Dear Consciousness Community: You Need a Political Awakening!

The time to act is now

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I’ve had some very disheartening talks lately with friends and acquaintances who are part of the extended “consciousness community” or the “transformational community” — the elite subset of the population that goes to EDM festivals, takes psychedelics, pursues yoga, Tantra, sound meditations, ecstatic dance, ayahuasca retreats, and so on. I’m closely associated with this elitist sector of society due to my past writing.

What bothers me is that most people in these communities — including many dear friends of mine — seem to be spiritually bypassing, ignoring the rapid slide toward autocracy in the U.S. I’m sorry to say it, but they seem to think, if they go to Burning Man enough times or take enough mushrooms and sit under enough vibrating gongs for long enough, the world will just simply magically elevate to a different frequency: All will be well. If they don’t actually believe this, it is still how they act.

Most of the people I know from these circles are obstinately apolitical. They have developed a number of rhetorical tricks and mental constructs to defend their abdication of commitment and responsibility. I find this exasperating. I intend to vent about it here, in a free-form way. (If you don’t want to read a tirade on this topic, feel free to skip this essay).

I also feel guilty, responsible for some of this. I was very excited, twenty years ago, about “the consciousness revolution.” Back then, I believed a mass awakening would be just the thing to reset and redeem our world: We could trip our way to launching a more utopian, benevolent society. My first books may have accidentally helped reinforce a worldview that allow people to “shut off their minds and float downstream,” as Tim Leary put it, while feeling vindicated and entitled, even as a diabolical form of technocratic authoritarianism takes hold, with incredibly ominous implications for our future.

One friend in NYC runs a group focused on “psychedelics and climate change.” After Trump won the election, she posted to her group about how she didn’t believe in the “Left / Right” dichotomy. She didn’t mention that Trump’s reelection was a tragedy for the environmental movement with long-term, devastating consequences. Instead, she said she found all politics to be about “ego.” However, in this case, one side, the Right, is pursuing insanely ecologically destructive policies. The other side is tepid and bland, but at least they tried to address the climate emergency. Right and “Left” (I hardly think of mainstream Democrats as “Left,” more like neoliberal sellouts, but let’s forget about that for now) are simply not the same.

A few nights ago at a party, I was speaking with a “spiritual” woman in her forties who repeated the same annoying point. She said she didn’t believe there was any real difference between Left and Right. She also said she was starting to watch Charlie Kirk videos, provided by her algorithm, and found him quite reasonable. She thought it was horrible how radical Leftists celebrated his murder (although this is repeated over and over, I have seen no evidence to support it; every Democratic politician and leftist influencer with a following decried the violence as abhorrent).

When I tried to offer an alternative viewpoint, she quickly cut me off. She refused to discuss anything “political.” She insisted she was entitled to her views. I had no right to keep arguing with her about what she believed, even though she had done no serious work or any research to arrive at her beliefs.

Behind her extreme defensiveness, I felt there was a bit of the vibe I sometimes encounter in Burner/post-New Age circles: There is this vague idea that people shouldn’t be challenged or forced to account for themselves in a strictly logical, evidence-based way. This is also part of the dangerously frothy thinking that has fed the MAHA movement. This idea that we should forget scientific evidence and follow our instincts and feelings has led to a situation where we will see children die in droves as states make vaccines optional, stop offering Covid shots, and so on.

We are truly in a stupidity epidemic. It is stunning. The “consciousness community” has built a rhetorical prison around itself, where you can’t even talk about the political situation at all — certainly not in the serious, realistic terms in which we all need to be talking about it now. The MAGA tyrants are basically Xeroxing the Third Reich playbook and wheat-pasting it across America. We are moving quickly toward elimination of free speech and the prospect of mass imprisonment of dissenters. We could see a genocide here; there is a lot of blood-lust on the Right, who like to call liberals and Leftists, “unhumans.” We need people to be speaking and acting now, as if their lives and future depended on it, because they do. Instead, most of us (even smart, well-resourced, well-educated people) seem paralyzed, entranced, asleep.

I asked this woman to forget about the words “Left” and “Right”: Did she believe that people, generally — including, even, poor people — should have the right to health care and public education as basic rights? She agreed that this was so — it was what everybody enjoyed in her country of origin. I then pointed out that the current regime in the U.S. is taking away health care from many millions of poor people, cutting basic social services, and transferring that money to the wealthy through tax breaks. The other political party, what we have to call the “Left,” is at least trying to stop this.

She once again reiterated she didn’t believe in politics, or “Left versus Right” dichotomies. All “politics” was the same, bad thing to her. She refused to reflect on how she arrived at her conclusions. Without doing research (like, for instance, reading books) and literally knowing nothing, she still held tight to her beliefs and would not allow for discussion about it. The term “tax break” meant nothing to her — I sensed she blocked it out as part of the general ambience of “political speak” that she rejected as dichotomous, alienating, and somehow not real, compared to how she feels while dancing to EDM at a desert festival.

One problem with many sectors of U.S. society is the hyper-focus on being (at least superficially) “nice.” Under the surface of most scenes, even ones that pretend to be "transformational” or “countercultural,” I encounter a deep, and deeply boring, conformity — a terror of sticking out, being oppositional, or causing conflict. One reason for this, I suppose, is social media, where you can get canceled in an instant if someone decides they don’t like you or they want to get you. Whether or not any putdown or accusation is true, it will stick for a long time, while any defense one can offer will be soon forgotten. Also, in the “consciousness community,” many people make a living essentially doing service work for corporations and/or wealthy individuals: Coaching, consulting, taking wealthy people on retreats, and so on. They fear holding a real position or challenging the status quo, because this might alienate some of their future clients.

I recommend people buck this trend. Take the losses. Break rank. Courageously speak your truth. Admit where you don’t know enough. Then actually do the research to learn.

As for “psychedelics and climate change,” I don’t understand how we can talk about our ecological situation seriously without acknowledging that, while progressives certainly didn’t do enough to address the ecological emergency unleashed by late-stage industrial society, the policies pursued by the Right spell catastrophe for our future. They pose an existential threat for all of us. If we allow this nightmare to continue, we doom our children to a hellish future.

Biden was far from perfect but he was, at least, seeking to build a renewable energy infrastructure in the U.S., creating thousands of manufacturing jobs in Red States to make solar power and wind turbines. In a kamikaze act of spite, Trump disbanded this entire industry — even though the U.S. is falling far behind other developed countries in generating renewable energy. China is now the world leader in this area.

The thing is: We need renewable energy for many reasons, not just to move toward a lower carbon economy (according to recent reports, we are rushing toward 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures by 2050, which will be devastating), but also because, let’s not forget, fossil fuels are a finite source of energy. They will run low fairly soon before they run out, particularly with data centers sucking up electricity so people can post cat memes while high school students cheat on their homework with AI.

Government policies are not just abstract concepts that mean nothing. Eventually, they massively impact people’s lives — that includes my life and your life. If you believe you don’t need to pay any attention to politics, that is only a result of a temporary condition of privilege and entitlement. It means your Medicare is not going to be taken away, the tariffs won’t ruin your business next week, and you can handle the skyrocketing energy and food costs that result from Trump’s policies. For many people, their privilege and entitlement may disappear when it is too late for us to fight back. Once the devastating policies of the Right impact you personally —like, for instance, when FEMA is disbanded and there is no federal response to a flood or earthquake in your city, or when the regulatory agencies are gone and your kids get cancer because of pollutants, or when a new strain of Covid turns fatal and there are no available vaccines for it, or when your transgendered cousin is rounded up and put into a concentration camp — it may be too late to do anything but suffer miserably.

In the U.S., many people today seem severely dissociated, in a trance. They are unable to think clearly, informed by historical context and logical inference. They are unable to connect what the government is undertaking now with real-world consequences later. They don’t even seem to grasp how government policies will impact them personally. Many Americans have forfeited their thinking to Fox News or to algorithmic capture on social media. I’ve never seen anything like it before.

When I consider the speed with which the Project 2025/“tech-fash” MAGA crowd are turning the U.S. into Nazi North Korea while the opposition remains in confused disarray. I sense impending doom hovering over this country. I don’t know exactly how doom will descend on us. It could be many different disaster happening all at once, such as economic collapse and hyper-inflation, antibiotic resistant superbugs, natural disasters, concentration camps for marginalized populations and political dissenters, along with destructive wars.

Let’s face it: