True Democracy or No Democracy

Our choice for the future

In my 2017 book, How Soon Is Now, I offered a blueprint for how we could transform our structurally unjust, ecological ruinous post-industrial civilization into a regenerative society based on authenticity, trust, ecological stewardship, and democratic participation. The book came out as Trump’s first term commenced. Most people, at that time, were not able to focus on such a comprehensive alternative.

I never felt the book was perfect, but I thought it was necessary to try to offer a comprehensive model of what could replace this broken system. I hoped the book would spark debate and public conversation, but those never happened. It took me ten years to finish the book, at great personal cost, both psychologically and financially. In the end, I felt I failed in my mission.

Eight years later, we see an intensive effort to transform our civilization, finally underway. Alas, we are moving in the complete opposite direction of what I hope for and what I proposed in that book. Instead of using the technological and political tools of our contemporary society to intensify democracy, enhance the realm of personal freedom in a positive sense, and confront the reality of an ecological emergency that threatens most forms of life (Tardigrades will be spared), we are seeing an intensive effort to turn the Earth into an authoritarian prison and graveyard for our long-cherished hopes of a truly emancipated society — Martin Luther King’s “shining city on the hill” — while we ignore the ecological crisis that may lead to our extinction.

I am past the point of judging or blaming. However, if I was to point fingers of blame, I would point them at the liberal and progressive establishment, which proved incapable of reckoning with the harsh reality that most working class people were experiencing in the US over the last decades. This includes the “radical counterculture” that ultimately embraced a self-centered libertarian philosophy and the “cult of the entrepreneurial self,” as found at Burning Man and Summit Series, among other places where the best-and-brightest, the intentional jet-set cognoscenti, congregated. Many of these people got absorbed into the MAHA movement, tacitly or implicitly supporting the fascist movement that has taken power, overthrowing the Constitutional rule of law.

I doubt I will ever win a Nobel Prize — or any major institutional award. However, when I look back over my career, I must admit I was extraordinarily prescient about many things. I foresaw future trends and tendencies far in advance. First of all, this was the case with psychedelics. I published Breaking Open the Head, my first book, on psychedelic shamanism, in 2002. At that point, almost nobody on the East Coast or in Europe took psychedelics or the visionary experience seriously. Psychedelics had been mocked and legally repressed since the early 1970s. Through my personal initiatory process, I discovered that the visionary experience induced through ancient plants and modern chemical compounds could be a way to address the terrifying abyss of the existential meaning crisis affecting my society.

Over the next decades, psychedelics went from being something that very few could take seriously to a massive social trend. The early stages of this were assisted by the web magazine I started in 2007, Reality Sandwich (eventually sold to another company). We were the first to cover psychedelics and the visionary experience seriously since the 1970s. If you are interested in getting a sense of what we explored, I recommend the anthology I co-edited, Exploring the Edge Realms of Consciousness.

As psychedelics exploded in popularity over the last twenty years, the movement mainly focused on proving the efficacy of substances such as psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA for treating mental health conditions, using the scientific method. At conferences like Horizons and MAPS, all of the occult and paranormal and mystical “fun” of psychedelia was drained out of them. The goal was to make the subject as dry-as-dust as possible in an effort to make the substances palatable for the mainstream and safe for reductive materialists.

Personally, I feel that how I explored the subject of psychedelics in my first two books, Breaking Open the Head and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, remains more advanced than the mainstream discourse around them today. There are some rare exceptions, such as Andrew Gallimore’s work on DMT entities, and the research done by Qualia Foundation. I pushed hard enough through my own personal initiation and research that I was forced to leave behind the reductive materialist perspective. This was a result of directly confronting the legitimacy of the occult, animist, psychic, and supernatural dimensions — an ontologically shocking experience that took me to the edge of madness.

Ultimately, I shifted from materialism to an idealist ontology. Idealism understands consciousness as the fundamental substrate of reality. Everything we experience and know emerges from the immanent field of consciousness — just as we project the real-seeming scenes and characters in a dream from our sleeping mind. I had already settled on monistic idealism when I wrote 2012, through direct phenomenological inquiry (particularly with 5-meo-DMT) and a study of the work of Rudolf Steiner and Amit Goswami, among others. Since then, monistic or analytic idealism has been given a deeper and more coherent treatment by the Dutch philosopher Bernardo Kastrup in books such as Why Materialism Is Baloney and Dreamed Up Reality. Other contemporary thinkers now support this philosophy, including Neil Theise and Donald Hoffman.

Already, way back in 2005, I realized that America was heading for hell-in-a-hand-basket unless “we” (the more conscious elite) did something about it. I was already deeply concerned about the possible trajectory leading to White Supremacist movements, Fascism, and so on. I recognized our country was in an existential emergency and the liberal / progressive elites were utterly clueless and unresponsive to the danger. Over the next years, working with a team, I built a media company, Evolver, and nonprofit, The Evolver Network, as a prototype for addressing the societal emergency facing the US. Unfortunately, we were unable to raise the kind of capital we needed to make a realistic attempt at our ambitious goals.

I’ve written about this a number of times now. Back in 2005 - 6, we already realized the massive problem with the Internet. The builders of the Internet had ignored the need for protecting people’s data and their identities. This became a fatal flaw as the Internet transitioned from a system built in the public interest to one controlled by private companies.

With Evolver.net, we wanted to build a social network that could challenge Facebook, where people would have secure control over their data and identity. They could choose what parts of their data they wanted to share with other organizations. Also, they would have the right to monetize their data as they chose. We envisioned building a new social network that was meshed with a media infrastructure as well as on-the-ground, person-to-person meet-ups that would build an infrastructure of local communities who were not just theorizing but alternative futures, but actually putting ideas into practice.

By 2012, we had about sixty local community groups, most in the US but some located around the world. We had a rudimentary social network, built on Drupal, and a media platform with Reality Sandwich. This was a like a “zero level” prototype of what we thought we could build, but for a number of reasons — including lack of capital investment — we didn’t get a chance to go further with the project.

Unfortunately, the progressive wealth-holding community in the U.S. failed to fund radical experiments and prototypes, while the Right lavishly funded their extremist ideas and operations. Jane Mayer’s Dark Money — a very important book — tells the story of how the Koch brothers and their allies decided, back in the mid-1960s, that they wanted to “take back America” from those who wanted a more equitable society based on social justice, racial and gender equality, and ecological principles. They put together a group of super-wealthy funders and devised a plan they knew would take many decades to execute and require much trial-and-error, building new institutions like the Heritage Foundation and Cato institute plus “astro-turf’d” social movements like the Tea Party. They bought academic departments and funded Reactionary thinkers like Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve. We are seeing the triumph of that long-range plan today. There was no similar, ambitious, long-term agenda from the progressive side.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, people tried to build an authentic Leftist movement in the U.S. But this movement was targeted and destroyed by the American government, its military and intelligence services. Important young leaders like the Black Panther’s Freddy Hampton were assassinated. Nonviolent student protestors at Kent State were shot down. White movement leaders like Abbie Hoffman were targeted with trumped-up drug charges and “lawfare” designed to suck the resources and energy of the Left into fighting expensive legal battles. It is an open question whether someone like John Lennon — a symbolic cultural leader of the Left — was also targeted by the government. It is certainly possible, as a few deaths of celebrities of that magnitude send a powerful signal to others who might want to step forward.

I suppose I see what’s happening in the U.S. as an inevitable outcome of our trajectory over many decades. In one sense, we failed to confront our hypocrisies, self-delusions, corruption, and lies. In another, the structural forces — the pulsing tentacles of a vast “Empire” seeking to perpetuate itself no matter what — were stronger than any efforts the people could make to reform or remediate the system from within. Without being able to address the mechanisms of the system as it became increasingly unjust and inequitable over decades, America finally pitched over into full authoritarianism — gangster rule — which is where we are now.

I understand the analysts who now say this will be a multi-generational catastrophe: Today, something like a third of the U.S. populace are fully mind-controlled by a Fascist ideology disseminated through Right Wing media, which now includes the former Twitter and pundits like Joe Rogan, Tim Poole, and Russell Brand. There is also a subset of tens of millions who are theocratic Fascists, wanting an anti-democratic White Christian nationalist regime in the US. Tragically, many of the tech billionaires who once seemed on the side of moderate progressivism have opportunistically joined forces with the authoritarian Right. It is difficult to envision a clear and quick path to changing the minds of so many deeply deluded people.

At the same time, however, the technologies and tools to build solidarity and create collective liberation are available to us now, in a way they have never been before. Before surrendering to Fascist annihilation, we should, at least, make a decent, cohesive effort to apply these tools for the good. Perhaps people in America will start to come to their senses at some point, as the world collapses around them. They will need to be shown a new direction.

Since I completed How Soon Is Now, many authors have evolved different theories related to my thesis, making it easier to assemble a thorough model of how an alternative would work. I am still working my way through Plurality, written by Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang, and a collective known as ⿻ Community. They focus on building tools for direct democracy and value exchange that can at the very least augment but could eventually supersede the systems and structures we have now.

Instead of manipulation, surveillance, and consolidation of power, digital technology can be used to enhance civic participation, protect minorities, and develop hyper-adaptive and responsive forms of governance. Tang, a self-described "anarchist minister," led initiatives in Taiwan to integrate open-source governance, deliberative democracy, and real-time citizen engagement, rebuilding social trust. She and her colleagues envision a world where technology strengthens the public sphere instead of eroding it — and they have already built elements of this in Taiwan. We can, in theory, bring these tools to the U.S.

Other recent polemics — Jason Hickel’s Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World; Grace Blakeley’s Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom; and Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto; Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism — focus on future economic models that don’t end in our assured extinction due to Capitalism’s infinite growth model.

As one example, in Vulture Capitalism, Blakely looks at capitalism as a system where capital dominates society and defines what is possible. Through the government, powerful corporations and financial institutions exert control over resource allocation for their own interests. As a result of corporate-friendly economic policies, we see meager wages for workers, disappearing social services, ever-growing inequality, poor planning for the future, and deepening crises. Blakeley proposes, instead, democratic socialist planning, where workers gain actual control over political and economic institutions through new mechanisms and institutions, such as participatory budgeting and public asset managers.

“People do not need to surrender their power to state institutions that can control and protect them; and nor do they need to surrender control to a market that is dominated by the powerful,” she writes. “In place of domination, we can build a society based on co-creation.”

In the U.S., we are quickly moving farther away from any kind of democratic participation or equitable redistribution. However, it is an open question if this shift to hard authoritarian control will prove sustainable in the U.S. At the same time, it is hard to imagine a mechanism for changing it now. It is also true that, under the Democrats, America was stuck, stagnant. We lacked for a meaningful vision of an alternative. Perhaps this authoritarian collapse will bring about an awakening and a new direction — only time will tell. Perhaps not too much of it.