Another brief thought on politics and a thought on how psychosomatic drugs alter one’s perception of reality.

Politics
The mainstream Democrats and many liberals in the US misunderstand why there is an alt-right. They assume that it is due to sheer hickery, racism, violent tendencies, primitive tribalism. Yes, there is a hickish, racist, violent, tribalistic side to the alt right. But the reason why there is an alt-right rather than a strong mainstream faction of conservatives has to do with illusions of consciousness. Liberals and conservatives both stand on moral platforms, and, yes, each side adamantly believes they are the correct party. The difference is not in the presence or absence of morality, because each side of the aisle thinks they have morals and the other doesn’t—conservatives are racist homophobic gunslinging oil-spilling hicks, liberals are city-slicking anti-american ideological pagan baby-killers.

In indigenous mythologies around the world, one of the strongest recurring motifs is that of the Trickster. The Trickster is the one who takes the role of the wild card, the one who is contrarian, morally ambivalent. Coyote, Raven, Seagull, Racoon, Hyena, Magpie. These are trickster figures, sneaky and opportunistic. When there is a social majority, the trickster emerges. Sometimes, the majority is mostly beneficial, and the trickster is maleficent. Sometimes, the majority is manipulative, and the trickster is a freedom-fighter. Sometimes the trickster is comic relief, sometimes the trickster is a terrorist. The trickster archetype is morally ambivalent, in that it recurs in the human psyche precisely as a counterbalancing force, indiscriminate toward the moral values of the societal mainstream, whether that be a tribe who outcasts, a church who burns heretics at the stake, or a political party who relies on peer pressure morality. The trickster emerges as a reaction to peer pressure, to tribalism. It is interested in destroying the power imbalance, not really in getting any moral accomplishment. The alt-right is leaning into the trickster archetype. Mainstream liberals are currently the social majority relying on peer pressure morality, and so the dark side of the conservatives is coming out. Depth psychology, psychoanalysis, and faith traditions teach us that everybody has a shadow-side, regardless of your political party. It is very very unwise to overlook your own darkness when you judge the darkness of another. There is often a cycling of who plays the trickster at different times in history. Fifty, sixty years ago, the progressive hippies were the trickster against the authoritarian polity. Now, it is the socially marginalized people who don’t want to progress for progress’ sake, to simply follow a social tide. And they are resorting to immoral behavior to get their message across, that there is the danger of an ideological liberal social majority taking root. It has always cycled like this, look at very old newspapers, they bled yellow and red. Nothing’s changed, if anything, there has been gradual improvement, and to expect everyone to suddenly become a happy snowflake after 3.7 billion years of harsh reality for life on Earth is quite unrealistic.

The liberals have a dark side, too. Social justice fueled the beginning of the USSR and Chinese communism, and led to the later atrocities produced by authorities and bureacracies. Institutionalized morality is risky, which is why the founding fathers instated separation of church and state. People will always fight for causes, and that is natural. But the US Constitution wisely keeps this tension of moral ambivalence at the heart of our government. It doesn’t matter who, everybody has something to learn. Every social cluster of people has a light and a darkness. Take your darkness for granted, and someone else will try to poke at it. Sometimes, people are just assholes, sometimes people are justly assholes.

When a group of people become self-righteous and overlook their own darkness, when they stop sitting down and talking with their opposition, regardless of which side starts it and regardles of if the other side is doing it too—as soon as the dynamic begins of refusing to check your own sin first, that is when deep darkness starts to take ahold. The trickster emerges and tries to do devilish chaotic things in the shadowy void of awareness. The shaman, the wizard, the noble warrior is the one who can face the trickster. The trickster is not an inherently evil force, but it loves to be seen that way, because that feeds it. To see the truth of the trickster is to relieve it of its job. But doing so requires that we relinquish our tribalistic, confrontational neurocircuitry and act like sapient, enlightened beings. The trickster exists to challenge us into deeper awareness, to keep us on our toes, to not allow our orthodoxy to be taken for granted. What seems evil to us at first may be an imperfect light put there to help guide us on our path to enlightenment. What we hate vitriolically may be a sign of something we do not understand.


Psychosomatic alteration of reality
Because reality is mediated/co-generated/filtered by our consciousness, and because our consciousness is not a separate entity from our body, when we are affected by various chemicals in our body, it can be hard to notice within ourselves, especially if the change is subtle and below-the-surface, not dramatic. It is easy to see when someone else’s reality shifts by way of psychosomatic drugs, whether they be psychedelics or psychiatric medicines. It can be hard to see it in oneself. Reality is to us what we experience regularly. So in the brief times when we go between realities, we see into the paradoxical polycosm of possibilities, we experience infinity and the subsequent aporia. But when we have shifted between grooves of reality, it is hard to notice in the moment, except in our memories and in our longings. We feel nostalgia for the past state or sensucht for the unrealized dream. It is, again, the job of the shaman or wizard role (or psychiatrist) to humble oneself beneath the esoteric knowledge of altering someone’s reality. The shaman can use psychosomatic effects to change lives, to change someone’s entire representational schema. This can be a profound act of transformation, and has extremely powerful implications. It can liberate someone by showing them an open door to a world outside, but it can also physiologically gaslight someone. The power of this becomes fuel for conspiracy theories, like the government putting things in our water (which has actually been publicly and officially admitted in several locations in the US as deranged experiments).

I don’t know what to make of it all, except that I am fond of the organic way of working with the hard earth within ourselves, of having to learn and fail and change and grow, of being stuck for years and years—even to die and to lose—looking for ordinary mechanisms of transformation that cannot become a crutch, such as good food, activities, books, film, music, meditation, stable relationships, only occasionally opening up to the chemical path to alternate reality. Psychosomatic drugs have a short metaphysical half-life. The reality they put you into does not last. Although there might not be a singular, permanent, coherent reality to fall back into, the act of relaxing one’s varied projections back toward a natural state is very wise. We will find all of our own sickly tatters and gnarled beauties together as within one tree. I trust the natural creative processes over my own little projections. Insofar as I can touch the links between my projections and the natural forces, I am whole. This is the natural state, I am always already whole, if only I know it.


June 14, 2023
Gorda, CA