Dreaming Differently: Psychedelic Meaning-Making
The world makes little sense in this strange age. Despite technological wonders meant to connect, we struggle to communicate. Although information and commerce can span the world in microseconds, we have become strangers to our neighbours. In a very real sense, we live in different worlds entirely — divisions in worldview, self-conception, and data diets create increasingly disparate versions of reality, with intersubjective agreement receding from grasp. But even as these divisions mount, a set of overarching apparent truths underpins what is, and informs decision-making on a mass scale. Stuck on a path of seeming inevitability toward an unpleasant end, a change in course would require a change in mind. By tracing the role of symbolic meaning-making through history, the present work will highlight the link between narrative and the construction of reality. If politics is taken as a way to reconfigure reality, then social change involves both the disruption and construction of narrative. But the fracturing of reality under post-modernity leaves us without the means to conduct politics; lacking a shared way of understanding, we cannot escape the prismatic hegemony. Inspired by the intersubjectivizing role of mystical cognition, popularization of the psychedelic experience will be proposed as a component of generating broad narrative compatibility. To be democratic, we must first exist in the same world; awareness of our interconnection is a vital first step.
To begin this exploration, we should first inspect the current situation. In the context of the contemporary West, the dominant popular worldview prefigures capitalism as the self-evident sole viable means of social organization. The facticity of this idea is so integral to Western subjectivity that its existence disappears into basic assumptions about the nature of reality. Irrespective of class and geography, whether enthusiastically supportive or a strident critic, the inevitability and intransigence of capitalism’s supremacy tinges every view. Market logic, then, comes to be applied instinctually in even non-market contexts, influencing perception and fundamental cognition of the everyday.
Mark Fisher, in his 2009 book, describes this condition by the titular term Capitalist Realism. Within the constraints of this ideology, not only are alternative models impossible to conceive, but it is difficult to even recognize that something exists to have an alternative to. The pervasive always-alreadyness of capitalist subjectivity precludes the possibility of an “outside”, and serves to subduct opposition into totalized status quo sequentialism. In a quote attributed to both Jameson and Žižek, Fisher remarks: “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” (2009) In the 21st century, Margaret Thatcher’s eerie assertion that “there is no alternative” has become not just a political-economic agenda, but a way of life.
Built on such a foundation, the structures of society are necessarily slanted. By constraining what’s possible to consider, the range of political discourse (ie the Overton Window) narrows — rendering substantive change impossible by normal means. For democratic governance to function as intended, a critical mass of citizenry must be free-thinking and well-informed. Regrettably, neither precondition is evident from within capitalist realism. Having only curated, ideologically-filtered information about the world at large (and lacking the necessary skills and experience), democratic behaviour is only transiently possible. In the absence of an agentic public, those with the means to manipulate reality become the primary drivers of mass action. In light of current trajectories — a rapid transition from neoliberal capitalism to what could be termed plutocratic neo-feudalism — a future of highly-stratified authoritarian rule, environmental catastrophe, and general misery seems nearly inevitable. We were promised flying cars and fully-automated luxury gay space communism, but instead we have received a boring dystopia. How can this course be changed?
Lacking meaningful access to the levers of political, economic, and military power, the site of intervention must be elsewhere. What’s more, even should such power be attained by some miraculous means, the individualistic, authoritarian, and value-reductive biases of unchanged subjectivities would serve to reproduce existing structures of domination in some new paradigm. External influences aside, the decay of numerous successful pro-democratic revolutions into same-or-worse authoritarian regimes can arguably be attributed in part to this effect. Based on the premise that dominant ontology co-constructs social structure, a benevolent result of dramatic social change would have a shift in popular mindset as a precondition. In other words: a prosocial post-capitalist world requires prosocial post-capitalist subjectivity. To this end, the present work will endeavour to find a path to this new subjectivity. Drawing clues from similar thresholds in human history, as well as tracing the genealogy of the current state, the power of narrative to configure reality will be highlighted as a key component to the ongoing struggle.
A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away
Beyond the evolutionary physiological and psychological capacity for complex thought and communication, the techniques of representational thought and storytelling are vital for human cultural development. The ability to represent objects and concepts with symbols allows for greater complexity of thought, abstract language, writing, mathematics, and beyond. Although some animals can learn symbolic thinking, humans seem uniquely predisposed to this strategy. While it is impossible to observe the evolution of early homo sapiens sapiens, the speculative work of anthroneuroendocrinology provides some clues. Michael Winkelman (2000) proposes that this innate talent for symbolic thinking arises out of an exogenously altered state of consciousness — specifically, encounters with psilocybin mushrooms. Observing that the psychedelic experience suppresses the “default mode network” responsible for structuring distinctions of identity, temporality, and object-formation, Winkelman suggests the precipitation of “magical thinking” enabled this new form of cognition. By engendering synaesthetic mixing of senses, and weakening the habitual thinking strategies of the default mode network, social intelligence came to be applied to the physical world. Early spirituality in the form of animism is consistent with this hyperactive agency attribution, instilling spiritual energy into otherwise inanimate objects.
Terence McKenna’s “Stoned Ape” hypothesis (1992), similarly, suggests that the mystical experience served to enhance prosocial intersubjectivity. A diminished sense of self-separateness, as well as enhanced empathic awareness enabled greater cooperation and a sense of general concern for the other. This novel form of extrapersonal cognition conferred an important survival advantage. By enabling the abstract representation of phenomena beyond the immediacy of the senses, early humans could conceptualize, operationalize, predict, and leverage forces otherwise beyond their reach. Observing the comparative neurology of our closest living relatives — chimpanzees — the human brain has far greater capacity to process psychedelic drugs (Winkelman 2000), suggesting our overall evolutionary process selected for this characteristic. Other behavioural and biochemical methods can bring on similar experiences — chanting, dance, rhythmic breathing, etc. — indicating the integrality of this neural function for modern humans.
Crucially, these changes represented a watershed moment for our evolutionary process itself: the shift from biological (Darwinian) evolution to sociocultural evolution. Rather than by natural and sexual selection over many generations, the primary driver of change moved beyond the individual organism and into the collective. The versatility and adaptability of the modern human allows for adaptations within generations, as new technologies and techniques can be passed between individuals. Based on the gene as the basic unit of biological transmission, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” (1981) to describe these transmissible units of information. Memetic transmission can both share new developments between individuals and communities, and enable the persistent accumulation of cultural assets over time.
Storytelling represents a key mechanism here, facilitating the transmission and distributed storage of memetic information, encoded in narrative. Through repetition and heritance of stories, future generations can learn and build upon the knowledge of their forebears without need for direct experience. Beyond factual accounts, stories can also be used to simulate and explore possibilities. Narrative forms largely retain their informational content through changes in thematic elements, allowing for cross-cultural interchange and persistence of information through long-term drift. These narrative archetypes — factual or fictitious — can serve as examples to navigate social situations, provide inspiration and education, offer reassurance, and caution against recklessness. By attaching a temporal component to object-subject relationships, narrative thinking has become central to our basic ontology (the construction of reality) and epistemology (how we know).
Parable, allegory, and similar narratives are key components of folk ontology. Often containing metaphysical and moral claims, these stories come to configure the nature of reality for a people. When codified as a system of beliefs, these stories can become a mythological system and the foundational unifying identity of a community. Reinforced by the effects of the mystical experience, this narrative identity engenders a generalized allegiance to the Big Other — enabling intersubjective co-construction of reality and creating the preconditions for civilizational thinking. Successive paradigms of pantheism, polytheism, and monotheism changed the character of these narratives — along with accompanying shifts in social organization. The agricultural revolution and its implications for the division of labour led to a more hierarchical structuring of community life. Organized religions, likewise, became the de facto stewards of core narratives (particularly in the West), consolidating the power to configure reality within a specialized priest class. Under these conditions, the moral and metaphysical norms of a people can be intentionally manipulated by the coordinated acts of political and mystic authorities. Narratives constructing the notion of divine right lend a sense of self-evident legitimacy to the political rule of monarchs, while inscribing personal station into the social structure itself. Over time, access to the mystical experience itself has been suppressed, funneled through officially sanctioned (and narratively prefigured) ritual — or eliminated altogether.
The Phantom Menace
The reification of these mystically-derived ontologies into structural norms had a side-effect: the weakening of the spiritual impulse. Without broad experience of the mystical phenomenon, authority-based religiosity and its political allies became vulnerable to undermining. Ontology veered away from the domain of narrative metaphysics during the European Enlightenment, replaced by correlationism and the positivist pursuit of objectivity. Liberal rationalism began to supplant norms of personal station and sovereign power, undermining traditional structures of collective morality and establishing the conditions necessary for democratic governance. But while the aim of Enlightenment philosophy is full human emancipation by the rational deconstruction of authority narratives, this project remains profoundly incomplete. Although the contemporary world enjoys some lasting benefits, old forms of power have continuously changed shape to subduct attempts to move ‘outside’.
Ultimately, rationalist disruption of overriding power narratives left a vacuum. With the death of God, the atomized organic solidarity of urban individualism, and rapid changes to political and technological conditions, the basis for a shared notion of reality began to decohere. Despite the new possibilities for meaning-making, a societal heritage steeped in authoritarian governance and unassailable truths leaves its members ill-equipped to exercise their new capacities. The autonomous moral reasoning required for robust self-determination generally only develops under minimally ideal conditions of upbringing and socialization. As such, relative material deprivation, societal anomie, and still-existing concentration of power prevents the widespread shift in worldview predicted by Enlightenment thinkers. Faced with the looming nihilism of an unconfigured societal reality, the narrative void is readily filled by any suitable content. Enter: capitalism.
Vital to this new narrative are two components of ontology: the construction of subjecthood (ie: ‘human nature’), and measure of value. Human nature from a classical liberal perspective constitutes a selfish, rational, independent, utility-maximizing agent — homo economicus. Value under capitalism, correspondingly, is primarily quantifiable and reductive, comprehensively measurable with respect to monetary worth. The positivist principle of a fully-measurable reality confers an apparent objectivity on this model — appealing to both the rational certainty of a scientistic epistemology and the concrete simplicity of its worldview. Of course, this structure constitutes not an objective view of reality, but another narrative construct of subjectivity. Regardless, the perceived facticity of this system came to dominate Western ontology, gradually colonizing religious, cultural, academic, and political sources of metaphysical influence. Weber’s observations and analysis of the Protestant work ethic having been recruited by the “spirit of capitalism” is one such example. When intrinsic value is replaced by capital, the predestination-oriented worldview of Calvinists comes to imply that material wealth represents virtue. By this moral reasoning, service to God is fulfilled by labouring and accumulating capital — an ideal motivator for capitalist subjects.
This worldview gradually detached from its religious roots and spread memetically across cosmopolitan society, becoming a foundational truth of modern life. A linear model of ‘progress’ constitutes the measure of goodness within this frame, while individual virtue is reflected by conformity to the norms of selfish individualism. The form of subjectivity produced by the capitalist narrative is eminently compatible with optimal behaviours for the reproduction of capitalist order — naturalizing hierarchies based on an essentialized notion of value. But despite these shared aspects of capitalist ontology, the individualistic and alienated nature of life in modernity inhibits generalized intersubjectivity. In the absence of an overarching common reality, race and nationality (among other superficial markers) present compatible identify-forming narratives, providing a substitute object of allegiance by reference to an exclusive category. At the risk of grossly oversimplifying historical events, the rank-ordering of racial categories and extreme emphasis on nationalism were prime contributors to institutionalized slavery and the horrors of the First World War.
A New Hope & The Empire Strikes Back
In the wake of such massive upheaval, thinkers associated with the Dadaist movement sought to undermine the dominance of status quo ontology. For Dadaists, revulsion at the atrocities committed under the guise of natural law and rationality warranted a disruption of the hegemonic narratives used to justify such acts. Using techniques of collage, bizarre juxtapositional assemblages, performance art, and conceptual writing, practitioners attempted to highlight the absurdity and irrationality of rationality and de-normify everyday experience. Avant garde artforms — notably ‘readymade’ sculptures made of everyday objects outside their typical contexts — presented an affront to the artistic establishment. By ideologically (and sometimes literally) intruding upon the smooth operation of bourgeois society, Dadaism carried an implied anarchistic political leaning, with links to far-left circles. But, as famously penned by Tristan Tzara: “Dada ne signifie rien”. Commonly translated as “Dada means nothing”, a more literal interpretation suggests that “Dada does not mean/signify anything”. The agenda of Dada was intentionally ambiguous and ill-defined, stubbornly refusing to accept concrete definition in favour of pure chaos, freedom, and unpredictability. In this way, Dadaism represents a primarily negative movement — practicing criticality in the style of the Enlightenment, but without proposing an alternative narrative. The inherent instability of such a movement led to its eventual dissolution without gaining significant transformative traction. But although short lived and limited in its successes, Dada’s legacy would come to inspire future subversive projects.
In the narrative void of the interwar period and the Great Depression, a wave of authoritarian nationalism culminated in the emergence of fascist movements. Particularly in Germany, widespread economic malaise resulting from war reparations and hyperinflation had left that nation in relative chaos. With its national identity bruised, and the narrative of German pride disrupted, the atomized individualism of modernity intensified — contributing to a sense of societal disorientation. Echoing the failure of Enlightenment era citizenry to adopt autonomy en masse, the anxieties of democratic freedom eventually gave way to a desire for the certainty of subjugation. In Fear of Freedom, Erich Fromm (2001) notes that the negative “freedom from” external influence is not inherently enjoyable. In an individualistic society without a cohesive narrative, subjects often struggle with meaning-making — impairing their positive “freedom to” reason and act autonomously. The discomfort of meaninglessness predisposes the individual to seek security — notably by appeal to authority, conformity, and destructiveness. Archetypal charismatic authoritarian figures leverage this effect, projecting a sense of certainty, strength, and simplicity as an antidote to the experience of chaos. Establishing a new identity by reference to purity and service of a higher purpose, the allegiance and obedience of (desirable) citizens is secured by establishing an enemy category to be controlled or destroyed. Scapegoats and illusory threats of this kind are a powerful unifying force, as simplistic narratives of Good versus Evil recruit self-preservation instincts to mobilize. By the time the Weimar Republic and other democracies crumbled, fascist memetic forms had gained cultural dominance (even to a degree in North America) — enabling the seizure of political power, and eventually culminating in the Second World War.
Meanwhile, new techniques of mass persuasion were under development using similar underlying mechanisms. Based on the application of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories by his nephew — Edward Bernays — techniques of propaganda came to shape public opinion and popular thought throughout the 20th century (Curtis 2002). Pioneered during the First World War, so-called ‘public relations’ recruits narrative as a means to manipulate behaviour. War propaganda of the era used Good/Evil framing extensively in concert with the valorization of national identity, in an effort to generate support and enthusiasm for military intervention. After the World Wars, the anti-communist Red Scare served as a replacement enemy, using the same narrative form to reinforce liberal capitalism’s righteousness — and cloak America’s growing imperialism. “Freedom” and other elements of American mythology become memetic keywords, constraining public discourse to a manageable range within the confines of capitalist democracy. Over time, consideration of communism, socialism — or really any alternative to capitalism — became taboo, automatically coded as seditious, dangerous, or insane.
Western cultural narratives similarly changed through the influence of public relations marketing. Faced with a limit to demand for produced goods, the marketing techniques of industry shifted from demonstration of comparative merit to the manufacture of desire. The emerging paradigm of consumerism leveraged the memetic power of narrative to manipulate ontology, accentuating the utility-consuming imperative of possessive individualism. By associating products, behaviours, and political positions with markers of personal identity, the unconscious choices of the subject are altered to conform with the desired pattern. Having constructed a perceived need — an illusory scarcity, or simply a sense of competition for limited resources — an impetus to maximize appropriation (thus consumption) comes to drive the individual. As described by Herbert Marcuse in his landmark work One-Dimensional Man (1964), consumerism has become a primary means of social control. Positioning individuality as a choice between standardized, commodified options, even perceived countercultural elements are subducted to serve the dominant political-economic model.
Echoing the reification process of earlier modes of social control, the memetic structures of consumerism gradually detached from their concrete referents and formed their own basis for constructing reality. Guy Debord notes in Society of the Spectacle (1967) that “all that once lived has become mere representation”, characterizing reality in the capitalist West as being fully mediated by commodities. Images, products, and standardized narratives have supplanted genuine human interaction as our primary means of relation. While superficially similar to the shared reality generated by a religious ontology, the subjectivity generated by spectacle remains highly individualistic — contingent on the specific consumptions and narratives one consumes. From within the spectacle, the illusion of democracy, individuality, quality of life, and freedom itself seems quite real. But the immediacy of the subject’s identification with dominant narratives eliminates the inner personal dimension in which critique can develop. Lacking any means of attaining intersubjectivity not mediated by the spectacle itself, the delusory nature of this ideology is made impossible to observe, rendering the constructed experience of modernity appear as a self-evident objective truth.
Return (and Subsequent Departure) of the Jedi
Based on these observations, Debord and other members of Situationist International made efforts to undermine the spectacle by adapting techniques and theories from Dadaist and Surrealist traditions. Driven by the same anti-authoritarian counter-hegemonic politics of its forebears, Situationists deployed avant-garde artforms and cultural practices to disrupt the smooth flow of spectacular imagery. Using techniques of détournement, the heavily structured, atemporal construction of modern life is hijacked to give rise to autonomous de-alienated moments of experience. In a practice similar to today’s Internet meme culture, practitioners took to reorganizing and subverting the same vocabulary of images used to create the spectacle, using the resulting disjunction to bring the absurdity of the taken-for-granted to attention. Situationist experiments in psychic automatism (or ‘flow’ states) have produced works of exceptional originality in music, art, and literature, allowing randomness and raw improvisation to mingle unconstrained by the need for concrete representation. The psychogeographical practice of dérive wandering is another manifestation of flow, drawing the subject to the forefront of their phenomenological experience as they traverse urban environments. Freed from the mundanity of rational order, the world is momentarily re-enchanted, granting the subject a measure of perspective with which to assess their everyday reality.
But whereas Dada was an intellectual movement of pure criticism, Situationism attempted to synthesize a new narrative through its critiques — a path toward postcapitalist thought. Coinciding with — and arguably aided by — the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s, the possibility of wholly different modes of social organization began to gain recognition. With the psychedelic experience long removed from mainstream society, the availability and popularization of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) had a profound impact on culture of the era, inspiring innovations in music, art, literature, politics, and culture. As a psychedelic drug quite similar to the psilocybin mushrooms at the beginning of this story, the same alterations to perception and meaning-making occur. In contrast with most other drugs in common use, these drugs have a proaesthetic (contra anesthetic) quality — in that they increase the level of sensation rather than dulling it. Based on anecdotal observations, psychedelics also act to disrupt reified cognitive schemata and heuristics — inhibiting the labour-saving mental strategies typically used to frame experience. The schematic fluidity of this state can yield revelations about previously-held assumptions, drawing attention to logical inconsistencies and previously unconsidered associations. Spontaneous insights may result from this condition, or — of interest to this exploration — the illumination of delusory thinking. The preconceived validity of an ideological worldview can suddenly collapse in this state, causing the subject to reevaluate what is ‘normal’. The aforementioned empathic and prosocial implications of ego-suppression at high doses also engenders a counter-individualistic reprioritization of values, often permanently altering one’s sense of self.
These characteristics make psychedelic drugs an ideal tool of ideological critique, acting as a cognitive-ontological prosthetic device that can precipitate or augment critical analysis. The potential for fundamental changes in an individual’s mindset led some at the time to speculate on the application of psychedelics as an implement of political change. Academic-turned-activist Timothy Leary and his collaborators theorized that the broad availability and use of these drugs could disrupt the hegemonic discourse, leading to a mass refusal to participate in status quo society. Although significant gains in human rights and equality did follow from a period of intensified awareness and activism, this trajectory was short-lived. Social ills resulting from the reckless use of psychedelics, and rapid changes brought about by the broader movement contributed to a moral panic, fueling reactionary conservative sentiment. With intensified drug prohibition and stigmatization driven by racist, anti-antiwar, and authoritarian sentiments, the so-called hippie movement largely dispersed, and the Situationist International disbanded in 1972.
The End (of History)
The postmodern and neoliberal era represents a subtle change in strategy. Postmodern incredulity toward metanarratives serves to continuously deconstruct overarching reality constructs, as had previous critical intellectual paradigms. But rather than asserting a new unifying narrative to fill this void, neoliberal ideology encourages the individuation of reality (within an acceptable range) to impede the cohesion of any competing construct. In an effort to reverse the mid-century trend of wealth equality, neoliberal policy gained popularity by the shaping of narrative memes. Using refined techniques of public relations propaganda, a simplistic reality-framing construct was cultivated — casting the individual as the protagonist of a conflict narrative. Emphasizing individual responsibility, competition, and self-sacrifice, the influence of social conditions are excluded from this worldview; systemic inequality and luck do not exist to neoliberal reasoning. American prosperity gospel revivalism in neoliberal times (as well as in the early 20th century) amplified the perception of wealth-as-virtue, feeding justification for the disproportionate privilege of elites and moral contempt of the poor. Cementing the utilitarian quantification of value in both dominant worldview and public policy, business logic came to be applied in non-business contexts — echoing the escape of the Protestant ethic from its socio-cultural origins.
The neoliberal myths of meritocracy and market-as-oracle become central to a renewed scientistic rational fatalism in the late modern psyche. The emerging use of game theory and information technology to quantify and systematize behaviour creates a creeping prefigurative influence. Whereas most sciences adapt their models to match conditions, neoliberal economics adapts conditions to match its models. Michel Foucault’s observations about the shifting nature of power are reflected here, as overt coercion gives way to disciplinary techniques of management. By appealing to rationalistic, deterministic sensibilities, bureaucratic systems are readily taken as authoritative — the apparent objectivity of positivist administration overriding even reasonable criticism. The compulsion to measure efficacy and optimize efficiency motivates often-inappropriate operationalizations of complex phenomena, producing perverse incentives and counterproductive (even harmful) strategies.
Applying hyperindividualistic reasoning, neoliberal public policy and social institutions are reformulated to reflect the desires of fully independent and self-reliant atomized person-units. In turn, the neoliberal subject comes to see itself in this light — in the words of John Steinbeck, cast “not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. Despite the vanishing rarity of true rags-to-riches stories, the presumed personal inevitability of this narrative has become the central myth of American identity. The canonization of the self-made man renders social safety nets valueless in the popular imagination, making austerity policies not just palatable but desirable. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, a viable alternative to liberal capitalist democracy was rendered unimaginable. Representing the watershed moment of Francis Fukuyama’s hypothesized “end of history” (Fisher 2009), capitalist realism cemented its preeminence as the universal core of a basic worldview.
Although the principles of capitalist realism seem to underpin a shared reality, late modernity is increasingly characterized by an ontological Balkanization. Improvements in technology and changes in the overall media landscape have enabled an expanding selection and specialization of information services. The initial high cost and limited availability of mass communication technology necessitated content with broad appeal, to be experienced synchronously by an attentive public. But as these barriers lowered, media outlets could deliver specialized content to targeted audiences: narrowcasting. With the advent of 24-hour news networks, a steady stream of current events could be delivered to homes, businesses, and institutions — customized with the ideological slant of the intended viewer. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (2002) identify a set of five ‘filters’ associated with this phenomenon, which shape both the form and content being broadcast. Being owned by an increasingly-concentrated set of elites and primarily funded by advertising, the so-called mainstream media are financially and politically motivated to support pro-establishment narratives and attract maximal viewer attention. These biases predispose mass media content toward sensationalism, factionalization, and the reproduction of dominant (pro-capitalist, authoritarian) discourses. The apparent divergences of liberal and conservative viewpoints are a key mechanism of this reality-control; as Chomsky observes, “the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum” (ibid.).
The Internet and social media represent a paradigmatic change in human society, enabling unprecedented communication and freedom of information, but paradoxically deepening divisions and obfuscating truth. The near-universal availability of one-to-many and many-to-many transmission — as well as the tools for content creation — presents a rich environment for creative possibilities. The relatively low barrier to participation and anarchic structure of the early Web generated great optimism for the democratizing potential of the information superhighway. Independent news media, countercultural artforms, and truly divergent political opinions could gain an audience in this space — bypassing the filters of traditional media. Marginalized and politically-oppressed persons, as well as those whose interests run contrary to hegemonic powers, now had access to a public sphere largely out of reach of authorities, enabling political organizing where it was previously impossible. Being unfettered by distance, time, and physical limitations, formerly-isolated individuals became enabled to connect and form communities of interest — no matter how narrow. The free flow of communication and radical availability of even restricted information offered by this new medium inspired utopian dreams among enthusiasts. In an attempt to codify the de facto sovereignty of online society, JP Barlow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation issued a declaration of the independence of cyberspace in 1996.
Harry Potter and the Decoherence of Reality
But whereas techno-utopians celebrated the capacity of the Internet to enable subjects to “drop out” and seek nondominant realities, they failed to foresee the always-already colonization of cyberspace by capital (among other influences). Recognizing the seemingly-limitless potential for economic opportunities, both establishment and startup enterprises set out to monetize this new frontier. Beyond basic ecommerce retail, and largely-unsuccessful early attempts to reproduce traditional media in digital form, the Web became integral to the emerging attention economy. Given the Web’s centrality to the contemporary experience of everyday life, existing techniques of identity-based marketing have been adapted to exploit the infinitely fine-grained targeting of audiences made possible by internet technology. With the attention of subjects now as a primary measure of value, techniques of reality manipulation are used to maximally capture and sustain attention — both by supplying stimuli, and by amending subjects themselves.
Peter Coffin (2018) describes this paradigm as custom reality, extending Debord’s theses into the digital age. In light of image-mediated culture, the identity of contemporary subjects is increasingly formed as a collection of consumable commodities as markers. By cultivating an identity (and thus group membership) with reference to specific commodities, the subject becomes motivated to maximally consume as a demonstration of their selfness. In the absence of an organic sense of belonging, our intrinsic desire for validation is recruited to produce enthusiastic support for the embedded narrative content. This can take the form of simple fandom — cultivating the identity of “Star Wars fan” to motivate purchases — or become a tool of political persuasion. Transforming “progressive liberal”, “vegan”, or “pro-lifer” into a brand identity creates an ontological backdoor, enabling the manipulation of meaning without altering the associated symbol. Exploiting this mode of deception, subjects can be made to adopt extreme or even self-contradictory positions in an effort to limit their identity-related cognitive dissonance.
Internet memes in their common form work in a similar fashion. By mixing media, juxtaposing popular culture elements, and reappropriating existing artforms, memes adopt the avant-garde techniques of subversive artistic movements discussed previously. This practice, however, has become a communications technology in its own right, with an increasing share of online communication using these multimodal forms. By compositing text with visual imagery or other media, the internet meme form allows encoding of semantic data within a pseudo-narrative container. Combining the identity-recognition characteristics of popular imagery and the reality-configuring capacity of narrative, the internet meme form exploits the image-mediated nature of spectacle society — accessing the subject’s sense of self by invoking commodified cultural symbols in order to reframe their experience. Memes can cultivate, modify or disrupt identity sets, spreading by appealing to ‘catchiness’ and the subject’s identity-forming commodities. A successful viral meme form can become a cultural touchstone, acting both as narrative and identity signifier — used across ideologies to draw attention and configure reality.
This process is self-amplifying; attention is used to manipulate subjectivity, which can in turn be used to draw attention. From our evolutionary and anthropological heritage, humans are predisposed to direct our focus toward novelty, threats, and things and people we like. Our sensory systems detect motion and contrast better than detail, which is ideal for noticing potential food and threats. As obligate socializers, we also dedicate a great deal of attention to gauging the acceptance and approval of those with whom we identify. By extension, threats to our group — or to our membership identity — warrant similar concern. Oft-cited as a contributing factor of addictive behaviour, intermittent reward stimuli produce far stronger reactions than similar stable phenomena. Of course, a purely deterministic view based on evolutionary psychology oversimplifies our motivations, but these instincts run deep in our social behaviour.
Based on these assumptions, the optimal attention-retaining strategy would be to construct a subjective experience for each individual that feeds back validating reflections of their own identity, peppered with manageable perceived threats to produce a distinguishable other. A cursory glance at any social media platform or content aggregation system reveals a similar pattern: an opaque, profit-motivated algorithm curating endless streams of “entergaging” content items encrusted with hyper-personalized advertisements. Interactions with these systems (‘likes’, comment combat, friendings, blocks, ad clicks, and more) produces behavioural information, from which a “data double” can be constructed. Over time, individuals come to experience effectively divergent internets — returning different results to identical searches, syndicating ideologically-reinforcing news sources, and enclosing a comfortable-yet-insecure social echo chamber. Since worldview is necessarily based on second-hand knowledge, incongruent information creates an inconsistent reality. In this bizarre dystopian scenario, we do not just think, believe, or act differently — we live in different worlds.
Lacking a common — or often even compatible — reality, meaning-making becomes extremely difficult. A lack of intersubjectivity produces escalating solipsism, trapping each individual in a lonely and totalizing personal void. Amplified by taunting synthetic images, our own insecurities can easily dominate the view; our aspirations drive us to consume, while our fears feed motivated hatred. Being outside one’s reality, the needs, rights, and pain of others are easy to ignore, while our own is of utmost importance. Those places where worlds do overlap typically contain common enemies, commodities, and the self-evident truths that maintain these status quo realities. As in previous times of decoherence, uncomplicated unifying narratives become extremely attractive; the recent rise of charismatic proto-fascist figures and magic bullet conspiracy theories as prime examples. With control over the very fabric of reality, the elites no longer have need of social control. In this kind of universe, the free choices of subjects can only serve the needs of capital, any possibility of an alternative is unrealistic, and the future has been cancelled. Where once we surveyed distant horizons, the funhouse mirrors of prismatic hegemony consume our awe-full gaze.
The Wrath of Kant
How, then, can democracy be made possible? How can people be brought to care about the other-at-large? Given the perilous trajectory of the neoliberal order, and the likelihood of catastrophic ecological collapse, how can we cooperate to change course? Is it possible to get “outside”?
As we have seen in earlier phases, a program of pure critique is insufficient to bring about lasting positive change. Certainly, disruption of dominant ontologies is a necessary precondition, but risks creating a narrative vacuum if no suitable alternative is presented. Particularly in the neoliberal and postmodern era, ideological disruption has become weaponized; attempts to undermine hegemony to locate truth are subducted into an illusory objectivity — making each the author of their own world. As Grafton Tanner (2016) observes: “instead of changing the world, we’ve set out to deconstruct all the different ways we’ve developed to know it”. Likewise, mere access to information and communication cannot alone cancel this effect, as the filtering of reality occurs both within the individual and in the informational sphere. With the web being no longer a possible “outside”, the netizen’s apparent escape from hegemony has instead become a mechanism of ideological reinforcement. The democratic (or forcible) seizure of political power, communications infrastructure, and so on would be impractical — and likely result in reproduction of existing power relations in some new form. Without a broadly shared — or even compatible — set of values, sustained, coordinated mass action is effectively impossible. Individualistic activism can certainly achieve singular goals, but transformational change remains out of reach.
With these conditions in mind, I propose our intervention must occur on the level of ontology. Since democratic thought can only occur under conditions of intersubjectivity, the lack of a common reality is a significant obstacle. Although it is tempting — as rationalists and empiricists have done — to seek an objective truth, this pursuit is ultimately futile. Human senses and reasoning are both inherently unreliable — vulnerable, as we have seen, to manipulation, mistakes, and more. Immanuel Kant’s synthesis of these positions suggests that the pursuit of absolute objectivity is not just impossible but also pointless; intersubjectivity is itself a sufficient basis on which to construct knowledge. With a universally-shared objective reality being unnecessary, a pragmatic objectivity can thus be achieved by establishing a common framework. While the positivist sciences can approximate the physical world, matters immaterial require a different tool: the reality-configuring capacity of narrative.
Surveying the pop culture landscape, a seemingly endless variety of narratives exist on which to draw, each with their own thematic setting. Stripping away the stylistic attributes, most of these stories are constructed around a set of basic forms. The particulars of these narratives carry their embedded meaning in metaphor and allegory, framed by the larger structure. A well-crafted story can be more than just an enjoyable diversion; it can act as an heuristic device to construct knowledge about the world. By rendering complex or abstract phenomena in narrative context, stories can be used as a mode of accessible theoretical analysis.
But existing products of the culture industry are produced and consumed from within the already-existing society, necessarily infusing their experience with hegemony. The norms and values of capitalism figure strongly in its popular fiction, with clear-cut hero/villain dichotomies, saviour discourses, wealth valorization, cis-heteronormativity, and pro-establishment themes throughout. An imperative to ensure profitability creates a risk-aversion bias in media, leading content houses to continuously (re)produce reliable, familiar, formulaic content. By implication, the previously-discussed End of History also represents the erasure of forward motion, or what Fisher observes as the “slow cancellation of the future”. Without a cohesive sense of progressive vision, popular culture has gradually transformed into a continuous reproduction of the now, drawing the popular imagination into a cul de sac of boring pessimism. Since popular culture (including online) is always-already suffused with capital, even ostensibly counterhegemonic elements are internally recouped — whether within the story itself, or through the viewer’s own divergent reality construct. The metaphysical and prefigurative power of these memes warrants careful consideration, making literary studies an important (yet undervalued) tool of critical inquiry.
Given the likelihood of swapping out one reified system of hegemony for another, pop culture narratives are insufficient for our intended purpose. Instead, we can draw insights from the origins of narrative thought itself. For early human communities, mystical narratives formed the basis of a shared reality — underpinned by the experience of mystical phenomenology. Being socialized with the stories and epistemic strategies of a communal culture, the individual comes to recognize their identity as a necessarily-interconnected part of the whole. Notions of justice, value, and cosmology are likewise framed with respect to group membership, contributing to a worldview and system of morality that regards the rights and responsibilities of the individual as subtendent to the collective. This rationale is augmented by the mystical experience; whether by practices of entrainment or the use of a psychedelic drug, the mode of cognition this effect produces predisposes the individual to collective thought. Suppressing the subjective sense of self-separation produces an experience of holism — the entirety of existence being part of a unified whole. The resulting conflation of subject and object extends a sense of responsibility to the physical, social, and immaterial worlds, leading the subject to consider the wider implications of their decisions. Taken in total, these properties lend themselves as an ideal foundation for the construction of prosocial autonomous moral reasoning.
Of course, current conditions are very different than those of small hunter-gatherer tribes. Living in a globally-interconnected, urban, cosmopolitan society, the allegiance of individuals to their kin is no longer reinforced by survival necessity. Accelerating hyperindividualism, amplified by efforts to consolidate power by economic and political actors, impairs mere identification with the generalized other. The apparatus of prismatic hegemony continuously promotes an ontology characterized by hierarchy, anthropocentrism, competition, discretism/dualism, and realism. The physical infrastructure, bureaucratic systems, cultural narratives, modes of communication, languages, and every other aspect of global society embody and reinforce this worldview. If our aim be to produce a shared basis for reality based on prosocial subjectivity, then the optimal strategy would be to distribute an ontology based on counterhegemonic values of heterarchy, ecocentrism, cooperation, holism, and idealism.
Fortunately, there is precedent for such a project, as well as the aforementioned nascent potentials of the human mind. Originating prophetic figures of the world’s major religions each taught variations of this worldview, or at least a corresponding conduct. These religious-spiritual traditions constitute a cultural scaffold for an ontological norm, giving form to an experience of the divine. Of note, a progressively expanding notion of “own” is evinced in these narratives — from immediate kin, to members of one’s community, to one’s neighbours in a more general sense. A truly universal concept of self-same kinship is warranted by a global society, implying a self-interested responsibility for the wellbeing of others, nature, and the world at large. The phenomenological properties of the mystical or psychedelic experience lend themselves well to this task, suggesting a possible tool for cultivating such a position. As previously discussed, the capacity of psychedelic drugs to de-reify existing belief structures makes such a fundamental reorientation more achievable. By highlighting the delusory nature of ideological worldviews and potentiating modes of consciousness consistent with prosocial ontology, psychedelic cognition could be considered consistent with the goals of this project. Although the acute effects of these drugs are transient, the impact of the overall experience is typically permanent; once made aware, it is difficult to return to ignorance.
It is important to note, however, that these effects are only potentiated by the psychedelic response — not guaranteed. In a state of increased schematic fluidity, the psychonaut becomes highly sensitive to psychological priming, producing a wide range of possible outcomes. The content and character of a ‘trip’ is influenced by one’s pre-existing worldview, state of mind, neurochemistry, surroundings, and experiences under the influence of the drug. Given the possible spontaneous collapse of foundational cognitive schemata and heuristics, the disorientation resulting from a relatively unstructured consciousness can be quite uncomfortable. If predisposed to anxiety, extreme moods, or psychosis, great care must be taken to avoid shocks resulting from such a suddenly-altered reality. Although the resulting basic phenomenal properties of this state tend toward the intended ontology, guidance is often needed to give form to the sensation. In the absence of a supporting scaffold or attentive guide, the subject may fail to effectively incorporate their experience — drawing contrary conclusions or even experiencing psychic trauma.
This dependency highlights the importance of narrative as a means of configuring reality. An effective narrative can leverage the world-shaping effects of the psychedelic experience to manifest the desired ontic shift, as well as providing a means to operationalize required concepts. But rather than simply producing a competing monolithic narrative or exogenous moral code — replacing one reified mythology with another — this task would be better fulfilled by a set of memetic elementary principles. Culturally-independent transmissibility of these memes requires narrative components to be compatible with existing folk traditions. Fortunately, with many of the component themes already represented in existing spiritual-religious traditions, these elements need only be drawn out and their commonality highlighted. By (respectfully!!) recruiting mythic concepts as proto-sociological theory — for example, a poltergeist being a manifestation of unaddressed injustice — praxis can be crafted using allegorical reasoning. Aided by these heuristics, intersubjectivity becomes more feasible, potentially enabling democratic thought and the conditions for development of autonomous moral reasoning.
The Final Frontier
This work is decidedly incomplete, representing only a proposed methodology for future exploration. By exploring the origins and historical basis for narrative as a reality-configuring implement, the roots of contemporary hyperindividualistic ontology can be seen in the stories we tell. Although social change requires the disruption of hegemonic norms, pure critique risks a narrative vacuum — swiftly filled by authoritative power. In this late age, reality has shattered entirely, trapping each subject in their own facet of a prismatic hegemony. If we are to move beyond mass solipsism and engage in democratic thought and action, a shared common basis for reality is needed. But rather than seeking an impossible objective “outside”, intersubjectivity can arise from awareness of our interconnectivity. Inspired by the metaphysical effects of mystical cognition, the narratively-contextualized popularization of the psychedelic experience could help to repair reality — restarting history, and making a new world possible to conceive. In the words of Ian Lain: the goal is not to wake up, but to learn to dream differently.
References
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Dawkins, Richard. 1981. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Debord, Guy. 1967. The Society Of The Spectacle. Black & Red.
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism. Winchester: O Books.
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Herman, Edward S, and Noam Chomsky. 2002. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press.
McKenna, Terence. 1992. Food Of The Gods. London: Ebury Publishing.
Tanner, Grafton. 2016. Babbling Corpse. Washington: Zero Books.
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