Already, commercial versions of the God Helmet are available online, as are stories of DIY hackers who are reproducing its basic effects with little more than some wires and a nine-volt battery. There’s talk about developing a version for virtual reality and incorporating it in video games.
Other researchers are pushing neurotech even further. Palo Alto Neuroscience,17 a Silicon Valley start-up, has developed a system that can tag the biomarkers of a nonordinary state—that is, brainwaves, heart rate variability, and galvanic skin response—and then use neurofeedback to guide you back there later. Trained meditators like Tibetan monks can put themselves into a transcendental state, and the machine will record their profile. Soon, as the technology matures, a novice will be able to put on the device and use these biomarkers to steer toward the same experience.
But if we continue to insist that smart drugs and psychedelics are cheating, what happens as the boundaries between ourselves and our tools continue to blur? As technological upgrades and modifications to our inner state become increasingly common, what happens to the Pale of the Body when whole swatches of the populace begin finding God in the machine?
The Pale of the State
In 2008, a middle-aged woman walked into David Nutt’s18 office in Bristol, England. Nutt is a psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist, specializing in the treatment of brain trauma, and this woman was in need of help. A serious head injury had caused a dramatic shift in her personality. She’d completely lost the ability to feel pleasure, becoming impulsive, anxious, and occasionally violent. Things had gotten so bad that she could no longer work, her children had been placed into foster care, and even her local pub had had enough—banning her for life after she’d begun abusing the staff.
Nutt was no stranger to serious head trauma, but most of the cases he saw involved drug abuse. This woman didn’t use drugs. Her injury had been sustained while horseback riding. Like most people, Nutt had assumed that horseback riding was a safe outdoorsy pastime. Yet when he checked the data, he was surprised to discover the sport produced serious injury or death in one out of every 350 outings.
At the time, Nutt was also the chair of the British Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Part of his job involved assessing and ranking the harms of various substances and reporting those findings to the government and the public. As this was the late 2000s, the substance then getting the most attention was MDMA. Fueled by the rave scene, the drug had spread across England like wildfire. The press had been talking about it in epidemic terms. Politicians were vilifying it as public enemy number one. Nutt wasn’t so sure.
After meeting that woman, he’d done a back-of-the-envelope calculation comparing the injuries and deaths caused by horseback riding—which he dubbed “equasy”—to those produced by MDMA. But even when he discounted the downstream costs of drug use such as addiction, violent behavior, and traffic accidents, his numbers showed the dangers of equasy and ecstasy several orders of magnitude apart. For every 60 million tablets of MDMA consumed, Nutt found 10,000 adverse events, or one for every 6,000 pills popped. He then compared that number to the 1-in-350 tally for horseback riding and published the results.
Headlines across the country 19 read: “British policy doctor claims ecstasy is safer than riding a horse.” Tabloids had a field day. The internet picked up the story and soon both houses of Parliament were hotly debating the topic. Within a week, Nutt was called before the home secretary (somewhere between the U.S. attorney general and the head of homeland security) and was publicly chastised for his irresponsible and incendiary remarks.
Yet, for Nutt, what he was saying wasn’t incendiary, it was simply the facts. “Ecstasy is a harmful drug,”20 he explained in his 2012 bestseller, Drugs—Without the Hot Air. “But how harmful? As harmful as drinking five pints of beer? As harmful as riding a motorbike? David Spiegelhalter, a professor of risk communications [at Cambridge University], has calculated that taking an ecstasy pill is as dangerous as riding a motorbike for about six miles or a [pedal] bike for twenty miles. These sorts of comparisons are useful because they can help people make choices about their behavior based on realistic assessments of the risks. Politicians, however, are highly resistant to them.”
And that’s putting it mildly. Consider this Abbott and Costello–like “Who’s on first” exchange21 between Nutt and the home secretary:
Home Secretary: You can’t compare harms from an illegal activity with a legal one.
Nutt: Why not?
Home Secretary: Because one’s illegal.
Nutt: Why is it illegal?
Home Secretary: Because it’s harmful.
Nutt: Don’t we need to compare harms to determine if it should be illegal?
Home Secretary: You can’t compare harms from an illegal activity with a legal one.
After the hearing, it was clear to Nutt that the British government wasn’t interested in data-driven comparisons. But that calculation had got him thinking. He decided to assess twenty of the most common substances of abuse for nine different categories of harm, including physical, mental, and social impact.
A quick scan of Nutt’s evidence-based rankings confirm what many would suspect. On the list of toxic substances, drugs like heroin, crack, and methamphetamine rank high. No question about it, they’re really bad for you and really bad for those around you. But, while heroin is so destructive it claims the number-two slot, it still couldn’t beat out the number-one scourge: alcohol. And tobacco—another legal staple of modern life—clocked in at number six, two ahead of marijuana, and just behind cocaine and methamphetamine. And what about MDMA, that supposed public enemy number one? It barely made the list, coming in at number 17, just ahead of LSD and magic mushrooms, which were 18 and 20 respectively. So, while those substances are arguably our most “feared” drugs, when Nutt examined the facts, they weren’t even close to the most “harmful.”
Nutt told the public about this work in a lecture at King’s College London. This time, the combination of the sensational subject matter and the media’s endless appetite for top-ten lists created the perfect viral storm. Everyone from the Guardian to The Economist picked up the story. The press crunched the data down to a headline: “Government minister claims alcohol more dangerous than LSD!”22
Nutt was back on the hot seat. This time it was too hot. A Home Office spokesman told the public: “The Home Secretary expressed surprise and disappointment over Professor Nutt’s comments which damage efforts to give the public a clear message about the dangers of drugs.” A few days later, Nutt was relieved of his drug czar post, forever becoming “the scientist who got sacked.”
But this does raise an important question: why did Nutt lose his job? After all, he’d been hired to provide an evidence-based message about the harmfulness of drugs and had done just that. In fact, he’d done such solid work that The Lancet, one of the most reputable medical journals in the world, published his findings. But the issue had nothing to do with the quality of his research. Nutt had transgressed a different barrier, the Pale of the State.
In very simple terms, the states of consciousness we prefer are those that reinforce established cultural values. We enshrine these states socially, economically, and legally. That is, we have state-sanctioned states of consciousness. Altered states that subvert these values are persecuted, while the people who enjoy them are marginalized.
Take Ritalin and Adderall, the ADHD meds that students as young as grade school pop like candy. These drugs don’t even make an appearance on Nutt’s list, while methamphetamines claim a top five spot. But they’re essentially the same substance. “Aside from some foul cutting material,”23 explains journalist Alexander Zaitchik in Vice, “Winnebago methamphetamine and pharmaceutical amphetamine are kissing cousins. The difference between them boils down to one methyl-group that lets crank race a little faster across the blood-brain barrier and kick just a little harder. After that, meth breaks down fast into good old dextroamphetamine, the dominant salt in America’s ADHD and cram-stu
dy aid, Adderall.”
Yet, our attitudes toward these substances—their inside or outside the pale status—is markedly different. The 1.2 million Americans who tried meth24 last year were breaking bad, while the 4.4 million American children who took ADHD drugs were striving to become better students. Same drugs, different contexts. One is manufactured by major pharmaceutical companies and enthusiastically dispensed by suburban doctors; the other is cooked up in trailers and sold on street corners.
Or consider three substances that sit squarely inside the state’s pale: caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. The coffee break, smoke break, and happy hour are the most culturally enshrined drug rituals of the modern era, even though two of the three are top-ten offenders in Nutt’s rankings. There’s hardly a single workplace in the Western world that doesn’t, at least informally, support this triad. And for good reason. An optimally tuned market economy needs alert employees who work as hard as possible for as long as possible. So dedicated time-outs for stimulant consumption (that is, the coffee break and, these days, the e-cigarette break) are institutionally sanctioned and socially reinforced.
Which is where the cocktails come in. Without the soothing effects of alcohol, the cigarettes-and-coffee workforce would become jittery wrecks within a fortnight. Add in some booze from time to time and you’ve got a finely tuned cycle of stimulation-focus-decompression that dovetails with broader economic goals. “In the competitive environment of the firm,” explains Intel researcher and author Melissa Gregg in the Atlantic,25 “it is little wonder that workers resort to performance-enhancing drugs. . . . When so many jobs require social networking to maintain employability, these mood enhancers are a natural complement to the work day after 5 p.m. In an always-on world, professional credibility involves a judicious mix of just the right amount of uppers and downers to remain charming.” Because these substances drive us forward, they continue to sit inside society’s perimeter fence, and never mind the evidence.
And that fence is the real reason Nutt lost his job. Even though the information he presented was considered, medical, and factual, it went against established norms and policies. It threatened approved channels of awareness and the substances that support them. Nutt ventured beyond the Pale of the State and ended up, professionally, burned at the stake.
Pipers, Cults, and Commies.
Hamelin is a town of about fifty thousand people,26 nestled among the rolling hills of central Germany. The buildings are timber-framed sandstone, the lanes are narrow and winding, the beer gardens are cozy. And then there are the rats. In Hamelin, the rats are everywhere.
In photos, on paintings, depicted in the stained glass of the town’s eight hundred-year-old church. All the bakeries sell them: rat-shaped cakes, cupcakes, and loaves of bread. They’re available as keepsakes and key chains. They are the town’s most famous citizens. Their tale dates back a thousand years, retold by Goethe, the Brother’s Grimm, and the poet Robert Browning, a warning to parents and children alike.
According to the “Luneburg Manuscript,”27 the only written account of the actual event, in 1284 Hamelin was suffering a rodent infestation. That’s when a wandering minstrel with a magic flute showed up. He claimed to be a rat catcher, willing to rid the town of its problem, but for a fee. The locals agreed to his price and the piper went to work. He played his flute and entranced the rats. They followed him wherever he went: out of the town’s main gates, down to the river, and into the water, where, unable to break free from the power of the music, they drowned.
It was a job well done; the issue was the fee. The locals refused to pay the piper. So he stormed off, vowing revenge. A few months later he returned, but this time, when he played his flute, it wasn’t the rats who followed—it was the children.
The citizens of Hamelin recorded their loss in their town register, afterward dating all proclamations according to the years and the days since the tragedy. Even today, the Hamelin town hall still bears the inscription:
In the year 1284 after the birth of Christ
From Hamelin were led away
One hundred and thirty children, born at this place.
Led away by a piper into a mountain.
Historians continue to debate the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.28 Early interpretations held that the rats were a carrier of plague, and this was an outbreak story. Others have argued it was a tale of forced conscription and a Children’s Crusade. A few scholars have focused on a singular detail—that magic flute whose tune none can resist—and argued this might actually be a story about the irresistible attraction of music, dance, and trance, against which a stern medieval church could not compete. So while we usually tell the Pied Piper story as a morality play, a reminder to pay your debts and keep your word, it might actually be a warning about the lure of ecstasis.
This is no idle warning. History is littered with tales of ecstatic explorations gone wrong. Consider the 1960s. Ken Kesey snuck LSD out of a Stanford research lab and all manner of tie-dyed hell broke loose. The same thing happened with the sexual revolution of the 1970s. What began as a quest for personal liberation ended up in spiking rates of marital dissatisfaction and divorce. And 1990’s rave culture too, which blended synthetic drugs with electronic music, collapsed under a series of tightening legal restrictions, ER visits, and tabloid fodder.
Which brings us to the final reason the Stealing Fire revolution has remained hidden from view: nearly every time we light out into this terrain, somebody gets lost. By definition, ecstasis makes for tricky navigation. The term means out of our heads and “out” isn’t always pleasant. These states can be destabilizing. It’s why psychologists use terms like “ego death” to describe the experiences. “[It’s] a sense of total annihilation,”29 writes psychiatrist Stanislav Grof in his book The Adventure of Self-Discovery. “This experience of ego-death seems to entail an instant merciless destruction of all previous reference points in the life of an individual.” In short, Alice didn’t wander into Wonderland—she fell down the rabbit hole.
Making matters worse, these experiences are enticing. Sometimes we revisit them more often than we should. The $4 trillion of the Altered States Economy is a stark testament to the depth of that desire. So while we’ve painted the guardians of the pale in a somewhat reactionary light, let’s give the gatekeepers their due. What lies beyond the pale isn’t always safe and secure. Outside the fence of state-sanctioned consciousness, there are, to be sure, peaks of profound insight and inspiration. But there are also the swamps of addiction, superstition, and groupthink, where the unprepared can get stuck.
For this reason, most people don’t venture outside alone. We look for others who have gone this way before us; we look for guidance and for leadership. But, as the Pied Piper’s story illustrates, not everyone who leads us beyond that fence has our best intentions at heart.
This past century was thick with cautionary tales. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his bioterrorist followers, Marshall Applewhite and the Heaven’s Gate suicides, and Charles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca murders are well-known examples. There are plenty of others. Combine enticing experiences with clay-footed gurus and you have a recipe for disaster.
No wonder parents of the 1960s hugged their children close as they traipsed off to California (or Bali or Maui) with flowers in their hair. There really was no telling if the next enlightened sage was a huckster, a demagogue, or both. Better to never venture out the door than roll those dice. Isn’t that why Harvard professor Timothy Leary, whose greatest crime was telling undergrads to “tune in, turn on, and drop out,” ended up branded by President Richard Nixon “the most dangerous man in America”?
And it’s not just the unscrupulousness of leaders; it’s the power of the tools they wield. During ecstasis, our sense of being an individual “I” gets replaced by the feeling of being a collective “we.” And this doesn’t just happen in small groups like the SEALs on night ops or Googlers at a desert festival. It’s also the feeling that arises at large politi
cal rallies, rock concerts, and sporting events. It’s one of the reasons people go on spiritual pilgrimages, and why evangelical megachurches are booming (with more than six million attendees every Sunday).30 Bring a large group of people together, deploy a suite of mind-melding technologies, and suddenly everyone’s consciousness is doing the wave.
“Communitas” is the term University of Chicago anthropologist Victor Turner31 used to describe this ecstatic sense of unity. This feeling tightens social bonds and ignites enduring passion—the kind that lets us come together to plan, organize, and tackle great challenges. But it’s a double-edged sword. When we lose ourselves and merge with the group, we are in danger of losing too much of ourselves. Our cherished rational individualism risks being overrun by the power of irrational collectivism. This is how the ideals of the French Revolution veered into the bloody mob rule of the Reign of Terror. It’s why, Turner argued, communitas is too potent to unleash without proper checks and balances: “Exaggerations of communitas,32 in certain religious or political movements of the leveling type, may be speedily followed by despotism.”
In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler provided a frightening example, co-opting traditional techniques of ecstasy—light, sound, chanting, movement—for his Nuremberg rallies. “I am beginning to comprehend some of the reasons for Hitler’s astounding success,”33 wrote Hearst journalist William Shirer in 1934. “Borrowing a chapter from the Roman church, he’s restoring pageantry . . . and mysticism to the drab lives of twentieth century Germans.” Hitler wasn’t just borrowing from Rome, but from the United States as well. According to Fuhrer confidant Ernst Hanfstaengl, “the ‘Sieg Heil’34 used in political rallies was a direct copy of the technique used by American college football cheerleaders. American college type music was used to excite the German masses who had been used to . . . dry-as-dust political lectures.”
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