If there is a spiritual ethic of wealth today that is spreading beyond elites and the upper class, it would probably be the bohemian hedonism and spirituality of the psychedelic renaissance, writes Jules Evans in the Substack newsletter Ecstatic Integration (February 8). Evans reports on “the out-sized role played by a handful of very wealthy people, often associated with the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative. They have funded a lot of research, advocacy, the arts, the retreat centres and underground ceremonies. They attend Burning Man and that’s where you go to schmooze if you want to find funding for your psychedelic research program or start-up.” This spiritual elite includes “the tech founders and VCs like Elon Musk or his friend Antonio Gracias, a major psychedelic philanthropist currently bidding to take over Lykos. And then there are the psychedelic heirs to great fortunes—the Gettys, Rockefellers, Marses, Seagrams, Swifts, Mellons, Bronners, Kochs and so on. One sees a similar attraction to psychedelic culture among the English landed gentry—Lady Amanda Fielding, friends of EI Josh Dugdale and Anton Bilton, even Prince Harry. At least one big English country house now has its own medicine ceremony chapel, just as at least one HNW entrepreneur in the U.S. has set up his own psychedelic church on his ranch.”
What Evans calls the “post-exit existential crisis” among entrepreneurs, where they sell their start-up companies and search for meaning, or try to optimize themselves in their work, has resulted in widespread experimentation with psychedelics. “And because they’re type A strivers and ultra-competitive, they bring the grind mindset to spirituality and it becomes a form of competitive ego-death,” he adds. While first-generation wealth creators may be focused on building their legacy, their heirs have the time and money to engage more intensely in the spiritual search rather than having inherited wealth define their identities. Evans writes that as the “East Coast party-economy” of the wealthy has shifted to the West Coast and Silicon Valley, new spiritual hybrids have emerged, such as “shaman bros” who consult the spirits for their clients, often with business insights. “The shaman who caters to the VIP crowd could be an indigenous healer—a Colombian taita or Shipibo shaman or Mexican Huichol who has in the last two decades found themselves going from dirt-poor to suddenly flying around the world doing ceremonies for the richest people on Earth who, he discovers, have no end of ancestral trauma.”
All this has led to a new philanthropy where the wealthy are funding new research, trials, retreat centers, or New Age arts and culture. Brian Muraresku, the author of The Immortality Key, which argued that most if not all religions were psychedelic-inspired, is one recipient of the new philanthropy. His book was turned into an art installation funded by the Jurvetsons and Christiana Musk, before the Cohen Foundation donated $200,000 to turn the book into a documentary. Evans adds that the new spiritual economy risks becoming exploitative, as it draws “grifters, high on charisma and low on ethics and expertise.” This elite spiritual culture may also be spreading to the masses. “West Coast HNW philanthropists are less into funding the Met or the Opera, they are disruptors and utopians, they want to change the world, heal humanity, invent AGI, get to Mars…And they have embraced psychedelics as a radical technology to upgrade humanity. Now, with Musk and Co’s embrace of the MAGA movement, we’re seeing the spread of Silicon Valley spiritual libertarianism into American public policy…According to one interpretation of the principles of Burning Man, you don’t need the state, you can create an anarcho-libertarian spiritual utopia of radical self-reliance (although another principle of Burning Man is ‘civic responsibility’).” Evans concludes that we are at a fork in the road regarding elite psychedelic spirituality: “Does the psychedelic elite support careful research, and the growth of systems of psychedelic healthcare with proper safety, oversight and ethics? Or does it try to shoehorn spiritual-libertarian bohemianism onto the unprepared masses.”
An in-depth report in Reason magazine (March) suggests that behind much of the research on psychedelics is a particular agenda seeking to spread a universal spirituality. “Perennial religion,” which teaches that there is a common mystical core behind all the world’s religious traditions, has been espoused by the leading psychedelic researchers, reports Travis Kitchens. He argues that the line between research and advocacy has been crossed, most notably in the 2015 Johns Hopkins and NYU study on the effect of psychedelics on clergy and other religious professionals by psychologist Roland Griffiths. The release of the study is on permanent hiatus after a 2023 New York Times investigation into scientific misconduct. Matthew Johnson, a protégé of Griffiths, charged that the research lab was run more like a “new-age retreat center,” with spiritual literature recommended to the subjects, and that politically aligned funders sought to spread psychedelics to religious communities. Johnson and Kitchens both stress how Griffiths (who died in 2023) had an “ambitious plan to revitalize Christianity by incorporating a psychedelic sacrament.”
Griffiths’s views about the common psychedelic and mystical core of Christianity (and other religions) are shared by his colleague Rick Doblin, head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), who says that psychedelic use is “a way to spiritualize people en masse but starting with people in religious traditions.” He adds that the studies proclaiming the psychotherapeutic benefits of psychedelics have all led up to the religious aims of the Johns Hopkins study. Brian Muraresku is actively proselytizing psychedelic religion, even promoting his book in the Vatican (which did host a conference featuring a talk on psychedelic science), and is involved with Ligare, a Christian missionary organization (started by Hunt Priest, a Hopkins study subject and pastor) that seeks to introduce various Christian communities to psychedelics. The religious campaign behind psychedelic research and advocacy has strongly divided researchers, with some fearing that scientific integrity is being sacrificed. Psychologist Ralph Hood of the University of Tennessee, said to be a supporter of the perennial approach to this research, denies that Griffiths infused spiritual beliefs into his research. Hood says that the spiritual dimension of psychedelic use is upsetting to the scientific and medical establishment, which may lead regulators to mischaracterize psychedelics as anti-depressants and destroy innovation.
(Ecstatic Integration, https://www.ecstaticintegration.org/p/high-net-worth-spirituality-and-elite; Reason, https://reason.com/)
