Do Psychedelics Make You More Liberal Or Left-Wing? New Research Debunks Decades-Old Myths

There is a common misconception regarding psychedelics like psilocybin: it is often thought that they tend to liberalize us, make us more prone to left-leaning ideas (i.e. ecology, egalitarianism, open borders). But a recent anthropological study demonstrates evidence that shows something quite different.

So let’s dive into the proverbial garbage can of ideology and try to understand what role could psychedelics play in our ideas for years to come.

Against the status quo

Politics is always a complicated subject. It tends to fire up sensibilities a lot more than any other topic, and it can be difficult to say anything without sounding condescending to those who don’t share our political views. Psychedelics, of course, do not escape this heat and can end up tangled in politics.

Since the sixties, these substances were generally linked to hippie counterculture, as a way of going against the status quo and defying the dominant societal norms. The myth seems to be that once someone tried psychedelics (such as LSD or magic mushrooms), their third eye would open and they would see the “powers that be.” Free love, militant pacifism, anti-capitalism—these ideas were close to psychedelics intake, and it was easy to think that the relationship was causal: you take acid, you feel more connected to people around you, you become a hippie.

Nevertheless, these ideas seem to not only be vox populi. A 2020 Scientific American article asked “What if a Pill Can Change Your Politics or Religious Beliefs?” and stated that “psilocybin seems to make people more liberal,” with “scientific reports associating psychedelic use and liberal values [going] back as far as 1971.” Based on a 2018 paper, the idea of both article and paper is that psilocybin could reduce tendencies in authoritative thought, and enhance liberal views.

Other titles inspired by that same research include “Psychedelic mushrooms reduce authoritarianism and boost nature relatedness, experimental study suggests” and “Scientists find magic mushrooms could help fight fascism”. That last one helps better illustrate the case for the supposed relationship between psychedelics and liberal thought.

Although the Scientific American piece received a rather definitive answer a month later—with the authors of the reply stating that “the current data simply do not support the idea that psychedelic treatments result in meaningful changes in political or religious beliefs or affiliation”— a more recent article called “Right-Wing Psychedelia: Case Studies in Cultural Plasticity and Political Pluripotency” by Brian Pace, Ph.D., from The Ohio State University, and Neşe Devenot, Ph.D., from the Department of Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, sheds light on how the alt-right, neoconservatives and straight-up nazis are appropriating psychedelics.

Set and Setting

According to the authors of “Right-Wing Psychedelia,” it is true that “a psychedelic experience can lead to shifts in worldviews—and even religious and political ideologies—but not in a consistent, directional manner.” The concepts of set and setting have been foundational to psychedelic theory since Timothy Leary coined the terms in the sixties, and could be used to understand how the psychedelic experience shifts (or exacerbates) someone’s worldview.

The set (the mindset) is the individual reality of the user, how their subjectivity has been constructed up to the point where they take a certain substance. The setting, on the other hand, is the social environment where the individual has a psychedelic experience. However, this term can also be expanded to include everything that is around that individual: the social reality in which they are immersed, and the context in which their individuality is developed, both in the short and long term.

This concept of setting is what can help us understand what the authors of the study call the “cultural plasticity” of psychedelic experiences. For example, although some researchers have claimed “that psychedelics are inherently destabilizing to existing hierarchies,” there is ample proof that they play an important role in some right-wing extremist blogs, like the infamous 8kun, as well as in numerous right-wing terrorist groups, like The Base: “The Base, an international neo-Nazi group, integrated collective LSD use into a neo-Pagan, male-bonding ritual involving the beheading of a stolen ram. Members of The Base were later arrested on weapons charges and discovered to be attempting to extract DMT,” explain the authors. Those same substances heralded by some as "mind-openers" or as tools to being more loving, can, in a different context, play a very contrasting role.

Is Green to the left?

Another widespread myth is the idea that psychedelic experiences make us get more in touch with the environment. Even though this could be in part true, with “recent correlational studies [associating] psychedelic use with pro-environmental beliefs and behaviors,” it does not necessarily mean that someone more connected with the environment is more likely to be a liberal. Devenot and Pace cite the case of prominent alt-right personality Richard Spencer, who is certainly preoccupied with the environment: “We are a special part of the natural order, being in it and above it. We have the potential to become nature's steward or its destroyer. European countries should invest in national parks, wilderness preserves, and wildlife refuges, as well as productive and sustainable farms and ranches.” In some cases, environmentalism can intertwine with eco-fascism, the idea that some particular ethnic group is to blame for environmental problems, such as global warming.

The authors conclude that “although much of this discourse focuses on individualistic therapeutic effects, a recurring theme is the notion that psychedelics can solve complex social problems by making people more politically liberal,” but that may not be the case with all psychedelic experiences. For some, psychedelics might just be an enhancement of previously held ideas, even extremist ideas.

“Right-Wing Psychedelia” was written by Brian Pace, Ph.D., and Neşe Devenot, Ph.D., both of whom have been working on the links between the right and psychedelics: Pace wrote three previous articles for Pysmposia, the latest being “Lucy In The Sky With Nazis”, from which the paper originated. The work of Devenot on the Intellectual Dark Web, “trickle-down consciousness” and individualism in mental health treatment also helped greatly advance the study. According to Pace, “the work of Alan Piper was really pioneering on this topic” and plays a big part in the foundations of the article.

Photo: Courtesy of Christopher Ott on Unsplash