Take me to your Dealer

Review of Psychedelics and the Coming Singularity (2024) by David Jay Brown

What is the psychedelic community? I have on occasion asked people this question and the answer is usually vague; a variation of ‘people who trip’ or ‘people who get together to talk about tripping’ (often both). The former doesn’t make much sense. What relationship does the acidhead in northern England, the Siberian shaman, and the Mazatec curandera really have? They may share some similar drug practices, using music perhaps, but nothing that constitutes community—neither in the sense of a communal life nor a religious communion.

If, however, we consider the psychedelic community to be those who gather to discuss tripping, then it’s still not that simple. Between the nineteen sixties and renaissance, events and conferences were often inhabited by the same small crew of characters, yet now, post ‘mainstreaming’ there’s so many events, and so many people (like endless variations of the therapist archetype) that to talk about the psychedelic community makes little sense. Instead, we must consider the fact that there are, like the trippers, many discrete groups.

Perhaps then it has nothing to do with the traditional notion of community. What about an ideological community? Or shared attitudes? Is there a worldview that is shared by participants? If such a thing exists then it is to found in the media that such a community produces. David Jay Brown has been publishing interviews with notable psychedelic thought leaders for many years, and his latest book of interviews, Psychedelics and the Coming Singularity, is in some sense a window into how a psychedelic culture articulates itself today—at least one iteration of it.

Brown’s introduction propounds a particular worldview. Anxiety, he suggests, is a core facet of human experience—death being the primary mover. He argues that ‘for generations that stretch back into our prehistory’ a sense of reassurance was found in the continuation of our offspring and the world. This idea, he goes on, is now shattered in the face of ‘climate crisis, global mass extinction, the Covid pandemic, the impending perils of advanced and weaponized robots’ and such like. Yet, is this apocalyptic moment unique?

Given that the reassurance of life continuation was also tempered with scriptural and oral histories of linear and cyclical apocalypses, afterlife, and warrior castes glorifying death, one must recognise a close psychological interrelation of anxiety and religion. In this respect, Brown sees modern culture as finding itself in a polarity between apocalyptic disaster and utopian tech dreams of becoming ‘all-powerful and immortal superhuman masters of space and time’. It is a Californian iteration of a ubiquitous human religiosity.

The ‘world’s leading experts’ and ‘cultural innovators’  that Brown interviews are men (with the single exception of neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge) who represent a range of professions, from journalists and comedians to scientists and cultural commentators. Considering the dichotomous (and ecologically bleak) framework that Brown sets up, I was pleasantly surprised at the present optimism of many of the interviewees. It’s often a question of point-of-view. As Duncan Trussell responded on being asked about the chances of the human race:

‘I think that the problem right now is that people are just ahistoric, and so because of that, the things that are happening in the world right now seem apocalyptic. It feels to me like somehow people think that, like, reality started in the eighties or something.’

Elsewhere, answering a similar question, Julia Mossbridge (with the benefit of precognition of course) says: ‘I have a fairly relaxed perspective about the future of humanity. I think we’re making positive changes, and I know it can seem dreadful, because there are pendulum swings that occur in response to positive changes. These are difficult. But it’s okay; it evens out as we go, as far as I can tell.’ In short, many of the people showcased in this book seek to shift contexts on our ‘cultural moment’. Is this itself psychedelic?

Interestingly, Europeans tend here to try to be optimistic compared to their American cousins—there’s perhaps something else to be said about their own context, so far as civilizational cycles go! Yet, on the whole, there’s more than just stoicism in answers. ‘I have a, maybe very Hollywood, romanticized version of how this will go,’ says Vince Kadlubek, ‘where the end of one paradigm coincides perfectly with the dawn of the next’. Or, Jeffrey Kripal, ‘I just think hope and optimism produce better futures than despair and pessimism.’

Brown’s interviews, however, are at their very best when the meta-questions take a back seat and the interviewees are able to wax-lyrical about their fields of interest. Whether it’s Hamilton Morris on chemistry, Grant Morrison on archetypal mythology in comics, or Erik Davis on the cultural history of psychedelics, there’s a genuine enthusiasm and insight that weaves its way through Psychedelics and the Coming Singularity. This to me is an excellent approximation of a psychedelic community: complex rather than singular; intellectually multilinear.

As David Luke (you know him, right?) responds when asked about psychedelics and connectedness: ‘On a sociological level […] there’s also a synergy there with group psychedelic experiences of communitas, which also enhance well-being’. And the thing about communitas is that it is fleeting; a sociological state which individuals pass through. It is both the psychedelic experience and the occasional communion of optimistic enthusiasts enthralled by the trip.

A psychedelic community then, if anything, is an occasional space of (usually enthusiastic) cross-disciplinary discussion and/or experiences that re-blossoms across generations and cultures—each individual one a passage ultimately taken thanks to a shared love of tripping, but which starts and ends in a multitude of different places. And above all it is this rich palette that comes out beautifully in Psychedelics and the Coming Singularity.

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