From Julius Evola to Solidarity

Jumping off of an audience comment that Julius Evola was the "OG fascist mystic dude," the team discusses long-running trends of fascist-adjacent psychedelia, corporate influence, and the "collateral damage" of psychedelic therapy. Perhaps the best antidotes for authoritarian psychedelia are solidarity and mutual aid. Excerpted from the January "Castalia" Livestream.

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Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.

[00:01] A cute anime girl commented that julius avola was the og fascist mystic dude and we've talked about and alan piper actually in the strange nazis interview that that pace and piper did there's some really good discussion about evola and some psychedelic press or psychedelic adjacent people who translated some of his writings if I'm remembering correctly yeah that's correct and I mean evola was you know an occultist who he you know he laid the groundwork for a lot of fascist philosophy and he was you know a an early experimenter with his own consciousness but was very much you know somebody who was in the might makes right kind of worlds and incidentally he's steve bannon's you know sort of go-to philosopher

[01:02] For how to take back the west so I mean in these ways these fringe ideas these ideologies that like believe me I would love to have spent you know the last couple of years of my life thinking about something more friendly but it's like it's to the point where it needs some reply and that's something that I think that we felt we needed to do to the castilia material without you know giving it a platform without sort of just sharing it on social media and saying lol what's this because there there are a lot I mean you know like that's definitely a first impulse but there's a lot to sort of untangle and explicate and I mean I really got a shout out to russ for you know helping us peek behind the curtain and see that see where some of

[02:06] This came from so yeah and along the lines of where some of this has come from you know there's an interesting prompt I'll say in the chat from luke where it says it seems to me that just like obama era neoliberalism led to trump recent pollenesque neoliberal psychedelia has opened up a space for all this psychedelic fascism and I think that's an interesting comparison to make I think there's also questions too of like in the context of mainstreaming and as people can almost taste it right on the oh we're almost there you know now that we've got you know billion dollar corporate engagement here and we're if maps doesn't get across the finish line you know at least one of these corporations will and then that'll be our trojan horse into psychedelics for everyone through you know even if it has to be medicalized and this notion that like we saw when we published various pieces of the angeli story that you know oh you guys you're gonna make psychedelics look bad

[03:06] You know and it's the same sort of trope that we've seen used whether trying to discuss psychedelic fascism or trying to discuss survivors and victims of psychedelic therapist abuse where it's like you can't talk about this because if people realize that there are these sketchy things going on around psychedelia it's going to harm our chances of getting mainstream acceptance but if mainstream acceptance requires sweeping all of this under the rug putting the skeletons in the closet and not acknowledging that there are real unfolding problems of abuse on a variety of fronts you know personally the notion of protecting the field at the cost of all of these harms to all of these people and the notion that like as somebody who has been targeted with you know by fascists by white supremacists who's dealt with anti-semitism throughout my life you know the notion that like I need to shut up about that for the good of psychedelia it just doesn't hold for me I mean it's a pretty cold utilitarian calculation I mean these people would contend that you know all of the things that

[04:08] You just talked about in at the end when we tally up all of the healing versus all of the harm that getting the medicine to as many people as possible under you know standard fda protocols is you know it look it's gonna come out in the wash man just sit tight yeah it's just a little collateral damage and I don't know I think we can I think we can talk about it along the way and I think that we've already seen certain policy solutions at a local ground up not top down level that have provided access and you know I think that's a good thing with regard to some of you know the questions about whether that increases demand I mean guess what we have more problems than just the drug war and don't get me wrong the drug war is a big one but we live in late capitalism and a pandemic and climate change we

[05:08] Have to do many things at once if we are to you know leave a leave the world a better place or even secure like hope for any sort of human future not to get too bleak but you know and when we look at issues of cartel and we look at like indigenous populations growing plants that that become drugs you know and all of this like we see there are huge issues of supply chains and global capitalism and you know if we can't engage on multiple fronts at the same time we're in you know deep [expletive] right but you know psychedelics are supposed to be multi-disciplinary they're supposed to open your mind and dissolve boundaries and turn us all into soul siblings holding hands and so you know if any of that's true or how about this if we think that's desirable there's a word for that on the left it's called solidarity you know it means that we help each

[06:09] Other and we try and build a better world together so I'm for that you're here you