Psychedelic Culture Enjoyers

Review of Psychedelic Injustice by Thomas Hatsis

After a night of light rain, it is a crisp autumn morning and the sun is emerging from behind some greyish-white clouds. It is quiet as I gently close my front door and wend my way into the countryside on some metalled farm tracks. A knapsack, with only an empty tub inside, hangs over my shoulder. After an hour of scanning some fields I notice a small, nippled, conical mushroom, then another, and another. A small troop emerges. I bend down to pick one. Who am I?

Am I a self-identified psychonaut or mycological enthusiast? Am I an Englishman, or Briton, picking as several generations have done before? Or a colonizer, appropriating a foreign culture? A human being driven by instinct to alter my brain chemistry? Or perhaps, a mere agent of the cosmic play, playing a joke on itself? Am I all or none of these things? And who am I, or indeed you, to decide?

These may be intellectual, thought-provoking questions. They may also be signals, allegiances, or declarations of fealty. Either way, they are designed to make us consider our place in the world and our experience of it—and they can be inherently political given one’s outlook or culture.

The late twentieth century was an individualist era in North America and Europe. It was quintessentially liberal—whether your liberalism is flavoured with economics or society matters little. Either way, the point was to liberate yourself from constraints. There are arguments within this; is one method or another better or worse at achieving liberation—but this is, for all the perceived difference and vitriol, a cultural infight. Explicitly ‘us’-orientated people were typically pushed to the political margins (left and right).

Liberal democracy, or at least the ideological version exported by the United States, was ascendent in consequence of the Second World War and Cold War hostilities—arguably reaching its narrative apotheosis in the 1990s, sometime between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. Economic and social individualism were wedded to notions of liberation. As one exponent, Margaret Thatcher, said of society, ‘there is no such thing!’ In other words, we are interconnected individuals, and nothing is more than the sum of its parts.

Yet, this liberal individualism was at best an aspiration, at worst a fantasy. ‘Us’ and ‘them’ lurks as the reality of social creatures—through subcultures, ethnic groups, competing elites, collective identities and so on. The political question is about how such groups are managed for the best advantage (be it of gods, peoples or ruling classes.) The ideological battles of this advantage are what society calls a ‘culture war’—perhaps more accurately a type of civil war.

One particularly successful ideology in the twenty-first century has gone by, or been criticized through, various names: intersectionality, cultural Marxism, woke, social justice, grievance industry, progressivism, etc. I’m not going to reiterate definitions or histories here, suffice to say it centres on an oppressor/oppressed framework, and the equitable correction of historical wrongs based on this schematic outlook. You are, no doubt, aware of it.

This ideology has undoubtedly been very successful in marching through universities, trade unions, education, non-profits, and non-governmental organizations. Government and corporate bureaucracies have also adopted swathes of its thinking—especially through the ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ mantra—first in the US, then in Britain and Europe too. Like all such social and cultural outlooks, it uses mechanisms of power to favour its client groups.

This top-down transformation from educated classes went mostly unnoticed by the general public. Yet once the subtle nudging in education, and through social lobby groups, inured more public institutions, there was a cultural push-back. Books were written to explain its ideological origins, methods, and perceived dangers, such as The Madness of Crowds (2019) by Murray; Cynical Theories (2020) by Pluckrose and Lindsay; The New Puritans (2022) by Doyle; and America’s Cultural Revolution (2023) by Rufo.

For want of a better phrase, the ‘anti-woke’ is now a mini-industry in itself. Great hay has been made by authors propounding what tends to an individualist corrective. They explain their nemeses in terms of emerging from, or tactically mimicking, groups such as Christian puritans, postcolonialists, the New Left, or Frankfurt School Marxism—traditions of ‘us and them’ stemming in this instance from the margins of the political left.

Psychedelic discourse has of course not been immune from this culture war. Questions I asked earlier have political consequences: cultural appropriation, reciprocity, privilege, etc. And these ideas are receiving some push-back.

In Psychedelic Injustice: How Identity Politics Poisons the Psychedelic Renaissance, historian Thomas Hatsis joins the cadre of voices in the aforementioned books that aim at challenging what he terms ‘Critical Social Justice’ (CSJ). He is specifically interested in how it muddies the progression of the ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’—a term we shall return to at the conclusion of this review.

Hatsis’ argumentation draws out three dominant narratives—namely, the Decolonize, Racist, and Gender narratives—in order to explain what they are, and how they work. Using a historical approach, he examines their narrative claims, centred on the oppressor/oppressed schema, exploring the logic in regard to outcomes; identifying contradiction or falsity. He does not argue that, say, racism is absent from the United States, but that these narratives distort the truth of the matter.

The author identifies three particular groups as pushing CSJ within the psychedelic discourse space: the nonprofit media organisation Psymposia; Chacruna, an ‘Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines’ and their publications such as Psychedelic Justice: Towards a Diverse and Equitable Psychedelic Culture (2021); and a variety of individuals he refers to as ‘psychedelic social justice warriors’, who, he suggests, tend to be less ‘radical’—they are also, I might add, overwhelmingly institutionalized in universities.

The book covers numerous topics. Some are strictly historical—for instance, the extent to which cannabis laws were explicitly introduced in America as a result of racism, or not; or, how Europeans also have a long relationship with psychedelics, sometimes less ‘problematically’ than some past indigenous folk in the Americas. Other times, Hatsis critiques current episodes, such as the furore over Martin W Ball’s 5-meo-DMT methods, or the meme culture of María Sabina. His over-arching point is that a priori narrative assumptions have distorting effects—hiding truths, both factual and moral—that he ultimately sees as needlessly divisive.

The author also places his criticisms in amongst the wider body of Social Justice critiques in America. This means he goes into some depth on, for instance, crime and gender statistics, with some detailed discussion of specific cases, how race is reported in the news, or the problems of cultural relativity in bodies of knowledge. For disinterested observers, none of these arguments will be new, and is perhaps over-indulged in certain chapters.

Nevertheless, the argument Hatsis makes is undoubtedly well-researched and cogent. I also have no doubt that the people he challenges will in turn have detailed counter-arguments. As such, perhaps Psychedelic Injustice will spark a great deal of debate—and I suspect Hatsis will relish this. Then again, outside a few individuals, perhaps it won’t. There is a sense that this ship began sailing some time ago, that perhaps even the book itself is appearing some years after it would have been most effective as a riposte. There is a lethargy setting in, but also a shift in the winds.

Hatsis argues from that tradition of liberal individualism. Take, for instance, his ‘core values’ of the Psychedelic Renaissance: ‘mental health, cognitive liberty, and spiritual autonomy’. These values, to varying degrees, are core facets of individualism—one should be free to heal oneself, alter consciousness, and practice whatever spirituality however one so chooses. Yet it amounts to a reaction of sorts, a kind of willful return to the 1990s. Granted, this was not a time of psychedelic freedoms—but these liberal values were then a dominant narrative.

Yet individualist fantasy persists. The author also wishes to see a ‘unified Psychedelic Renaissance’—a kind of collective identity revolving around the values he suggests. Indeed, he concludes, ‘May ours be a revolution of radical unity. A revolution of radical love’. Insofar as individuals need to be liberated for a collective good or purpose, this echoes the civil infighting of a culture war. These values may be noble, but they are utopian, and reality waits around the corner.

From left to right, from paupers to billionaires, from patients to tribes, there is really no terribly obvious way to delineate ‘psychedelic culture’ other than some ‘we’s and some ‘I’s like to trip, and for myriad reasons, across cultures, across times. It has no overarching and explicit ideology or social group—just discrete pockets that are more or less popular at any given time.

During the last popularizing of psychedelia in the 1960s, socio-political fault lines asserted themselves in its discourse. This happens in early and late majority adoption stages in trends—what has recently, and cringe-inducingly, been called ‘mainstreaming’. And as we have seen, this cycle of history has returned.

The ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’ as a collective identity may simply be a description of an increase in scientific research, or of a cultural energy that brings some friends and like-minded people together in some places at some times. It may also be an empty slogan on which ideological fault-lines are drawn, and certain client groups are favoured. Nevertheless, trippers were certainly tripping before it, during it, and will no doubt continue to do so after.

The one thing the Psychedelic Renaissance definitely is then, is a product of its time, and will necessarily entail the variety of (competing) values that invested people choose to ascribe it, and the culture war these necessarily imply. It ultimately reflects our society’s era—the science, the culture, the power dynamics and prevailing trends. And what has emerged?

‘Who am I?’—in the past fashionably answered in a personal revelation or universal oneness—has in fact become more commonly asked politically as a ‘Who are we?’. The winds of ‘us’ have already blown in, no longer hidden under ‘I’ or pushed to the margins, but loudly articulated—not only in psychedelia but society-at-large, of which it is ultimately but a small articulation.

Psychedelic Injustice manages to be at once a throw-back to a yesteryear and a window into tomorrow—a kind of Boomer individualism hitched to a collective identity. Aside from the historical value of truth, which is a very commendable pursuit and well argued, the book also implicitly asks you to consider your own values, and under which narrative you wish to pick your mushrooms.

It seems to me that criminality has been the one identity people in this part of the world shared as trippers. As this is slowly eroded (in North America at least), then precisely how trippers depict themselves, through values, identities and groups, will become increasingly diverse, and as such potentially more divisive. Yet, it must be remembered, this doesn’t reflect the psychedelic experience, but the state of society itself, and boils down to a question about how we treat one another.