We Have Met the Enemy and They Are Us

The election revealed a lot—maybe too much. But among all the cheering and gloating there's one group I never expected to see celebrating: The psychedelic citizens of “Medicine World."

These last few days, everyone I know feels like they’re hanging in the breeze. It’s unnerving, and there’s a great deal of shock, and grief, and gloating, and hate bubbling up right now from all sides. No great surprise there. But one thing I didn’t expect to find was the number of people in the spiritual community who are celebrating the election returns. I don’t mean in a “this is what’s needed to blow up the system!” or “Trump is the bodhisattva!” sense. I mean legitimately, actively excited that he won.

I thought we all agreed. I thought we were on the same page. Now I see we never were, and that maybe I never knew what was true anyway. 

“Medicine World” is a sketchy term at best.

I use it as shorthand for the polymorphous realm of spiritual seekers, ayahuasca guides and MDMA therapists, solo wilderness adventurers and supplicants. It’s by nature indefinable, and yet I lean on it to assure myself that we all pray for the same things: Greater peace, greater compassion, greater understanding and respect for one another’s differences.

Do we? Did we ever? I know, I know, the signs were there all along. Remember Jacob Chansley, the “QAnon Shaman”? Besides being—by a long shot—the sharpest dresser of the Jan. 6th rioters, a single glance tells you that guy’s drinking ayahuasca—and that he’s not tuned to the same station I am. A childish part of me truly believed the ultraviolet corridors of the psychedelic realm all led to the same place of unity and agreement. What did I know? 

Then there’s an acquaintance—a medicine guide who interviewed me on his podcast—who posted this alongside an image of an American flag:

“Congratulations to America and its Democracy. The people…have elected a President and I think even more so, a coalition of visionaries whose goal it is to allow America to shine…I hope that the new President will have messages of unity and healing and try and end the divisiveness of this country.

I hope that the Left is able to wisely reflect in the mirror and see that’s its extreme positions are not what the majority of Americans want. Economic prosperity is vital. Only an elite would think otherwise. Nations need borders as homes need walls. The health and well-being of our children is of vital importance. Threats to them are threats to life itself. Indoctrinating our children in radical ideology and the sexualizing of children is unacceptable…May God continue to bless the USA and life itself.”

I can’t really argue with such lofty sentiments, though I have a couple actually quite a lot of bones to pick with the details. I can’t separate these truisms from those who speak them. I’m someone who read—and admired!—J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy; today I’m legitimately frightened for what he plans to do in office. Let’s not crack into the topic of his boss, a figurative literal rapist. 

The podcaster and the QAnon shaman may be mere foot soldiers, but they’re far from the only ones. I’m not sure Trump buddy Russell Brand (another celebrity whose writing I once admired) counts as a spiritual figure, but Charles Eisenstein—author of the now slightly perverse-sounding The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible—certainly does. I sometimes wonder if his interminable posts are designed simply to exhaust readers before they can devine his true sympathies, but it’s clear he’s wading in some truly muddy waters.

Again: What do I know? If I’ve learned anything from my adventures in Medicine World, it’s that holding opposing points of view isn’t optional; it’s part and parcel to “the psychedelic perspective.” Moving out of linear and into fractal thought reminds us that our 3-D problems and narratives are merely that: They’re stories we tell ourselves to make sense of an often senseless-seeming world, and as stories go they might not be true. 

What I’m recognizing in this harsh morning are all the ways I bought into my own stories of good and bad. Don’t get me wrong: Trump and his backers are objectively awful, and I believe another four years of his gross incompetence and greed will be ruinious. And yet believing that voting for its opposite would somehow save us was lazy at least, delusional at worst.

Here’s the thing: I’m not a true believer, and never have been. No president has ever embodied the values I home towards. None has addressed, head-on, the concerns I find truly needful: The rapid degradation of our climate, the massive inequalities built into our political and social systems, the virus of institutional racism. (Okay, I was pretty excited about Obama, but that feels like a lifetime ago.)

Still, I believed fooled myself that having a loose spiritual orientation was a kind of glue, a shared belief in something approaching justice, fairness, and respect for all forms of life. Now I get, with more than a twinge of sadness, why psychedelics are called “non-specific amplifiers.” They don’t make us kinder and more compassionate. All of us believe we’re doing the right thing, at least most of the time. Of course, what’s “right” is highly up for grabs. In perhaps the most jarring moment of Timothy Snyder’s brilliant Bloodlands, he points out that the soldiers of the Third Reich believed they were on the side of good. Until we engage with those we disagree with on this basis, change is impossible.

I’ll leave you with a note from a dear friend. He’s not psychedelic per se, but he crystallizes the disorientation of this moment:

“I fought the strong urge to stay home in bed all day, and got up to get ready for work. Coming in to the Dylan Center, I at least feel like I’m doing some small part to uphold the humanities, even humanity itself. Music still sounds wondrous, art still persists, Woody Guthrie’s guitar still kills fascists. But at the same time the very molecules around us seem rearranged into unrecognizable patterns, obscuring the faces of people I’ll never understand.”

Though my friend’s words express despair, I feel embedded in them the call to keep engaging those we don’t agree with. To let down our end of the rope, to gaze into each others’ faces and trust that something approaching recognition will take hold.