

Signs and wonder will occur. The magicians of Pharaoh could perform many of the same miracles as God. The Israelites in the Wilderness were shown constant miracles. Yet they continued to sin and true faith was left unencouraged. For the kings of the later Israel, the idols formed rational and effective centres of propaganda. The idols allowed for a centralising of narrative and alliances with foreign kings. They were technologies understood to petition and extract natural forms of energy.

The blowback the Bible describes was not rational. It occurred within the realm of the invisible, the prophets, and not of earthly politics. We may wonder whether the problems of psychedelic ideology are occurring in an analogously ‘invisible’ realm: that of information and meaning, translating into visible chaos and liquefaction.

McKenna stated that the purpose of life is to have a “Good Party”. Mescaline delivered Aldous Huxley from “the world of selves, of time, of moral judgments and utilitarian considerations”. Alan Watts claimed that all suffering is a “form of play”, from which one may achieve distance through drug consumption – realising that “there isn’t anything in whole universe to be afraid of because it doesn’t happen to anyone!”

Part of the psychedelic idol is the mythology of its own cultural story. Putting aside the pseudo-history and bad theology that have littered psychedelic dialogue, millions have tried these substances, but nothing has fundamentally changed. Many of the world's most powerful people have experienced them, and here we are.

Like any idol, techno-psychedelia’s emptiness is self-revealing. If everything is play and contingency, then the same can be said of that axiomatic claim. Steve Jobs, a venerated saint of the LSD ideology, said that he realised as a young man that reality is pliable - you just have to move it around, push a few bricks, and things will dramatically start to happen. Amid the engineered weirdness and fluidity of the current psychedelic meaning space, one hopes that the status quo’s narrative domination is also liable to such leveraged and rapid collapse.

The question isn't whether psychedelics can produce profound experiences - clearly they can.

The question is whether the reduction of transcendence to technique serves liberation or control.