What occurs whenever you combine ketamine, ecstasy, and mushrooms with far-right ideology? Spoiler: The outcomes aren’t fairly.
In the previous few years, the thoughts of Elon Musk has dramatically moved in two instructions, one lateral and the opposite vertical. Ideologically, he has shifted from a average big-business centrist who supported Barack Obama to a far-right partisan of Donald Trump, a White Home adviser whose contentious tenure ended final Wednesday. Cognitively, Musk has gone from being hyperbolic however nonetheless grounded in actuality to being—or so it will appear—nearly completely excessive as a kite. That metaphor is likely to be too dated for the high-tech Musk, the futurist behind Area-X and Starlink. Maybe it’s extra correct to say he’s as a excessive as a satellite tv for pc circling within the exosphere—and is often on the verge of leaving earth’s orbit altogether to go careening out of the photo voltaic system completely.
The truth that Musk is a person of ketamine and different mind-altering substances has lengthy been identified. As I pointed out in March, Musk’s “use (or abuse) of illicit medicine—together with LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, and mushrooms, in addition to ketamine—has been reported by such respected shops as The Wall Avenue Journal.” On Friday, The New York Occasions published an extensively documented article that made clear that Musk’s drug makes use of is much more intense and undisciplined than the sooner reporting had outlined:
Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went effectively past occasional use. He advised individuals he was taking a lot ketamine, a robust anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a identified impact of power use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a every day remedy field that held about 20 tablets, together with ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, in keeping with a photograph of the field and individuals who have seen it.
This account largely focuses on the months earlier than the final election, though there is no such thing as a cause to assume Musk has moderated his drug consumption extra just lately. The Occasions article is personality-focused. It additionally frames the drug use when it comes to Musk’s more and more “erratic” habits, together with his convoluted private life. This “erratic” habits consists of giving a fascist salute at a Trump inauguration occasion. As an outgrowth of his “pro-natalist” ideology which argues that folks of superior intelligence have to populate the earth, Musk has 14 “identified” kids from a number of ladies resulting in ongoing custody battles (there are experiences that the precise Musk brood is far bigger, since there are quite a few as but unacknowledged progeny). Ashley St. Clair, who gave delivery in February to the newest little Muskling, says he told her “could be keen to offer his sperm to anybody who wished to have a toddler.”
Clearly, Musk’s weird persona is a consider his freaky habits, together with his epic drug consumption. However it’s a mistake to deal with Musk as an remoted oddball or to disassociate his actions from their political context. Musk’s urge for food for mind-altering substances and his more and more strident assist for far-right ideology in actual fact go hand-in-hand. On April 28, Jules Evans, of the Psychedelic Problem Undertaking, revealed an intriguing essay in The New York Occasions arguing that “a as soon as left-wing psychedelic motion” has grow to be “tightly intertwined” with the Trump administration. The proof Evans supplies is revealing: Silicon Valley Trump supporters comparable to Peter Thiel are investing in psychedelics and Well being and Human Providers Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (who reportedly sold cocaine as an Harvard undergraduate) is an fanatic for utilizing psychedelics as therapy for trauma.
However the historic narrative Evans presents—that psychedelics had been as soon as the provenance of left-wingers focused on hippy beliefs of peace and consciousness enlargement, however at the moment are embraced by right-wingers focused on making a living—is fake. In reality, mind-altering medicine are a software and have for a lot of a long time (if not centuries) been utilized by the precise in addition to the left.
Within the early nineteenth century, probably the most outstanding drug customers in British tradition had been excessive Tories comparable to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey (creator of the vivid 1821 memoir, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater), who had been rabid haters of Jacobins and pro-democracy actions. Their imaginations deep in opium reveries, these literary giants penned essays wealthy in gothic imagery to specific their reactionary disdain for modernity.
Present Problem
In his e-book Blitzed: Medication in Nazi Germany (2015), the historian Norman Ohler highlights the fact that Hitler’s regime had a powerful affinity for methamphetamine, generally referred to as meth. The drug (which was authorized at the moment) was an essential gasoline for the Nazi struggle machine, which used meth as an energizing agent for troopers (because it lowered each concern and the necessity for sleep).
Nearer to residence, some American libertarians have lengthy been pleasant to drug tradition. As Brian Doherty paperwork in his entertaining book Radicals for Capitalism (2007), within the Nineteen Fifties a bunch of militantly libertarian businessmen related to the Basis for Financial Training turned unlikely experimenters with the newly found drug LSD (then authorized). This group included William C. Mullendore, a former assistant to Herbert Hoover and onetime vice chairman of South California Edison in addition to the high-powered lawyer James Ingebretsen. Within the early Nineteen Fifties, this group—usually given to union busting and pushing for a rollback of the New Deal—fell beneath the sway of the New Age guru Gerald Heard (who additionally occasionally served because the non secular mentor to cultural figures just like the poet W.H. Auden and the novelist Aldous Huxley). Maybe as a result of they felt so alienated from an America the place Social Safety turned unassailable and union density was excessive, they turned to mind-altering medicine to supply a path to another actuality.
Beneath Heard’s celebration of non secular enlargement, Doherty notes, “this squad of spiritually in search of high-bourgeois industrialists and professionals lived out a primary wave of psychedelic adventurism, earlier than the extra populist one of many mid-to late Sixties.” After all, the wealthy are used to seeing the world as their playground, one the place they will take dangers they wouldn’t essentially need to share with the plebes. In that spirit, as Sam Tanenhaus describes in his new biography of William F. Buckley Jr., within the late Sixties Buckley and fellow Nationwide Assessment editor James Burnham (each fierce elitists) experimented with LSD.
San Francisco within the Sixties was residence to each the counterculture and the burgeoning tech sector. In 1961, the engineer Myron J. Stolaroff began the Worldwide Basis for Superior Examine in Menlo Park, California, to advertise using psychedelics as a software for creativity. As the author Malcolm Harris notes in his 2023 e-book Palo Alto, “acid was marketed to Bay Space information staff as a productiveness support from the start.” Harris observes that this custom lives on within the current “surge of curiosity in ‘microdosing,’ now a preferred performance-enhancing methodology in Silicon Valley tech circles that includes taking tiny quantities of LSD earlier than work.”
It’s this Silicon Valley tradition of utilizing medicine to reinforce psychological efficiency that almost all clearly formed Musk. However in parallel with the Silicon Valley drug tradition, there’s a extra hedonistic tradition round Donald Trump (who himself is personally averse to ingesting and medicines). As a Rolling Stone reported in 2024, the primary Trump administration was “awash” in pace and Xanax.
Among the many proper, medicine like ketamine used not merely utilized in a utilitarian spirit to get a aggressive edge over rivals however are tied to a bigger ideology of caste superiority. Musk has a savior complicated, one tied to his sense that he’s a determine of future with a mission to “make life multiplanetary & prolong the sunshine of consciousness to the celebrities.” In different phrases, Musk sees himself as a Nietzschean Übermensch— past the mundane norms of excellent and evil. However generally even an Übermensch wants slightly assist to entry his superpowers. In comedian books, that is normally accomplished by way of publicity to radiation; in actual life from performance-enhancing medicine. (Not by accident, Musk is a huge fan of Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic Dune [1965], the place a mixture of medicine and genetic engineering produces a superman. What Musk misses is that Herbert’s novel is a critique of this fascist plan).
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Anybody who does medicine is aware of the actual hazard is not only overdosing but in addition mixing them up for a too potent concoction. In Musk’s case, he’s combined collectively not simply many potent medicine however added within the much more poisonous mind-altering powers of right-wing ideology.
Writing within the psychoanalytical journal Parapraxis, the scholar Taija Mars McDougall, at the moment a postdoctoral fellow on the College of California, reflected on what occurs whenever you combine ketamine with an elitist ideology. She notes that ketamine is “the drug of our time” simply as earlier eras had been additionally outlined by completely different medicine (the sixties by marijuana and LSD, the Seventies with cocaine).
McDougall calls consideration to the writings of Musk’s Silicon Valley ally Marc Andreessen, whose 2023 essay “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” has a chapter referred to as “Changing into Technological Superman.” In that chapter, Andreesen (who can also be personally abstentious) writes, “We aren’t primitives, cowering in concern of the lightning bolt. We’re the apex predator; the lightning works for us.”
Ketamine, McDougall suggests, is the lightning that Musk sees as permitting him to grow to be an apex predator and dominate all of the primitives who are usually not able to grow to be supermen. Given Musk’s personal embrace of racism—notably his promotion of the “white genocide” lie—it’s not onerous to conclude that the “primitives” on this state of affairs are individuals who historically are racially marginalized.
As McDougall argues:
When those that are on the levers of the highly effective nexus of know-how and finance are utilizing ketamine therapeutically, recreationally, and past, it feels indicative of the financial significance of Musk’s personal willingness to over-leverage—taking over more and more pernicious quantities of debt for the sake of, say, shopping for Twitter—and the techno-optimist’s willingness to over-leverage to grow to be the apex predator. Via ketamine, we would glean an understanding of … the perniciousness of an unbounded white psyche, its fantasies of technodominance, and what the disciples of such a motion are keen to pledge to attain it come collectively in a determine like Musk.
In her wealthy essay, McDougall attracts on her personal private experiences utilizing ketamine to make a persuasive case that Musk’s descent into ideological fantasy (full with paranoia and a disregard for opposite proof) has been exacerbated by his drug use.
It’s regrettable that Musk has grow to be the ugly public face of the brand new psychedelic revolution. As Jules Evans rightly notes, there’s a class dimension to how plutocrats have hijacked promising therapeutic discoveries:
Many members of the millionaire and billionaire class have discovered that means, therapeutic and pleasure in psychedelics, and so they need to deliver that to the plenty. (Take any of the large American dynasties—the Gettys, Rockefellers, Mellons, Kochs, Hearsts—and also you’ll in all probability discover a member who has given cash to psychedelic causes.) They might dismiss considerations about security as sensationalism or drug struggle propaganda, however their sources present them entry to months of remedy and break day work to get well after a nasty journey. Most People don’t have that luxurious.
Evans rightly requires “a greater public security web for psychedelics.” Medication like ketamine, mushrooms, and LSD might certainly enrich humanity. They’re too priceless to be simply left to the Nazis. As for Musk, he must go chilly turkey—not simply on medicine but in addition on the fantasy that he’s a racial superman.
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