This is Bert Olivier, a close friend and mentor, with his partner Marianna:

Bert’s formal title is Extraordinary Professor of Philosophy – apologies, in the intro I refer to him as remarkable professor, but this wrong (same-same but different!!). He has 47 or 48 years of employment and participation in the world of academia, and his publishing record is formidable. His in-depth philosophical knowledge is apparent within moments of speaking with him, and he has much to offer in the way of perspective and thought provocation. You can find many of his academic articles online, and he frequently writes excellent pieces for the Mail and Guardian’s thoughtleader platform. Link here.

Apologies for the poor sound quality of the interview – I did what I could after the gremlins stole a small piece of recording kit that made it impossible to test the audio quality when going into the interview.

Short guitar lead-in to the interview is a snippet of Damian Williams’ beautiful acoustic guitaring, with me on the bass guitar.

Download at 128kbps (118mb): DOWNLOAD HERE.

Please note: this is an article I wrote for submission to a journal from which I have not yet received feedback. The journal editor and article reviewers may accept the article, reject it, or accept conditionally with specific changes required. If it gets accepted and published, I will edit this note to say so!

Placing the Ecological Crisis in a Broader Context:

The Orphic and the Promethean

Abstract:

The historical prevalence of Promethean characteristics such as dominion and domination has resulted in a dispensation where exclusive pragmatism and habitual perception have steered human actions in directions that have resulted in an unprecedented ecological crisis. Christianity, reductionist science, pragmatic technology, and capitalism have homogenised discursive arenas, making ecological degradation unavoidable as a consequence of Promethean progress. Mechanisms exist that prevent changes toward ecologically sensitive attitudes from rooting and spreading as remedies to ecologically destructive attitudes. Alternative, Orphic attitudes, theories, and movements do exist and they offer something of a response to Promethean attitudes underpinning the ecological crisis. Permaculture offers a down to earth, context-bound approach to establishing Orphic systems, while philosophy in two specific formats are tools to further broaden the context of the ecological crisis.

Keywords

positive and negative freedom, shapers of discourse, pragmatism and utilitarianism, permaculture, philosophy in the present, philosophy as a way of life.

In the year 1859 the English philosopher, political economist and civil servant John Stuart Mill saw his book On Liberty published. In it he points out the importance of “experiments of living”:

As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them.

Mill’s considered position could not be clearer: if you do not hurt anybody else in your endeavours, then you should be free to think and do whatever you like. This is indeed sums up the concept of ‘negative freedom’ or ‘negative liberty’: “One has negative liberty… when there is an absence of external interferences to one’s doing what one wishes – specifically, when there is an absence of external interferences by other people” (Matt Zwolinski, accessed 2018). Mill was concerned that the ‘tyranny of the majority’ – or rather, that the tyranny of those “who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority” – was eroding people’s freedoms in the negative sense to which I have just drawn attention. Freedom increasingly was becoming ‘positive freedom’, where “one has the opportunity and ability to do what one wishes” (Zwolinski 2018), but where the opportunities are invariably delineated by institutions or organisations such as the state. I must therefore add that one has positive liberty when one has the opportunity and ability to do what has been deemed as acceptable to do by the State or some other institution, organisation, or dominant societal, political, economic or attitudinal force. Mill’s project in On Liberty was partly to situate the broad concepts of liberty and freedom on a spectrum and thereby emphasise that all liberties and freedoms are not equal – for example, that which a person does ‘freely’ under endorsement from a historically dominant institution (such as State, Church, and economically influential entity) is not the same kind of liberty as the freedom to do whatever one pleases and be left alone so long as one does not injure another person.

It is not my intention to become reflectively engaged in the normative ethical activity of asking whether or not positive liberty is preferable to negative liberty. While it is possible to argue on the one hand that negative freedom is the freedom to starve, and on the other hand that ‘freedoms’ endorsed by specific institutions with clear vested interests and agendas are technically no freedoms at all, the answer perhaps lies in the middle of the two extremes, and this topic as ever remains a fertile one for consideration and discussion. For the initial purpose of this paper, however, I would like to ask, to what extent is it possible to exercise freedom in its negative sense in contemporary society? By contemporary society, I mean specifically the advanced, consumer, competitive, Capitalist, industrial, Democratic, dominion-driven dispensation, an acronym for which is ACID, one I have adopted (and slightly adapted) from the ecophilosopher Karl Hoyer (2012) (who attributes it to Sigmund Kvaloy Setreng). Shortly after a person is born, he or she is given an identity number, national security number, national insurance number, or whatever the barcode-like number is called in the country in which a person is born. This number ‘plugs’ one into a socio-political and economic system where invariably fiat currency intermediates almost all activity, and fiat currency is debt-based and inherent to it is the need to pay back the debt created the moment money is issued (Pittaway 2017: 70-78). This is one reason why in ACID a person will never be allowed to exercise negative liberty: there is always a tax-person, a banker, a bureaucrat, an inspector, an auditor, or any of ACID’s henchmen knocking at the door, so to speak, to keep the cogs of a debt-based economy turning – one is never left alone to do as one likes, free from interference by other people, people who generally represent the ‘interests’ of ‘the system’. These interests (of which economic control is only one) are regurgitated in various forms via the corporate-owned mass media, as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman remind one in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (2002: 306): the mass media “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion”. Various other ‘ACID perpetuation mechanisms’ have been the subjects of scrutiny: Mill (1858) saw them in ‘the dangers of Democracy’, various thinkers saw them in the contradiction that is the closed capitalist core of an allegedly open democracy (Ralph Nadar via Manfred B. Steger 2009, James G. Speth 2008, Peter Barnes via Speth 2008, Gar Alperovitz via Speth 2008, Robert McChesney in Chomsky 1999); Herbert Marcuse (1972) saw them in the expansion of an homogenising one-dimensionality of what he called Advanced Industrial Society (or AIS, which denotes something very similar to ACID), Gilles Deleuze (1992) in disciplinary societies and societies of control, and Thomas Princen (2010) in what he calls ‘traffic control measures’. These Acid perpetuation mechanisms are aspects of a system that forces upon a person a narrow positive freedom but marginalises chances of exercising negative freedom.

When discussing the topic of the debt-based economic system I referred to above, interlocutors have often responded in defence of the system by saying that it works, that despite imperfections it is the best system human beings have managed to construct after centuries of ‘progress’ through previous forms of economic activity. They point out that the technology I use, for example the computer I used to type this paper, is all a product of the system and that I should be grateful for it all. Strange then that the imperatives accompanying ACID – expand, consume, ‘progress’, increase, dominate, compete, accelerate, develop, and so on (Pittaway 2017: 80-102) – have led the human species, as well as the ecosystems constituting most of life on planet Earth, to an unprecedented crisis. John B. Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York (2010:155) explain:

It is impossible to exaggerate the environmental problem facing humanity in the twenty-first century. Available evidence now strongly suggests that, under a regime of ‘business as usual’ with no substantial lessening of the drivers of environmental destruction, we could be facing within a decade or so a major ‘tipping point,’ leading to irrevocable and catastrophic climate change. Other ecological crises — such as species extinction, the rapid depletion of the oceans’ bounty, desertification, deforestation, air pollution, water shortages and pollution, soil degradation, the imminent peaking of world oil production (creating new geopolitical tensions), and a chronic world food crisis – all point to the fact that the planet as we know it and its ecosystems are stretched to the breaking point. The moment of truth for the earth and human civilization has arrived.

“Business as usual” is the domain of ACID, and Foster, Clark and York have identified it as being instrumental in causing the ecological destruction. Considering that business as usual in ACID is quantitatively represented by indices such as GDP, one can again see the link between the business as usual of ACID and ecological destruction in these observations from Joel Kovel (2002: 48):

Capital employs purely quantitative indices such as gross domestic product (GDP) because they are convenient indices of accumulation. Scarcely a critic of the ecological crisis has refrained from commenting upon the stupid brutality of this number, which reduces the living and the dead alike to the common denominator of what can be extracted from their commodification. It is necessary, though, to see thinking in terms of GDP as no mere error, but the actual logic of the reigning power.

Clearly, then, some interlocutors have very narrow definitions in mind when they claim that the contemporary globalised economic system ‘works’ and is ‘the best’ system human beings have been able to create. The computer they tell me to be grateful for, they may not realise, is designed to break after a specific period of time (as is the case with all products of technology made for mass consumption) so that the corporation that produced it can continue accruing massive profits (and also ‘play its part’ in keeping the cogs of the economy turning). This is known as planned obsolescence (Pittaway 2017: 161), something that engineers and scientists are employed to ‘perfect’ despite the obscene ecological impact of a world full of Technology-designed-to-break all the time for the sake of (debt-based) economic activity. Planned obsolescence is typical of the obscene ecological impacts of several large-scale industries now found all over the world and which seem inseparable from the broadly-accepted notions of ‘development’ and ‘democracy’. This links back to what I have said about system-endorsed positive ‘freedoms’, specifically that they are exclusively prescribed by a dominant institution: in the broader context of ACID, freedom is the positive freedom to develop, as Inge Konik (2015: 15-16) points out via Wolfgang Sachs:

…Truman promoted ever increasing production and technological advancement as key to the well-being of all nations, regardless of their economic, political, social and cultural differences, nuances, and dreams. Sachs holds that this was the first time that a “world view” was prescribed in which “all the peoples of the earth were to move along the same track and aspire to only one goal – development”.

The development of ACID and economic growth go hand in hand. Economic growth is measured in numbers that increase as the money supply does, numbers such as the GDP index, but in a debt-based fiat currency (i.e. the currency of ACID), as the money supply is increased, so is global debt. Inherent to this phenomenon is an obligation to pay money back (which requires more money expansion/creation, entailing more debt), hence constant expansion of the lucrative industrial activity that has been equated with progress in ACID. This kind of industrial ‘progress’ comes in many forms, for examples, the fossil-fuel industry, the agricultural industry, the meat and fish industries, and so on (see Pittaway 2017: 47-79 for some of the anthropic causes of the ecological crisis), all of which have had devastating consequences for the ecology of the planet. The 2017 Oxfam report on global inequality called ‘An economy of the 99%’ clearly states the consequence of this link between the economic model I have described and the ecological consequences: “Our economic model is based on exploiting our environment and ignoring the limits of what our planet can bear”. Indeed, ecological exploitation must occur for the ‘progress’ and development of this type of economy, a claim substantiated by the simple fact that ecological exploitation continues to accelerate alongside the now global imperative to ‘progress’, grow and develop as per the economic model of ACID. Environmental and political author and activist, George Monibot (2017), of theguardian.com offers support for my contention here with the following: “Growth must go on – it’s the political imperative everywhere, and it’s destroying the Earth. But there’s no way of greening it…”. Founder and president of the Living Economies Forum, David Korsten (2016), adds: “Contrary to the promises of politicians and economists, this growth is not eliminating poverty and creating a better life for all. It is instead creating increasingly grotesque and unsustainable imbalances in our relationship to Earth and to each other.” Considering the opening reference to Mill’s observation about the need for “experiments of living”, wherein he commented that “modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them”, the ecological crisis is perhaps a wake-up call that ACID is a failed experiment which has jeopardised the well-being of the natural systems on which life depends for survival.

Mill’s On Liberty was published the year 1859. It is perhaps an eerie coincidence that in the same year the first commercial oil well went into production in Titusville, Pennsylvania, USA. The world’s population of human beings at that time was one billion. Commercial oil provided the means by which human beings would multiply their population seven-fold in an evolutionary-historical blink of an eye, but it did not provide the motive. The motive can be traced to specific human attitudes, to the kinds of thoughts that human beings entertain about the relationship between themselves and the rest of the world, because what “people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to the things around them” (Lynn White Jr. 1967: 11). White identified Christianity, technology, and science as instrumental underpinnings of the attitudes that would after the industrial revolution bring about an anthropological onslaught against nature. I will comment on these ‘shapers of discourse’ in ways the White does not, and I will add capitalism to the list. Christianity, having institutionally dominated the direction of human thought for well over a millennium and having persecuted, oppressed and often obliterated[1] that which was alternative to it, spread the imperative of dominion-over-the-earth, widely eliminating alternative approaches to living and thereby starting the first of the homogenisation projects in the history of Western-dominated civilisation, which via globalisation is now the bulk of human civilisation. Reductionist science continued the project of spreading the dominion imperative, even though eventually it would abandon the notion of God. René Descartes, for example, anticipating the flavour of scientific inquiry as it would develop out of the period of Christian domination, writes in his 1637 Discourse on Method (1972: 119) that he looks forward to the time when the new science will render humans “masters and possessors of nature” – unsurprisingly, Descartes was a devout Christian. Francis Bacon, a figurehead in the scientific arena who happened also to express Christian sentiments, stated that the “secrets of nature are better revealed under the torture of experiments than when they follow their natural course” (Pierre Hadot 2008: 93). In light of these and other similar scientific sentiments, Hadot (2008: 123) states the following:

What we must say, I think, is that with Francis Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, and Newton, a definitive break… may have taken place, and these scholars discovered the means of progressing in a decisive and definitive way in this project of dominating nature, limiting themselves to the rigorous analysis of what is measurable and quantifiable in sensible phenomena.

Alongside Christianity and science one can place technology and capitalism (which were commented on earlier) as central in the project of delineating the scope of ecologically deleterious positive freedoms available to a citizen of ACID. Christianity, reductionist science, technology and capitalism are ‘shapers of discourse’ that have spread ecologically-problematic attitudes across the globe, attitudes that have ‘steered’ human actions that result in ecologically-problematic outcomes – this is not to say that these shapers of discourse are solely responsible for motivating ecologically problematic human actions, but they are the historically dominant ‘drivers’ of attitudes that have influenced human action over the course of Western history. Regarding technology in ACID, the creation and use of technology are intimately connected with the scientific focus on “what is measurable and quantifiable in sensible phenomena” (Hadot, Ibid) as per the use of instrumental reason identified by Max Horkheimer (1947). Instrumental reason can be thought of as the application of reason for purely and exclusively technical-pragmatic purposes. Horkheimer (2002: 104) does offer a glimpse of the relevance of the pragmatic and instrumental attitude in the context of the ecological crisis: “Modern insensitivity to nature is indeed only a variation of the pragmatic attitude that is typical of Western civilization as a whole”. Martin Heidegger’s analysis of technology (1943) as something essentially entangled with the process of ‘Enframing’ reveals a coterminous attitude toward nature, where nature is reduced to nothing but a ‘standing reserve’ of resources for human use.

The constituents of the ecological crisis (Pittaway 2017: 31-46), the direct physical causes of the crisis (Pittaway 2017: 47-79), the attitudinal causes of the crisis (Pittaway 2017: 80-102), and the perpetuation mechanisms that prevent much needed social change (Pittaway 2017: 103-127) in the direction of ecological sustainability, all constitute an unprecedented problem facing human beings, as well as the countless forms of life that are destroyed in the wake of ACID’s modus operandi. The focal areas of this paper so far depict a dispensation in which the possibility of conducting ‘experiments of living’ is marginal, even negligible, because dominant shapers of discourse paved the way for a global platform characterised by socio-political and economic homogeneity that dictates the extent and limits of ‘freedom’. To be sure, this is a very confined, limited and narrow form of positive freedom – a person will not be left alone, free from interference from other people in this system. Furthermore, this almost all-encompassing system, ACID, which is partly a result of certain problematic attitudes toward nature and simultaneously a perpetuator of those attitudes, is a disaster for the ecology of the planet. Keeping in mind the notions that ACID is perpetuated by various mechanisms, and accordingly that alternatives to ACID (or experiments of living) are thereby marginalised or negated, consider very broadly the philosophical notion of the dialectical process. For my purposes, I will describe a dialectical process very simply (in broadly Hegelian terms) as a process consisting of three parts: a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis. A thesis is an idea; in the spirit of simplicity, I will use the example of ‘self’ as a thesis. In this limited example, the antithesis of ‘self’ is ‘other’. A synthesis of the two might be ‘community’. The dialectical process therefore is a model often used to describe how change occurs: change of a concept (self – other – community), a society, or any system. I wish to make only the following point about the dialectical process I have just exemplified: the process requires that the thesis and the antithesis ‘merge’ or ‘combine’ or ‘overlap’ at some point, or else a synthesis cannot be arrived at – in other words, something new cannot emerge. In Hegelian logic the ‘synthesis’ will, in its turn, become a ‘thesis’, and by being ‘negated’ provoke a new antithesis, synthesis, and so on.

It is certainly the case that ‘new things’ have emerged (and continue to emerge) in and from the dispensation of ACID, the system which I have argued is characterised by various traits of the historically-dominant shapers of discourse – Christianity, science, technology, capitalism, and to a lesser extent democracy. But the ‘new things’ to which one is perhaps able to refer are more than likely completely compatible within the confines of consumer capitalism, ‘pragmatic’ technology, and reductionist science – some of the very shapers of discourse that have identified as instrumental in spreading ecologically problematic attitudes. However, I must ask: have any of the dominant system characteristics really changed since the dominion-enforcing reign of Christianity, since the ubiquitous expansion of pragmatic technologies, since the compartmentalising materialism of reductionist science, and since the profit-addiction inherent to capitalism? One might perhaps be able to refer to isolated examples where a considerable change occurred, examples like the end of race-based slavery, or when the right to vote for leaders was granted to all people. However, these remain isolated examples. I have chosen a context of considerable proportions, namely the ecological crisis, as a reminder that systemically nothing has really changed – and by systemically I mean the advanced competitive consumer Capitalist industrial Democratic dominion-‘crazed’ dispensation that continues in the same direction as it has for centuries, albeit at an exponentially accelerated pace – the ecological crisis is a severe reminder of this. The general characteristics of the system remain the same ones that have been ecologically problematic since they became dominant. And, as already pointed out, mechanisms exist that prevent change of the characteristics that I have identified as ecologically problematic.

The relevance of my reference to the dialectical process should now be clear: in ACID, the dialectical process is ‘frozen’ in any large-scale sense via an intricate interconnection of dominant physical and non-physical system components characterised by competition, dominion, utility, and a variety of other characteristics that can be called Promethean (under inspiration from Hadot, 2006). This, of course, is a topic open to discussion and debate, i.e. the topic of the extent to which ‘ACID does dialectic’, so to speak – I clearly espouse support for the view that in any large-scale sense of the concept of dialectic, ACID ‘does not do change’. In Hegelian terms – if these must be adopted – one might say that the system has become so homogenised that any antithesis to a thesis is an antithesis only in name, and that the synthesis (or every synthesis, in succession), has incrementally ‘ironed out’ all genuine antitheses, so that only qualitative homogeneity remains. Or, using the well-known formula for encouraging originality, coined by Edward de Bono (1970), ‘lateral thinking’, in the present encompassing system the only lateral thinking that is tolerated is the kind that does not question the system itself, but merely promises its more efficient operation. In a 2012 BBC interview hosted by Paul Mason, Manuel Castells, author of Rise of the Network Society (2010), offers a glimpse of support for my contention here – that ACID ‘does not do change’ – when he says that “the political institutions are impervious to change”, and of course the political institutions are central in and for ACID. Rosi Braidotti (2013:58) also speaks about the “inertia of established mental habits” in a manner that suggests a stagnation of the dialectical cycle:

I do think that one of the most pointed paradoxes of our era is precisely the tension between the urgency of finding new and alternative modes of political and ethical agency for our technologically mediated world and the inertia of established mental habits on the other.

And Foster, Clark and York refer to a “prevailing hierarchical social order” with a “commitment to stasis in its fundamental social-property relations” (2010:17), a social order where “those on top have a vested interest in blocking fundamental change” (2010:27).

So at a very superficial level it is possible to agree with the broad concept of ‘the end of history’, a concept attributed mainly to Francis Fukuyama – but only in the sense that the concept highlights an ideological goal attributed to the Promethean and its contemporary manifestation as ACID, rather than as an accurate depiction of the normative (or desirable) ‘positive status’ of ACID (let alone the capacity to put an arbitrary stop to the historical process itself) , which Fukuyama (1992) is clearly in favour of:

Writing in the twentieth century, Hegel’s great interpreter, Alexandre Kojève, asserted intransigently that history had ended because what he called the “universal and homogeneous state” – what we can understand as liberal democracy – definitely solved the question of recognition by replacing the relationship of lordship and bondage with universal and equal recognition. What man had been seeking throughout the course of history – what had driven the prior ‘stages of history’ – was recognition. In the modern world, he finally found it, and was ‘completely satisfied.’ This claim was made seriously by Kojève, and it deserves to be taken seriously by us.

Leaving aside the question, whether this interpretation is compatible with Hegel’s own work (which it arguably is not, considering the difference between Hegel’s ‘logic’ and actual history) Fukuyama does indeed take Kojève’s claim seriously, and espouses support for liberal Democracy, which is the political component of ACID, while I do neither of these things due to the inherently problematic characteristics and mechanisms of ACID I have already briefly outlined. Promethean characteristics, qualities, and attitudes result in actions that marginalise alternatives to the Promethean, and also result in the construction of dominant system ‘mechanisms’ that prevent alternatives from arising. Put differently, the Promethean is like a ruthless dictator, whose ‘success’ is attributable to his or her might and dominance (and who accordingly eliminates opposition), rather than like a meritocratic leader who facilitates any kind of promising system-wide change.

I have argued that the dominant characteristics of ACID are ecologically problematic and that mechanisms exist that prevent social and economic change, hence my claim that ACID is something in which the dialectical wheel is prevented from spinning in any real manner. However, just because ACID ‘does not do dialectic’ does not mean that ‘antitheses’ are not available. I use the word antitheses very loosely here; better for my purposes would be the phrase ‘alternatives’. These alternatives are ones characterised by qualities that would clearly be unfamiliar in the broad arenas of ACID. One example is the Occupy Movement that occurred primarily in the years 2011-12, a movement in which attention was drawn to the rule of what was referred to as the one per cent – the one per cent of the world’s population that owns and controls considerable portions of the world’s wealth and uses it to reap massive profits, usually via socially problematic, ethically problematic, and ecologically problematic means. It is clear that some of the characteristics of the movement are entirely different to those common to ACID, something which Noam Chomsky comments on in a 2012 ‘Democracy Now’ interview hosted by Amy Goodman: the movement “spontaneously created something that doesn’t really exist in the country [i.e. the USA]: communities of mutual support, cooperation, open spaces for discussion… just people doing things and helping each other”. This is an important observation in the context of this study: people cooperating and helping each other, i.e. not competing. The movement offers such glimpses of manifestations of alternative attitudes, alternative attitudes I am convinced are ones that need to be paid attention to when addressing the question of what to do in light of the ecological crisis. Broadly, these alternative attitudes are ones I call Orphic (again under inspiration from Hadot, 2006), and some more examples of Orphic attitudes will be offered below.

‘Orphic’ areas of focus, to differing degrees, espouse attitudes that are in contrast to the problematic ones I group under the label ‘Promethean’, and I offer these attitudes as suggestions for further exploration as a ‘response’ in the context of the ecological crisis. A certain indulgence on the part of the reader is generally required here: indulgence in the form of a kind of ‘suspension of disbelief’ regarding some of these ‘suggestions’. Without it, the reader would not, for example, give someone like Graham Hancock (whose important work has, despite some striking recent confirmations by other scientists, been largely sidelined by mainstream scientists), a chance to convince her or him. Hancock (1995, 2015) identifies contemporary civilization as one with amnesia, where what is forgotten is a large and crucial chunk of human history where humankind reached a sophisticated level of civilisation with its own knowledge and technology. Despite its sophistication, the civilisation was unable to survive a cataclysm; but there were some survivors and they initiated megalithic stone building projects to convey to future civilisations some important messages from vast antiquity. The Orphic message is clear here: ACID is not the apex of human history (despite what school and university history classes imply), and furthermore, past advanced civilisations have met their demise, suggesting that ACID is not impervious to collapse despite its status of being ‘advanced’. The question of how to best anticipate cataclysmic events arises, and in the case of ACID, the event appears to be a cascading series of ecological collapses induced by human actions; the answers are perhaps to be found in changes to the relationship between human beings and nature, in a direction away from anthropocentrism and towards biocentrism.

In search of Orphic ‘alternatives’, one can look at ‘older cultures’, cultures like the Kogi, the Ik of Uganda, the Najavo, the Hopi, the Cree, Ojibwa and the San (listed by Thom Hartmann in his ‘Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight‘ (1998:154). They all share the attitude of deeply respecting the interconnection of the human and non-human world, and accordingly see human beings as a reciprocal part of nature. These older cultures “are most often cooperators, not dominators”, and “the anthropological record shows that not one culture believed itself to be separate from and superior to nature” (Ibid). One can look at the ‘unnamed movement’ written about by Paul Hawken in his Blessed Unrest (2007), a movement consisting of between one and two million organisations and groups all working toward justice in various spheres, and though disparate, these organisations and groups share the vision of an ecologically, socially, politically, and economically sustainable dispensation. One can look at a non-reductionist scientific model such as Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance (1991), which proposes that characteristics of a species are shaped by non-physical fields connecting all members of the species rather than purely physical and quantitative genetic processes. One can look at an approach to human economic activity Charles Eisenstein calls ‘sacred economics’ (2011), an approach that is unrecognisable in character, and in social and ecological impact, when compared to the debt-based and growth-focused economic system of contemporary civilisation. One can look at the Zeitgeist Movement,  which is characterised by a strong sense of technological and scientific pragmatism, yet manages to align such pragmatism with sustainable approaches to providing for physical needs in a context of finite ‘resources’. One can look at deep ecology, which has the ecological goal of “the protection of the planet and its richness and diversity of life for its own sake” (Naess 2008: 100). All of these examples of Orphic ‘alternatives’ are explored in considerable detail in my PhD study (Pittaway 2017: 128-170). This article serves in part as a broad summary of the research that constitutes the study.

Clearly lacking in the literature about ecologically sensitive (i.e. Orphic) alternatives is a clear route for transition, and by this I mean a transition from an ecologically problematic dispensation characterised predominantly by Promethean attitudes such as dominion and dominance, to an ecologically sustainable dispensation characterised by Orphic attitudes such as cooperation and interconnection. This is perhaps a common limitation of outlines of systems and ideas alternative to the dominant ones of ACID, and if I were to offer nothing in the form of ‘actionable’ steps toward solutions, then it would be a limitation of this paper as well. However, this is where permaculture becomes an invaluable Orphic addition in the context of the ecological crisis. Permaculture is a design system constituted by twelve design principles, informed by various ecological observations, and motivated by the imperative for human beings to co-exist in a sustainable manner with the non-human world. Considering what I have said about transition, permaculture plays a crucial role because it offers very specific principles that can be applied by an individual, a family, a community, a village, a city, a country… and I dare to suggest even by all the countries constituting the human civilisation. There is, however, no one-size-fits-all way to implement permaculture: in permaculture, every environment is a manifestation of different natural features, and often synthetic features too, that need to be observed, and in which human beings need to interact and make small and slow changes, accepting feedback, valuing the marginal, and so on – these latter clauses are allusions to specific permaculture principles. They are all context specific. Permaculture, I contend, is a context-specific, adaptable, patient, accessible, realistic, down-to-earth, actionable approach to creating Orphic change. It is an embodiment of the awareness of the need to carefully design and construct alternatives to the systems of ACID from the ground up via ecologically respectful means. So when faced with the question of how to transition from ACID to something sustainable and ecologically respectful, the answer is not to be found in something as complicated, idealistic, and perhaps ultimately impotent as voting for a ‘green’ political party (because in practice there is only one party, the business party, as Noam Chomsky once wryly observed in a ‘Newstatesman’ interview hosted by Alyssa McDonald,  2010), but rather in the assembly and use of a compost toilet; in the planting of fruiting trees; in the catching and storing of rain-water; in growing some herbs and edible leaf-crops near the home kitchen; in getting rid of ‘the television’; in purchasing one or two solar panels and one or two deep-cycle batteries and learning how to adapt one’s lighting and (for example) computer-powering needs to this small solar-power setup; in being creative with the ‘waste products’ that usually end up in the bin and making useful items from them; in keeping chickens for the purposes of producing eggs for protein in the diet; in sourcing local fresh produce and meat wherever possible; in learning the edible properties of ‘weeds’ and incorporating ‘weeds’ into one’s diet; and so on. These may seem like small steps, but one need not be part of some bigger social phenomenon, or be rich, or be talented, or well-connected socially, in order to take the steps – and this simplicity is part of what makes permaculture very appealing in the context of the socio-political and economic complications that underpin the ecological crisis. Remembering the opening remarks to this paper about positive and negative freedom, I should point out that permaculture is one of the few arenas in which one can learn how to exercise negative freedom – in the implementation of small, slow, sustainable, synergistic systemic solutions that together add up, with the consequence that the need to depend fully on the homogenised and homogenising systems of ACID is thereby reduced. I am not for a moment suggesting that permaculture can feed the world – perhaps it could, but the world’s seven and a half billion people grew to that number because of the widespread commercialisation of fossil-fuels since the second half of the nineteenth century (when the population of human beings was only one billion), but the fossil-fuel system is now widely acknowledged to be inherently unsustainable – something that uses a finite resource can never exist infinitely, as pointed out by Jared Diamond (2005: 490): “While there has been much discussion about how many big oil and gas fields remain to be discovered, and while coal reserves are believed to be large, the prevalent view is that known and likely reserves of readily accessible oil and natural gas will last for a few more decades”. If something is inherently unsustainable then it must come to an end, so here I draw obvious attention to the question, then what? And this is when permaculture would likely be turned to – but never in a one-size-fits-all manner, as I have already commented – but it need not be the case that the global fossil fuel systems collapse (or the ecologies of the planet collapse in a manner that cripples ‘business as usual’, whichever occurs first) before permaculture becomes incorporated into broader socio-political and economic endeavours. On smaller scales, if one wishes to conduct small ‘experiments of living’, then permaculture is a great place to start, as it offers numerous options to put ecologically sensitive ideas and attitudes into practice and thereby exercise some level of autonomy in the face of the seemingly overwhelming juggernaut that is ACID.

Clearly, a ‘working dichotomy’ has been foregrounded: a dichotomy between ecologically-problematic attitudes and ecologically-respectful attitudes; a dichotomy between the Promethean and the Orphic. The Promethean, due to its characterisation in part by dominance, its focus on having dominion over all of the non-human world, and a variety of other characteristics, has marginalised the Orphic, whose various characteristics have made it easy to be dominated (this is perhaps a criticism of the Orphic). It is with the dichotomy between the Promethean and the Orphic in mind, as well as with the broad context of the ecological crisis, that I turn to philosophical ‘contributions’ that shed important light in context of the ecological crisis. The first is a text called Philosophy in the Present (2009), in which Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek offer their answers to the question of the role of philosophy in the present, and both philosophers make it perfectly clear that philosophy occurs when faced with incommensurability, or in other words, when insurmountable barriers to dialogue are encountered: Žižek explicitly says that philosophy is not a dialogue (2009:50). There is relevance here to the difficulty of ‘dialogue’, or the inherent dichotomy, between Promethean agents and Orphic activists. Other characteristics of philosophy Badiou and Žižek identify are the following: philosophy is the creation of new problems; philosophy is a process of cutting through particulars to reach the universal; philosophy occurs when faced with incommensurability, mutual exclusivity, and paradoxical relations; philosophy is the creation of new problems; philosophy changes the concepts of the debate; philosophy occurs when one lacks the certainty of ‘being at home’, philosophy occurs when faced with internal foreignness, and the breakdown of organic society; philosophy is the Elucidation of choice; philosophy sheds light on the distance between power and truths; philosophy occurs in light of the redefinition of human nature; philosophy is singularity participating in universality; philosophy does not occur in the confines of preconceived ideas of human nature, the confines of humanity as it has been historically constituted, or the confines of the established model of humanity; philosophy occurs alongside the ‘transformation of life’. Each of these focal areas opens up possibilities for insight on various aspects of the ecological crisis (Pittaway 2017: 216-237). For example, “humanity as it has been historically constituted and defined” is a phrase that Badiou (2009: 74-75) uses in the following: “Each time that philosophy confines itself to humanity as it has been historically constituted and defined, it diminishes itself, and in the end suppresses itself. It suppresses itself because its only use becomes that of conserving, spreading and consolidating the established model of humanity”. I have already suggested that various shapers of discourse have dominated historically: the attitudes of domination and dominion partly characterise them, propelling their dominance and dominion, and via their dominance and dominion, they homogenised the historical playing field, resulting in ACID, the Promethean writ large. In other words, the Promethean ‘model of humanity’ is “humanity as it has been historically constituted” (Ibid). And Badiou makes it clear that when philosophy confines itself to, conserves, spreads, or consolidates humanity as it has been historically constituted, it diminishes and suppresses itself. An obvious route, then, toward practicing philosophy in a manner where it is not diminished or suppressed, is to broaden focus and bring (incommensurable, dichotomized) alternatives ‘into the mix’, so to speak. In other words, the historically dominant Promethean may be positioned against the marginalized Orphic. Accordingly, the dialectical wheel can turn properly: the dominant theses of the Promethean will be posed against the ‘antitheses’ (I prefer ‘alternative ideas’) of the Orphic, and synthesis can potentially occur. I therefore contend that this ‘version’ of philosophy can play an important role in any process with the goal of comprehending the problems constituting the ecological crisis, and in seeking potential solutions to it.

The second text of interest to the issue of the role of philosophy in the context of the ecological crisis is Hadot’s essay “Philosophy as a way of life”, and to a lesser extent, “The sage and the world”. Both essays appear in the book called Philosophy as a way of life (1995), and “The sage and the world” certainly leads thematically into “Philosophy as a way of life”. The purview here is mostly different from that in Philosophy in the Present, with the occasional overlapping implication. Hadot traces the notion of philosophy as a way of life as it was ‘approached’ in ancient times – an approach that I contend is of considerable value in the context of the ecological crisis. For example, Hadot (1995: 254) quotes Bergson to convey the character of ‘habitual perception’:

Life requires that we put on blinkers; we must not look to the right, to the left, or behind, but straight ahead, in the direction in which we are supposed to walk. In order to live, we must be selective in our knowledge and our memories, and retain only that which may contribute to our action upon things.

This is one manner of perception where human beings retain knowledge which may contribute to our action upon things, and Hadot (Ibid) refers to it as “utilitarian perception”. I do not suggest that utilitarian perception is ‘bad’, because certainly everyday pragmatism is necessary in the pursuit of food, shelter, a variety other material needs, and in the operation of ‘utilities’, etc. But the Bergson quote does suggest an exclusive pragmatism, and this is the realm of the Promethean, where the ‘objects’ of nature are valued only for their instrumental value and not their inherent value – and ACID is the contemporary ‘manifestation’ or embodiment of this hegemonic realm. The concept of philosophy as a way of life nurtures a form of perception where the inherent value of extant things is foregrounded, where human attitudes align with an ecologically respectful ‘cosmic consciousness’, and where human actions accordingly are aligned with qualities of the Orphic. For example, Hadot (1995: 206-212) says of the practice of philosophy as a way of life that “the feeling of belonging to a whole is an essential element: belonging, that is, both to the whole constituted by the human community, and to that constituted by the cosmic whole”. Perhaps the following from Hadot (1995: 273) perfectly sums up the Orphic character of philosophy as a way of life, while foregrounding the theme of interconnection and downplaying exclusively utilitarian tendencies that earlier in this paper I attributed to the ecologically problematic modus operandi of ACID:

Philosophy in antiquity was an exercise practiced at each instant. It invites us to concentrate on each instant of life, to become aware of the infinite value of each present moment, once we have replaced it within the perspective of the cosmos. The exercise of wisdom entails a cosmic dimension. Whereas the average person has lost touch with the world, and does not see the world qua world, but rather treats the world as a means of satisfying his desires, the sage never ceases to have the whole constantly present to mind. He thinks and acts within a cosmic perspective. He has the feeling of belonging to a whole which goes beyond the limits of his individuality.

By exploring philosophy in the ‘formats’ I have just outlined, and by broadening the context of the ecological crisis via reference to Promethean shapers of discourse and Orphic attitudes, I hope to be able to offer some additional components of a conceptual framework that can be used to approach and address the worrying issue of the ecological crisis, a crisis which hitherto has clearly not been adequately addressed considering the extent to which it is daily exacerbated.

References

BBC. 2012. “Alternative Economic Cultures: Manuel Castells.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/programmes/analysis/transcripts/151012.pdf (accessed 11 June 2018).

Badiou, Alain, and Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. Philosophy in the Present. UK: Polity Press.

Braidotti, R. 2013. The Posthuman. UK: Polity Press.

Castells, Manuell. 2010. The Rise of the Network Society (Second edition). UK: Blackwell.

Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward. (1988) 2002. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. USA: Pantheon Books.

Chomsky, Noam. 1999. Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. UK: Seven Stories Press.

De Bono, Edward. 1970. Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step. USA: Harper and Row.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on societies of control”. October, Vol. 59. USA: MIT Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Democracy Now. 2012. “Chomsky: Occupy Wall Street “Has Created Something That Didn’t Really Exist” in U.S. – Solidarity.” https://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/14/chomsky_occupy_wall_street_has_created

Descartes, René. (1637) 1972. ‘Discourse on Method’. In: The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. 1. Tr. Haldane, E.S. and Ross, G.R.T. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Diamond, Jared. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. USA: Penguin.

Eisenstein, C. 2011. Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the age of Transition. USA: North Atlantic Books. http://sacred-economics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/sacred-economics-book-text.pdf

Foster, John B. and Clark, Brett and York, Richard. 2010. The Ecological Rift – Capitalism’s War on the Earth. USA: Monthly Review Press.

Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. Introduction to The End of History and the Last Man. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/fukuyama.htm

Hadot, Pierre. 1995. Philosophy as a Way of Life. USA: Blackwell.

Hadot, Pierre. 2006. The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature. Trans. Michael Chase. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hancock, Graham. 1995. Fingerprints of the Gods. UK: William Heinemann Ltd.

Hancock, Graham. 2015. Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth’s Lost Civilisation. UK: Hodder and Stoughton.

Hartmann, Thom. 1998. The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. UK: Hodder and Stoughton.

Hawken, Paul. 2007. Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World. UK: Penguin.

Heidegger, Martin. (1943) 2002. On the Essence of Truth. New York: Continuum.

Horkheimer, Max. 1947. The Eclipse of Reason. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hoyer, Karl G. 2012. “Ecophilosophy and the Environmental Debate”. In Ecophilosophy in a World of Crisis: Critical Realism and the Nordic Contributions, eds. Bhaskar, K., Hoyer, K.G., and Naess, P., 44-72. UK: Routledge.

Konik, Inge. 2015. “Whither South Africa – Neoliberalism or an Embodied Communitarian Indigenous Ethic?” PhD diss., Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

Korsten, David. 2016. “Why the Economy Should Stop Growing – and Just Grow Up”. http://davidkorten.org/economy-stop-growing-just-grow/

Kovel, Joel. The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? London and New York: Zed Books.

Marcuse, Herbert. 1972. One Dimensional Man: studies in ideology of advanced industrial society. London: Abacus.

McDonald, Alyssa. 2010. “The NS Interview: Noam Chomsky”. https://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2010/09/war-crimes-interview-obama (accessed 11 June 2018).

Mill, John S. (1859) 2002. On Democracy. USA: Dover Publications, Inc.

Monibot, George. 2017. “Too Right it’s Black Friday: Our Relentless Consumption is Trashing the Planet”.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/22/black-friday-consumption-killing-planet-growth

Naess, Arne. 2008. The Ecology of Wisdom, eds. Drengson and Devall. USA: Counterpoint.

Oxfam. 2017. “An Economy of the 99%.” https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bp-economy-for-99-percent-160117-summ-en.pdf (accessed 11 June 2018).

Pittaway, David A. 2017. “Broadening the Context of the Ecological Crisis: Featuring the Orphic and the Promethean.” PhD diss., University of the Free State.

Princen, Thomas. 2010. Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order. USA: MIT Press.

Sheldrake, Rupert. 1991. The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God. Vermont: Park Street Press.

Speth, James G. 2008. The Bridge at the end of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. USA: Yale University Press.

Steger, Manfred B. 2009. Globalisms: the Great Ideological Struggle of the Twenty-First Century. USA: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Zeitgeist Movement, The. “The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought.” https://www3.thezeitgeistmovement.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The_Zeitgeist_Movement_Defined_PDF_Final.pdf (accessed 11 June 2018).

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Notes:

[1] See the following source for an example of the Christian prosecution of the Cathars, Albigensians, and Bogomils: http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/cathars-albigensians-and-bogomils accessed 11 June 2018.

Please note: this is an article I wrote for submission to a journal from which I have not yet received feedback. The journal editor and article reviewers may accept the article, reject it, or accept conditionally with specific changes required. If it gets accepted and published, I will edit this note to say so!

A Contradiction at the Core of Democrapitalism:

Some Socio-Political and Ecological Implications

Abstract

Peter Barnes has made the following observation regarding the incompatibility of democracy and capitalism: democracy is an open system, while capitalism is a gated system. Yet the dominant global political economy is ‘democratic capitalism’ (or ‘democrapitalism’), which, in the light of Barnes’ observation, is an oxymoron. A result of the presence of a gated capitalist ‘core’ within democracy is the political prioritisation of ‘business as usual’, which resists socio-political or economic changes because economic growth is a prerequisite of capitalism. Authentic responses to some of the challenges facing humankind – challenges arising from unrestrained economic growth – cannot occur if economic growth is permanently on the political agenda. A broad literature review is here conducted in order to highlight aspects of the open-closed contradiction that lies at the heart of democrapitalism and some of its accompanying effects, and links are made between to the broader issue of the impact of human economic activity on ecology at large occurring alongside the prioritisation of economic growth in democrapitalism. Acknowledging the open-closed contradiction of democrapitalism means acknowledging its in-built incapacity to rise to some of humanity’s current challenges, such as the ecological crisis. Solutions to such challenges, it is suggested, should be sought elsewhere.

Keywords: democracy; capitalism; open-closed distinction; the occupy movement; ecological crisis.

 Introduction

In this paper, I collate views from several critical thinkers for the central claim that a deep-seated contradiction lies at the heart of the ‘union’ between democracy and capitalism, or ‘democrapitalism’. In the context of this paper, these denote a political economy with economic growth being a central defining feature, the presence of which excludes the possibility of curbing economic growth. Yet capitalist economic growth is a restless dynamo (Kovel 2002, 39) – it is a form of growth based on the presumably endless expansion of human economic activity via the increase in the throughput of ‘natural resources’ extracted from nature. I will expand on these focal areas, and it will be clear that one implication of the emphasis of certain themes is that capitalism and democracy are incompatible[1]. From the outset, however, I wish to make clear what I am not arguing: I am not arguing that democracy and capitalism are inherently ‘bad’, undesirable, or in need of excision from the human socio-political and economic arenas, regardless of my personal opinions on these matters. I am also not setting out to trace the historical development of the relationship between democracy and capitalism. I do argue that, due to the open-closed paradox at the core of democrapitalism, solutions to issues caused by capitalist characteristics (such as ‘addiction’ to economic growth) must be sought outside of the so-called democratic political sphere indistinguishable from capitalist ‘business-as-usual’.

Features of capitalism under scrutiny

Joel Kovel (2002, 39) reminds readers of his explicitly-titled book, The Enemy of Nature: the End of Capitalism or the End of the World? of an inherent defining feature of capitalism: that capitalist production is primarily for profit:

Those who do not know yet that capitalist production is for profit and not use can learn it right away from watching Wall Street discipline corporations that fail to measure up to standards of profitability. Capitalists celebrate the restless dynamism that these standards enforce, with its drive for innovation, efficiency and new markets.

Kovel continues his exposé by immediately outlining the difference between ‘exchange-value’ and use-value, the former being the central focus of capitalism in that ‘exchange-value’ is the area in which capital (profit) is accumulated; he writes (2002, 39) that use-value

signifies the commodity’s place in the ever-developing manifold of human needs and wants, while exchange-value represents its ‘commodity-being’, that is, its exchangeability, an abstraction that can be expressed only in quantitative terms, and as money. Broadly speaking, capital represents that regime in which exchange-value predominates over use-value in the production of commodities – and the problem with capital is that, once installed, this process becomes self-perpetuating and expanding.

Foster, Clark and York (2010, 40) agree on this point: “It is exchange value, which knows only quantitative increase – not use value, which relates to the qualitative aspects of production – which drives the system”. In capitalism, the focus on exchange value is elevated to soaring heights by the exclusive focus on ‘quantifiable profit’. Baer (2012, 300) reminds readers, via reference to Foster, that private “corporations are institutions with one and only one purpose: the pursuit of profit”. Kovel (2002, 48) discusses this ‘pursuit of profit’ with reference to the benchmark of progress in industrial neoliberal ‘free-market’ capitalist society – GDP. Capital, he says,

employs purely quantitative indices such as gross domestic product (GDP) because they are convenient indices of accumulation. Scarcely a critic of the ecological crisis has refrained from commenting upon the stupid brutality of this number, which reduces the living and the dead alike to the common denominator of what can be extracted from their commodification. It is necessary, though, to see thinking in terms of GDP as no mere error, but the actual logic of the reigning power…

Already, from the lattermost observation, an ecological consequence of the focus on GDP (and concomitantly, economic growth) is apparent, and this consequence will be brought more into focus later in this article. To give a clearer picture of capitalism’s prioritisation of such indices, consider the following from the online Library of Economics and Liberty[2]; the focus is on the USA, the country heralded as the epitome of free-market capitalism, a system that has had global reach for generations:

Gross domestic product, the official measure of total output of goods and services in the U.S. economy, represents the capstone and grand summary of the world’s best system of economic statistics. The federal government organizes millions of pieces of monthly, quarterly, and annual data from government agencies, companies, and private individuals into hundreds of statistics, such as the consumer price index (CPI), the employment report, and summaries of corporate and individual tax returns. The U.S. Department of Commerce then marshals the source data into a complete set of statistics known as the National Income and Product Accounts. This set of double-entry accounts provides a consistent and detailed representation of production in the United States (GDP) and its associated income (national income).

Accompanying globalisation has been the spread of the prioritisation of GDP throughout the world – countries are often listed according to their GDP statuses. A country might be more or less democratic depending on whichever criteria one uses to ascertain the level of democracy in a country; but all countries, in being part of a global economy, participate in economic activity, which is measured in GDP. So all countries might not be democratic in the same way that the USA is, but all governments, democratic or otherwise, participate in the global economy, thereby creating a system-driven imperative to prioritise GDP.

Capitalism’s presence in democracy

Noam Chomsky[3] once responded to the question, “Do you vote?” – and voting is the main political contribution of the average citizen of a democracy – with the following observation:

I often do, without much enthusiasm. In the US, there is basically one party – the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population.

Chomsky’s observation draws attention to the homogeny of a supposedly heterogeneous democratic political sphere. Chomsky is commenting on the USA, but as McChesney points out in the introduction to Chomsky’s book, Profit over People (1999, 10), the USA is “the spawning ground of liberal democracy”, which is to say the American model of democracy is applicable when discussing democracy in general considering the extent to which the model has via globalisation been implemented in many countries. Speth (2008, 31), in The Bridge at the end of the World, agrees, emphasising the economic aspect of the model in question: “With increasingly few exceptions, modern capitalism… is the operating system of the world economy”. Speth (Ibid) is very specific about the type of ‘operating system’ he is denoting; it is clearly not exclusive to the USA, and it clearly does involve ‘government’, or what Speth refers to as the administrative state:

I use “modern capitalism” here in a broad sense as an actual, existing system of political economy, not as an idealized model. Capitalism as we know it today encompasses the core economic concept of private employers hiring workers to produce products and services that the employers own and then sell with the intention of making a profit. But it also includes competitive markets, the price mechanism, the modern corporation as its principal institution, the consumer society and the materialistic values that sustain it, and the administrative state actively promoting economic strength and growth for a variety of reasons.

The administrative state referred to by Speth is, for the purposes of this paper, synonymous with the term ‘government’, and the main point I am emphasising from Speth’s observations is that when capitalism is the economic base of a country, the administrative state promotes economic strength and growth, be it by way of policy or other means. Both Chomsky and Speth single out of this kind of policy – business policy – in the political/governmental/administrative sphere, thereby drawing attention to the USA’s explicit capitalist attitudes and ideology at a political level. But McChesney makes it clear (1999, 9)  that neoliberal capitalism is “the defining political economic paradigm of our time”, which is certainly true if one considers that extensive capitalist activities occur in all countries, albeit to varying degrees. With a focus on the USA, Steger (2009, 121), quoting Nadar, points out in Globalisms: the Great Ideological Struggle of the Twenty-First Century, that there is a serious problem for democracy when a capitalist monetary economy is in use: a “‘massive avalanche of corporate money’ has buried the democratic system of the United States”. Keeping in mind the aforementioned point that the United States’ democracy is representative of the globalised neoliberal capitalist political sphere, it is useful to consider more information from Nadar via Steger:

Government has been hijacked to a degree beyond anything we have seen in the last 70 years. It’s been hijacked by corporate power, the multinationals mostly. They have their own people in government. They run [for elections] their own people, they appoint their own people, they get corporate lawyers to become judges. And when that happens you no longer have a countervailing force called government arrayed against excesses of what Jefferson called ‘the moneyed interest’. Instead, you have this convergence, almost a phalanx, of business controlling government and turning it against its own people.

This phenomenon is confirmed in a 2017 report from Oxfam called ‘An Economy of the 99%’[4] in a manner that makes the ‘corporate hijacking of democracy’ relevant beyond the confines of the USA:

Many of the super-rich also use their power, influence and connections to capture politics and ensure that the rules are written for them. … Some of the super-rich also use their fortunes to help buy the political outcomes they want, seeking to influence elections and public policy.

The state may have at several stages in the history of democracy included some regulatory functions, but since the ‘free-market’ economic neoliberal regimes unleashed during the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, deregulation has been a priority of the democrapitalist government[5]. Speth (2008:218) goes so far as to say that government has been “captured by the very corporations and concentration of wealth it should be seeking to regulate and revamp”[6]. It is worth looking at the entire paragraph (Ibid) from which this sentence has been extracted for the clear relevance it has considering the themes and issues raised so far in this article:

There are many reasons why government in Washington today is more problem than solution. It is hooked on GDP growth – for its revenues, for its constituencies, and for its influence abroad. It has been captured by the very corporations and concentration of wealth it should be seeking to regulate and revamp, a pattern that has now reached alarming proportions. And it is hobbled by an array of dysfunctional institutional arrangements, beginning with the way presidents are elected.

‘The way presidents are elected’ is a reference to voting, and voting is a characteristic of democracy by definition, not just in the United States. Being ‘hooked’ on GDP growth is certainly also a trait shared by any country participating in a capitalist economy (granted, to varying degrees), and it is hard to find examples of countries not participating in capitalist activity. I have laid enough of a conceptual foundation at this stage of the paper to get to the crux of my argument. Peter Barnes, quoted by Speth (2008, 218) puts it succinctly:

Democracy is an open system, and economic power can easily infect it. By contrast, capitalism is a gated system, its bastions aren’t easily accessed by the masses; capitalism’s primacy thus isn’t an accident, nor the fault of George W. Bush. It’s what happens when capitalism inhabits democracy.

Barnes’ explanation goes some way in justifying Speth’s following damning remarks about the state of Democracy based on his research thereof. He calls it “weak, shallow, dangerous and corrupted” (Ibid), stating that it is “the best democracy money can buy”, and that the “ascendency of market fundamentalism and antiregulation, antigovernment ideology makes the current moment particularly frightening”. Speth later (2008, 219) explains, by way of Barnes again, that the notion of the state promoting “‘the common good’ is sadly naive. …We face a disheartening quandary here. Profit-maximizing corporations dominate our economy. …The only obvious counter-weight is government, yet government is dominated by these same corporations”[7]. These observations are supported by the 2017 Oxfam report[8], ‘An economy of the 99%’, in which the democrapitalist system I have outlined so far is referred to as ‘crony Capitalism’. Some effects of this system are also identified in the report:

Crony capitalism benefits the rich, the people who own and run these corporations, at the expense of the common good and of poverty reduction. It means that smaller businesses struggle to compete and ordinary people end up paying more for goods and services as they face cartels and monopoly power of corporations and those with close connections with government.

How do corporations achieve such influence? Speth (2008, 219) quotes Gar Alperovitz to explain that “the large corporation regularly”…

1. Influences legislation and agenda setting through lobbying
2. Influences regulatory behaviour through direct and indirect pressure
3. Influences elections via large-scale campaign contributions
4. Influences public attitudes through massive media campaigns
5. Influences local government choices through all of the above – and adds the implicit or explicit threat of withdrawing its plants, equipment, and jobs from specific locations.

Steger (2009:7) clearly agrees, specifically with the focus on points 1 and 5 regarding agenda setting and the influence on local government:

I contend that market globalism is a political ideology that has achieved dominance in our time. Espousing a hegemonic system of ideas that make normative claims about a set of social processes called ‘globalization,’ market globalists seek to limit public discussion on the meaning and character of globalization to an agenda of things to discuss that supports a specific political agenda.

These ‘normative claims about a set of social processes’ used by ‘market globalists’ to ‘limit public discussion’ are factors that clearly prevent social change in the interests of ‘the people’ (which is often called for by ‘the people’ when they exercise their political contribution in the form of a democratic vote), whether the market globalists know it or not. Further factors are identified in the Oxfam report already mentioned:

…[T]he rich [construct] ‘reinforcing feedback loops’ in which the winners of the game get yet more resources to win even bigger next time. For example, they use their wealth to back political candidates, to finance lobbying and – more indirectly – to bankroll think tanks and universities to shift political and economic narratives towards the false assumptions that favour the rich.

Capitalism is not synonymous with democracy

Changing focus now to a frequently encountered pro-market, pro-capitalist claim made by market globalists: ‘globalisation furthers the spread of Democracy in the world’ – this is a claim that needs to be addressed. Steger (2009, 84) points out that this “market-globalist claim is anchored in the neoliberal assertion that freedom, free-markets, free trade, and democracy are synonymous terms”. This is an interesting point to consider in hindsight of something that J.S. Mill makes clear in On Liberty[9] regarding the dangers of democracy, namely that liberty (freedom, popularly and naively associated with democracy) was originally conceived of as being in opposition to the state. He says that in “old times” liberty meant “protection against the tyranny of the political rulers” (2002, 3). Clearly, then, liberty and freedom are not necessarily synonymous with the ideology of a state, and in fact any consideration of the concept of freedom (based on an historical approach) needs to address the limitation of the power and extent of the state – in other words, liberty partly entails freedom from the power of the state.

There are supporters of the notion that democracy and economic development go hand-in-hand. Here is Steger (2009, 85) quoting Fukuyama:

Francis Fukuyama, for example, asserts that there exists a clear correlation between a country’s level of economic development and successful democracy. While globalization and capital development do not automatically produce democracies, ‘the level of economic development resulting from globalization is conducive to the creation of complex civil societies with a powerful middle class. It is this class and societal structure that facilitates democracy.’

Steger’s response (Ibid) is that such a definition is a “‘thin’ definition of democracy” in use in the neoliberal ‘free-market’ capitalist, globalised world, a definition that “emphasises formal procedures such as voting at the expense of the direct participation of broad majorities in political and economic decision making”:

This focus on the act of voting – in which equality prevails only in the formal sense – helps to obscure the conditions of inequality reflected in existing asymmetrical power relations in society. Formal elections provide the important function of legitimating the rule of dominant elites, thus making it more difficult for popular movements to challenge the rule of elites. The claim that globalization furthers the spread of Democracy in the world is based largely on a narrow, formal-procedural understanding of “democracy”.

Steger (Ibid) continues with some crucial analysis:

Neoliberal economic globalization and the strategic promotion of polyarchic regimes in the Third World are, therefore, two sides of the same ideological coin. They represent the systemic prerequisites for the legitimation of a full-blown world market. The promotion of polyarchy provides market globalists with the ideological opportunity to advance their neoliberal projects of economic restructuring in a language that ostensibly supports the ‘”democratization” of the world.

No surprise then that in a previously encountered sentiment from Speth (2008, 218), neoliberal ‘free-market’ government was described as being “hobbled by an array of dysfunctional institutional arrangements, beginning with the way presidents are elected” (emphasis added). Steger has provided some strong grounds for scepticism about the electoral process. This concern is implicit in the quote from Chomsky, where he comments that there is really only one party in the USA, the business party. McChesney (in Chomsky 1999, 11) puts it bluntly: “Democracy is permissible as long as the control of business is off-limits to popular deliberation or change, i.e. so long as it isn’t democracy”. Such ineffectiveness of the vote is one of the reasons identified by McChesney (Ibid) for neoliberalism being “the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet”.

Profit over people and the environment

Another reason identified by McChesney (1999, 10) for neoliberal Democracy being the ‘enemy’ of participatory democracy has to do with the pernicious social (and as will be seen, ecological) impact of the former ‘thin’ version of democracy. He explains that to be effective,

democracy requires that people feel a connection to their fellow citizens, and that this connection manifests itself through a variety of nonmarket organisations and institution groups, libraries, public schools, neighbourhood organisations, cooperatives, public meeting places, voluntary associations, and trade unions to provide ways for citizens to meet, communicate, and interact with their fellow citizens. Neoliberal democracy, with its notion of the market über alles, takes dead aim at this sector. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomised society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralised and socially powerless.

It is clear from the above explanation from McChesney that he views people as socially and politically malleable: put them in an environment suited to encourage participation between people, and such interaction is likely to occur. On the other hand, the latter neoliberal capitalist environment is one where the capitalist ‘free-market’ motive of profit-making turns physical environments into ones where individuals are forced to perpetuate corporate profit-making, i.e. people are turned into consumers. Good consumers are ones whose attitudes have been shaped by the capitalist assumption that economic growth is good, that freedom is the freedom to consume, that political participation is the marking of a piece of paper in an election in order to elect leaders who will make sure that the economy keeps growing, and so on – these are aspects of the “hegemonic system” referred to in an observation from Steger (2009, 7) earlier on in this article. So scrutiny of capitalist assumptions in a democracy, specifically the assumptions that endless growth is desirable or inherently good or logical, and that the role of politics is to ensure the growth of the economy, does go a considerable distance in answering the question, ‘what perpetuates the attitudinal factors causing the ecological crisis?’. In a nutshell, part of the answer is the presence of a ‘gated’ capitalistic growth-demanding core in a shallow ‘democratic’ arena.[10]

In McChesney’s observations (Ibid), clear attention is drawn to the social consequences of the prioritisation of the market in a neoliberal democracy, but the ecological implications should be clear: consumers and shopping malls are symbols of the kinds of activities associated with capitalist growth, which requires a constant increase in the processing of nature’s resources to increase GDP, which comes with obvious deleterious effects on the health of ecologies. The issue McChesney has highlighted can be restated as the issue of ‘profit over people’, a concept that can be broadened to include ‘profit over the environment’ considering the ecological focus I have at times alluded to and which I will discuss in more depth below. As already seen, the idea of ‘profit over people’ is the title of Chomsky’s 1999 book. In it, he writes (1999, 132) that the “the most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations. The decisions made by GE affect the general society substantially, but citizens play no role in them, as a matter of principle”. It is fitting that Chomsky uses as an example GE (General Electric), one of the world’s most influential and powerful players in the fossil-fuel industry, an industry notorious for systematising massive ecological damage. GE is one of a large number of corporations with more economic power (and therefore political power too, considering what has been revealed so far about the problematic union of the economic and political arenas) than most countries in the world, which can be seen in the following excerpt from Steger (2009, 120), who is again highlighting information offered by Nadar: of the “top one hundred economic entities in the world”, he points out,

fifty-two are corporations and only forty-eight are countries. Moreover, the gross annual sales of such huge TNCs as General Motors exceed the gross domestic product of countries such as Norway, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia.[11] Shaping the globalization of commerce and finance in an authoritarian fashion, these transnational companies contribute to a widening ‘‘democracy gap’’ between ordinary people and their political institutions.

Steger (Ibid) turns to Nadar’s explanation of how the widening of the ‘democracy gap’ occurs:

The global corporatists preach a model of economic growth that rests on the flows of trade and finance between nations dominated by the giant multinationals – drugs, tobacco, oil, banking, and other services. The global corporate model is premised on the concentration of power over markets, governments, mass media, patent monopolies over critical drugs and seeds, the workplace and corporate culture. All these and other power concentrates, homogenize the globe and undermine democratic processes and their benefits.

 Homogenisation of the globe

‘Homogenisation of the globe’ (Ibid) is a useful term to use when considering not only the social and political impact of the domination of the ‘free-market’ neoliberal Capitalist economic system, but also its ecological impact. Democracy in its idealised form is undermined, as has been shown in this paper already, but so is the ecology of the planet due to the restless dynamism of capitalism that demands of the democracies it infiltrates the processing of ever-increasing amounts of ‘resources’ or services for economic growth. So when Chomsky (1999:132) says that the “‘corporatization of America’ during the past century has been an attack on democracy”, one can legitimately add that it has been an attack on the ecologies of the planet as well; i.e. an attack on nature, the preservation of which is in the interests of ‘the people’ considering the all too obvious, yet often overlooked, fact that people need nature to remain in-tact and healthy and diverse if human life is to be sustained. Remember here that the ‘democratic’ system of the USA is a symbol for the kind of ‘democracy’ that has swept the planet has already been discussed earlier on in this paper; what is said about the USA is relevant the world over to varying degrees depending on the level of democracy occurring, and wherever capitalist activity is taking place. Chomsky (Ibid) continues with relevant information regarding the issue of what prevents the kind of social change often in the interests of ‘the people’, and (I will add) in the interests of the ecologies that constitute life on the planet as well: the “so-called ‘free-trade agreements’ are one such device of undermining democracy. They are designed to transfer decision making about people’s lives and aspirations into the hands of private tyrannies that operate in secret and without public supervision and control”. It follows that a political system in which ‘secret operations’ (whether in the economic or political worlds, which I am arguing overlap) in which decisions are made that affect the lives of millions, is not openly democratic – instead, it is operating in a ‘gated’ manner (which, of course, is a reference to the open-closed distinction I attributed to Barnes earlier). Within the gates – within what I have referred to as the core of the democrapitalist system – lies the capitalist commitment to ‘grow the economy’, which usually entails increasing industrial activity, which in turn usually entails increasing the throughput of natural resources for profit. In a quote from Kovel (2002:48) that featured earlier in this paper, the link between economic growth (measured in GDP) and negative ecological impact is clearly made: “Scarcely a critic of the ecological crisis has refrained from commenting upon the stupid brutality of this number [i.e. GDP], which reduces the living and the dead alike to the common denominator of what can be extracted from their commodification”. But reducing the living and dead in such a manner cannot not occur if an industrial-technological capitalist economy is to survive: it survives at the expense of what is considered to be a ‘standing reserve’ of natural resources (which, ironically, undermines the political economy’s long-term survival by jeopardising the well-being of the natural platform on which humanity depends) – this is why Kovel (Ibid) referred to ‘GDP thinking’ as “the actual logic of the reigning power”. So one could reasonably expect that, if my argument about the open-closed paradox of democratic capitalism has any merit, as democracy (an open system) spreads, so does capitalism (a closed system), and vice versa, and alongside the growth of these shapers of discourse, there is an increase in the rate of ecological destruction as citizens are transformed into consumers, and ‘resources’ are processed according to the capitalist imperative to ‘grow-or-die’ – and this is indeed observable: the spread of democratic capitalism and the accompanying devastating impact on the natural world.

Solutions? Look elsewhere.

Based on the themes I have developed so far in this article, it should be clear that if a person believes that solutions to issues such as the large-scale destruction of natural ecologies are to be arrived at from within the realms of democrapitalism, then such beliefs would be rendered naïve. A ‘shallow’ democracy is impotent at achieving fundamental system changes when a deep-seated (gated, closed) capitalist kernel gives impetus to continue economic growth. Unsurprising then that after a long history of inter-governmental meetings convened to form a response to an issue like climate change, few (if any) actionable constraints on one of the primary causes of climate change, namely economic growth, are discernable in reality. Perhaps there is something of an explanation to be seen in an observation Thomas Princen (2010:55) makes, via reference to Robert Chambers, about ‘lack of political will’. In the following, Princen (via Chambers) equates politicians (i.e. the representatives of democracy) with ‘the rich and powerful’ (i.e. the ‘cream’ of the economic ‘crop’): “lack of political will means that the rich and powerful have failed to act against their own interests”. It could be suggested that a different form of democracy would be needed – and here one can consider the ‘direct democratic’ process put into practise during the height of the Occupy Movement. Here is Ian Buchanan’s description of the Occupy Movement’s participatory process, followed by some comments he makes on the “pale shadow of ‘true’ democracy” that I have contextualised in this paper: ‘Occupy’, says Buchanan (2015:193),

was an example of participatory democracy in action – the set of principles the occupiers wanted to live by was created and embraced by the occupiers themselves. All proposals required the support of at least 90% of the General Assembly in order to be ratified, which is far more onerous than parliamentary democracies anywhere else requires. And of course that was precisely the point: it demonstrated that democracy as we know it, that is, democracy as it is practiced in the United States and elsewhere is a pale shadow of ‘true’ democracy, which is open to all and premised on the notion that only near-consensus can be regarded as representative of the will of the people. As impractical as this model of democracy might be, its symbolic value should not be underestimated. It bespoke a powerful hunger for social justice, for a political and economic system that represents the needs of the many not the greed of the few that not even President Obama could fail to perceive.

Having been a part-time member of the London chapter of the Occupy Movement in 2011-2012, I was involved in the direct democratic process – arguably an attempt to engage in a transition from a shallow democracy to something deeper. At no point was the process unimpeded by the presence of the ‘henchmen’ of democrapitalism: police-people continuously played a ‘cat-and-mouse game’ with us, disturbing meetings by arriving with ever new-and-urgent conditions and often with police-barriers which the police placed around us in an attempt to minimise the activists’ discussions. This is illustrative of the manner in which change is prevented in an ‘advanced’ consumer capitalist industrial democracy, and it also raises a problem regarding the effectiveness of large-scale dissent: large-scale dissent is conspicuous, thus making it easy for the henchmen of democrapitalism to identify ‘threats’ and prevent the kinds of activities that would undermine the reigning power of the system. Whether a more ‘decentralised’ democracy, like the one aimed for by ‘Occupier’, would be one that curbs economic activity in a manner that responds effectively to issues like destruction of natural ecologies is up for debate. What is not up for debate, based on the links that I have made in this article, is that something is needed, or rather various steps need to be taken toward an ‘alternative’, one markedly unlike the model of the oxymoronic democratic-capitalist-government in which economic growth is of paramount importance, if ecological sustainability is to be viable. These are desperate ecological times[12], and perhaps desperate measures are needed.

 Conclusion: deep political and ecological transformation starts with the individual, perhaps via a psychedelic experience and implementation of permaculture principles

In the wake of the marriage between democracy and capitalism, with the knowledge that a large-scale attempt like ‘Occupy’ did not achieve a tangible, long-lasting alternative[13], with the awareness that calls for deep transformation aimed at a democrapitalist governments are ‘barking-up-the-wrong-tree’ (because, as has been seen, the rich and powerful are unlikely to act against their own interests), and knowing that unprecedented ecological crises face the human race, I suggest that deep systemic transformation begins with transformations at the personal level. What I mean by this – and based on what has surfaced in this article – is that a person can make a concerted effort to decrease purely capitalistic ‘endless-growth’ thinking, to lessen the ‘governmentality’ in which voting is seen as sufficient political action, to incorporate into their thinking the notion that democracy is not synonymous with capitalism, to recognise the restless dynamism not only at the heart of capitalism but as the impetus for political agendas as well (regardless of the lip-service given to egalitarian motives by capitalists and politicians alike), and to radically alter their relationship with ‘nature’ so that nature is not treated like a ‘standing reserve of resources’.

There are various methods in which to decrease purely capitalistic ‘endless-growth’ thinking and to lessen ‘governmentality’. An education wherein critical thinking skills are enhanced, which happens (for example) in the Humanities, is one such method, but education of this sort may take several years to achieve a substantial change in the way a person thinks about ecology and democrapitalism. Such an education would also not guarantee that a person ‘translates’ theory into action, and the person may simply perpetuate business as usual afterwards. However, there is an education of a different kind that can be achieved in a matter of a few hours, after which it is guaranteed that a person will be radically transformed.

The education to which I refer is one that occurs during a proper psychedelic experience. The topic of psychedelics may seem controversial, but psychedelic studies are receiving extensive attention in the USA and elsewhere[14]. It may be impossible to accurately put the experience into words, but it is possible to measure some aspects of the results of the experience, which is what numerous researchers have done[15]. One study published extremely relevant results in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, results supporting my claim that a psychedelic experience can very quickly transform the way in which people think about their relationship to nature, and also lessen ‘governmentality’. The title of the study (by Lyons and Carhart-Harris, 2018) is revealing: “Increased nature relatedness and decreased authoritarian political views after psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression”. Here follow some results (emphasis added):

In the general population, psychedelic drug use is not associated with increased incidence of mental health problems (Johansen and Krebs, 2015; Krebs and Johansen, 2013)[16], but is instead associated with lower rates of suicidality and psychological distress (Hendricks et al., 2015a, 2015b; Johansen and Krebs, 2015; Krebs and Johansen, 2013). Psychedelic drug users have also been shown to exhibit greater optimism (or reduced pessimism) than non-users (Grob et al., 1996) as well as increased concern for others, nature and the environment when compared with users of cannabis, amphetamine or heroin (Lerner and Lyvers, 2006). Experience with psychedelics has been found to positively affect one’s sense of feeling part of nature rather than separate from it, leading to pro-environmental behavioural changes… A recent correlational study of ours found that lifetime psychedelic drug use in the general population positively predicted nature relatedness and negatively predicted authoritarian political views. (Forstmann and Sagioglou, 2017).

Having substantiated the claim about the psychedelic experience imparting pro-nature and anti-authoritarian political views, I will turn to Gary Fisher (quoted in Walsh and Grof 2005) to support my claim that the psychedelic experience works remarkably quickly in achieving personal transformation:

Fortunately, after a successful psychedelic experience, you never go back to your previous state of consciousness – that’s the whole point of taking psychedelics. If you don’t integrate the higher levels of consciousness into your daily life, then the trip has been irrelevant. … If a psychedelic doesn’t result in your becoming a human being who is more human, then psychedelics are meaningless and don’t make a difference. I have never known anyone who had a profound transcendental experience who wasn’t significantly changed in his or her daily life by that experience.

Having had a transformation coterminous with the one facilitated by the psychedelic experience, it may be difficult for a person to know how to ‘translate’ their experience into ecological pro-activity. Regarding this issue of implementation, I will refer to some of the research I conducted in my PhD study[17], specifically Chapter 6, where I focus extensively on the positive ecological impacts of the personal implementation of permaculture principles in various context-specific manners. In a nutshell, one can drastically reduce their contributions to cyclical consumption (cyclical consumption is excellent for capitalist economic growth) and organise some aspects of some of the systems on which s/he relies according to down-to-earth principles of sustainability. One can be left with very real, tangible examples of ‘alternative systems’, examples that may be symbolic in that they may be convenient microcosms from which lessons can be learned regarding how to use permaculture principles, which are ecological principles, to order larger macrocosms like communities and cities.

One such microcosmic alternative system is a compost toilet. It might seem absurd that I am ending an article that is ostensibly about the unholy marriage of democracy and capitalism – by all means massive intuitions that shape discourse in complex ways – by invoking the image of a simple and humble compost toilet. However, it is a remarkably and surprisingly powerful symbol: a compost toilet system is something a person can take complete control over. It can be built using recycled or ‘upcycled’ materials; it is ‘flushed’ with compost or saw-dust, or even a handful of sand, thereby saving water. No faeces or urine are flushed ‘away’ to be dealt with by ‘someone else’; no nitrates enter a given ecology ‘in excess’ thereby causing nitrification, which is detrimental in the context of broader ecology. One can safely incorporate the correctly-processed compost into a vegetable garden or orchard, thereby facilitating the growing of food. One can point at a compost toilet and proclaim, ‘Look, I built this, I maintain it, I empty it, and I create fertility from it and I grow food as an end result. I don’t have to earn money to pay for the water that flushes my faeces away so that it can be processed ‘somewhere else’ where it often ends up detrimentally impacting nature (via nitrification of rivers, oceans, and water-tables), and I obtain food produced from my own environment because I have taken control of one small aspect of my life’. No representative of democrapitalism needs come and inspect the cement foundation and sewer system (for a fee, of course) and ‘hook you up’ to the municipal water supply (for a fee, of course), because no cement foundation, sewer system, or municipal water supply is necessary for a self-built compost toilet.

So it is without facetiousness that I end with a question arising in light of the themes I have built on in this article, and in the recent light of my invocation of the symbol of a compost toilet: what is more useful in the age of democrapitalism and unprecedented ecological crises – voting in the elections for the particular administration of an inescapably capitalist democracy, or responsibly undergoing a psychedelic experience, and thereafter applying permaculture principles in some small manner as a first step in re-organising the systems on which one depends?

 Funding details

This work is based on the research supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant Number 99188, SARChI Chair in Identities and Social Cohesion in Africa, Nelson Mandela University). Opinions, findings, conclusions and recommendations expressed in this work are those of the author’s alone and the NRF accepts no liability whatsoever in this regard. The author also acknowledges research support he received during his PhD (2014-2017) from the NRF and the University of the Free State.

 References

Baer, H.A. 2012. Global capitalism and Climate Change: The Need for an Alternative World System. UK: AltaMira Press.

Chomsky, N. 1999. Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. UK: Seven Stories Press.

Foster, J. & Clark, B. & York, R. 2010. The Ecological Rift – Capitalism’s War on the Earth. USA: Monthly Review Press.

Kovel. J. 2002 and 2006. The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (First and second editions). London and New York: Zed Books.

Lyons, T., Carhart-Harris, R.L. “Increased nature relatedness and decreased authoritarian political views after psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression”. Journal of Psychopharmacology. 2018, DOI: 10.1177/0269881117748902

Mill, J.S. 2002 [1859]. On Democracy. USA: Dover Publications, Inc.

Pittaway, D.A. 2017. ‘Broadening the context of the ecological crisis: featuring the Orphic and the Promethean’. South Africa: University of the Free State.

Pollan, M. 2018. How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. michaelpollan.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/ How_to_Change_Your_Mind_excerpt.pdf accessed 28 May 2018

Speth, J. 2008. The Bridge at the end of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. USA: Yale University Press.

Steger, M. 2009. Globalisms: the Great Ideological Struggle of the Twenty-First Century. USA: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Walsh, R. and Grob, S. 2005. Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics. USA: Sunypress.

[1] This is not a new idea, but I provide support for it in a manner that may reveal different themes for consideration.

[2] http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/GrossDomesticProduct.html accessed 30 May 2018.

[3] http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2010/09/war-crimes-interview-obama accessed 30 May 2018.

[4] https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bp-economy-for-99-percent-160117-summ-en.pdf accessed 30 May 2018

[5] In 1987, during Reagan’s presidency, then Vice-president George H.W. Bush visited a Monsanto laboratory in 1987. The company was trying to circumvent what company people called “bureaucratic hurdles”, a reference to regulatory processes. Here is a video clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7Dw_aSbkDg accessed 30 May 2018) of Bush and his entourage being shown the gene-manipulation process. Of note are his words, “We’re in the dereg [deregulation] business. Call me”.

[6] This point is driven home in the documentary, ‘The World According to Monsanto’ (youtube.com/watch?v=N6_DbVdVo-k accessed 31 January 2017), where it is made abundantly clear that a ‘revolving door’ exists between Business and politics. Google search the name Michael Taylor as a case in point, and the phrase ‘Monsanto revolving door’; the infographic at the following site reveals unbelievable collusion: whale.to/a/monsanto_revolving_door.html

[7] Barak Obama made a comment in his interview with Marc Maron on the WTF podcast in support of the notion that government as it is in the USA (and therefore elsewhere in the world) is heavily influenced by ‘institutions’ such as the National Rifle Association, which is not a corporation but certainly functions according to the corporate model. Obama is commenting on a shooting spree perpetrated by a young person who had easy access to arms and ammunition (a common phenomenon in the USA), but the comment is relevant in the context of this article because Obama alludes to the impotency of government to actualise change: “… unfortunately the grip of the NRA on congress is extremely strong. I don’t foresee any legislative action being taken in this congress. I don’t foresee any real action being taken until the American public feels a sufficient sense of urgency and they say to themselves this is not normal this is something we can change and we can change it. And if you don’t have that kind of voter and voter pressure then it is not going to change from the inside” (https://www.scribd.com/document/270074395/The-Complete-Transcription-of-Barak-Obama-and-Marc-Maron-on-WTF-Podcast accessed 30 May 2018). The NRA is one institution that has a grip on congress; a multitude of corporations also wields such power. In the context of this article, Obama’s argument is flawed – it shows an ignorance of a chronology dilemma: the voting public is identified as the entity from which pressure must materialise, but, as will be seen soon in this article, a vibrant and democratically proactive public arena is dismantled by neoliberal decisions made by politicians who act in the interests of corporations: “Instead of citizens, [neoliberal democracy] produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomised society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralised and socially powerless” (McChesney, in Chomsky 1999, 10).

[8] https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bp-economy-for-99-percent-160117-en.pdf accessed 30 May 2018

[9] First published in 1859.

[10] I have elaborated on this answer at some length in this paper, based on research conducted in my PhD study, ‘Broadening the Context of the Ecological Crisis: Featuring the Orphic and the Promethean’ (2017). I developed several other themes in the process of answering the question about attitudinal causes of the ecological crisis, and these will be explored in other articles.

[11] More recent information about this is found in Oxfam’s 2017 report called ‘An economy for the 99%’: “Big businesses did well in 2015/16: profits are high and the world’s  10 biggest corporations together have revenue greater than that of the government revenue of 180 countries combined”.

[12] ^{Foster, Clark and York comment (2010:155): “It is impossible to exaggerate the environmental problem facing humanity in the twenty-first century. Available evidence now strongly suggests that, under a regime of ‘business as usual’ with no substantial lessening of the drivers of environmental destruction, we could be facing within a decade or so a major ‘tipping point,’ leading to irrevocable and catastrophic climate change”.}

[13] This is not to say that ‘Occupy’ was not influential. Indeed it was, as is evident in the following observations from David Harvey: “I credit the Occupy movement with sparking that new conversation – a conversation that highlights the wealth inequalities all over the world. … It’s interesting that everybody knows what you’re talking about when you mention the “one per cent”. The issue of the one per cent is now on the agenda and given depth by studies like that of Thomas Piketty, in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Joseph Sitglitz has a book on inequality, too, and several other economists are talking about it. Even the IMF is now saying that there is a danger that follows when inequality reaches a certain level. Even Obama is saying it. But Obama wouldn’t have said it if Occupy hadn’t done so first”.

[14] ^{See Michael Pollan’s latest (2018) book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.}

[15] ^{Simply do a search for ‘psychedelic studies’ and refine search results to the studies conducted at Johns Hopkins University, UCLA, and NYU.}

[16] ^{Note that these in-quote references are not included in the reference list at the end of this article. The in-quote references can be traced via the specific paper by Lyons and Carhart-Harris, namely “Increased nature relatedness and decreased authoritarian political views after psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression”.}

[17] The study is called ‘Broadening the context of the ecological crisis: featuring the Orphic and the Promethean. University of the Free State, 2017.

Please note: this is an article I wrote for submission to a journal from which I have not yet received feedback. The journal editor and article reviewers may accept the article, reject it, or accept conditionally with specific changes required. If it gets accepted and published, I will edit this note to say so!

 “To Learn Healing Knowledge”:

Philosophy, Psychedelic Studies and Transformation

Abstract

‘Philosophical learning’ may be summarised in Sobiecki’s fitting catchphrase “to learn healing knowledge”. This phrase integrates three crucial aspects of philosophical learning. Firstly, philosophy involves not just intellectual ‘learning about’ but a practical learning experience. Secondly, philosophy aims for learning that leads to some form of ‘healing’ through transformation. Thirdly, the kind of knowledge sought through philosophical learning is ‘insight’, rather than the mere accumulation of information. Insight is the kind of knowledge that changes a person. Notably, the catchphrase “to learn healing knowledge” is taken from an article that details the use of psychoactive plants among Southern Bantu Diviners. In the spirit of this link, I aim to challenge contemporary negative attitudes to the topic of psychedelics, and argue that there are good reasons for philosophers to pay attention to the potential use of psychoactive substances to promote philosophical learning. I shall argue first, that the results of some contemporary studies (within a growing body of contemporary research in the ‘new science of psychedelics’) affirm the benefits of psychedelic use in an ‘orchestrated guided experience’. Secondly, I argue that philosophers in particular have little reason for negative attitudes towards psychedelics, since the aims of such ‘orchestrated guided experiences’ are consonant with the nature of philosophical learning. This is indicated by the link between ‘philosophical perception’ and ‘psychedelic perception’, which may be understood in terms of experiential learning, healing, transformation and insight. In fact, philosophy, understood as a learning practice fostered by the use of psychedelics, has both a strong historical precedent and obvious ties to contemporary indigenous cultures. Here I cite research conducted by Wasson, Hoffman, Ruck and others into the use of psychedelics and the Eleusinian Mysteries at the origin of Western philosophy. Notably, however, the western philosophical tradition is not exceptional in this regard. A great many cultures, both ancient and contemporary, venerate psychoactive substances as agents of learning, healing, and transformation. Thus, it might be argued that contemporary mainstream philosophy may have opportunities to learn, or re-learn, from some Southern African indigenous cultural practices. In sum, considering the positive light in which the topic of psychedelics will be painted throughout my discussion, I will conclude by suggesting that psychedelics have the potential to play an important role in fostering the deeply transformative ‘philosophical learning’ that is the condition for genuine, positive social change. This makes the topic of psychedelics an immanently worthy subject of philosophical reflection.

Introduction

All psychedelics are illegal.[1] In most countries, penalties for possession of these substances are severe and a person may spend many years in jail if convicted for a drug offence. In this context of illegality, it is unsurprising that the topic of psychedelics is often taboo. However, as pointed out at The Lancet (2006), the taboo status of psychedelics is not based on social and legal concerns that do not correspond to scientific evidence:

Exaggerated risks of harm have contributed to the demonisation of psychedelic drugs as a social evil. But although this dangerous reputation — generated and perpetuated by the often disproportionately stiff penalties for their use — is helpful for law enforcement, it does not correspond to the evidence. Rather, the social prescription against psychedelic drugs that hinders properly controlled research into their effects and side effects is largely based on social and legal, as opposed to scientific, concerns.

“The new science of psychedelics” – which is a phrase used by the renowned author Michael Pollan in the title of his 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence – shows unambiguously that psychedelics have a bright side, so to speak. In the discussion to follow, I will show that orchestrated psychedelic experiences are being used in therapeutic contexts to promote psychological healing. This has bearing on questions of identity and social cohesion. Further, the purpose of the experiences orchestrated via the psychoactive plant-medicines used by various indigenous cultures for centuries is to “to learn healing knowledge” (Sobiecki 2012, 219). Philosophy as practiced by ancient philosophers also shares a conspicuously similar intent. This is unsurprising considering the strong arguments for the centrality of a highly venerated ancient Greek ritual (the Eleusinian Mysteries) that induced either a literal psychedelic experience, or an experience fully coterminous with it. It is therefore possible to conceptualise psychedelic consciousness and philosophical consciousness alongside each other, and to emphasise that psychedelic studies are relevant to contemporary scientific endeavours, philosophy, and indigenous cultural practices. The study of psychedelics can therefore be investigated for its possible transdisciplinary and cross-cultural contributions to the promotion of healing knowledge.

The new science of psychedelics

For most of this sub-section, the results of various scientific studies should ‘speak for themselves’. Methodologically, this initial approach is important because the themes and information in this sub-section will serve as the foundation from which links will be made to resonant themes concerning philosophy and indigenous cultural practice. The studies are often funded by credible institutions (such as Johns Hopkins University, UCLA, and NYU) using credible methodologies (usually the randomised double-blind approach), which is important to remember when considering what may seem to be the ‘incredible’ descriptions of the orchestrated psychedelic experience and the results attained from the careful use of psychedelic substances combined with psychotherapy. Towards the end of this sub-section, I will collate several more generalised observations made by psychedelic researchers about the psychedelic experience.

In a 2016 study titled “Rapid and sustained symptom reduction following psilocybin treatment for anxiety and depression in patients with life-threatening cancer: a randomized controlled trial”, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, the following results are specified:

[P]silocybin produced immediate, substantial, and sustained improvements in anxiety and depression and led to decreases in cancer-related demoralization and hopelessness, improved spiritual wellbeing, and increased quality of life. At the 6.5-month follow-up, psilocybin was associated with enduring anxiolytic and anti-depressant effects (approximately 60–80% of participants continued with clinically significant reductions in depression or anxiety), sustained benefits in existential distress and quality of life, as well as improved attitudes towards death. The psilocybin-induced mystical experience mediated the therapeutic effect of psilocybin on anxiety and depression (Ross et. al. 2016).

In a similar 2016 study titled “Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized double-blind trial”, also published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, the following results are specified:

High-dose psilocybin produced large decreases in clinician- and self-rated measures of depressed mood and anxiety, along with increases in quality of life, life meaning, and optimism, and decreases in death anxiety. At 6-month follow-up, these changes were sustained, with about 80% of participants continuing to show clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety. Participants attributed improvements in attitudes about life/self, mood, relationships, and spirituality to the high-dose experience, with >80% endorsing moderately or greater increased well-being/life satisfaction. Community observer ratings showed corresponding changes. Mystical-type psilocybin experience on session day mediated the effect of psilocybin dose on therapeutic outcomes (Griffiths et. al. 2017).

Again in 2016, a study titled “Long-term follow-up of psilocybin-facilitated smoking cessation”, which focused longitudinally on 15 participants, was published in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse. In the study the following is recorded:

At long-term follow-up, nine participants (60%) were confirmed as smoking abstinent. At 12-month follow-up 13 participants (86.7%) rated their psilocybin experiences among the five most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their lives (Johnson et. al., 2016).

In a 2017 study titled “Psilocybin-occasioned mystical-type experience in combination with meditation and other spiritual practices produces enduring positive changes in psychological functioning and in trait measures of prosocial attitudes and behaviors”, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology in 2018, the following is specified:

Compared with low-dose, high-dose psilocybin produced greater acute and persisting effects. At 6 months… both high-dose groups showed large significant positive changes on longitudinal measures of interpersonal closeness, gratitude, life meaning/purpose, forgiveness, death transcendence, daily spiritual experiences, religious faith and coping, and community observer ratings. Determinants of enduring effects were psilocybin-occasioned mystical-type experience and rates of meditation/spiritual practices. Psilocybin can occasion enduring trait-level increases in prosocial attitudes/behaviors and in healthy psychological functioning (Griffiths et. al. 2018).

In another article published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, titled “Increased nature relatedness and decreased authoritarian political views after psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression”, the following is recorded:

In the general population, psychedelic drug use is not associated with increased incidence of mental health problems (Johansen and Krebs, 2015; Krebs and Johansen, 2013), but is instead associated with lower rates of suicidality and psychological distress (Hendricks et al., 2015a, 2015b; Johansen and Krebs, 2015; Krebs and Johansen, 2013). Psychedelic drug users have also been shown to exhibit greater optimism (or reduced pessimism) than non-users (Grob et al., 1996) as well as increased concern for others, nature and the environment when compared with users of cannabis, amphetamine or heroin (Lerner and Lyvers, 2006). Experience with psychedelics has been found to positively affect one’s sense of feeling part of nature rather than separate from it, leading to pro-environmental behavioural changes (Forstmann and Sagioglou, 2017). (Lyons and Carhart-Harris, 2018)

MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Study, has taken MDMA therapy trails through FDA approved phase 2, which is no small undertaking in the U.S.A. considering the strict requirements of the regulatory processes for clinical trials. A major breakthrough has occurred since the phase 2 trials: “On July 28, 2017, MAPS and the FDA reached agreement on the Special Protocol Assessment for Phase 3 clinical trials”, which confirms “that the protocol design, clinical endpoints, planned conduct, and statistical analyses for the Phase 3 trials… are acceptable to support regulatory approval by the FDA”. The following summary of numerous trials is provided at the MAPS website:

Phase 2 clinical trials have shown that MDMA can reduce fear and defensiveness, enhance communication and introspection, and increase empathy and compassion, enhancing the therapeutic process for people suffering from PTSD [post-traumatic stress syndrome]. In MAPS’ completed Phase 2 trials with 107 participants, 61% no longer qualified for PTSD after three sessions of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy two months following treatment. At the 12-month follow-up, 68% no longer had PTSD. All participants had chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD, and had suffered from PTSD for an average of 17.8 years.

I have listed some findings from five published articles, and quoted from a summary of MAPS findings. This methodology could go on indefinitely due to the several dozen similar studies and results, many of which are compiled at various institutions’ websites (for example, the Heffter Institute and the Beckley Foundation). One more article, this time published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, must feature in this sub-section because in it some important themes and information are emphasised that explicitly depict the psychedelic experience as profoundly transformative, which should already be clear from the previous studies’ results. The researchers employed semi-structured interviews to ascertain from thirteen “adult participants aged 22 to 69 years… with clinically elevated anxiety associated with a cancer diagnosis” the qualitative impacts of psychedelic therapy. Here follows a summary of the findings:

General themes found in all or nearly all transcripts included relational embeddedness, emotional range, the role of music as conveyor of experience, meaningful visual phenomena, wisdom lessons, revised life priorities, and a desire to repeat the psilocybin experience. Typical themes found in the majority of transcripts included the following: exalted feelings of joy, bliss, and love; embodiment; ineffability; alterations to identity; a movement from feelings of separateness to interconnectedness; experiences of transient psychological distress; the appearance of loved ones as guiding spirits; and sharing the experience with loved ones posttreatment. Variant themes found in a minority of participant transcripts include lasting changes to sense of identity, synesthesia experiences, catharsis of powerful emotion, improved relationships after treatment, surrender or “letting go,” forgiveness, and a continued struggle to integrate experience. (Belsar et. al. 2017)

There has been a large focus on the impact of psilocybin in this sub-section, with MDMA featuring once. However, studies are available on all of the psychedelic substances listed at the start of this article, and I have not found any rigorously conducted study or trial that either does not put the careful use of a psychedelic substance in a positive light, or emphasise the profundity of the psychedelic experience. The respected researcher Stanislav Grof, for example, speaking about his work with LSD, had the following to say:

[T]his substance is an unspecific amplifier of mental processes that brings to the surface various elements from the depth of the unconscious. What we see in the LSD experiences and in various situations surrounding them appears to be basically an exteriorization and magnification of the conflicts intrinsic to human nature and civilization. If approached from this point of view, LSD phenomena are extremely interesting material for a deeper understanding of the mind, the nature of man, and human society. (Grof 1975)

Grof went so far as to suggest that work with altered states of consciousness, such as the states of consciousness induced by taking a psychedelic substance, may play a role in increasing “our chances of planetary survival”:

Deep reverence for life and ecological awareness are among the most frequent consequences of the psychospiritual transformation that accompanies responsible work with non-ordinary states of consciousness.  The same has been true for spiritual emergence of a mystical nature that is based on personal experience. It is my belief that a movement in the direction of a fuller awareness of our unconscious minds will vastly increase our chances of planetary survival. (Grof 1992)

Grof’s sentiments might seem a step too far in comparison to the methodological rigour of contemporary clinical studies. However, evident in the results of contemporary clinical studies are ‘peak experiences’ facilitated by the psychedelic under scrutiny in any given study, and it is frequently the case that researchers see beyond necessarily-limited clinical scopes. For example, Lester Grinspoon, M.D., an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (HMS), and his colleague James B. Bakalar, the associate editor of the Harvard Mental Health Letter and a lecturer in law in the department of psychiatry at HMS, state the following (1997):

Psychedelic therapy has an analogue in Abraham Maslow’s idea of the peak experience. The drug taker feels somehow allied with a higher power; he becomes convinced that he is part of a much larger pattern, and the sense of cleaning, release, and joy makes old woes seem trivial.

Gary Fisher, a clinical psychologist, places emphasis on the role of psychedelics beyond the confines of the purposes to which psychedelics are put in clinical conditions:

Fortunately, after a successful psychedelic experience, you never go back to your previous state of consciousness – that’s the whole point of taking psychedelics. If you don’t integrate the higher levels of consciousness into your daily life, then the trip has been irrelevant. … If a psychedelic doesn’t result in your becoming a human being who is more human, then psychedelics are meaningless and don’t make a difference. I have never known anyone who had a profound transcendental experience who wasn’t significantly changed in his or her daily life by that experience. (Fisher, in Walsh and Grof 2005)

To be sure, there are some risks in the psychedelic undertaking, just as there are risks in an endless array of human endeavours, but when psychological screening of potential patients is carried out, as is always the case in the trials and studies listed here and elsewhere, and when the patients are ‘guided’ by a trained administrator and later allowed to integrate their experience proactively via psychotherapy, the results are overwhelmingly positive. The word ‘positive’ may be grossly inappropriate, considering that, as has already been seen, patients rated their psychedelic experience “among the five most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their lives” (Johnson et. al. 2016) – this is surely another articulation of the concept of a ‘peak experience’. It is with the demonstrable facts made available in the psychedelic studies in mind, as well as the broader notion of the ‘peak experience’ that facilitates a profound transformation in the participant of the orchestrated psychedelic experience, that attention can now be given to the character of philosophical perception, which is consonant with at least some important aspects of the psychedelic experience.

The transformative character of philosophical perception

After his research into ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, Pierre Hadot (1995) makes numerous observations about the transformative character of philosophy as it was practiced in ancient times. These were times during which philosophy was practiced as a way of life. A useful starting point in understanding the philosophical transformation of perception Hadot observes is Seneca’s experiences with the contemplation of wisdom. This is a philosophical endeavour frequently associated with ancient philosophers: “I look at [wisdom] with the same stupefaction with which, on other occasions, I look at the world; this world that I quite often feel as though I were seeing for the first time” (Hadot 1995, 257). Hadot (Ibid) comments on Seneca’s sentiment as follows:

If Seneca speaks of stupefaction, it is because he sometimes finds that he discovers the world all of a sudden, “as though [he] were seeing it for the first time.” At such moments, he becomes conscious of the transformation taking place in his perception of the world. Normally, he had not been in the habit of seeing the world, and consequently was not astonished by it. Now, all of a sudden, he is stupefied, because he sees the world with new eyes.

‘Seeing the world with new eyes’ clearly denotes a transformation, and Hadot elaborates on the nature of the transformation brought about by philosophical perception by referring to some observations made by Henry Bergson. Hadot (1995, 254) first cites Bergson’s account of habitual perception, which is the perception aligned with utilitarianism and pragmatism. Bergson writes:

Life requires that we put on blinkers; we must not look to the right, to the left, or behind, but straight ahead, in the direction in which we are supposed to walk. In order to live, we must be selective in our knowledge and our memories, and retain only that which may contribute to our action upon things.

Habitual perception is contrasted with philosophical perception: These are also Bergson’s words, quoted by Hadot (1995, 253): “Might not the role of philosophy be to bring us to a more complete perception of reality, by means of a kind of displacement of our attention?” Hadot immediately comments on this philosophical ‘displacement of attention’ and emphasises the transformative power of philosophy as a way of life. It is important to note the relevance of these comments (1995, 254) for what has been reported and described (in the previous sub-section of this article) about the psychedelic experience:

The ‘displacement of attention’ of which Bergson speaks… is in fact a conversion: a radical rupture with regard to the state of unconsciousness in which man normally lives. The utilitarian perception we have of the world, in everyday life, in fact hides from us the world qua world. Aesthetic and philosophical perceptions of the world are only possible by means of a complete transformation of our relationship to the world: we have to perceive it for itself, and no longer for ourselves.

There is much that can be said about this perceptual shift in our relationship to the world. I have argued elsewhere (Pittaway 2017, 248-259) that this shift is of crucial importance for the ecological plight of the planet and its consequences for human ‘civilisation’: people seeing the world for itself rather than for themselves entails a dispensation notably different to the pragmatism and utilitarianism that reduces nature to little more than a standing reserve of resources for human consumption (Heidegger 1977, 4; 19-20). It is not my purpose here to pursue this theme. What I am emphasising here is that the philosophical transformation described by Bergson and Hadot is conspicuously similar to the transformation attained via the psychedelic experience, and via this emphasis I assert that the psychedelic experience is of relevance not only to philosophy as practiced beyond the walls of a classroom, but to any context in which the theme of transformation of this sort is foregrounded. Considering some of the results of psychedelic studies compiled earlier, philosophical transformation is remarkably psychedelic, as evidenced by these sentiments from Lucretius when describing “how the world would look to us if we saw it for the first time”, quoted by Hadot (1995, 258):

First of all, the bright, clear colour of the sky, and all it holds within it, the stars that wander here and there, and the moon and the radiance of the sun with its brilliant light; all these, if now they had been seen for the first time by mortals, if, unexpectedly, they were in a moment placed before their eyes, what story could be told more marvelous than these things, or what that the nations would less dare to believe beforehand? Nothing, I believe; so worthy of wonder would this sight have been.

Furthermore, the transformation or displacement from habitual perception to philosophical perception is one that entails a transition towards a state of being characterised by freedom, peace, and serenity, which are surely desired outcomes of the process of healing:

[I]t is quite apparent that the transformation of one’s view of the world was intimately linked to exercises which involved concentrating one’s mind on the present instant. In Stoicism as well as in Epicureanism, such exercises consisted in ‘separating oneself from the future and past,’ in order to ‘delimit the present instant.’ Such a technique gives the mind, freed from the burden and prejudices of the past, as well as from worry about the future, that inner detachment, freedom, and peace which are indispensable prerequisites for perceiving the world qua world. We have here, moreover, a kind of reciprocal causality: the mind acquires peace and serenity by becoming aware of its relationship with the world, to the extent that it re-places our existence within the cosmic perspective. (Hadot 1995, 259)

What one is learning when undergoing this kind of transformation is not ‘book knowledge’, but an intuitive form of healing knowledge that entails the fostering of cosmic consciousness (Hadot 1995, 266): by “‘cosmic consciousness’, we mean the consciousness that we are a part of the cosmos, and the consequent dilation of our self throughout the infinity of universal nature”. This is the context in which ancient philosophical mysticism can best be understood. In an interview about his series of guided psychedelic experiences, Michael Pollan (in the Ferris-Pollan interview, 2018) clarifies the meaning of the word ‘mystical’. This suggests that cosmic consciousness (which I have associated with philosophical consciousness) is identical to ‘psychedelic consciousness’: the psychedelic experience “feels to people like a mystical experience … It’s very spiritual, this sense of transcending this bag of bones we are and actually connect with larger entities”. This would explain why, In Plato’s Phaedo, the ‘mystics’ are equated with the ‘true philosophers’: “For ‘many,’ as they say in the mysteries, ‘are the thyrsus bearers, but few are the mystics,’ – meaning, as I interpret the words, the true philosophers” (1891, 1023); and again: “the founders of the mysteries would appear to have had a real meaning, and were not talking nonsense when they intimated… that he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods” (Ibid). The association occurs again, this time in Plato’s Phaedrus, when reference is made to seeing “beauty shining in brightness, – we philosophers following in the train of Zeus, others in company with other gods; and then we beheld the beatific vision and were initiated into a mystery which may be truly called most blessed, celebrated by us in our state of innocence” (1891, 1093). The ingredients of philosophical consciousness, as sought by ancient philosophers, are therefore the following: seeing for the first time, or seeing with new eyes; transitioning from seeing the world habitually, or for ourselves, to seeing the world for itself; a ‘healing’ characterised by perceptual freedom, peace and serenity; cosmic consciousness characterised by transcendence of human mortality and a feeling of being connected to a bigger unity; a mystical sense of being initiated into the mystery of existence. These ingredients are conspicuously similar to some of the characteristics of the psychedelic experience, as compiled in the previous sub-section, which, as I will now show, should be no surprise, because ancient Greek culture held in the highest regard a series of initiation rituals (the “mysteries” referred to in both the Phaedo and Phaedrus quotes) that were either literally psychedelic or fully coterminous with the psychedelic experience.

The Eleusinian Mysteries were constituted by a set of initiatory rituals that occurred at Eleusis, situated slightly north of Athens and visited by “people of all classes, emperors and prostitutes, slaves and freemen” (Ruck 1978, 12). The ancient Greek empire’s most revered celebration continued for a period of time exceeding 2000 years. It was a celebration shrouded in secrecy, so much so that “no one, under pain of death, could reveal what happened within the sanctuary” at Eleusis (Ibid). Despite the secrecy surrounding the ritual, or perhaps due to the secrecy and the astounding reports by initiates that they underwent life-changing experiences there, various inquiries have been made into the goings-on at Eleusis. As I will show below, what has so far been explored about philosophical perception is perfectly situated in the context of a guided psychedelic experience at Eleusis that cultivated in a participant “the supreme experience in an initiate’s life” (Ruck 1978, 19) – in other words, a peak experience, as was the case with the participants of controlled psychedelic studies.

At Eleusis, the preparation of the sacred kykeon was, according to Ruck (1978, 13; 17), the central event: “a special potion, as we know, was drunk prior to the visual experience”. I have not been able to find an inquiry into the Eleusinian rituals that does not make reference to the drinking of the kykeon (sometimes referred to as a potion) as well as the reported effects of consuming it. The kykeon is everywhere accepted to be a “barley drink” (Rosen 1987, 416) infused with mint. In 1943 Albert Hoffman synthesised LSD from ergot fungi, which grows on grains such as barley. When asked by Wasson if the Ancient Greeks could have arrived at a psychedelic drink – i.e. their kykeon – from natural substances and extraction processes at their disposal, Hoffman (1978, 10-11) said that

it is certainly not pulling a long bow to assume that the barley grown [at Eleusis] was host to an ergot containing, perhaps among others, the soluble hallucinogenic alkaloids. The famous Rarian plain was adjacent to Eleusis. Indeed this may well have led to the choice of Eleusis for Demeter’s temple, and for the growth of the cluster of powerful myths surrounding them and Triptolemus that still exert their spell on us today.

Despite Hoffman’s considered conclusion (1978, 8-11), one commentator, Ivan Valencic (1994), has pointed out that the various available descriptions of the effects of drinking the kykeon indicate that a far more powerful psychoactive substance was the key ingredient in the kykeon recipe. This view holds that considerably large doses of water-soluble ergot fungi would have been needed at exactly the right time of the year for the ceremony, and such reliable availability of large amounts via the erot-extraction method is not guaranteed. However, rather than conclude that a lack of reliable availability of the ergot psychoactive proves that no psychoactive substance was used at Eleusis, the commentator suggests, first, that the myth of Demeter – around which the ceremony is centred, and in which reference is made to the barley drink – was constructed to deliberately protect the secret of the kykeon by misleading ‘audiences’ about the exact ingredients of the kykeon. The commentator goes so far as to suggest that a different, more reliable psychoactive substance was likely the culprit, with his guess being one of the psychoactive ‘magic’ mushrooms such as one containing psilocybin, a molecule that certainly induces powerful psychedelic effects, as already seen in the extracts from contemporary psychedelic studies. The point here is not to identify which psychoactive substance was used, but rather to emphasise the insistence of researchers that some kind of powerful psychoactive was used.

Rosen follows the philology of the word kykeon via an examination of a fragment of a poem by Hipponax. He identifies (1987, 15) first its potential literal meaning in the poem: “a remedy against the hunger arriving from… poverty”, and quickly points out that the speaker of the poem requires of the addressee barley for his drink. Rosen immediately suggests that the more appropriate meaning of the word is ‘drug’: “the kykeon was also known in antiquity for its medicinal qualities, making it all the more appropriate that it be referred to as… a drug in the literal sense” (Ibid). Rosen (1987, 422-423) also focuses briefly on the work of C. Watkins to point out that the Homeric references to kykeon

reflect an inherited pre-Greek religious ritual. [Watkins] points out the striking formulaic and thematic correspondences between these Homeric passages and the references in the Rig-Veda to the ritual drinking of soma, which also contains barley. Indeed the central characteristic of both potions, as Watkins demonstrates, is that they were each originally psychotropic.

Rosen’s inquiry into the issue is conveniently succinct. A slightly longer philological approach is taken by Ruck (1978, 13-17), not into the Hipponax source, but directly into the Demeter myth pivotal to the Eleusis Mysteries. Ruck’s textual analysis is too long to summarise here, but his conclusion – which is supported in detail in his analysis – is that the “myths of Demeter and Persephone and all their company fit our explanation in every respect. Nothing in any of them is incompatible with our thesis”. The “explanation” Ruck is referring to is about the effects of the Eleusinian ceremony, and the “thesis” he mentions is that the Eleusinian initiates underwent a literal psychedelic experience. Here is an example of why Ruck makes such a conclusion: the central myth associated with the Eleusinian mystery is the myth of the abduction of the goddess Persephone, and her abduction is symbolic: “The marital abduction or seizure of maidens while gathering flowers is… a common theme in Greek myths and Plato records a rationalized version of such stories in which the companion of the seized maiden is named Pharmaceia or, as the name, means, the ‘use of drugs’” (1978, 13). Ruck adds, “The particular myth that Plato is rationalizing is in fact one that traced the descent of the priesthood at Eleusis. There can be no doubt that Persephone’s abduction was a drug-induced seizure”.

For anyone who has had a strong psychedelic experience, it is perhaps the case that identifying the exact psychoactive substance used at Eleusis is less important in supporting the explanation and thesis (Ibid) than is the recognition that the reported effects of the Eleusinian experience are coterminous with the psychedelic experience. After conducting his textual research into the Mysteries, Ruck (1978, 13) summarises the effects as follows:

There were physical symptoms, moreover, that accompanied the vision: fear and a trembling in the limbs, vertigo, nausea, and a cold sweat. Then there came the vision, a sight amidst an aura of brilliant light that suddenly flickered through the darkened chamber. Eyes had never before seen the like, and… the experience itself was in-communicable, for there are no words adequate to the task. Even a poet could only say that he had seen the beginning and the end of life and known that they were one, something given by god. The division between earth and sky melted into a pillar of light.

To see ‘the beginning and end of life’ and to ‘know that they are one’ surely casts light on the epiphanies had by terminal cancer patients in the relevant psychedelic studies. Furthermore, the themes of ‘eyes never before seeing the like’ and ‘transformed visions’ arose when identifying aspects of philosophical perception, and they are often present in reports of the psychedelic experience. On this matter, Wasson (1978, 5), referring to the transformation facilitated by a psychedelic experience, seems to be quoting Seneca (and he also indirectly incorporates the concept of habitual perception):

This newness of everything – it is as though the world had just dawned – overwhelms you and melts you with its beauty. Not unnaturally, what is happening to you seems to you freighted with significance, beside which the humdrum events of everyday are trivial. All these things you see with an immediacy of vision that leads you to say to yourself, “Now I am seeing for the first time, seeing direct, without the intervention of mortal eyes”. (Emphasis added).

In keeping with these themes, Wasson (1978, 4) quotes Aristides the Rhetor to elaborate further on the effects: what the initiate experienced was “new, astonishing, inaccessible to rational cognition”. Eleusis, says Aristides,

is a shrine common to the whole earth, and of all the divine things that exist among men, it is both the most awesome and the most luminous. At what place in the world have more miraculous tidings been sung, and where have the dromena called forth greater emotion, where has there been greater rivalry between seeing and hearing?

The reference to a “rivalry between seeing and hearing” – synaesthesia – makes best sense if placed in the context of the effects of the psychedelic experience, for it is the case that under the influence of psychedelics, auditory stimuli often manifest in a visual manner, and vice versa. Wasson, who partook in Mesoamerican mushroom rites, puts it as follows: “For the sights that one sees assume rhythmical contours, and the singing of the shaman seems to take on visible and colorful shapes” (1978, 4). Indeed, it was directly after he had partaken in the rites that Wasson made the link: “That there might be a common denominator between the Mexican mushroom Mystery and the Mystery of Eleusis had struck me at once. They both aroused an overwhelming sense of awe, of wonder” (Ibid). It is crucial to re-acknowledge at this point that the Eleusinian Mysteries ceremonies and rituals were conducted annually for the entire history of ancient Greece, and that these ceremonies and rituals inspired in initiates “an overwhelming sense of awe, of wonder” (Ibid). This is what ancient philosophers reported accompanying the philosophical perception that resulted in practicing philosophy as a way of life. It would be untenable to suggest that a ritual renowned throughout the ancient world would not have been influential in other cultural pursuits, such as philosophical endeavours. It is more viable to suggest that the Eleusinian Mysteries, which clearly had psychedelic components, influenced ancient philosophical endeavours, or that there was a mutual reciprocation between the two pursuits.

Ruck (1978, 19) provides further important commentary and description on the experience at Eleusis:

The ancient testimony about Eleusis is unanimous and unambiguous. Eleusis was the supreme experience in an initiate’s life. It was both physical and mystical: trembling, vertigo, cold sweat, and then a sight that made all previous seeing seem like blindness, a sense of awe and wonder at a brilliance that caused a profound silence since what had just been seen and felt could never be communicated: words are unequal to the task. Those symptoms are unmistakably the experience induced by an hallucinogen.

The word ‘hallucinogen’ and ‘psychedelic’ are, for the purposes of this article, synonymous, as are the words ‘psychoactive’ or ‘entheogen’. They are words that more often than not since the 1970s are used as pejoratives, the year when the (failed) war on drugs was legislated in the USA (after the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 was passed by the Nixon administration). It is important to note that beyond the confines of the failed war on drugs, the experience that is facilitated by the use of a psychedelic or hallucinogen is often considered to be “the culminating experience of a lifetime” (1978, 12), or, as has just been seen via Ruck’s commentary, “the supreme experience in an initiate’s life”. Accepting the hypothesis that such a substance was used in the ceremony at Eleusis allows one to make sense of statements such as the following one made by Rosen (1978, 423-424): “Spiritual and physical happiness is… the promise of Eleusinian initiation. … Our sources stress not only that the initiate will be happy in the afterworld, but that he will also be happy and prosperous in this life”. It is precisely the case that terminal cancer patients are ‘happier in this life’, as well as more prepared for their ‘journey into the afterworld’, after psychedelic therapy. In general, patients and initiates alike have mystical experiences, are struck by awe and wonder, feel as though they are part of a bigger and more meaningful whole, re-evaluate how they comprehend life and death, see visions and patterns and details they have never seen before, and so on. Ancient philosophers, as has been seen already, spoke similarly of the sights of wondrous things, of feeling connected to a greater whole, and so on. The ancient philosophical experience of the “dilation of our self throughout the infinity of universal nature” (Hadot 1995, 266) is particularly telling, because it matches a psychedelic experience described by Michael Pollan (in the Ferris-Pollan interview, 2018). Pollan describes the psychedelic experience as entailing a process of ego-dissolution, which seems like a less poetic way of saying the “dilation of our self”. He comments that the experience of ego dissolution “feels to people like a mystical experience”, and adds that ego dissolution “is a kind of rehearsal for death”, which provides insight into why the Eleusinian experience prepared initiates for the afterlife, and why the guided psychedelic experience eases anxiety in cancer patients regarding their imminent deaths. Perhaps this ‘mystical’ context explains why Thomas Taylor, in his research into the Eleusinian Mysteries in 1891, records the following important comparison. He writes (1891, 166), “Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, … thus elegantly compares philosophy to these mystic rites”: “philosophy may be called the initiation into true sacred ceremonies, and the instruction in genuine Mysteries”. Philosophy is again associated with the Mysteries when he articulates the following analogy:

Just as persons who are being initiated into the Mysteries throng together at the outset amid tumult and shouting, and jostle against one another, but when the holy rites are being performed and disclosed the people are immediately attentive in awe and silence, so too at the beginning of philosophy: about its portals also you will see great tumult and talking and boldness, as some boorishly and violently try to jostle their way towards the repute it bestows; but he who has succeeded in getting inside, and has seen a great light, as though a shrine were opened, adopts another bearing of silence and amazement, and ‘humble and orderly attends upon’ reason as upon a god.

By emphasising the above links between philosophical consciousness and psychedelic consciousness, I am not suggesting that the direction taken by philosophy as a discipline since the time of the ancient philosophers – almost exclusively a direction away from the altered states of consciousness central to the older philosophical endeavour at Eleusis – is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ direction. The process of change is universal, and philosophy as a discipline obviously cannot be exempt from this law. What I am suggesting, very specifically, is that the philosopher must acknowledge in the history of one’s discipline the high esteem – rather, the highest esteem – placed on the ‘initiatory’ experience facilitated at Eleusis, an experience that some researchers and authors acknowledge and argue to be one induced by psychedelics and which the Ancients equated with philosophy. A consequence of this acknowledgement is, at very least, that a philosopher cannot simply dismiss this type of experience without doing an injustice to the history of the discipline in which they participate – philosophers must take the experience seriously. And perhaps it is not only philosophers who should take the experience seriously, but also all people who see the influence that the (psychedelic) ancient Greek culture has had for the rest of humanity’s history. Ancient Greek culture and philosophy “had a huge influence on the world. Greece is the birthplace of democracy and Western culture. In so many fields of human endeavour – government, philosophy, science, mythology, religion, and all the arts – the accomplishments and contributions of Greece have at times been equalled but have never been surpassed” (McGinnis 2004, 7). This immense productivity emanated from a culture that highly venerated experiences that were either literally psychedelic, or at very least, fully coterminous with the psychedelic experience, and it was also a culture that practiced philosophy as a way of life accompanied by philosophical perception, a type of perception that shares important features with psychedelic perception.

Southern African Indigenous Cultural Use of Psychoactive plants

The researcher J. F. Sobiecki, in an article titled “A review of plants used in divination in southern Africa and their psychoactive effects” (2008), found that of “85 species of plants that are used for divination by southern Bantu-speaking people”, “39 species (45 %) have other reported psychoactive uses, and a number have established hallucinogenic activity” (2008, 333). He states that the “findings indicate that psychoactive plants have an important role in traditional healing practices in southern Africa” (Ibid). Sobiecki quotes (Ibid) the diviner Mahube with words that immediately foreground the similarity of Mahube’s experience to the experiences so far associated with psychedelic perception: “I eat medicines that work in my body like matches to dry wood. I do not open my eyes. It is not with my eyes that I see. My ancestors see for me. I see in a dream”. Sobiecki’s article is extremely well researched and referenced; here is an extract (2008, 335) that is typical of the thoroughness of his research and also indicative of the overwhelming evidence provided for the claim that psychoactive plants are widely used in indigenous Southern African cultural practice:

Some interesting terms for psychoactive plants exist, including bhayiskhobho (bioscope (cinema) in Zulu), otherwise known as the ‘mirror’ or ‘TV’, which refers to the effects of hallucinogenic plants such as the toxic Boophone disticha (L.f.) Herb. (see Hall 1994: 54). Another Zulu term, bonisele, describes several plant species that are used by initiate diviners to elicit divinatory powers and induce dreams of the ancestral spirits. The term is derived from the verb bona, and means “to see on my behalf” (L.C. Posthumus pers. comm.) or “to show me the light” (L. Maponya pers. comm.). The descriptions of the effects of bonisele plants on the initiate diviners are analogous with metaphysical ‘seeing’, transcendental enlightenment and revelation. An example of one such plant is Chamaecrista mimosoides (L.) Greene. Descriptive phrases for such plants also include ‘magical plants’ and ‘plants that arouse the spirits’.

In another article titled “Psychoactive Ubulawu Spiritual Medicines and Healing Dynamics in the Initiation Process of Southern Bantu Diviners”, Sobiecki reports (2012, 216) his findings as follows:

Findings reveal that there is widespread reliance on ubulawu as psychoactive spiritual medicines by the indigenous people of southern Africa to communicate with their ancestral spirits — so as to bring luck, and to treat mental disturbances. In the case of the Southern Bantu diviners, ubulawu used in a ritual initiation process acts as a mnemonic aid and medicine to familiarize the initiates with enhanced states of awareness and related psychospiritual phenomena such as enhanced intuition and dreams of the ancestral spirits, who teach the initiates how to find and use medicinal plants. The progression of the latter phenomena indicates the steady success of the initiates’ own healing integration.

Quite simply, in Southern African indigenous cultural practice, psychoactive plants play an important role, and they induce in the ‘user’ a state of consciousness that has at least some similarities to the psychedelic experience referred to in earlier parts of this paper, and to the philosophical consciousness accompanying philosophy as a way of life as practiced by ancient philosophers. I share Sobiecki’s view (2012, 219) that the psychedelic effects of the psychoactive plants used in Southern African indigenous cultures are generally less intense than in the cases of rituals elsewhere in the world where psychedelic substances are used, for example in the case of the Amazonian shamanistic use of ayahuasca. Sobiecki does suggest (Ibid), however, that the “purpose and results of the South American and South African plant use” is the same, i.e. “to learn healing knowledge”. This phrase, to learn healing knowledge, is a fitting catchphrase summarising the purpose of psychedelic use in both the Eleusinian Mystery ritual and the contemporary clinical applications of psychedelic therapies; it is also a fitting phrase for at least some aspects of the transformation brought about by philosophical perception in the context of philosophy as a way of life.

Conclusion

From what has been presented in this paper on the new science of psychedelics, the psychedelic origins of philosophy and the concomitance of philosophical perception and psychedelic perception, and the psychedelic component of Southern African indigenous psychoactive plant use, it is clear that the psychedelic experience is relevant to all disciplines. Psychedelics have the potential to play an important role in fostering the deeply transformative ‘philosophical learning’ that is the condition for genuine, positive social change considering that in all three disciplines, i.e. science, philosophy, and indigenous cultural plant use, healing knowledge was acquired via the psychedelic experience. A society constituted by people who have learned healing knowledge is surely a qualitatively ‘better’ society than one constituted by individuals operating according to the exclusively pragmatic imperatives of habitual perception. This makes the topic of psychedelics an immanently worthy subject of philosophical reflection, and opportunities for collaboration may be available if philosophers, scientists, and indigenous cultural plant healers focus on the psychedelic commonalities between their disciplines. A common ground spanning across such a large expanse of time (i.e. from Ancient Greece and age-old indigenous contexts through to medical and clinical contexts of the twenty-first century) and across such broad contexts (i.e. ancient philosophy, philosophy as a practice, philosophy as a transformational process, indigenous cultural practices, and contemporary clinical research), is an invaluable tool for cohesion across contexts. Fortunately, the value of this truly transformative psychedelic experience has recently been acknowledged via studies such as the ones referred to in this article – an aura of reputability is beginning to accompany inquiries into the broad topic of psychedelics. Philosophy, if it is to reconnect with the ancient practices from which it was birthed, and if it is not to be confined to ‘discourse about philosophy’, can also pursue the opportunity to focus on this arena of transformative potential, and as a consequence partake in the exploration of altered states of consciousness that are relevant across cultures, disciplines and contexts. Indeed, there is a danger in ignoring a topic like psychedelic studies, as pointed out by Rudgley (quoted in Roberts 2006), who also points out some opportunities that can be gained from exploring altered states of consciousness like the one induced by psychedelics. Rudgley’s comments were made to motivate anthropological inquiry into altered states of consciousness, but the comments are relevant to any discipline:

Bearing in mind that humans have an innate need to experience altered states of consciousness, to ignore or repress our own natures in this way is to neglect our own capacities. What anthropology can do, by describing other cultures in which scientific and poetic approaches to truth are part of a holistic vision, is to remind us of the lack of harmony in the elements of our own second nature. It can indicate ways in which we may reach a better understanding of the importance of altered states of consciousness in both our collective and our personal lives.

It is with these thoughts in mind that I conclude with the following sentiments of Ruck (1978, 17) that go some distance in encouraging collaboration in this important field of academic and experiential research: “Now… those of us who have experienced the superior hallucinogens may join the fellowship of the ancient initiates in a lasting bond of friendship, a friendship born of a shared experience of a reality deeper far than we had known before”.

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[1] To list a few obvious ones: ‘magic’ mushrooms containing the psilocybin molecule; mescaline from certain cacti; lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD); ayauscha and Dimethyltryptamine (DMT); Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, which is not a ‘classic’ psychedelic but does induce some psychedelic effects).

Peterberg style batch box burner. Different to the ‘J-tube’ style rocket stoves I have made so far in that all the wood is placed in the batch box at once. The idea is that the precise, calculated dimensions of the batch box facilitate a maximum-efficiency combustion of the wood.

No idea what I will end up doing with the burner yet. I made it out of sheer curiosity. What is really nice is that this tiny one is move-able by two people.

This post is about the small solar power system that provides us with light (dc, i.e. direct current) and power for a few things at our off-grid cabin.

The ‘few things’ I refer to are:

• phone charging (dc)
• laptop (occasional use) – direct power (dc) and battery charge (ac, i.e. alternating current)
• hair clippers (ac)
• headlight battery charging (dc)
• cordless drill battery charging (ac)
• and a few other miscellaneous things

Here’s the panel. It’s a 128W, 24V panel that seems to work excellently with the 12V system:

Bolted and locked to the roof:

MPPT controller/regulator and breaker switches:

The two batteries, 102Ah each, connected to each other to maintain the 12V system config. Also, the 600W inverter used for AC conversion:

Small diy LED light; there are several of these inside and outside the cabin:

The car radio/stereo and speakers powered directly:

The DC jack that connects to various devices:

The little phone charger job I threw together:

The small inverter that connects to the previously pictured jack and converts 12v to 13-24v depending on requirement. The laptop runs at 19v; I had to find an old power supply for my laptop, cut off the connection, and wire it into a new connection:

A close-up of the small inverted and male-female jacks:

Materials used:

Old boiler/geyser barrel.

Fire bricks for the burn chamber.

All other bricks are standard bricks.

Ceramic fibre board for the riser inside the barrel.

Clay and sand mortar between all standard bricks.

Fire-cement (very tiny amount) between burn chamber fire bricks.

Cob plaster to seal barrel and around burn chamber.

(All bricks will eventually be cobbed).

A few pics of the start of the eco-brick build at Jikani community centre in Hogsback.

Each eco-brick contains approximately 1 full garbage bag of plastics that would otherwise end up in landfill.

So far 4000 eco-bricks have been collected. That’s 4000 garbage bags that have been diverted from landfill.

The eco-bricks will constitute the inner wall material for what will be a community room utilised for reading and will probably house a few community computers.

Not only is the utilisation of eco-bricks diverting plastics from landfill; it eliminates the use of a large number of bricks, cement and other building materials that would otherwise be used for the build.

The mortar between the eco-bricks is cob mortar: a mix of clay, sand and straw.