This is an excerpt from my first book, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, which explores how people use practices from ancient Greek philosophies in modern life.
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It’s every liberal parent’s nightmare. One day they happen to glance at their 14-year-old son’s laptop, and they see he is watching videos by Andrew Tate, the mullah of misogyny. They start to notice red flags in their son’s conversation: ‘bitches’, ‘choke-holds’, ‘feminism is cancer’, ‘Hitler wasn’t all bad’. Could their sweet little Quentin have been radicalized by the online far-right manosphere?
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This is a story about dangerous ideas, and words’ magical power to heal and to harm. It’s about AI, Charles Manson, dubstep, Neo-Nazis, occultism, and a lot of amphetamine, but it’s mainly about Nicholas Land.
‘You went into psychiatry to try and cast light on the mystery of suffering. Did it?
‘Not really. It’s a theological question, you can’t expect medicine to answer it.’
RD Laing, interviewed near the end of his life.
In this article I’m going to look at definitions of ‘psychedelic integration’ and suggest that philosophy and theology inevitably play a role in the evaluation of the truth and wisdom of post-trip beliefs.
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I read the anecdote in a biography, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, by Robert D. Richardson. James has long been my favourite philosopher and psychologist. But after reading this biography, I love James for his personality and life-philosophy.
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The most influential thinkers of the last half century are an obscure group of French philosophers — Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and possibly others like Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes. They are The Postmodernists…duh-duh DUHHHHH! — and they pose a fundamental threat to western civilization — to free speech, reason, science, to the idea of the individual and universal values, to liberalism itself.
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In 1841, a young Danish intellectual called Soren Kierkegaard abruptly broke off his engagement to his fiancé, the beautiful Regine Olsen. They were very much in love. So why break up?
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Our psyches are deeply connected to the material and symbolic worlds we weave around us. The habitat of our daily lives re-inforces our habits, for good and ill. All our stuff – our apartments, our clothes, our books, our TV, our online activity, our food, our relationships – helps make us who we are, in a powerful feedback loop.
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How are you feeling? How well are you? Is your weight where you want it to be? Smoking too much? How happy are you on a scale of one to ten? Are you optimising your personal brand? How fast was your last five kilometre run? Would you like to share that via social media? Would you like a life-coach to help you overcome these challenges on a way to a better, happier, more awesome you?
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Watch out folks. There is a murky world lurking behind the scenes, a sinister cabal of policy-makers, psychologists, CEOs, advertizers and life-coaches, watching you, measuring you, nudging you, monitoring your every smile, all to try and make you happy. We must resist. This, broadly, is the message of sociologist William Davies’ book, The Happiness Industry: How Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being.
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