Psychedelics Macht Frei

It was fascist when Hitler doped the Wehrmacht. It's still fascist when Silicon Valley dopes tech geniuses with performance-enhancing psychedelics.

David Bell, a professor of history at a Princeton and biographer of Napoleon, published an excellent essay in the Winter 2023 issue of Liberties titled “The Triumph of Anti-Politics.” Bell noted, with alarm, “the toxic growth of several distinct and distinctly contemporary patterns of thought that all tend to undermine the idea that citizens with different political principles and moral values can collectively deliberate on the public good.” He identified four ascendant strains: Trumpian populism, of course; free-market fundamentalism; wokeism; and technocracy. Most people would identify Trumpian populism as by far the most dangerous of the four. Bell, interestingly, did not. Rather, he identified the technocrats as “the end of this dark road.” It is the technocrats, Bell wrote,

who most clearly and explicitly reject politics itself as corrupt and inefficient, and it is they who, in the long run, will benefit if the American public becomes entirely despairing about political life. It is all too easy for me, as a historian, to see how the public could, in its despair and disgust, ultimately embrace a charismatic technocratic figure promising to stand above the corrupt political fray, to manage social problems in a unifying and rational, if dictatorial, manner. The promise worked for Napoleon Bonaparte, whose version of enlightened despotism was the technocracy of his day. It worked for many others who followed in his wake. This outcome may still seem unlikely, but if the political conflict in this country turns violent (or rather more violent: it is already violent) then people will not simply despair about politics; they will start to fear it. At that point, the appeal of a Caesar could become overwhelming.

I was reminded of Bell’s absorbing essay yesterday when I read a Wall Street Journal story with the headline, “Magic Mushrooms. LSD. Ketamine. The Drugs That Power Silicon Valley.” Tech companies that once subjected employees to drug tests now “see psychedelics and similar substances, among them psilocybin, ketamine and LSD, as gateways to business breakthroughs.” We may be approaching a moment when drug tests are administered to fire not employees who take drugs, but employees who do not. The Journal piece came hard on the heels of a Businessweek story documenting the same phenomenon, headlined, “Can Workplace Ketamine Retreats Improve Vibes In The Office?” Coffee is so five minutes ago!

After the Businessweek story came out I inserted a paragraph about this creepy new trend into a New Republic piece about economists’ worries (unfounded, I think) about recent declines in productivity. But the Journal piece persuaded me to devote an entire essay to explaining why doping workers to enhance economic performance is an intrinsically fascist practice. “Fascist” is not a word I use lightly, but it’s appropriate here. Before the Wehrmacht invaded France, Adolf Hitler made sure that the troops all had Pervitin (see above), a “performance-enhancement” methamphetamine that the Third Reich developed to create the new man and win the war. Now tech firms are embracing ketamine and other psychedelics to create the new economy and win market dominance. The comparison is unavoidable. I detail it in my latest New Republic piece, which you can read here.