Psychedelics vs. the Apotheosis of Reason

Jules Evans recently interviewed Steve Rolles about "What comes after the war on drugs?" A transcript of that conversation is a fascinating demonstration or dramatization, in my opinion, of what Max Weber (and many others) have called "the apotheosis of reason."

Psychedelic drugs basically turn loose the best, and the worst, intentions and experiences accessible to individuals. Both the best and the worst are far more extreme than modern day humans can easily imagine. We have historical references like Christ/Buddha/Gandhi, and Torquemada/Hitler/Manson; but we do not find or confront those extremes regularly in our daily lives. When somebody gets crazy, like on October 7th in Israel, that merely precipitates a crazy reaction: lives and society are destroyed, but nothing is learned. In fact the world only becomes stupider.

No great patriotic war has ever helped humanity. Each and every one of them brought only dishonor, ruin and tragedy. Ideas, not battles, mark forward progress for Man. During battle, ideas literally disappear and only force exists. Battle is an absence of ideas, even if ideas are blamed or credited beforehand and afterward. Drugs, especially psychedelic drugs, produce battle within a mind.

The interview by Evans of Rolles is replete with the blissful ignorance and glib denial of evil. The whole framework of how to best regulate psychedelics so they provide benefits without causing harm hearkens back to classic lines from war movies like (two of my favorites) Full Metal Jacket and Starship Troopers:

    "How can you shoot women and children? Easy--just don't lead them quite as much."

    "What's the matter, you want to live forever? Let's all get tattoos!"

Steve Rolles is charming to note that psychedelics can turn people into boring dickheads. But there may be nothing so boring as his own discussions about, "The core thrust of regulation (being) ...keeping people safe or at least safer, and mitigating known risks."

That's not why people take psychedelic drugs, it's only what they seem to get interested in after they've been turned into dickheads. People take psychedelic drugs to overcome themselves, or in Nietzsche's own language, zur Selbsüberwindung zum Übermenschen. People want salvation, and that has never been a project for reason, but always a project for faith. 

Galileo began the long historical trend away from faith and toward reason in the early Seventeenth Century; but not long after Nietzsche died insane and godless at the dawn of the Twentieth, Albert Hoffman, Richard Helms, Paul Tibbets, Rudolph Höss, Captain Al Hubbard and Timothy Leary certainly ended that trend.

Now people vote for Donald Trump or believe in woke-ism. And they fight each other. They appear only able to cherish the artillery shell in the face or the bullet in the heart.

They want a trip, but it'll be a bad one now. Forget regulation.