The essay argues that the shift of psychedelics from counterculture to mainstream acceptance is tied to the rise of 'capitalist realism,' a term from Mark Fisher meaning capitalism is seen as the only viable social system. Neoliberalism, the driving force, defused the political and collective potential of 1960s psychedelic movements by emphasizing individualism over social change. The anti-work and communal aspects of psychedelic culture were lost as they became tools for enhancing or treating individual brains without challenging capitalist society. The author contends that psychedelics' context-dependence shows that personal change, aligned with values of love and connection, requires transforming society, especially given ecological and social crises.
The essay argues that new materialist theories from critical posthumanism and psychedelic drugs can mutually enrich each other. Posthumanism's focus on relationality and embodiment helps articulate the ontological and ethical implications of psychedelic experiences of interconnectedness, while psychedelics can enact a 'posthuman phenomenology' that reveals human entanglement with more-than-human environments. The author contends that psychedelics' potential for social transformation is best understood through a materialist lens, not by opposing science to spirituality. Pushing against the science-spirituality binary, which reproduces modern individualism, the essay calls for increased attention to material transcorporeality. It concludes that realizing psychedelics' political value requires a 'material spirituality' grounded in a non-reductive redefinition of matter and consciousness as embodied.