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Psychedelics as a model for destroying oppressive power structures

• By Mike Elliott

By Mike Elliott - written for the Diversity, Culture, and Social Justice course at the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines

Mike is the Founder and Executive Director of Mindscape Collective, and is in the MA program for Psychedelics and Consciousness Studies at the University of Ottawa. He's been an engineer and leader in the software industry for over 15 years.

We are so fucked.

If you're reading this around time of writing, or even many years after, you probably say and hear those words as much as I do. The hyper-capitalist, fascist, dogmatic, colonial, patriarchal, racist, sexist, violently oppressive contemporary world order gives us more than enough reason to feel that way.

But not forever?

There's no turning back from where humanity have found ourselves. But if we look to our collective human history, existing indigenous groups, communities working against or outside of these systems, and the transformative nature of psychedelics and plant medicines, we find hope in what a better future will look like with these power systems dismantled and abolished.

Remembering our shared communal ancestry and connection to the earth

As a non-native white man born and raised in North America with a European immigrant father, my life and privilege are a direct product of global colonial religious and state systems entrenched and evolved since at least the Age of Discovery 500 years ago. Looking further back in history to the dawn of anatomically modern humans and beyond, hundreds of thousands of my ancestors -- like all of us -- coexisted in fluid, decentralized, kin-based networks with deep connections to nature, plant medicine, the mystical, and their rituals.

Recent works such as The Dawn of Everything (Graber & Wengrow, 2021) challenge the conventional narratives of linear progress toward hierarchical domination. Their research reveals that early human societies were incredibly diverse, with various social organizations that embraced communalism and egalitarianism---ideas that resonate with our understanding of the indigenous practices and ancestral memories of connection to the earth. These living groups work to keep these traditions alive while maintaining the balance between neo-colonial pressures and traditional authenticity.

We can learn from our collective ancestry and these indigenous communities to shift that balance and push back against the violent, extractive, money and dogma-fueled systems that threaten, persecute, and destroy us. By reexamining the past through the psychedelic lens and those of our indigenous kin and ancestors we gain insight into alternative societal organization models -- ones that prioritize mutual aid, cooperation, and the relationship with nature rather than hierarchical and centralized control systems.

The rise of patriarchy, domination, alienation, and forgetting the Divine Feminine

The birth of the patriarchal society is thought to be associated with the Neolithic Revolution around 10,000 years ago when humans shifted from their nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to agriculture-based settlements, bringing forth the structures of property and hierarchy.

In Food of the Gods, (McKenna, 1993, societies and their deep connection with nature and rituals of psychoactive plants fostered that fostered unity and communion with the Divine Feminine, the goddess of creation, were disrupted by the advent of agriculture. Comparing this with Graber and Wengrow's work, we see similar patterns across many cultures.

When humans began controlling plants through domestication, we lost touch with the oneness and connected consciousness of the earth, and began suppressing the goddess-oriented view of the world. We nearly lost the innate search for transcendence of ordinary consciousness via spirituality and psychedelics.

The new society defined by centralized power, hierarchy, and strict roles opened the door to patriarchy and domination culture -- emphasizing order with the control and exploitation of nature and people for individual gain. This establishment became self-reinforcing and resistant to change, while alienating individuals from each other and their communities due to the bias toward materialism while diminishing the ideas of intuition and spiritual insight.

Mycelial networks as an archetype for decentralized society

Both theories are similar in the track of prehistorical humanity's connection to nature, the feminine, and diverse social systems with many experiments in non-hierarchical, stateless, network-based ways of living and cooperating with each other.

Prehistory is hard to put into words, like the ineffability of psychedelic experiences. But we have compelling indication that early humans existed in webs of branching, cooperative societies that enhanced resilience in their intergroup relations and facilitated a synergy with the interconnected natural world.

This is also a description of mycelial networks, except mycelium operate underground and have existed for up to 1 billion years. That's at least 5,000 times longer than humanity as we know it. What do plants and fungi know that we can learn from? Did our ancestors model them to build early societies? Can we do it again?

Ego death as an analogue for dismantling power structures

The Ego is the central power structure of our mind and individual identity. It gives us our sense of self, and the continuous narrative of our lives. A key feature of many psychedelic plant medicines is Ego death, a profound dissolution of the I culminating in a radically different perspective on the self and existence.

Documented effects of psychedelics, and ego death in particular, include strong feelings of oneness -- that we are a small part of a vast network of all beings and entities, the totality of natural, cosmic, and metaphysical dimensions, eternity, and ancestry. This is a state of being we can equate to what we know of the actions and rituals of our early human predecessors.

What if we could have a cultural ego death, dissolving the power systems defining the current world order and humanity's collective sense of self, to incorporate these ideas of our roots into the future?

Resistance and rebellion through a psychedelic lens

If our goal is to liberate ourselves from the evils of the present world order, we need to take back our autonomy by dismantling and abolishing the power structures that reinforce it. The state has a monopoly of coercion by force and violence, organized religion has the means of coercion by dogma and thought-policing -- all blocking our rights to communal self-governance and divine connection to the universe. The authoritative, hierarchical institutions perpetuating endless extraction and destruction of us and nature must be stopped.

These entrenched institutions are the antithesis of the message our early ancestors, indigenous relatives, and psychedelics have always held true, teach, and preach. This emancipation will be done by individual mindset shift and community organization. We need to keep an eye on that divine message as a north star to liberate the world from the mess it's in.

We can't get discouraged about the massive forces working against us in this mission, and we have to be careful about the balance of civil disobedience and contributing to the problem by working too closely with the system itself.

The fine line between the psychedelic renaissance and societal revolution

There is a very real danger that what we call the psychedelic renaissance can backfire, further perpetuating and entrenching the colonial oligarchy. Obviously, this renaissance is merely a rediscovery of psychedelics in the western world and global north, and subjugates indigenous peoples and the global south in favor of colonial extractivism. The war on drugs and legal regulations have suppressed these plants and medicines for decades, and it might be said that a noble cause might be to work on reforming them.

But working in the legal system and toward medicalization of psychedelics is fraught -- the medical system is broken, the commodification of substances is its own profit-driven industrial complex, and legal frameworks are the foundation of the oppression we are fighting against. It is apparent that this so-called psychedelic renaissance in the west is another form of neo-colonialism.

Medicalization in the name of access is has already shown to be problematic. It is likely decreasing access due to its cost-prohibitive profit-driven underpinnings This of course disproportionately affects accessibility to people of color, the less-fortunate, and the populations in which these medicines have been worshiped with forever. It also, somewhat paradoxically, hinders decriminalization and legalization efforts.

We have to seriously consider radical alternatives to the status quo. Civil disobedience, resistance through fearlessly clawing back our sovereignty with a grasp on mutualism and community, and -- only if necessary -- negotiations with the powers that be, can crumble the house of cards precariously standing on our shoulders.

Working outside of the system

There are more equitable approaches to access to the psychedelics and plant medicines. This has shown to be in possible by negotiating exceptions within the systems we feel stuck in. While religion has been one of the most devastating institutions to indigenous groups and the world, some groups have made compromises with the state by citing religious freedom.

There are examples of achieving relative autonomy in spite of the power structures working against it. Look at two contemporaneous communities operating under the protection of religious freedom in the USA today.

The Native American Church is decentralized with many branches that have had religious protections of the use of Peyote in their ceremonies, and has varying degrees of exclusivity based on geographic and sectarian boundaries.

The Divine Assembly is a more recent example of an autonomous community that has one tenet: Each individual can commune with the Divine and receive guidance -- worship needs no dogma, and requires no intermediaries, leaders, or hierarchies. At first, it was simply a church that used psilocybin mushroom as sacrament, which they found legal precedent to worship with. Now they've expanded their definition. Where else can that apply?

Build the world we want, end the world we don't

We are in an intense, dire place as a species. We are nearing peak domination culture, and end-stage capitalism. Nature is fighting back faster than we can keep up. We need a balanced revolution.

With one hand, we quietly make the machine irrelevant by rebuilding something so much more beautiful that no one wants the old world anymore. Like spores and seeds beneath us, creating mycelial and root networks that crack the foundations, breaking through concrete and the towering skyscrapers of oppression until they crumble as we rise.

With the other hand, we raucously rupture the illusion. We overtly combat the systems restraining us by remembering our power out loud. We break the spell of inevitability of societal collapse -- not gently, but with glory.

We work below and above the system to crush its influence on our cause.

Maybe we aren't so fucked.

To fix this situation, we embrace our ancestral history, nature, psychedelics, and the groups operating autonomously while celebrating diversity and culture, and radically rethinking social justice by abolishing the systems that force us to strive for that justice in the first place. We return the land to the indigenous people who've occupied it forever. We end oppression of BIPOC and queer people. We live and let live, love and let love.

Let there be gardens, and let there be fire. Because we're not just building what's next. We're ending what should have never been. And we are doing this in service to and communion with our ancestors, psychedelic medicine, nature, the cosmos that have created and nurtured us, and our almost-forgotten continuously expansive consciousness that connects us all.

We got this.

References

Graber, D. & Wengrow, D. (2021). The dawn of everything. (New York City, NY: Farrar Straus & Giroux)

McKenna, T. (1992). Food of the gods. (London, UK: Rider)

Green, R. K.( 2021, April 12) On Decolonizing and Psychedelics. Chacruna https://chacruna.net/decolonizing_policy_psychedelics/

Hauskeller, C. (2022, August 25) Decolonization is a metaphor towards a different ethic. The case from psychedelic studies. Taylor & Francis. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03080188.2022.2122788

George, J. R., Michaels, T. I., Sevelius, J. &, Williams, M. T. (2019, July 1). The psychedelic renaissance and the limitations of a White-dominant medical framework: A call for indigenous and ethnic minority inclusion. Journal of Psychedelic Studies. https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/4/1/article-p4.xml

Ladha, A, & Suša, R. (2022, November 29) Why the Psychedelic Renaissance is just colonialism by another name. Double Blind. https://doubleblindmag.com/colonialism-by-another-name/

Williams, K, Romero, O. S. G., Braunstein, M, & Brant, S. (2022, July 30). Anthropology of Consciousness. Indigenous Philosophies and the Psychedelic Renaissance https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anoc.12161

Letheby, C., Gerrans, P., (2017, June 30) National Library of Medicine. Self unbound: ego dissolution in psychedelic experience. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6007152/

Keywords:
- psychedelics
- power structures
- indigenous
- ego death
- community

Summary

This article explores psychedelics as a catalyst for dismantling oppressive power structures like patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. Drawing on ancestral memory, indigenous wisdom, and decentralized traditions, it argues for a future built on mutual aid and connection to nature. The author likens ego death to the cultural shift needed to transcend domination and hierarchy. It critiques the commodification of psychedelics and calls for community-based alternatives that resist co-optation. By building new systems and breaking down the old, we can move toward liberation, autonomy, and reconnection with the earth, spirit, and one another.

Image credits:
- Ayahuasca visions by Peruvian maestro and painter Pablo Amaringo, from 'The Ayahuasca Visions of Pablo Amaringo' by Howard Charing, Pablo Amaringo, and Peter Cloudsley (2011)
- Hypnagogist (https://www.instagram.com/hypnagogist/) used with permission
- Jessica Perlstein -- The Fifth Sacred Thing (https://www.jessicaperlsteinart.com/workszoom/3667292/the-fifth-sacred-thing#/)