Psychedelics and Fascism: From MK-Ultra, to Esalen and Silicon Valley

German Conservative Revolution 

Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt (1888 – 1985), known as the “Crown Jurist of the Third Reich.”

It’s commonly assumed that the “mind-expanding” capabilities of psychedelics usually lead to progressive or liberal views. So, their proponents are surprised by their persistent association with the right. In “Right-Wing Psychedelia: Case Studies in Cultural Plasticity and Political Pluripotency,” Brian A. Pace and Nese Devenot observe that, “Recent media advocacy for the nascent psychedelic medicine industry has emphasized the potential for psychedelics to improve society, pointing to research studies that have linked psychedelics to increased environmental concern and liberal politics.”[1] However, in “Why is the American right suddenly so interested in psychedelic drugs?” for The Guardian, Ross Ellenhorn and Dimitri Mugianis report that “psychedelic therapies are receiving unprecedented financial and political support – and much of it comes from the right.”[2]

The history of psychedelics begins with Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963), a fascist who inspired the CIA’s MK-Ultra program. And ultimately, interest in psychedelics derives from occult interest in the ancient shamans of the Altai Mountains, which is believed to be the original religion of the Aryans. H.P. Blavatsky(1831 – 1891), who is considered the “godmother” of the New Age movement, despite the fact that she inspired the racial ideas of the Nazis, was inspired in her knowledge of Shambhala, a Tibetan Buddhist legend mentioned in the Kalachakra Tantra. Csoma de Körös (1784 – 1842), a Hungarian orientalist from Transylvania, was the first to report of the legend of Shambhala in the West, which he located in “the land of the Yugurs (Uighurs)” in Xinjiang, a province of Northwestern China. In an 1825 letter, Csoma de Körös wrote that Shambhala is like a Buddhist Jerusalem, and he believed it would probably be found in Kazakhstan, close to the Gobi desert, where it would later be situated by Blavatsky.[3] Others later would also locate it more specifically either in Xinjiang, or the Altai Mountains. Thus the Altai Mountains are the reputed source of the early form of spirit or “divine” communication known as shamanism, regarded among occultists as the “Oriental Kabbalah,” a supposed remnant of the migrations of Aryan survivors of Atlantis.

Interchangeable with Shambhalah is the legend of Agartha, promoted by Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (1842 – 1909), founder of synarchism, the second occult tradition, other than Blavatsky’s Theosophy,  which influenced the Nazis. Saint-Yves was a key influence on René Guénon (1886 –1951), the founder of Traditionalism, which advanced the idea of a “perennial philosophy” as the single esoteric core shared by all the world’s major religions. The most important figure in Traditionalism after Guénon was Julius Evola (1898 – 1974), who would become the most important ideologue of late twentieth-century fascism. Evola was also a member of the Ur Group with Arturo Reghini, who was also a friend of Aleister Crowley, godfather of twentieth-century Satanism.

These ideas found their way to another member of the Ur Group, Mircea Eliade (1907 – 1986), who inspired the more modern cult of neo-Shamanism, popularized at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, itself an emulation of the Eranos Conferences, another outgrowth of occult fascism. The phrase “Third Reich” was originally coined by the German thinker Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who in 1923 published a book titled Das Dritte Reich. Van den Bruck, like Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, Julius Evola and Carl Schmitt, was a leading figure of the Conservative Revolutionary movement, prominent in the years following the First World War. Rooted in the Counter-Enlightenment of the Romantic Era, the movement rejected liberalism and parliamentary democracy as the failed legacies of the Enlightenment. Inspired by the notion of the Volk, the movement advocated a new conservatism and nationalism that was specifically German, or Prussian in particular.[4] Ultimately, explained Kurt Sontheimer, Conservative Revolutionary anti-democratic thought in the Weimar Republic “succeeded in alienating Germans from the democracy of the Weimar constitution and making large groups receptive to National Socialism.”[5]

Evola also shared a number of acquaintances with Schmitt, including Ernst Jünger, Armin Mohler and Prince Karl Anton von Rohan (1898 – 1975), who founded the Kulturbund, the Austrian counterpart of the Herrenclub. After the World War I, there appeared a large number of movements dedicated to the economic and political union of European. One example was the fascist-leaning Verband für kulturelle Zusammenarbeit founded in Vienna in 1921 which cooperated closely with its sister organization, the Fédération des Unions intellectuelles, with which it later united as the was the Association for Cultural Cooperation (“Kulturbund”).[6]

Eliade was an important participant at the Eranos Conferences, an intellectual discussion group founded in 1933 by Olga Froebe-Kapteyn—a devotee of Alice Bailey, Blavatky’s leading successor after Annie Besant—dedicated to the study of psychology, religion, philosophy and spirituality which met annually in Ascona, near the site of Monte Verità.[7] Froebe-Kapteyn was associated with Count Hermann Keyserling (1880 – 1946), who founded the School of Wisdom. In the 1920’s, Jung became joined the School of Wisdom, where he met Prince Karl Anton Rohan, an active supporter of the idea of German Conservative Revolution. Jung became active in Rohan’s Kulturbund and Europaische Revue. The Kulturbund later opened individual centers in Paris, Milan, Frankfurt and Heidelberg, and its membership reads like a “Who’s Who” of European industry and intelligentsia.[8] Future Chancellor of Germany, Konrad Adenauer was among the leading members. Foreign authors featured in the Kulturbund’s periodical, Europäische Revue included Winston Churchill, Julius Evola, Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, Arrigo Solmi, José Ortega y Gasset and Carl Jung.[9]

The Kulturbund’s periodical, Europäische Revue, which Rohan founded in 1925 and edited until 1936, was identified by Armin Mohler as one of Germany’s leading “young conservative” publications.[10] After the onset of the Great Depression, IG Farben subsidized the journal and other Kulturbund activities. Lilly von Schnitzler, whose husband George was a director of IG Farben, was one of the Kulturbund’s treasurers.[11] Lilly was in extensive correspondence with Carl Schmitt. Foreign authors featured in the Europäische Revue included Winston Churchill, Julius Evola, Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, Arrigo Solmi, José Ortega y Gasset and Carl Jung.[12] The revue appeared from 1925, but in 1933 came under the control of the ideology of National Socialism. The journal would continue its publication until 1944, with the aid of Joseph Goebbels.[13]

When Fröbe-Kapteyn met Carl Jung at Keyserling’s School of Wisdom, he suggested her auditorium be used as a “meeting place between East and West.”[14] Eranos was funded by the Mary and Paul Mellon, of the influential Mellon family. The thirteen most powerful families in the United States as listed by George Seldes were as follows: Ford, du Pont, Rockefeller, Mellon, McCormick, Hartford, Harkness, Duke, Pew, Pitcairn, Clark, Reynolds and Kress. With the possible exception of three of these families all had close connections with fascism and the support of Hitler.[15] Of these, five were involved in the failed fascist coup in 1933, known as the Business Plot, headed the of the American Liberty League, against Roosevelt: du Pont, Mellon, Pew, Pitcairn and Clark. Most prominent among the Mellon family supporters of the American Liberty League was Andrew Mellon (1855 – 1937), son of Thomas Mellon (1813 – 1908), the patriarch and founder of Mellon Bank. Prior to becoming Secretary of the Treasury, Paul’s father Andrew Mellon, a supporter of Hitler, controlled interests such as Alcoa, and formed several cartel arrangements with I.G. Farben.[16] Andrew’s son was Paul Mellon, who served with the OSS in Europe during World War II, and who was co-heir to one of America’s greatest business fortunes, derived from the Mellon Bank. Paul’s sister Ailsa Mellon Bruce was married to David Bruce, also a former OSS officer and later US ambassador to Great Britain.[17] After the war, a number influential members of the Mellon family maintained close ties with the CIA, and Mellon family foundations have been used repeatedly as CIA fronts.[18]

MK-Ultra

Mind-control scene from Kubrik’s A Clockwork Orange

An article for The Nation, titled “The People’s Front,” published in a November 16, 1946, reported that Jean Coutrot’s Mouvement Synarchique d'Empire (MSE), the synarchist organization behind the collaborationist Vichy regime of France, was attempting to restore the intimate ties between French and German industrialists which it had developed before the war, and referenced 1946-1947 article by Michael Sordet, “The Secret League of Monopoly Capitalism,” referring to the Liberty League, and published in the scholarly Swiss journal Schweiner Annalen, which hinted that the main base of operations of the synarchists was shifting from Europe to the United States.[19]

The word “transhumanism” was first mentioned at a conference hosted by Coutrot in 1939, in Pontigny Abbey, founded in 1114 by Hugh of Mâcon, who later joined his friend St. Bernard de Clairvaux at the Council of Troyes in 1128 to officially approve and endorse the Templars on behalf of the Church. [20] Coutrot helped to found the Center for the Study of Human Problems (CSHP) with Aldous Huxley with support from the Rockefeller Foundation.[21] In July 1941, a report was submitted by Henri Chavin, at the time the Director of Sûreté nationale, to the French Minister of the Interior, presented the synarchist conspiracy as an attempt by international capitalism to “subject the economies of different countries to a single, undemocratic control exercised by high banking groups.”[22]

According to the Chavin Report, Huxley is described as “pro-national-socialist.”[23] In Vichy France, Huxley frequented the Thursday salon of Paris editor for Harper’s Bazaar, Marie-Louise Bousquet, who was married to the playwright Jacques Bousquet, and which were attended by attended Pablo Picasso, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Ernst Jünger, a WWI hero, one of the leading figures of the German Conservative Revolution, a Wehrmacht officer and censor who worked for the Nazis in occupied France during WWII, and who was an important inspiration to post-war fascism.[24] Jünger also frequented the George V luxury hotel, where a roundtable of French and German intellectuals gathered, including Jean Cocteau and Carl Schmitt.[25]

The combined influences on the concept of transhumanism, explain Dard and Moatti, derive from the idea of a man transcending his human condition, towards union with God. According to the two authors, that idea derives from the French palaeontologist and Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 – 1955), member of the CSHP. Considered the “Catholic Darwin,” Teilhard was closely associated with Aldous’s brother Julian, who wrote the introduction to Teilhard’s Phenomenon of Man (1955). According to Julian Huxley, revealing his Kabbalistic outlook, wrote: “evolution is nothing but matter become conscious of itself.”[26]

Aldous Huxley would become the ideological leader behind the CIA’s infamous “mind-control” program, known as MK-Ultra. Mary and Paul Mellon shared a friendship to Carl Jung with Allen Dulles, who would become the first civilian head of the CIA in 1953.[27] It was anthropologist Gregory Bateson who provided the rationale for the creation of the CIA in a letter to his boss, Bill Donavan.[28] Bateson was a leading member of the Cybernetics Group, a CIA project that both directed the evolution of the personal computer, and contributed to MK-Ultra.

Like MK-Ultra, the personal computer was a project of the Cybernetics Group, and designed to provide the ultimate tool of social control. The theological implications of this idea were further explored in God and Golem, Inc. (1964), where Cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener compares the creative power of God with that of man creating machines, and machines ultimately reproducing themselves. Among the symbols featured on the front cover is a Masonic all-seeing eye. Wiener suggests that resistance to these ideas is rooted in the same prejudices that once stigmatized magic, and draws parallels to the practices of the Black Mass, as well as the Golem of Kabbalistic legend and Goethe’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. According to Wiener, “If we adhere to all these taboos, we may acquire a great reputation as conservative and sound thinkers, but we shall contribute very little to the further advance of knowledge. It is the part of the scientist—of the intelligent man of letters and of the honest clergyman as well—to entertain heretical and forbidden opinions experimentally, even if he is finally to reject them.”[29]

According to Bateson, cybernetics is “the biggest bite out of the Tree of Knowledge that mankind has taken in the last 2,000 years.”[30] The Cybernetics Group was funded by the Macy Foundation, which had close links with the Rockefeller Foundation. Its chief LSD executive Harold Abramson gave LSD for the first time to Bateson. Macy Conference attendee Oscar Janiger, a University of California Irvine psychiatrist and psychotherapist, known for his LSD research, which lasted from 1954 to 1962, and for having introduced LSD to Cary Grant and Aldous Huxley, who became the guiding figure behind MK-Ultra. Huxley was the author of Brave New World, a dystopia bout a dictatorship that uses psychoactive drugs and promiscuous sex to control the population. The name of the drug used was Soma, the name found in the Vedas, and related to the Haoma of the Magi, which is considered a substance similar to the one believed to have produced the psychic abilities of ancient shaman, which they likened to schizophrenia.[31]

LSD had been developed in 1943 by Albert Hofmann (1906 – 2008), working as a chemist at Sandoz AB, a Swiss pharmaceutical house owned by S.G. Warburg. However, LSD was first synthesized by Hofmann in 1938 from ergotamine, a chemical derived by Arthur Stoll from ergot, a grain fungus that typically grows on rye. As Martin Lee discovered, Sandoz was linked through cartel agreements to IG Farben, which throughout the 1930’s, maintained a special secret division devoted to research on psychedelic agents, and Nazi mind control experiments with mescaline were carried on by Nazi doctors at Dachau, which was only a few hundred miles from Sandoz. Lee concludes that, therefore, “we can be certain that the Nazi high command was already aware of these substances.”[32]

MK-Ultra truly began in 1952, the year Huxley returned to the United States accompanied by Dr. Humphrey Osmond who was brought in by Dulles to play a prominent role in the project. In October 1955, Huxley had an experience while on LSD that he considered more profound than those detailed in The Doors of Perception. The man who introduced both Osmond and Huxley to LSD was Alfred Hubbard, who had worked for the OSS during the war as a “Special Investigative Agent.” Over the years, Hubbard also reportedly worked for the Canadian Special Services, the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms. Hubbard, who is known as the “Johnny Appleseed of LSD,” became an apostle for LSD in the early 1950s after supposedly receiving an angelic vision telling him that something important for the future of mankind would soon be coming. When he first read about LSD he immediately identified it as part of that vision and tried it for himself in 1951. Through his extensive connections, which included the Pope, as he once boasted, he has been credited with “turning on” as many as 6,000 people to LSD.[33]

Hofmann exchanged letters with Carl Schmitt and introduced LSD to Ernst Jünger. Hofmann described their encounters in detail in the chapter entitled, “The Radiance of Jünger” in his autobiography, LSD: My Problem Child. In Approaches: Drugs and Altered States, Jünger described a lifetime with consciousness-enhancing experiments—hashish, cocaine, and morphine until he worked his way to LSD, psilocybin, and peyote. Jünger also coined the term “psychonaut” to describe the work of chemist Arthur Heffter who isolated mescaline from the peyote cactus in 1897.

With Mircea Eliade, Jünger edited Antaios, a German cultural magazine published from 1959 to 1971, which had a conservative orientation and promoted perennial philosophy and the study of Jungian archetypes. The magazine was initiated by the publisher Ernst Klett, who wanted to involve the scholars of the Eranos circle. Other people who had been approached but rejected the editor position included Aldous Huxley, Karl Jaspers and Joseph Campbell, another important Eranos attendee who worked closely with Paul and Mary Mellon.

In 1946, Jünger met Armin Mohler, who is often considered a central intellectual figure of the post war extreme Right in Germany, and who would become his secretary. Mohler was press secretary for Heidegger and maintained extensive correspondence with Carl Schmitt, and was an important scholar on the German Conservative Revolution, and was responsible for popularizing that term, in Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932: Ein Handbuch, this PhD dissertation published in 1949 under the supervision of Karl Jaspers.[34]

From the 1960–1970s onwards, the Conservative Revolution heavily influenced the European New Right, in particular the French Nouvelle Droite. Armin Mohler was one of the first German publishers to write about his close friend, Alain de Benoist, the founder of Nouvelle Droite. The leading organization of the Nouvelle Droite was known as GRECE, the Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (“Research and Study Group for European Civilization”), founded by de Benoist and others who belonged to the World Union of National Socialists (WUNS).[35] Some of the prominent names that have collaborated with GRECE include Mircea Eliade, Arthur Koestler, Hans Eysenck, Konrad Lorenz, Jeune Europe founder Jean-Francois Thiriart, Thierry Maulnier and Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange.

In 1968, wrote an article for GRECE’s journal Nouvelle École, titled “LSD and alterations of the hereditary stock.” During the 1960s, MK-Ultra doctor Dr. Hans J. Eysenck was Director of MK-Ultra Subproject 111 at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at Maudsley Hospital in London, the staging ground for MK-Ultra in Europe and Africa, perhaps Australia as well.[36] From the 1950s to the 1980s, Eysenck was perhaps the best-known psychologist in the UK. His popular psychology texts were standard reading for trainee social workers and teachers and helped shape school and university syllabuses. Eysenck was Professor of Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, from 1955 to 1983. Eysenck was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto, along with Julian Huxley, Betty Friedan, Isaac Asimov, Sidney Hook, and B.F. Skinner, among others. Eysenck's work has undergone reevaluation since he died in 1997. In 2019, 26 of his papers were “considered unsafe” by an enquiry on behalf of King’s College London.[37]

Radicals for Capitalism

Lawrence Fertig, Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Read and Henry Hazlitt

The leading contributors to the Liberty League, and a number of its fascist front groups such as the Crusaders and the Sentinels of the Republic, were also leading contributors of National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). The first president of NAM was Samuel Bush (1863 – 1948), father of Prescott and grandfather of George H.W. Bush.[38] In 1940, James William Fifield Jr. gave a speech to NAM at the Waldorf Astoria New York where he praised capitalism and business leaders, while denouncing Roosevelt and the New Deal. The speech, which underlined that Christian leaders and religious arguments were crucial in the effort to promote a free-market agenda, was exceptionally well received. Thus was born the premise that led to the cultivation of the Christian Right, which henceforth married the contradictory teaching of Christianity with selfishness, in a conflation which one observer termed “Christian libertarianism.”[39]

Fifield was an American Congregational minister who led the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles. The members of Fifield’s church were mostly among the wealthy, giving Fifield the nickname “The Apostle to Millionaires.”[40] By the middle of the decade, its members included his longtime friend Dr. Norman Vincent Peale (1898 – 1993), a 33° Scottish Rite Freemason,[41] was an American minister and well-known champion of the concept of “positive thinking,” especially through his best-selling book The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale would also later become Donald Trump’s mentor.

Peale was also a member of The Fellowship, also known as The Family, founded in 1935 by a Norwegian-born Methodist minister named Abraham Vereide, after, he claimed, he had a vision in which God came to him in the person of the head of the United States Steel Corporation. Vereide and his associates played a significant role in the de-Nazification of Germany and the political rehabilitation of former members of the Third Reich for service both in the new Federal Republic of Germany and U.S. intelligence. In 1946, Vereide undertook a mission to search through the Allied prisons in Germany for men “of the predictable type” ready to turn their allegiance from Hitler to Christ, and by extension, in Vereide’s thinking, America.

Vereide’s friends in the German military government and back in the United States would certify them as “men not only to be released but to be used, according to their ability in the tremendous task of reconstruction.”[42] These included Joseph Retinger’s partner in the European Movement and the Bilderberger Group, Hermann J. Abs—a former comrade of Walter Benjamin—who became the vice president of the Family’s German organization, International Christian Leadership (ICL).[43] Others included Gustav Schmelz, a manufacturer of chemical weapons; Paul Rohrbach, an advocate of eradicating native Africans in order to make room for German colonists; and General Hans Speidel, who had accepted the surrender of Paris on behalf of the Führer in 1940, and a coconspirator with Rommel in the attempted assassination of Hitler, the “July Plot” of 1944. Another of the Nazi agents with whom Vereide and The Family would network after the war was Baron Ulrich von Gienanth, the Gestapo chief of the German embassy in Washington and a member of the SS. Others included Baron Konstantin von Neurath, Hitler’s first foreign minister, and General Oswald Pohl, the last SS commander of the concentration camps.[44]

A few noted libertarians, including Alfred Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov and Garet Garrett, worked for the National Economic Council (NEC), founded in 1943 by Merwin K. Hart, which he used the NEC to recruit businessmen to The Fellowship, of which he was a member of the board and part of its inner circle.[45] Hart waged an anti-communist campaign through the NEC, which was funded by some of the biggest names in corporate America including the General Motors, DuPont, Monsanto, Sears, and the Mellon-controlled Gulf Oil.[46]

Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, also belonged to Merwin K. Hart’s American Actions, Inc. (AAI), the successor organization of the America First Committee. The AFC, which was committed to opposing America’s entry into the war, and spread anti-Soviet, anti-British and isolationist propaganda among the American people, was also secretly financed by the Third Reich.[47] Many of the leaders of Hart’s group were previously associated with the AFC and the American Liberty League. A few of the key individuals were the du Ponts, Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors, Upton Close, John T. Flynn, the AFC’s New York state chairman, AFC founders General Robert E. Wood and William H. Regnery, and Norman Vincent Peale.[48] 

The term “neoliberalism” was coined at the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, which inspired the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, a sister organization of Coudenhove-Kalgergi’s Pan-European Union, which included Otto von Habsburg. The society advocated the free-market principles set forth by the Lippmann Colloquium. The Lippmann Colloquium was a conference of intellectuals held in Paris in 1938, organized by French philosopher Louis Rougier, who was initially refused membership in the Mont Pelerin Society because of his former association with the Vichy Regime.

Another former Vichy collaborator involved in the Colloquium was Alexandre Marc, who was involved in the European Movement. Marc was also the founder of Ordre Nouveau, linked with synarchists like Jean Coutrot, the purported author of the Synarchst Pact. With Denis de Rougemont of the CIA front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), Marc had been a member of the Sohlberg Circle, founded by SS member Otto Abetz, who was German ambassador to Vich France. Abetz’ key disciples were Alfred Fabre-Luce and Bertand de Jouveval, who both subscribed to Coudenhove-Kalergi’s dream of a United Europe.[49] Israeli anti-fascist historian Zeev Sternhell published Neither Right nor Left, accusing De Jouvenel of fascist sympathies in the 1930s and 1940s. De Jouvenel sued in 1983, claiming nine counts of libel, two of which the court upheld. Jouvenel was supported by friends he knew from the post-war period: prominent names like Henry Kissinger, Milton Friedman and Raymond Aron, a close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre.[50]

After World War II, because of the excesses of fascism, the right had been largely discredited, and communism was gaining widespread popularity in Western Europe. Many considered the nationalization of industries as a positive direction. To counter these tendencies, Hayek derived his strategy from Carl Schmitt, to whom he openly acknowledged his debt. According to Hayek, “The conduct of Carl Schmitt under the Hitler regime does not alter the fact that, of the modern German writings on the subject, his are still among the most learned and perceptive.”[51] In Road to Serfdom, following Schmitt, Hayek characterized state intervention in the economy as tantamount to totalitarianism.[52]

In addition to its own activities, the Volker Fund also helped support the formation of various complementary institutions, including the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), founded in 1953 by Frank Chodorov, which was later renamed Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). The FEE, the oldest free-market think tank in the United States, was founded was in 1946. The initial officers of FEE were Leonard E. Read as President, Henry Hazlitt as Vice-President and Chairman David Goodrich of B.F. Goodrich. Leonard E. Read, a member Fifield’s Spiritual Mobilization had been general manager of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and then Executive Vice President of NAM.[53] Friedrich Hayek saw FEE as part of the inspiration for the formation in 1947 of the Mont Pelerin Society, where Read was a member, which also provided a financial subsidy to the society.[54]

As reported by Brian Doherty, in Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, Leonard E. Read was the first of the libertarian circle to know of Aldous Huxley’s friend and LSD guru Gerald Heard.[55] Heard had also become a guide and mentor to numerous well-known Americans, including Clare Boothe Luce (wife of Bonesman Henry Luce of Time, Life and Fortune, US Ambassador to Rome and was made a Dame of Knights), and Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, who had been a patient of CIA doctor Humphry Osmond, in his attempts to try to cure alcoholics with LSD. In 1958, Clare Booth Luce dropped acid with a psychiatrist. According to counterculture icon Abbie Hoffman:

I’ve always maintained that Henry Luce did more to popularize acid than Timothy Leary. Years later I met Clare Boothe Luce at the Republican convention in Miami. She did not disagree with this opinion. America’s version of the Dragon Lady caressed my arm, fluttered her eyes and cooed, “We wouldn’t want everyone doing too much of a good thing.”[56]

Read introduced Heard’s writings to lawyer James Ingebretsen and SoCal Edison executive W.C. Mullendore, and a former protégé of Ayn Rand’s, Thaddeus Ashby. They began hosting meetings at Idyllwild, a retreat in the mountains east of Los Angeles, to listen to Heard. In the mid-1950s, they all joined the Bacchanalia at the Bohemian Grove, in Northern California, where they were joined by Herbert Hoover and Henry Hazlitt.[57]

Read shared the mystical sources of libertarianism in Elements of Libertarian Leadership (1962), where he prescribes the mystical techniques of Rudolf Steiner in order to maximize our creative potential. These same techniques inspired Read to write his most successful piece of writing, “I, Pencil” published in the December 1958 issue of The Freeman. Like an LSD-inspired hallucination, “I, Pencil” is written in the first person from the point of view of a pencil, detailing the complexity of its own creation, listing its components and the numerous people involved in its creation. Some academics insist it is as classic an example of metaphorical economics as any from Adam Smith.[58] In the reprint, Milton Friedman wrote the introduction. Friedman used the essay in his 1980 PBS television show Free to Choose and the accompanying book of the same name.

Esalen Institute

Paul Mellon’s uncle, James Ross Mellon, was the great-grandfather of William “Billy” Mellon Hitchcock, who funded Timothy Leary’s LSD projects at the family’s Millbrook Estate on behalf of the CIA.[59] Billy’s sister Peggy was director of Leary’s International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), later renamed the Castilia Foundation.[60] Billy Hitchcock was sent by his uncle by marriage, David Bruce, to meet with Dr. Stephen Ward to investigate the rumors of Masonically-themed “black magic” parties connected to the Profumo Affair.[61] Ward had also pimped Mary Anne MacLean, co-founder of the satanic Process Church of the Final Judgement, which was linked to the Manson Family atrocities, which connected numerous Hollywood celebrities and musicians, like the Mamas and the Papas and the Beach Boys, to Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, a film about a coven who bring about the birth of Satan’s child.[62]

Leary became another leading personality involved at Esalen. As admitted by Michael Murphy, one of its founders, one of the models for the development of Esalen Institute was the Eranos Conferences.[63] The Esalen Institute was established in 1962, in Big Sur, California, by two transcendental meditation students, Michael Murphy and Richard Price, who were given networking support by Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley and his wife Laura, as well as by Gerald Heard and Gregory Bateson. In 1936, Watts attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, where he heard D.T. Suzuki, a Japanese author of books and essays on Buddhism, Zen and Shin that were instrumental in spreading interest in both Zen and Shin to the West, and a frequent speaker at the Eranos Conferences. Suzuki wrote approvingly of Japanese fascist and racist policies in Korea, Manchuria and China. An admirer of Nazism and apologist for the Third Reich’s policies against the Jews, Suzuki was a close friend of Gestapo officer Karlfried Graf von Dürckheim, a Rothschild descendant and chief assistant to Joachim von Ribbentrop.[64] Dürckheim helped Suzuki introduce Zen Buddhism to the western world. In 1958, Dürckheim met Alan Watts, who described him as “…a true nobleman—unselfconsciously and by a long tradition perfect in speech and courtesy Keyserling’s ideal of the grand seigneur.”[65]

Alan Watts’ and Frederic Spiegelberg’s founded the American Academy of Asian Studies (the precursor to the California Institute of Integral Studies). At the academy, Watts taught from 1951 to 1957 alongside Frederic Spiegelberg, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany and Stanford University professor of Asian religions, whose teachers included a cross-section of the German Conservative Revolution and the Eranos conferences, such as Rudolf Otto, Paul Tillich, Martin Heidegger and Carl Jung and like Joseph Campbell. Paul Tillich (1886 – 1965) was a German-American Christian existentialist philosopher and Lutheran Protestant theologian who is widely regarded as one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century.[66] From 1924 to 1925, Tillich served as a Professor of Theology at the University of Marburg, where he met and developed a relationship with Heidegger.[67] There has, however, been criticism of Tillich as belonging to the “Conservative Revolution” and for having anti-democratic ideas. Tillich did proclaim the desire for overthrow the Weimar system with its capitalistic economy and parliamentary democracy.[68]

As explained by Hans Thomas Hakl in Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, “Spiegelberg not only lectured at Esalen, as also did the Eranos speaker Paul Tillich, the historian Arnold Toynbee or the parapsychologist J.B. Rhine, but he also steered Esalen’s founder, Michael Murphy, on to the spiritual path that would lead him to Esalen.”[69] Spiegelberg reported on the 1936 Eranos conference in the Europäische Revue, edited by Prince Karl Anton Rohan, founder of the Kulturbund. Spiegelberg was one of the participants at the seminars on yoga given by Jung and SS member Jakob Wilhelm Hauer at the Psychological Club in Zurich. In India he had visited Sri Aurobindo and Sri Ramana Maharshi. In 1951, Spiegelberg invited Haridas Chaudhuri, a disciple of Aurobindo, to join the staff. From 1956, he also taught at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. He also wrote a book, heavily influenced by Suzuki, on the art of Zen, with a foreword by the Eranos lecturer Herbert Read. He was also the author of a book on alchemy, which he illustrated with magical sigils from the sixteenth-century Kabbalistic-magical text Liber Raziel, attributed to Eleazar ben Juda ben Kalonymos, known as Eleazar of Worms.[70]

Price took a room in San Francisco at Watts’ and Spiegelberg’s newly founded academy. This placed Price at the center of the emerging North Beach Beat scene, where he became involved with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder in particular.[71] In 1956, in San Francisco, Price experienced a transformative psychotic break and was admitted to a mental hospital for a time. In May 1960, Price returned to San Francisco where he met Michael Murphy, also a graduate of Stanford University. Price’s interest in the expansion of human potential led him to investigate many avenues of research, including the exploration of altered states of consciousness with psychedelic drugs, and participating in experiments at Gregory Bateson’s Palo Alto Veterans Hospital.[72] A friend of Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts was also introduced to LSD by Gregory Bateson, and served as a consultant on Bateson’s schizophrenia project.[73]

Due to his own experience in a mental hospital, Esalen founder Richard Price became interested in the methods of “anti-psychiatry” for treating schizophrenia. Price and co-founder Michael Murphy were both admirers of R.D. Laing, whom they invited to lead a seminar at Esalen in 1967. In the same year, psychologist Julian Silverman, researcher on schizophrenia at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) at Bethesda, Maryland, came to Esalen to teach a workshop entitled “Shamanism, Psychedelics, and the Schizophrenias.” NIMH was founded by Robert Hanna Felix, 33rd degree Mason, who was a director of the Scottish Rite’s psychiatric research, which operated the Ashbury Medical Clinic in San Francisco that assessed Charles Mason while on parole.[74] In the summer of 1968, Price recruited Silverman to put together a series of seminars and workshops entitled “The Value of Psychotic Experience.” Participants in the study included Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, Alan Watts and Fritz Perls.[75]

Stanford Research Institute (SRI)

As cybernetics gave birth to both MK-Ultra and the development of the personal computer, the life of these two seemingly contradictory trajectories continued to be closely connected. This was evidenced by CIA’s experiments into paranormal phenomena which were supported by Stanford Research Institute (SRI), which also played a foundational role in the rise of the personal computer. Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, SRI is one of the world’s largest scientific research organizations, funded directly by US intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA’s Office of Technical Services and Office Research. Originally founded as a means of attracting commercial business research at Stanford University in California, SRI began taking on military and intelligence contracts, many of them classified

The director of Educational Policy Research Center at SRI was Willis Harman, who hired Al Hubbard as a “special investigative agent.”[76] Willis Harman was also vice president of the International Foundation for Advanced Study (IFAS) in Menlo Park, which was Hubbard’s brainchild. The founder and president of IFAS was Myron J. Stolaroff. Stolaroff was in contact with Gordon Wasson, and was introduced to psychedelics by Gerald Heard and travelled to Vancouver to partake of Al Hubbard’s LSD sessions.[77] Hubbard became a member of IFAS’s board, along with Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer.[78] While Stolaroff was president, IFAS conducted clinical studies that attempted to measure the effects of LSD, mescaline, and other drugs on creativity.

Among the test subjects of IFAS was Stewart Brand, who spearheaded the movement that drew on the 1960s counterculture to present the “personal computer,” a term he coined, as a tool of personal empowerment. Brand was deeply influenced by Marshall McLuhan, as well as cybernetics visionary Norbert Wiener, and architect and designer Buckminster Fuller, known for his designs of biospheres. As explained in Computer: A History of the Information Machine, the personal computer was in large part a product of the “computer liberation” movement that grew out of the counter-culture of California in the 1960s. In 1974, Brand published a collection of essays under the title II Cybernetic Frontiers. Two of the essays consisted of interviews he conducted with Gregory Bateson. As explained by Erik Davis in TechGnosis, “Bateson later bloomed into the quintessential California philosopher, a resident of Esalen and patron saint of the Whole Earth Catalog.”

Harman may have betrayed a clue in May 1974, when he led a Stanford Research Institute study titled “Changing Images of Man.” The report was prepared by a team that included Margaret Mead, B. F. Skinner, Ervin Laszlo and Sir Geoffrey Vickers of British intelligence. Others involved in this project included Carl Rogers, Ralph Metzner, Joseph Campbell, and Harman’s partner at IFAS, James Fadiman. The stated aim of the study was to change the image of mankind from that of industrial progress to one of “spiritualism.” The report stressed the importance of the United States in promoting Masonic ideals, effectively creating the ideal Masonic state.[79]

Joseph Campbell was an important figure at the Esalen Institute, which became a center for the development of new psychotherapeutic techniques during the 1970s and 1980s. Campbell helped Mary Mellon, the original sponsor of the Eranos conferences, found Bollingen Series of books on psychology, anthropology and myth. When Paul Mellon once complained to the essayist and poet Allen Tate that too many writers were leftists, Tate replied that writers were typically in financial need and that Mellon should award scholarships and prizes, which would inhibit the revolutionary spirit. Mellon, as the story goes, then founded the Bollingen-Mellon prizes of twenty thousand dollars each.[80] Bolligen also funded Gershom Scholem’s writing of writing of Sabbatai Zevi the Mystical Messiah.[81]

Although the Bollingen Series was not a Traditionalist organization, it published the works of central figures in Traditionalism, like René Guénon’s leading disciple Coomaraswamy, and Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade. According to Eliade, a shaman is “…believed to cure, like all doctors, and to perform miracles of the fakir type, like all magicians [...] But beyond this, he is a psychopomp, and he may also be a priest, mystic, and poet.[82] And Eliade argued that the word shaman should not apply to just any magician or medicine man, but specifically to the practitioners of the ancient religion of the Turks and Mongols of Central Asia. The pre-Buddhist Bön culture was the national form of shamanism in Tibet, which was part of Tantric Buddhism, another area of interest to Eliade, who praised Tantra as the highest form of yoga, and therefore whose works were criticized in Romania for their eroticism.

Campbell, like Jung and Eliade, was also an important figure in the modern promotion of Yoga and Kundalini, an interest they were both preceded in by Carl Jung, whose seminars on Kundalini are compiled in The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga. In 1924, Campbell had befriended Jiddu Krishnamurti, sparking his lifelong interest in Hindu and Indian thought. Campbell regarded Kundalini as “India’s greatest gift to us,” and praised Ramakrishna as  “a virtuoso in the experience of the Kundalini transformations.”[83]

Neoshamanism

Altai shaman

In 1967, a small working group, including Stanislav Grof, Abraham Maslow, Anthony Sutich, Miles Vich, and Sonya Margulies and Willis Harman’s partner at IFAS, James Fadiman, met in Menlo Park, with the purpose of creating a new psychology that would honor the entire spectrum of human experience. As Grof explained:

The renaissance of interest in Eastern spiritual philosophies, various mystical traditions, meditation, ancient and aboriginal wisdom, as well as the widespread psychedelic experimentation during the stormy 1960s made it absolutely clear that a comprehensive and cross-culturally valid psychology had to include observations from such areas as mystical states; cosmic consciousness; psychedelic experiences; trance phenomena; creativity; and religious, artistic, and scientific inspiration.[84]

 The Esalen Institute served as the primary platform for the leading exponents of neoshamanism, such as Gordon Wasson, Myron Stolaroff, Robert Anton Wilson and his collaborator Terence McKenna. It was Esalen guest Carlos Castaneda who was chiefly responsible for the rise of neoshamanism. Castaneda’s attention was drawn to psychedelics by reading Wasson, Huxley and Andrija Puharich’s Sacred Mushroom: They Key to the Door of Eternity. Castaneda influenced another Esalen teacher, anthropologist Michael Harner, founder of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and an early attendee of Anton LaVey’s and Kenneth Anger’s Magic Circle, which developed into the Church of Satan.[85]

Castaneda was a close friend of a student of Idries Shah, Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo, who along with Oscar Ichazo, was a key figure in the Human Potential Movement. Naranjo, like Shah, was also a member of the US Club of Rome, and in 1969 he was sought out as a consultant for the Education Policy Research Center, created by Willis Harman at SRI.[86] Naranjo is regarded as one of the pioneers of the Human Potential Movement, for integrating psychotherapy and the spiritual traditions through the introduction of Gurdjieff’s “Fourth Way” teachings. According to Gurdjieff’s leading disciple, John G. Bennett, who was head of British Military Intelligence in Constantinople, and his friend Idries Shah, the popular author of Sufism, Gurdjieff’s teaching originated with a chain of Sufi masters who were the descendants and spiritual heirs of the ancient shamanism of the Altai Mountains, where Central Asia had been their heartland for forty thousand years or more.[87]

According to John C. Lilly, who had been through the first levels of Ichazo’s Arica training, Ichazo claimed to have “received instructions from a higher entity called Metatron,” the name of the god of the Kabbalah.[88] Though his ideas were developed from Tantric Buddhism, Naranjo interpreted them in terms of Shamanism and derived from what he called his “tantric journey” which involved a Kundalini experience that he compared to both being possessed by a serpent and an alchemical process.[89]

Grof went on to become adjunct faculty member at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), a position he holds till today. Integral theory, a philosophy with origins in the work of Sri Aurobindo and Jean Gebser, which seeks a synthesis of the best of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern reality, was developed by Grof’s collaborator Ken Wilber, a major figure in the field of transpersonal psychology.[90] Wilber argues that the account of existence presented by the Enlightenment is incomplete, as it ignores the spiritual and noetic components of existence. In his work Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995), he builds many of his arguments on the emergence of the noosphere and the continued emergence of further evolutionary structures. In a review of the book, Michael Murphy said it was one of the four most important books of the twentieth century, the others being Aurobindo’s The Life Divine, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality. In the 1990s, Wilber founded the Integral Institute. Notable members included Esalen founder Michael Murphy and Deepak Chopra, who calls Wilber “one of the most important pioneers in the field of consciousness.” Cultural figures as varied as Bill Clinton, Al Gore and musician Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins have mentioned his influence.[91]

MDMA

Hollyhock retreat on Cortes Island, near Vancouver, founded by members of Esalen

It was the Californian pharmacologist Gordon A. Alles who first came across the psychopharmacological effects of the mescaline derivative Methylenedioxy-ampheta-mine or MDA, which was tested beginning in the early 1960s as an agent to facilitate psychotherapy by Naranjo.[92] In 1962, Naranjo’s associate, the American chemist Alexander T. Shulgin, had synthesized MDMA, a derivative of the essential oils of nutmeg, which had lower hallucinogenic activity than MDA but was less toxic. A circle of interested persons known as the “Boston Group” had a lasting influence on the therapeutic use of MDMA (a.k.a. “ecstacy”) beginning in 1976. The group consisted of a chemist, a few persons interested in spiritual development and psychotherapy, and others associated with the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. For example, the physician Rick Ingrasci, an early MDMA therapist, got his MDMA from the Boston group.[93]

The name ARUPA, for the Association for the Responsible Use of Psychedelic, was coined by Richard Price, and originated from Sanskrit and meaning a “formless” network. Its main activity between 1978 and 1984 was to organize invitation-only conferences at Esalen to discuss the therapeutic use of psychedelics. MDMA became a major topic of the meetings in the early to mid-1980s. Among the participants were most of the psychedelic luminaries of the time, including David Nichols, Rick Doblin, Jack Downing, Stanislav Grof, Oscar Janiger, Rick Ingrasci, Sasha Shulgin, Myron Stolaroff, Rick Strassman, Ralph Metzner, Leo Zeff, and George Greer.[94]

Ingrasci was one of the founders of the Hollyhock retreat, on Cortes Island near Vancouver. In the early 1970s, before it was Hollyhock, the Cortes Island campus was a human potential education centre called Cold Mountain Institute. Cold Mountain was driven by Richard Weaver, who trained at Esalen Institute, and who introduced many group therapy processes, such as Gestalt, Encounter, role-playing, and body work, to the West Coast of BC. In 1982, a group of 10 Hollyhock founders purchased the land from the abandoned Cold Mountain Institute. According to their website: “This twist of fate has its origins in a miraculous story that includes The Vancouver Folk Festival, a fortune teller, the founder of Greenpeace, and red Hollyhocks growing over a hedge.”[95] A number of connections have been drawn between Vancouver City Hall and Hollyhock, in part due to the number of people hired by the City of Vancouver who have connections to the retreat.[96]

In March, 1985, when it had become obvious that scheduling against MDMA was inevitable, a conference was held on “MDMA in Psychotherapy” at Esalen. Among the 35 participants were veterans of psychedelic research, including Grof, Naranjo, Richard Yensen, Robert Lynch, Francisco DiLeo, and psychotherapists using MDMA in their practices. The Earth Metabolic Design Laboratories, Inc. (EMDL) was set up in 1984 as a formal organization to support and coordinate the opposition against the proposed scheduling of MDMA. Directors included Rick Doblin. The Board of Advisors included Grof and Richard Price, and Yensen, who calls himself a Shaman.[97] According to Terence McKenna, Esalen held conferences every year during the 1980s, where it paid all the leading personalities in the psychedelic scene to speak:

Anybody who was a researcher in psychedelics or who even had strong opinions... and we all got to know each other. That’s what Esalen did; it actually created a community by bringing us together from all over the country once or twice a year. Stan Grof, Gordon Wasson, John Lilly, Dave Nichols, Myron Stolaroff, Rick Yensen... virtually anybody who now has any visibility in the movement got to know everybody else during those years.[98]

Ingrasci was permanently barred from practicing psychiatry in 1989, after patients came forward to allege that he had sexually abused them while they were under the influence of MDMA. Psychiatrist Francesco DiLeo of Maryland had been disciplined for similar violations just two years earlier. Rick Doblin wrote in his PhD dissertation that: “The loving and trusting feelings that can be induced by MDMA can make patients more vulnerable to sexual pressure.”[99]

Transhumanism

Timothy Leary (1920 – 1996)

Teilhard de Chardin was also the primary inspiration behind both the New Age movement and the creation of the Internet, a project associated with cybernetics and MK-Ultra. Cybernetics, eugenics, Teilhard de Chardin’s “Noosphere,” interest in modern computing, psychedelics and the occult have combined in a modern manifestation known as transhumanism. The creation of the personal computer were merely a milestone, a stepping-stone to a grander ambition of replicating the human mind by creating a thinking machine. By achieving artificial intelligence, in fulfillment of Norbert Wiener’s dream, would be to make man a god. Ultimately, man would create a thinking machine that would become omniscient, and by tapping into the totality of human knowledge, through Google and Wikipedia, and through the use of the Internet and various “social-networking” applications like Facebook, Twitter, and so on, it would be possible to track the actions of every human on earth, actualizing the Masonic All-Seeing Eye.

Gregory Bateson’s protégée Stewart Brand became one of the earliest “digerati” of the 1980s, having adopted Norbert Wiener’s idea that machines extended human potential. And it was Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog which managed to recruit the tech savvy among his fellow denizens of the 60s counterculture to interpret the rise of the personal computer and the Internet as tools of personal liberation from tyranny. Although these aspirations sound left-leaning, they were embedded in a libertarian strain that served to align the technology industry with neoliberal principles. Aligned with the pranksterism of Discordianism, and the teachings of Teilhard de Chardin, the trend fueled the emerging hacker culture. The result is a disturbing political trend that swept Silicon Valley, which evolved into transhumanism and technolibertarianism. 

Technolibertarianism, sometimes referred to as cyberlibertarianism, hailed the new “cybernetic frontier” that could be fortified against government intrusion through robust forms of encryption. The term Technolibertarianism was popularized in critical discourse by technology writer Paulina Borsook, author of Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech. It represents what English media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron as “The Californian Ideology” in a 1995 essay. The development of the California Ideology was shaped by the presence of the Koch brothers in California, who had moved the CATO Institute from Wichita to San Francisco, alongside a handful of other Koch-funded libertarian organizations.

The Californian Ideology, according to Barbrook and Cameron, “is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as Wired and Mondo 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others.”[100] In the 1980s, Timothy Leary reemerged as a spokesperson of the “cyberdelic” counterculture, whose adherents called themselves “cyberpunks,” whose adherents were pioneers in the IT industry of Silicon Valley and the West Coast of the United States. In the 1980s and 1990s, many young people became interested in Leary’s Eight-Circuit Model of consciousness, because they felt that by reconciling spirituality with science and technology, it helped them to define the new techno-generation they were part of.[101] In contrast to the hippies of the 1960s who were decidedly anti-science and anti-technology, the cyberpunks of the 1980s and 1990s enthusiastically embraced technology and the hacker ethic. As Leary proclaimed, rebranding his popular commandment, “PC is the LSD of the 1990s” and admonished bohemians to “turn on, boot up, jack in.”[102]

Wired was founded by Louis Rossetto, a “radical libertarian” also influenced by Ayn Rand, Marshall McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin. Rossetto, was inspired the Koch brothers’ Reason magazine when he was a student at Columbia in the early 1970s.[103] Formerly known as Wired News or HotWired, the strongest influence on the Wired magazine’s editorial outlook came from the techno-utopianism of co-founder Stewart Brand and his long-time associate Kevin Kelly. Stewart Brand had hired Kelly in 1983 to edit later editions of the Whole Earth Catalog, the Whole Earth Review and Signal. With Brand, Kelly helped found the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) in 1985, one of the oldest virtual communities in continuous operation. An early and very active member was Howard Rheingold, a former director of IONS who worked at Xerox PARC, and a founding executive editor of HotWired. Rheingold co-authored Higher Creativity: Liberating the Unconscious for Breakthrough Insight with Willis Harman. According to Rheingold’s book, the WELL’s Usenet feed was for years provided by Apple.

Rheingold, along with Timothy Leary, Albert Hoffmann, Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson were often featured in the first cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 which, along with the print version of Boing Boing, with which it shared several writers, including Mark Frauenfelder, Richard Kadrey, Gareth Branwyn, and Jon Lebkowsky, helped develop what was to become the cyberpunk subculture. According to Jon Lebkowsky, a contributing editor of the online magazine Hot Wired, the evolution of the cyberpunk subculture within the vibrant digital culture of today was mediated by two important events: One was the opening of the Internet. The other was the appearance of Mondo 2000, published in California during the 80s and 90s. Mondo 2000’s editors were R.U. Sirius and Rudy Rucker, the great-great-great-grandson of Hegel, and also a member of the Church of the Subgenus, a Discordian off-shoot.[104]

According to Leary, Mondo 2000, which was subtitled A Space Age Newspaper of Psychedelics, Science, Human Potential, Irreverence and Modern Art, became “a beautiful merger of the psychedelic, the cybernetic, the cultural, the literary and the artistic.”[105] Mondo 2000 was first called High Frontiers, and then evolved into Reality Hackers in 1998, created by Sirius and hacker Jude Milhon, to better reflect its drugs and computers theme. Milhon, who is also known by her pseudonym St. Jude, and coined the term “cyberpunk,” was a member of a “lefto-revolutionist programming commune” in Berkeley that created the legendary Community Memory project, the first public online computer system. Reality Hackers eventually evolved into Mondo 2000, and the focus of the magazine shifted from the coverage of psychedelics to cyberculture.

Technolibertarianism is also known as extropianism, which was founded by Max More, who according to R.U. Sirius also coined the term transhumanism. According to Mark Dery in Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Twentieth Century, “As theorized in Extropy, Extropian transhumanism is a marriage of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche—specifically, Rand’s conviction that statism and collectivism are the roots of all evil and Nietzsche’s complementary concepts of the end of morality, the ‘will to power,’ and the Übermensch, or ‘overman’.”[106] More’s libertarianism is founded on his Luciferianism, as articulated in an article he wrote, “In Praise of the Devil”: “Lucifer perseveres in trying to point out to us that we have no reason to accept altruism. It is only freedom from the false-virtue of altruism that we gain freedom from God and ‘the State.’”[107]

A notorious exponent of technolibertarianism is Trump backer Peter Thiel, who together with Elon Musk is the most influential member of the “PayPal mafia,” as well as founder of the CIA-backed Palantir, the first investor of Facebook, and who is listed as a Steering Committee member of the infamous Bilderberg Group.[108] While in university, Thiel co-founded The Stanford Review, a conservative and libertarian newspaper, in 1987 with funding from the father of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol, who had operated Commentary magazine as a CIA front.[109] As Youssef El-Gingihy remarked in “How Silicon Valley, spooks and the super rich took control of the 21st century” in the Independent, “It appears that Thiel conceives of himself as this John Galt-type heroic figure lifted straight out of the pages of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.”[110] Thiel, who is openly gay, is a friend of Ann Coulter, who dedicated her new book, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America, to him. In a 2009 article for the Cato Institute, Thiel wrote of his commitment to “authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.”[111] Thiel was a major backer of Ron Paul in 2012.

In 2004, Thiel launched the CIA-backed Palantir Technologies, which is often cited as the source of the intel that allowed the Americans to capture Osama bin Laden. According to Geoff Shullenberger, the philosophical basis for Thiel’s founding of Palantir is found in an essay titled “The Straussian Moment,” published in 2007 in the volume Politics and Apocalypse, to explore the relationship of the ideas of Leo Strauss and his friend Carl Schmitt, the former “Crown Jurist” of the Third Reich, and key figure of the German Conservative Revolution, and their relationship to the mimetic theory of Girard.[112]

Thiel is also an exponent of a right-wing philosophy the neo-reactionary movement (sometimes abbreviated to NRx), an anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, reactionary philosophy. The movement is also known as the Dark Enlightenment, a term coined by English author and philosopher Nick Land, in his essay of the same name. Land has been described as the “father” of accelerationism, a set of ideas which propose that capitalism and technological change should be drastically accelerated to create further radical social change.[113] Accelerationism reflected a similar approach adopted by Satanists, particularly the Process Church and Charles Manson. Land has also “highly-recommended” the works of David Myatt’s fascist Satanist Order of Nine Angles (O9A), whose international distributor is adept Kerry Bolton, founder of the Black Order and associate of Alexander Dugin, known as “Putin’s Rasputin.”[114]

Thiel is also on the advisory board of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. One of the directors of MIRI was Ray Kurzweil, a head of engineering at Google and the prophet of transhumanism. For the transhumanists, the Internet is not just an agglomeration of inert information, but poses the possibility of humanity creating a collective consciousness of the mystics. Effectively, transhumanism is the hallucination arrived at by computer scientists on drugs. As psychedelic drugs impede the ability to discern reality from imagination, they often lead to the mistaken attribution of life, or even “divinity,” to inanimate objects, like a computer program. The ultimate foolish dream of the transhumanists is that with the creation of “cyberspace,” we’ll be able to enter the “Pleroma,” the mystical realm of the ancient Gnostics, by “uploading” our minds to the Internet. Thus, the Internet will have come to serve as a totality of human knowledge, the omniscient collective consciousness of Teilhard de Chardin, also known as the “Global Brain.”

Heylighen is best known for his work on the Principia Cybernetica Project, his model of the Internet as a Global brain, and his contributions to the theories of memetics and self-organization. Heylighen presently works as a research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, the Dutch-speaking Free University of Brussels, where he directs the transdisciplinary research group on “Evolution, Complexity and Cognition” and the Global Brain Institute with Ben Goertzel. Goertzel is an American author, mathematician and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. An advocate of psychedelics, Goertzel is also on the Advisory Board of the Timothy Leary Archive maintained by Michael Horowitz, father of Wynona Ryder. Teilhard’s concept of the Noosphere is also currently being researched as part of the Princeton Global Consciousness Project (GCP), which is privately funded through IONS. GCP monitors a geographically distributed network of hardware random number generators in a bid to identify anomalous outputs that correlate with widespread emotional responses to sets of world events, or periods of focused attention by large numbers of people.

A member of MIRI’s board of Research Advisors is Nick Bostrom, who is considered one of the founders of the transhumanist movement. In 1998, Bostrom co-founded the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), which has since changed its name to Humanity+. In 2004, he co-founded the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Bostrom was named in Foreign Policy’s 2009 list of top global thinkers “for accepting no limits on human potential.”[115] In the A History of Transhumanist Thought, Bostrom traces the history of transhumanism to alchemy, Francis Bacon and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Bostrom argues that if artificial intelligence can surpass that of humans, then this new superintelligence could replace humans as the dominant lifeform on Earth, which would mean an existential catastrophe for humans.

MIRI’s Director of Research was Humanity+ board member Ben Goertzel. With Belgian cyberneticist Francis Heylighen, Goertzel directs the transhumanist Global Brain Institute. Along with Marvin Minsky at MIT, Goertzel’s research has been backed by Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation. Established in 2000 by convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the foundation funded Martin Nowak’s research at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, which studies the evolution of molecular biology with the use of mathematics. Nowak is the Professor of Biology and Mathematics and Director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, a type of updated eugenics, at Harvard. Epstein actively funded several universities and science institutes including the Santa Fe Institute, MIT and MIT’s Media Lab.

Psychedelic Therapy

Donna Dryer and her husband Richard Yensen, performing psychadelic therapy for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)

Peter Thiel has invested extensively in the emerging industry of psychedelic therapy.[116] Thiel’s CIA-backed Palantir assisted Cambridge Analytica, founded by CNP members Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, in breaching Facebook to acquire user data in their microtargeting strategies in support of Donald Trump’s election. In 2018, the Mercer Foundation donated $1m to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), for studies of MDMA treatment of PTSD in veterans.[117] Pace and Devenot mention that Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of Robert Mercer, and an owner of Breitbart, has been funding MDMA therapy Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).

MAPS’ liaison is Jonathan Lubecky, a former soldier who suffered from PTSD until he was “cured” through psychedelic therapy. According to the article: “According to social media posts by Lubecky and Rick Doblin’s description of Lubecky’s work, his contact with the American political right wing is far-ranging and includes figures such as former President Donald Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence, Rudy Gulliani and right-wing “conspiracy theorist” Alex Jones.”[118]

Rick Doblin, who studied with Dr. Stanislav Grof, is the founder of MAPS, received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana. His undergraduate thesis at New College of Florida was a 25-year follow-up to the classic Good Friday Experiment, which evaluated the potential of psychedelic drugs to catalyze religious experiences. He also conducted a thirty-four year follow-up study to Timothy Leary’s Concord Prison Experiment.

MAPS “fiscally sponsored” the northern California-based Center for Consciousness Medicine, which was co-founded by Aharon Grossbard and his wife Françoise Bourzat, during its start-up phase. CCM is the most recent incarnation of the School of Consciousness Medicine. Grossbard and Bourzat have taught at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), and have close ties to the Hakomi Institute of California, which both teach alternative methods of psychotherapy and healing. Bourzat is an Alumni Faculty at the Esalen Institute.[119]

“It’s very cult-like,” said a source who used to be close to Grossbard and Bourzat’s community. As reported by Katie MacBride in an article for Inverse, seven sources close to the community allege to a decades-long pattern of sexual contact between guides and clients, with Grossbard and Bourzat acting as leaders who felt “above” professional and ethical standards, and that they passed those beliefs onto their trainees, some of whom then repeated the behavior. Five of the seven sources said it was common for Grossbard to give his male patients high doses of psychedelics, and “ritualistically anoint” them by touching their genitals and sometimes inserting his finger into their anus, which he claimed was to “clear the root chakra.”[120]

According to an ABC News report, as director of MAPS, Doblin has given comment on the publicised serious allegations of sexual assault by MAPS-employed therapists engaging in a clinical trial trialling psychedelic MDMA as therapy for survivors of sexual assault. Four years after Meaghan Buisson submitted a formal complaint to MAPS regarding the series of incidents, Doblin defended the organisation failing to review all videos of the sessions, stating “This unethical sexual misconduct happened after the therapy was over … So that made us think that we didn’t need to review the video.”[121]

The article states that the woman in this case, Meaghan Buisson, in the months after the clinical trial finished, Buisson moved to the island of Cortes, where Dr. Donna Dryer and Richard Yensen lived, for further treatment. “The first clinician I really spoke to after I escaped from Cortes summarised my experiences… as being seduced, drugged, raped, blamed and held as a sex slave for nearly two years,” Buisson said. “To posit complex emotion as something that can simply be excised by a pill … a drug like MDMA, that may have healing properties, but it can also be intensely traumatic,” she added. “It can actually make things worse.”[122]

In a civil claim filed in B.C. Supreme Court in 2018, Buisson alleges she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by Yensen, with Dryer’s knowledge, while in treatment with the couple. Yensen does not deny having sex with Buisson, but accuses her of initiating it, describing her as “a skilled manipulator.” Yensen also denies owing her the responsivity of care inherent in a doctor-patient relationship, because they were merely fellow participants in a research study, but with different roles. The civil claim has since been settled out of court, though MAPS has acknowledged that Yensen carried on an “unethical” sexual relationship with Buisson and said Dryer knew but failed to report it to any authorities. The organization has cut ties with both Yensen and Dryer.

[1] Brian A. Pace & Nese Devenot. “Right-Wing Psychedelia: Case Studies in Cultural Plasticity and Political Pluripotency.” Front Psychol (December 2021). Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8717779/

[2] Ross Ellenhorn & Dimitri Mugianis. “Why is the American right suddenly so interested in psychedelic drugs?” The Guardian (October 18, 2022). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/18/psychedelic-drugs-us-republican-thiel-mercer-foundation

[3] Alexander Berzin, “The Nazi Connection with Shambhala and Tibet,” The Berzin Archives, (May 2003)

[4] Armin Mohler. The Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1918-1932 (ARES Verlag, Gmbh, 2018).

[5] Kurt Sontheimer. Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlag, 1968), pp. 13-14; cited in Roger Wood. The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic (University of Nottingham, 1996), p. 29.

[6] E. Kövics and Mary Boros-Kazai. “Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europe Movement on the Questions of International Politicsduring the 1920s.” Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, Vol. 25, No. 3/4 (1979), pp. 233.

[7] Hans Thomas Hakl. Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 26.

[8] Guido Müller. “France and Germany after the Great War,“ in Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Frank Schumacher, ed. Culture and International History (Berghan Book, 2003), p. 103.

[9] Guido Müller. Europäische Gesellschaftsbeziehungen nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Das Deutsch-Französische Studienkomitee und der Europäische Kulturbund (Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2014), p. 391, n. 247.

[10] Jay Sherry. Carl Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 84.

[11] Ibid., p. 93.

[12] Müller. Europäische Gesellschaftsbeziehungen nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, n. 247.

[13] Guido Müller. “France and Germany After the Great War.” Culture and International History. Ed. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht & Frank Schumacher (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), p. 104.

[14] Jay Sherry. Carl Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).

[15] Ibid., p. 225.

[16] Glen Yeadon & John Hawkins. Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of America (Joshua Tree, Calif: Progressive Press, 2008), pp. 43, 80.

[17] See David Livingstone. Ordo ab Chao, Chapter 9: JFK Assassination and Chapter 13: Counterculture.

[18] Lee & Shlain. Acid Dreams, p. 190.

[19] Michael Sordet. “The Secret League of Monopoly Capitalism.” Schweiner Annalen (No. 2, 1946-47).

[20] Olivier Dard & Alexandre Moatti. “Aux origines du mot ’transhumanisme.” Futuribles, Association Futuribles, 2016.

[21] Olivier Dard. Jean Coutrot: de l'ingénieur au prophète (Presses Univ. Franche-Comté, 1999), p. 223, 379-381.

[22] Henry Chavin. Rapport confidentiel sur la société secrète polytechnicienne dite Mouvement synarchique d’Empire (MSE) ou Convention synarchique révolutionnaire (1941), p. 8.

[23] Henry Chavin. Rapport confidentiel sur la société secrète polytechnicienne dite Mouvement synarchique d’Empire (MSE) ou Convention synarchique révolutionnaire (1941), p. 8.

[24] Susan Ronald. A Dangerous Woman: American Beauty, Noted Philanthropist, Nazi Collaborator - The Life of Florence Gould (2018).

[25] Ernst Junger. A German Officer in Occupied Paris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). p. xvi.

[26] Pierre Teilard de Chardin. The Human Phenomenon (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press), p. 114.

[27] Hans Thomas Hakl. Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 106.

[28] Arthur B. Darling. “The Birth of Central Intelligence.” Adapted from a history of the CIA to 1950 completed by the author in 1953. For a preceding portion, devoted principally to the OSS, see Studies VIII 3, p. 55 ff. Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol10no2/html/v10i2a01p_0001.htm

[29] Wiener. God & Golem Inc, p. 5.

[30] Erik Davis. TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. (London: Serpents Tail, 2004) p. 151.

[31] David Livingstone. Transhumanism: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Sabilillah Publications, 2015), p. 276.

[32] R.U. Sirius. “The CIA, LSD and the Occult.” Interview by with Martin Lee (High Frontiers, issue #4   1987)

[33] Todd Brendan Fahey, “The Original Captain Trips,” High Times, (November 1991).

[34] Tamir Bar-On. Where Have All The Fascists Gone? (Routledge, 2016); Jacob Taubes. To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections (Columbia University Press, 2013).

[35] Nicola Lebourg. “The French Far Right in Russia’s Orbit.” Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (May 15, 2018).

[36] “CIA funds research by Eysenck.” New Statesman (1979).

[37] Sarah Boseley. “Work of renowned UK psychologist Hans Eysenck ruled ‘unsafe’.” The Guardian (October 11, 2019).

[38] Yeadon & Hawkins. Nazi Hydra in America, p. 163.

[39] Kruse. One Nation Under God, p. 7.

[40] Ann Fields, “Apostle to Millionaires.” Coronet (August 1944), p. 87.

[41] “Temple Architects Hall of Honor.” The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (scottishrite.org, retrieved 30 November 2016).

[42] Ibid., p. 158.

[43] Ibid., p. 166.

[44] Ibid., p. 167.

[45] Sharlet. The Family, p. 190.

[46] Ames. “Meet Charles Koch’s Brain.”

[47] Lee. The Beast Reawakens, p. 85.

[48] Carlson. The Plotters (Dutton, 1946), p. 288-289; Ralph Morris Goldman. The Future Catches Up: American Political Parties and Politics (Writers Club Press, 2012), p. 96.

[49] Daniel Knegt. Fascism, Liberalism and Europeanism in the Political Thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce (Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017), p. 56.

[50] Daniel Knegt. Fascism, Liberalism and Europeanism in the Political Thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce (Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017), p. 20.

[51] Hayek. Constitution and Liberty, p. 485.

[52] William E. Scheuerman. “The unholy alliance of Carl Schmitt and Friedrich A. Hayek,” Constellations, Volume 4, Issue 2, (October 1997), pp. 172–188.

[53] Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). Retrieved from https://www.herinst.org/BusinessManagedDemocracy/culture/businessvalues/FEE.html

[54] Ronald Hamowy, ed. The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism (Thousand Oaks, Cambridge Analytica: SAGE Publications, Cato Institute, 2008), p. 492; Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe. The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 15.

[55] Ibid.

[56] Abbie Hoffman. Soon to be a Major Motion Picture (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980), p. 73

[57] Ibid.

[58] Ibid.

[59] See David Livingstone. Ordo ab Chao, Chapter 9: JFK Assassination and Chapter 13: Counterculture.

[60] Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD : The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (Grove Press, 1992). pp. 97–98.

[61] David Livingstone. Ordo ab Chao, Chapter 9: JFK Assassination and Chapter 13: Counterculture.

[62] Nigel Cawthorne. Cults: The World’s Most Notorious Cults (London: Quercus Publishing, 2019).

[63] Hans Thomas Hakl. Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 106.

[64] Gerhard Wehr. Karlfried Graf Dürckheim: Leben im Zeichen der Wandlung (Freiburg, 1996), p. 75.

[65] Alan W. Watts. In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915–1965 (Vintage, 1973), p. 321.

[66] Ted Peters & Carl E. Braaten (ed.). A map of twentieth-century theology: readings from Karl Barth to radical pluralism (Fortress Press, 1995).

[67] Hue Woodson. Heideggerian Theologies: The Pathmarks of John Macquarrie, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Karl Rahner (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2018), pp. 94–107.

[68] Hans Thomas Hakl. Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 368 n. 297.

[69] Hakl. Eranos, p. 106.

[70] Hakl. Eranos, p. 106.

[71] Barclay James Erickson. “The Only Way Out Is In: The Life Of Richard Price.” In Jeffrey Kripal and Glenn W. Shuck (editors), On The Edge Of The Future: Esalen And The Evolution Of American Culture (Indiana University Press, 2005) p. 139-40.

[72] “The Aquarian Conspiracy”; Konstandinos Kalimtgis David Goldman and Jeffrey Steinberg, Dope Inc.

[73] Andrew Pickering. The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (The University of Chicago Press, 2011) p. 174.

[74] Carol Greene. TestTube Murder: The Case of Charles Manson (Germany, 1992).

[75] The Gestalt Legacy Project. The Life and Practice of Richard Price: A Gestalt Biography. (Lulu.com, 2014 ) p. 75.

[76] Lee & Shlain, Acid Dreams, p. 156.

[77] Jay Stevens. Storming Heaven.

[78] Accoding to Myron Stolaroff, in “Hofmann’s Potion.” Documentary by Connie Littlefield, NFB.

[79] Picknett & Prince, The Stargate Conspiracy, p. 319.

[80] Hans Thomas Hakl. Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 130.

[81] Wasserstrom. “Defeating Evil from Within,” p. 49.

[82] Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004), p. 4.

[83] Joseph Campbell, “Masks of Oriental Gods: Symbolism of Kundalini Yoga,” Literature of Belief: Sacred Scripture and Religious Experience, ed. Neal E. Lambert (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1981), p. 109–38.

[84] Stanislav Grof. “A Brief History of Transpersonal Psychology,” StanislavGrof.com.

[85] Hobson, G. “The Rise of the White Shaman as a New Version of Cultural Imperialism.” in: Hobson, Gary, ed. The Remembered Earth. (Albuquerque, NM: Red Earth Press; 1978) p. 100-108.

[86]   Claudio Naranjo. World Public Library. [http://www.worldlibrary.org/articles/claudio_naranjo]

[87] J.G. Bennett. Gurdjieff: Making a New World (London: Turnstone Books, 1973) p. 9.

[88] John C. Lilly & Joseph E. Hart, “The Arica Training,” Transpersonal psychologies, edited by Charles T Tart (Routledge, 1975).

[89] Kripal, Esalen, America and the Religion of No Religion, p. 177.

[90] S. Esbjörn-Hargens. Introduction. Esbjörn-Hargens (ed.) “Integral Theory in Action: Applied, Theoretical, and Constructive Perspectives on the AQAL Model.” (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010)

[91] Steve Paulson. “You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber.” Salon.com (April 28, 2008)

[92] Torsten Passie. “The early use of MDMA (‘Ecstasy') in psychotherapy (1977-1985).” Drug Science, Policy and Law, Volume 4 (January-December 2018). Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2050324518767442#bibr104-2050324518767442

[93] Torsten Passie. “The early use of MDMA (‘Ecstasy') in psychotherapy (1977-1985).” Drug Science, Policy and Law, Volume 4 (January-December 2018). Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2050324518767442#bibr104-2050324518767442

[94] Torsten Passie. “The early use of MDMA (‘Ecstasy') in psychotherapy (1977-1985).” Drug Science, Policy and Law, Volume 4 (January-December 2018). Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2050324518767442#bibr104-2050324518767442

[95] Retrieved from https://hollyhock.ca/about/

[96] Pamela Chaloult. “How big money drives social change Green philanthropists are striving to turn Metro Vancouver into a sustainable nirvana.” Vancouver Sun (August 8, 2010). Retrieved from http://www.renewalpartners.com/blog/pamela-chaloult/vancouver-sun-article-carol-newell-and-joel-solomon; "Vancouver City Hollyhock." City Caucus (March 8, 2010). Retrieved from  https://web.archive.org/web/20100310043459/https://www.citycaucus.com/2010/03/vancouver-city-hollyhock

[97] Torsten Passie. “The early use of MDMA (‘Ecstasy') in psychotherapy (1977-1985).” Drug Science, Policy and Law, Volume 4 (January-December 2018). Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2050324518767442#bibr104-2050324518767442

[98] James Kent. “Terence McKenna Interview,” Part 2. Trip Zine. (2001-05-01) [http://www.tripzine.com/listing.php?smlid=96]

[99] Bethany Lindsay. “As psychedelic therapy goes mainstream, former patient warns of danger of sexual abuse.” CBC News (March 18, 2021). Retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-sexual-abuse-psychedelic-therapy-1.5953480

[100] Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron. “The Californian Ideology,” Mute Vol 1, No. 3 - CODE (1 September 1995).

[101] stephinrazin. “Timothy Leary: Psychedelics to Internet.” Retrieved from http://www.docstoc.com/docs/39010334/21065137-Timothy-Leary-Psychedelics-to-Internet

[102] Timothy Leary, Michael Horowitz & Vicky Marshall. Chaos and Cyber Culture. (Ronin Publishing, 1994).

[103] Mark Ames. “Homophobia, racism and the Kochs: The tech-libertarian “Reboot” conference is a cesspool.” Pando (July 8, 2014).

[104] “Family tree of Rucker’s mother’s brother, Rudolf von Bitter” (PDF). Rudyrecker.com.

[105] Turner. From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 164.

[106] Mark Dery. Escape Velocity.

[107] “In Praise of the Devil.” Lucifer.com.

[108] Carole Cadwalladr. “Peter Thiel: ‘We attribute too much to luck. Luck is an atheistic word for God’.” The Observer (September 21, 2014). p. 8.

[109] George Packer. The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), p. 125

[110] Ibid.

[111] Peter Thiel. “The Education of a Libertarian.” Response Essays, Cato Unbound (April 13, 2009).

[112] Geoff Shullenberger. “The Intellectual Origins of Surveillance Tech” (July 17, 2020). Retrieved from https://outsidertheory.com/the-intellectual-origins-of-surveillance-tech/

[113] Andy Beckett. “Accelerationism: How a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in.” The Guardian (May 11, 2017).

[114] Nick Land. “Occult Xenosystems.” Xenosystems (October 11, 2020). Retrieved from http://www.xenosystems.net/occult-xenosystems/

[115] “The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers – 73. Nick Bostrom.” Foreign Policy (December 2009).

[116] Ross Ellenhorn & Dimitri Mugianis. “Why is the American right suddenly so interested in psychedelic drugs?” The Guardian (October 18, 2022). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/18/psychedelic-drugs-us-republican-thiel-mercer-foundation

[117] Ibid.

[118] Brian A. Pace & Nese Devenot. “Right-Wing Psychedelia: Case Studies in Cultural Plasticity and Political Pluripotency.” Front Psychol (December 2021). Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8717779/

[119] Katie MacBride. “Aharon said it was healing.” Inverse (November 16, 2021). Retrieved from https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/grossbard-bourzat-psychedelic-assisted-therapy-abuse

[120] Katie MacBride. “Aharon said it was healing.” Inverse (November 16, 2021). Retrieved from https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/grossbard-bourzat-psychedelic-assisted-therapy-abuse

[121] Elise Worthington, Kyle Taylor & Tynan King. “Meaghan thought psychedelic therapy could help her PTSD. Instead it was the start of a nightmare.” ABC News (July 25, 2022). Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-25/horrifying-video-of-mdma-drug-trial/101241532

[122] Elise Worthington, Kyle Taylor & Tynan King. “Meaghan thought psychedelic therapy could help her PTSD. Instead it was the start of a nightmare.” ABC News (July 25, 2022). Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-25/horrifying-video-of-mdma-drug-trial/ https://hollyhock.ca/about/ 101241532