Ten theses on the politics of psychedelics

Summary

Psychedelics can serve as political tools that disrupt established systems, promoting a more radical form of democracy rather than reinforcing traditional liberal-democratic structures. The article argues for a rethinking of psychedelic mysticism and experience to acknowledge their embodied and politically empowering aspects. This involves moving beyond narrow views of psychedelics that focus solely on neurological effects and addressing the anti-democratic forces present in modern society.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This article liberates discussion of the politics of psychedelics from its present impasse. Across ten theses, it asserts that psychedelics are interruptive deautomating political technologies, which makes them conducive to democratic politics, in the radical sense: rather than consolidating liberal-democratic systems of representative or managed democracy, psychedelic experience tends to open such regimes up to the ferment of radical democracy. To conceptualise the political ramifications of psychedelics requires that psychedelic mysticism and the phenomenology of psychedelic experience be reconceived in ways which give due recognition to their embodied, agential and politically potentiating dimensions, which involves correcting restrictively neuro-centric conceptions of psychedelic mysticism and expanding incomplete phenomenologies. It further requires that the “deautomating” dimensions of psychedelic experience be conceptualised alongside an analysis of the prevailing anti-democratic forces of automation, administrative reason and computationalist abstraction.

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