Kingdom of Cults, Part 4

My radical therapy programme for the entire industrialised world.

In Part One and Two of this post I started from my gut feelings about our supposed leaders. In Part Three I said industrial civilisation is the largest and most powerful cult the world has ever seen. 

I promised to try to lay out how we might deal with that, keeping my warnings about solutions delusions in mind. I would also add that asking environmentalists for solutions at this stage is like asking your doctor to cure your cancer when he’s been telling you to stop smoking for 30 years. 

So any attempt to change course is going to be hard. It’s going to be impossible if we go on assuming we’re dealing with sane, well adjusted people. Or, indeed, that we ourselves are sane, well adjusted people. We didn’t just happen to end up operating a globally destructive economic system by accident. We painstakingly constructed it over generations, on top of millions of innocent corpses. 

Our rehabilitation then has to be deeply therapeutic. I don’t mean bath bombs, tubular bells and green smoothies, although they may play a role. I mean taking people to the point of psychological breakdown or breakthrough within expertly controlled conditions. This will trigger and enable a return to sanity. 

Sustainabile is a small contribution to that. It’s part of how we can break down and break through our attachment to the world as it is, or how we would like it to be.

This is what Joseph Campbell identified as the hero’s journey: separation - initiation - return. We may need to repeat this many times as we hone our techniques, possibly over many lifetimes. 

You may have noticed that this has a slightly different theory of change than “10 things you can do for a sustainable office.” 

Most people won’t like it, or even agree with it. Few will volunteer. Even fewer will pay. But maybe it shouldn’t be a paid thing at all.  

Individual by individual, small group by small group, we must deconstruct the industrial worldview. And we’re going to have to do it while the system it has created collapses around us. We must find and widen the cracks and crevices where the living truth of a normal human ecological consciousness can breath through. 

If you’re doubting this, consider the following. Throughout history some colonists ended up living with indigenous people. The records show how many of them never wished to return. They would evade capture. If caught, they would return to the wilderness as soon as they could. Here’s a clue: it wasn’t because they especially liked eating wombats and porcupines. 

Also during those periods indigenous people were taken into our way of life. Almost all of them returned to their own people the first chance they got. Many that didn’t withered away to an early death under conditions they found intolerably inhuman. 

Escape was easier then. The cult was not so pervasive. It had not taken over so much of the physical and mental space and resources. 

How do we create such refuges now?

Free space is now rare. At least, anywhere that industrialised people will find practical or desirable. Whether we’re talking remote eco-villages, bunkers or Mars, for most of us, there’s nowhere to run. 

We might go for the hills or the forest. Live off grid. But as Ted Kaczynski found out, as did Wendell Berry, the industrialised world has a habit of following. Bit by bit, it turns your remote idyll into a suburb. Or more likely you will find, as I did, that you’re still carrying the suburbs in your head.  

I was born and raised in the fields and forests of the Essex-Hertfordshire border in south east England. I keenly remember standing on the hill outside my village, watching as the London lights marched closer. I moved further away, to Suffolk. I lived in a farm cottage. I worked in the woods. But I found myself taking the Guardian into the trees to feed a news addiction I couldn’t shake. Eventually, that and the search for a mate drew me back to the towns. 

Even arch-primitivist Thoreau only hid out in Emerson’s back garden for a year or so. Then he went off to a proper job. 

You could join a small eco-community somewhere. Those I’ve belonged to are rather like trying to escape a lunatic asylum by building a less luxurious one by consensus. It’s out of the fire and into the frying pan, where you have to spend all day arguing about whether the vegans have to wash it. 

All this means that for most of us, escape is going to begin as an internal process. I’m not talking spiritual escapism or bypassing. You can say you’re Zen because you can stare at the wall for hours. But you might need to consider whether that’s going to help your descendants tackle the cockroach plague of 2052. 

The paradigm is the problem. It is that which must be changed. Here’s where my day job is starting to meet up with this blog. I was recently hired by a government ministry of all things. I was asked to research what motivates people to take pro-ecological action. I couldn’t say “sex, drugs and rock and roll”. I had to come up with something else. 

It turns out the peer reviewed literature on this is very clear. People act based on the progressive values that we all share. Ecological values are developed and strengthened by meaningful experiences in nature. 

That’s a remedy we can work with. 

But there’s a bit I left out of my report. It’s also well documented that carefully administered psychedelics can help. It’s in study after study. Not to mention tens of thousands of years of direct, curated experience. Certain natural compounds, ingested in the right context, help reinstate our harmony with the world. The mushrooms that make the forest think can help us think too. Our planet grows patches for the glitchy software of our minds. 

Our family wants us back.

Let’s remind ourselves how powerful these methods are for destabilising the cult of industrial civilisation. We need look no further than the efforts to demonise and criminalise them throughout history. Consider how widespread psychedelic use was integral to progressive movements of the 60s and 70s. Then again in the 80s and 90s in the UK free party, traveller, rave and road protest scene. They helped catalyse freedoms that were then repressed. They weren’t perfect or without casualties, but nothing rebellious ever is. 

Recall the seditious things I’ve said on this blog. What if I were to say that I’ve been microdosing psilocybin for years? That would be the thing most likely to get me into trouble with my job and the police. And the following section is probably the one most of my readers will find hardest to support.  

Bingeing beer and red wine to stave off the terror of imminent societal collapse is apparently my business. It’s the subject of jovial approval. Ditto my burgeoning caffeine addiction. That’s not even to mention the incredible numbers of people, including many of my own friends and family, gulping down pharmaceutical antidepressants. They need them to cope with everyday life in the society we’re apparently perfecting. The pain of modernity is now acute. The world’s most powerful nation is struggling with an opioid addiction. 

So we’re already on a lot of drugs. Maybe, we should just be a bit more choosy about them?

The idea that the repression of natural psychedelics has anything to do with concerns about mental or physical health is laughable at a glance. Everybody who’s taken any time at all to learn anything about the subject immediately understands this. There are mental health risks associated with the use of these compounds, even when properly applied. But in the right contexts they’re blasted into almost complete insignificance by their positive effects. 

But let’s pretend health reasons are behind this dominant system’s attempts to destroy the use of psychedelics. How come alcohol is still fine and dandy? How did this depressive muscle poison get top of the pile? That’s without even referencing the legal mental health abuse of the over exposure to chemicals, computers, smart phones, violent entertainment, social media and pointless work. Or the health effects of junk food, air pollution or destabilising the Earth’s entire climate and killing all the plants and animals. Where’s the War on All That? 

This societal cult seems very concerned about our health when we’re risking it in the name of escape. It doesn’t give a shit when destroying ourselves lines up nicely with the dominant economic model and the cult’s agenda. I can eat yourself to morbid obesity and Type 2 diabetes spurred on by the junk food ads everywhere I look. I can still smoke nicotine into an early grave. All legal. If I once take some naturally occurring mushrooms in a therapeutic setting on my own or with loving friends or experienced experts, I am very likely breaking the law. Thankfully, this is starting to change. It’s being challenged in many places around the world. We should take full advantage of that.      

Visionary comedian Bill Hicks brought many of these ideas into mainstream entertainment, and they’re true. 

He said: “I believe God left certain drugs growing naturally upon this planet to help speed up our evolution.” I would say many naturally occurring psychoactive substances co-evolved with us. They have properties that help to maintain our ecological sanity. That’s been repeatedly proved scientifically in a lab. It’s as real as penicillin, which is, you may know, also a fungus. Why else would they have been fundamental to ritual ecstacy for thousands of years? And why was ritual ecstacy such a major part of keeping humanity sane?

This might seem a radical, almost reckless approach. Which is itself an illustration of just how weird we’ve become. All I’m suggesting is a return to the way nearly all humans have operated for almost all of our history.  

We’re in a crisis created by our consciousness. We need a serious intervention that can alter that. In environmentalism as elsewhere, we keep saying we want radical change. But we don’t want to change anything radically, especially ourselves. 

This, clearly, has political ramifications. Bill again: “Drugs that occur naturally on this planet, that make you realise how you’re being fucked every day of your life are illegal. Coincidence? I dunno…”  

Our industrialised, militarised society is right in including such substances in its War on Drugs. It does so for the same reason it cracks down on serious activists, or even those demonstrating an alternative lifestyle. And for the same reason it fought a centuries long war on ‘superstition’ a.k.a. ecological belief systems. 

Even with their inherent risks and pitfalls, these are things that, left unchecked, might genuinely threaten the exploitative, mechanistic, destructive status quo.

This is intertwined with colonialism. Kill local ecological and spiritual traditions. Ban the sacred substances that fuel them, or harness them into the creation of submission to the system. 

The cult we are dealing with operates like a highly aggressive form of conceptual cancer. It overpowers and kills the concepts and practices that would otherwise wake us from it and cure our disease. That’s not an ideological or belief statement. Again, as Bill Hicks said: “Give me paper and a pen, I’ll show my work, case closed…I can prove this on an Etch-a-Sketch.”

So here it is, finally, my own listicle. My own “Quick and easy steps to sustainable living”:

1. Be expertly supported through a mental breakdown to an ecological consciousness in a place of natural beauty, if necessary with expertly administered natural psychedelics. 

As John Muir said: “Into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.”

I’ll line that up against any of your complex systems theories, social change models and elaborate diagrams and come out smiling. 

If you don’t believe me, you can read the literature. 

Of course, this has an element of fighting with fire. Maybe it’s just time for a new, less suicidal cult, to take over. Or rather, as I tend to think, there will be lots of new cults jostling for position in the chaotic interim, trying to establish their own form of order and their own new dominant systems. Which is as it has always been. Some of them, of course, will be better for us than others.

The key for us is to find those that build safe, resilient and loving communities around them. They’ll need enough coherency and genuine connection to deal with bad actors and the mentally ill, including heading off those who suddenly decide they’re the guru or messiah.  

Beyond that, it’s all to play for. Or at least, all the remnants will be to play for by whoever is left alive to play for them. 

Next week we’ll take a look at another tool for charting that territory.