Cogito, Ergot Sum: On Psychedelics and Conspiracy Thinking

During our recent Bicycle Day Digital Darshan, Erik Davis briefly mentioned Saint Peter’s Snow, a 1933 novel by Leo Perutz, and its role in conspiracy theories about Albert Hofmann and the origins of LSD. Saint Peter’s Snow described the isolation of a hallucinogenic drug from an ergot-type fungus, five years before Hofmann first synthesized LSD and a decade before Bicycle Day! It also depicted the secret testing of this hallucinogen on unsuspecting villagers, anticipating the infamous Pont-Saint-Espirit incident of 1951. Finally, it names ergotized grain as the secret psychoactive sacrament of the ancient mysteries, over four decades before The Road to Eleusis.

In his 2013 article, “Leo Perutz and the Mystery of St Peter’s Snow”, Alan Piper offers prosaic explanations for the novel’s apparent prescience:

“How did an Austrian author, writing in 1933, predict the isolation of a hallucinogenic drug from an ergot-type fungus ten years before the discovery the hallucinogenic properties of LSD? At the time of Perutz’s writing St Peter’s Snow, alkaloids had already been isolated from ergot and ergot had been cultured in artificial media exactly as described in Perutz’s novel.

How did Perutz predict a mass testing of a hallucinogenic drug on the unsuspecting inhabitants of an isolated village almost twenty years before the Pont St Esprit incident? The potential of ergot to induce mass hysteria of a religious order had already been proposed. The history of biological warfare reveals that during the First World War, ‘the Germans developed anthrax, glanders, cholera, and a wheat fungus specifically for use as biological weapons.’ [...]

How could Perutz be able to reveal ergot as the secret sacrament of the ancient mysteries over forty years before this possibility became a matter of academic and scientific investigation in the 1970s? The use of psychoactive plants to communicate with the gods in the ancient world had been extensively documented by Eusebe Salverte in the nineteenth century and had reached popular consciousness in the 1920s.

All these elements appeal as knowledge that an individual in Perutz’s intellectual milieu could well have acquired by keeping up with scientific and medical developments or through café conversation.”

These observations haven’t prevented conspiracists from plugging both Perutz’s novel and Piper’s analysis into their own theories. For example, take a 2013 article by Joe Atwill and Jan Irvin, “Manufacturing the Deadhead: A Product of Social Engineering…”, in which the authors draw inspiration from Piper’s article while ignoring its conclusions:

“The authors maintain that in light of the evidence showing that the psychedelic movement was part of a multi-generational plan, Perutz’s book clearly shows an awareness of that agenda.”

What exactly was this plan, this agenda? In a nutshell: The psychedelic counterculture was engineered by the US government and banking establishment, as part of a general plan to “usher in a new Dark Age” or “neo-feudalist, post-modernist” paradigm. Psychedelic drugs were developed and disseminated in order to debase America’s culture by “debasing of the intellectual abilities of young people to make them as easy to control as the serfs of the Dark Ages.” The psychedelic revolution was the next phase of Project MK-ULTRA, the psychedelic revolution was really just top-down mind control. Albert Hofmann was “both a CIA and French Intelligence operative.” Other conspirators included Edward Bernays, Aldous Huxley, R. Gordon Wasson, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, the Esalen Institute, Robert Hunter, Ken Kesey—all members of a cabal with tentacles stretching from the CIA and an open-ended list of secret societies (including, of course, the Freemasons) to the gurus and rock stars of the 1960s.

Where I start to take offense is with Atwill and Irvin’s claim that the role of psychedelics in this shadowy agenda is to “dumb down the masses.” (To illustrate this intellectual debasement, they rely on empty wordplay and stereotypes—“Deadhead” is code for “a drugged, thoughtless person,” and Woodstock was nothing but “drugged teenagers fornicating in the mud.”) The irony here is exquisite. In our post-2016 dystopia, it’s become all too apparent that the diseased reasoning of conspiracy theorists is dangerous, as truthers and denialists of every stripe hijack our public discourse and drown any hope for unified action in a rising tide of corrosive cynicism. With a complete lack of self-awareness, Atwill and Irvin claim to expose the counterculture’s secret agenda of “using psychedelics and ending critical thinking to bring about the apocalypse,” when it’s clearly their brand of ignorance posing as critical thinking which is going to be the death of us all.

One of the best diagnoses of conspiracy thinking can be found in The Skeptics Guide to the Universe by Steven Novella:

“Conspiracy thinking is arguably the confluence of many of the logical fallacies and cognitive biases ... In many ways it is the “one ring to rule them all” of faulty thinking ... I have also referred to the conspiracy theory as the last refuge of the intellectual scoundrel [...]

Once the conspiracy narrative is adopted, it becomes a lens through which reality is viewed. Pattern recognition and hyperactive agency detection combine to form a tendency to see disparate events as connected, with an unseen agent behind them. Confirmation bias then kicks in. Every event, no matter how random or innocent, can become evidence for the conspiracy. Anomaly hunting feeds into this as well. Everything even slightly unusual or unfamiliar becomes an anomaly that proves the conspiracy. Every coincidence is part of the pattern. [...]

The ad hominem attack is also a common fallacy employed by the conspiracy theorists. If you question their elaborate conspiracy theory, then you’re gullible and lack the vision to see events for what they are. If you point out the factual and logical problems with their case, then you’re clearly part of the conspiracy. You are a shill, or part of an ‘astroturf’ campaign, or even perhaps one of the Illuminati.

Conspiracy theories are also often arguments from ignorance. Theorists point to apparent anomalies, coincidences, or things that don’t make sense to their limited understanding, and then ‘just ask questions.’ If you can’t explain everything down to an arbitrary level of detail, there must be a conspiracy. They don’t have to provide evidence for the conspiracy, they can just poke holes in the standard version of events.”

“Manufacturing the Deadhead” is a textbook case of this faulty, insular thinking, almost as if Atwill and Irvin were working off Novella’s checklist of logical fallacies and cognitive biases. Their conspiracy involves a “multi-generational plan” and an absurdly large number of conspirators, what Novella calls a “grand conspiracy” and dismisses by quoting the author Dean Koontz:

“The sane understand that human beings are incapable of sustaining conspiracies on a grand scale, because some of our most defining qualities as a species are inattention to detail, a tendency to panic, and an inability to keep our mouths shut.”

Also, Atwill and Irvin divide the world into three types of people: first, the network of conspirators; second, the “sheeple” who believe the standard version of history (e.g. LSD was first synthesized by Albert Hofmann in November 1938, and its hallucinogenic effects were discovered by Hofmann in April 1943); and third, the theorists themselves (the “Army of Light”), who have seen through the conspiracy. Atwill and Irvin conclude their article:

“The authors are not looking to bring anyone out of one cave and into yet another, but to free humanity from this insanity. And only the truth is capable of that. Esalen, Aldous Huxley, Gordon Wasson, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, and the peddlers of this agenda: The spell is now undone and the true secrets of Eleusis, of the CIA and the psychedelic revolution, are now revealed for the entire world to see.”

My main motivation here isn’t picking on conspiracy theorists—that’s going for the low-hanging fruit. My main motivation is to point out something lurking in Atwill and Irvin’s psychedelic conspiracy manifesto: the uncomfortable proximity between conspiracy thinking and psychedelic ideation. At least a few of Novella’s fallacies or biases are common elements of profound psychedelic experiences and the worldviews that tend to emerge from them. For instance, “hyperactive agency detection”—the attribution of deliberate intent to random occurrences—is a filter through which conspiracy theorists interpret social forces and historical events. But when expanded, from human history and human actors to the universe in general, hyperactive agency detection is simply animism. Another shared trait is hyperactive pattern recognition, or apophenia, which Novella defines as “the tendency to see illusory patterns in noisy data,” and which complements his categories of misinterpreted coincidence and confirmation bias. The question of whether or not these patterns are “illusory” is a metaphysical debate for another time, but a heightened awareness of meaningful coincidence—synchronicity, omens, divination—is certainly a common effect of profound psychedelic experiences. Novella observes that “conspiracy theories can result from apophenia—seeing a nefarious pattern in random or disconnected incidents,” and this includes psychedelic apophenia. The character Colin’s paranoid-lysergic monologue in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is a perfect example of psychedelic experience giving birth to grand conspiracy.

A couple of years ago, Michael Taft appeared on an episode of Vincent Horn’s Buddhist Geeks podcast, “Meditating on LSD”. He describes with experience and insight the psychedelic-inspired attribution of relevance to everyday stimuli, in Buddhist terms as “suchness”: mundane objects and events become “saturated with being ... aliveness ... luminosity ... almost glowing or shining with a kind of prenatural meaning ... luminous depth of presence and meaning.” But then he warns:

“Where people go astray with this is then creating vast theories about what that means, and how that connects with every other thing in the universe, in sort of a paranoid way that leads to conspiracy theories, if it’s a negative kind of connection, or in kind of an overly important, cosmic meaning way if it’s a pleasant meaning.”

As an antidote to this risk of psychedelic revelation, the risk of either descending into paranoia or inflating into grandiose self-importance, Taft counsels that “we don’t have to go there ... instead just stick with that suchness. Just the being of the object has this tremendous weight that can arise in a jhanic state.”

Just stick with the suchness. I wish I’d heard that advice many years ago, when I developed an acute case of “interpretosis” after my own psychedelic epiphanies. Just stick with the suchness.

ψ संघ