Ego tripping: Why do psychedelics "enlighten" some people — and make others giant narcissists?

In the 1968 counterculture classic “Wild in the Streets,” a musician in his early 20s petitions to lower the voting age in the United States to 14. He quickly becomes president and turns the country on its head, forcing everyone over the age of 35 into “re-education camps.”

A truly gonzo montage unfolds, and we witness a gun-wielding teenage police force drag older adults out of houses and bus them into a concentration camp named “Paradise Camp 23.” They are force-fed the psychedelic drug LSD while dressed in bright blue togas adorned with peace symbols. The sequence ends with dozens of blissed-out senior citizens dancing in a field — happy, peaceful, psychedelic zombies.

For well over 50 years, there has been a persistent belief in the psychedelic world: If everyone could be switched on with these drugs, then we’d all be better off. A commonly recounted experience with psychedelics is that it dissolves one’s ego, blurring the boundaries between ourselves and others. As the ego dissolves, we profoundly understand that we are all connected, all the same, all one.

This recollection is so common, it’s reasonable to expect anyone who goes through a psychedelic experience to come out of it with a sense of deep humility and balance with the universe. This ego death inevitably brings about a realization that no one is better than anyone else. We are all worthy of love because we are all one.

Except that isn’t always what happens.

The history of western psychedelic use is littered with stories of elitism and evangelism. From Aldous Huxley to Timothy Leary, psychedelics have long been considered agents of spiritual betterment — drugs that bring about enlightenment. In fact, an uncomfortable truth is that many psychedelic “prophets” of the past century were also advocates of eugenics, believing a small group of genetic elites were crucial in steering humanity to its next stage of evolution.

In the 21st Century, these evangelical ideas have taken hold in the minds of a self-appointed “hallucinogenic elite." An assortment of business leaders, politicians, billionaires and tech bros who are now taking psychedelics at invite-only luxury retreats, such as The Journeymen Collective, with the express intention of fostering change in the world. But not just any change. It is this elite group deciding which way to steer human evolution. As author James Oroc described in his 2018 book, “We are the 5% who have to help humanity move into its next phase, the recognition of our own divine origins.”

But how does psychedelic ego death lead to ego inflation? Why are some people going through these experiences and coming back not with humility but with a heightened sense of righteous purpose? And what do we even mean when we talk about ego death with psychedelics?

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How to kill an ego

“At moderate to high doses, one very typical effect [of psychedelics] is to reduce the ordinary sense we have of being an entity separate from everything else,” philosopher Chris Letheby explained to Salon. “I think sometimes when people talk about ego death, maybe what they're referring to is what you might call total ego dissolution: a state of consciousness in which there is no experiential sense of self at all.”

Letheby has been studying the nexus of psychedelics and philosophy for several years. He says scientists have worked to quantify “ego dissolution” in relation to psychedelics, developing simple questionnaires that can rate the level of ego death a person experiences during a trip. And these surveys certainly have value in establishing a universality to some aspects of the psychedelic experience.

But pretty quickly in our conversation we hit a controversial philosophical roadblock, one that has been debated for a long time. Can a conscious experience exist without a self to experience it? If our ego dissolves completely during a psychedelic experience then “who” is left having that experience?

Letheby is in a philosophical camp that does believe total ego dissolution experiences can happen on psychedelics, but he suggests they are rarer than most people realize. For the majority of psychedelic experiences, some minimal sense of subjective self holds strong, but perhaps most importantly — regardless of the degree of ego dissolution during a trip — a process of reconstruction must occur for someone to engage again with the world.

“For whatever reason, the brain doesn't stay in that state. It doesn't stay in the kind of no boundaries, one-with-everything state. Its default tendency reasserts itself as the concentration of the drug exits the system and stops altering how the brain is processing information,” Letheby says.

Indeed, our ego springs back following a psychedelic experience — often in a different form, whether positive or negative. And according to Letheby the big factors that determine how one’s sense of self is reconstituted following a trip are set and setting: What happened to you during the trip? What community of people are around you? What were your intentions going into the trip? Who were you before the trip?

Who will lead the “revolution?”

“I remember when I was in college, on my third or fourth acid trip, being just shocked and horrified that assholes who took psychedelics were assholes on psychedelics.” Douglas Rushkoff told Salon. Since the late 1980s, he has been at the coalface of psychedelic counterculture. Crossing paths with everyone from Timothy Leary and Terrence McKenna to Robert Anton Wilson and R.U. Sirius, Rushkoff was an early proponent of the crossover between technology and psychedelics.

Over time Rushkoff watched the promising liberatory nature of technology be squashed by billionaire techno-capitalists. His most recent book, “Survival of the Richest,” investigated the mindset behind the super rich who are simultaneously leading the world into catastrophe while using their profits to hide from the apocalyptic reality they created.

In the book he recounts being invited to an exclusive gathering of business elites. The gathering was spawned by a duo who had a powerful ayahuasca experience and felt it their purpose to bring together like-minded leaders to address problems of climate change. A Zen monk was present at the gathering to help oversee things, and after a few hours of small talk the cohort got down to brass tacks. They were the self-anointed ones who were going to save the world.

“How could this awakening group of elites now lead humanity to a greener, more cooperative future?” Rushkoff wrote. “Lead? Really? These were freshly-minted New Agers whose entire life experience had been spent as financial advisors, brand managers or tech investors. Now, thirty minutes into their awakened selves, they were ready to lead the revolution.”

According to Rushkoff, for these people, psychedelics seemed to simply garnish their pre-existing capitalist beliefs with a newfound cosmic justification. All their systems of exploitation and domination held strong, and psychedelics just amplified a sense that they were the only ones that could save the world.

“There's [a-hole] capitalists having intense psychedelic experiences, blowing their f**king brains out, but still processing the experiences in such a way as to reinforce the worst of themselves,” Rushkoff said in an interview with Salon.

The phenomenon of these billionaires consuming brain-blasting doses of psychedelics and not being shaken and humbled is one that still flummoxes Rushkoff. He sees this as both a problem of set and setting — powerful people who consider themselves leaders and are surrounded by lackeys who never say no —  and a fundamental indication that some people’s brains are just wired differently.

“There is a feedback loop quality to some psychedelics,” Rushkoff explained. “It can loop where you become a more strident version of yourself. So you know, Elon Musk on psychedelics is even more Elon Musk than Elon Musk.”

When talking about the way the über-rich take psychedelics and come back with a heightened elitism, Rushkoff is very clear. These people are not neurotypical. Their brains are wired differently, he says. If your view on reality is one of a systems theorist, then your psychedelic experience will simply amplify that perspective. Combine the idea that reality is something to be “fixed” with a sense of embedded power — suggesting you are the one to fix it — and you’re getting close to a perfect recipe for entering the echelons of the hallucinogenic elite.

We are God... Or I am God?

In 1987 actress Shirley Maclaine adapted her autobiographical novel “Out on a Limb” into a five-hour TV miniseries. The story followed MacLaine on her journeys into new age spirituality and the series concluded with her standing on a beach, arms outstretched, yelling “I am God!”.

Rushkoff recounts the scene as a way of highlighting how some people can come away from psychedelic experiences with inflated egos. For MacLaine, the affirmation was there to symbolize how we are all God. How our ego is merely an aspect of a greater whole. I am God really means We are God.

“But I can understand someone whose neurology is different, and feels not part of the social fabric. I am God, becomes I am God,” Rushkoff says.

Valerie van Mulukom is a cognitive psychologist at Oxford Brookes University. A few years ago, she co-authored a 2020 study in the journal Psychopharmacology that surveyed over 400 psychedelic users. The research asked participants to describe their most awe-inspiring or emotionally intense psychedelic experience. Subjects also completed several questionnaires designed to measure things like awe-experience and narcissism.

The findings were somewhat surprising, uncovering a link between intense psychedelic experiences and reduced levels of maladaptive narcissism. But as with most science, the devil lay in the details — and in this instance they told a much more complicated story.

The research compared ego-dissolution scales with a survey that quantified awe-experience. And it turned out ego dissolution did not correlate with increased feelings of connectedness and empathy, and reduced symptoms of narcissism. Instead, it was feelings of awe that seemed to be fundamental in reducing levels of narcissism.

And it wasn’t all kinds of awe either. Most specifically, the research found psychedelic experiences that generated feelings of awe leading to a sense of connectedness with nature and humanity were most associated with positive reductions in narcissism. But those subjects who took psychedelics and had feelings of awe connected with the greater universe came back from the experience with no decrease in narcissistic traits.

Several years later, van Mulukom is still not entirely sure what to make of these results. Speaking to Salon, she said there may be something important in psychedelic experiences that connect one directly with nature or other people. But again, questions of set and setting become crucial, and why some people come out of psychedelic experiences with increased narcissistic drives is still a mystery.

When pressed to speculate, van Mulukom suggests individuals with a more porous sense of self will possibly find it easier to gain that positive sense of human connectedness from a psychedelic experience.

“Do narcissists have stronger self boundaries because they are guarding their creation of the sense of self?” van Mulukom asked. “Then you take psychedelics. You get the euphoric feeling. You feel like you're connected, but you're not actually. Your self-boundaries are not porous. So then you get the feeling of enlightenment without actually experiencing that connection.”

So if you have pre-existing narcissistic tendencies then you could frame the psychedelic awe experience as an interaction between just you and the universe. But van Mulukom proffers another wrinkle to the mix of set, setting and neurology: culture. Ideas around self are vastly different from culture to culture. Some communities of people believe we are deeply connected to each other, and these beliefs can manifest in supernatural ideas such as mind-reading. Underpinning these beliefs is a more porous sense of the boundaries between our individual selves.

And one thing that really defines current Western civilization is a profound focus on individualism. The self reigns supreme in our modern techno-capitalist world. There is no we, only I. 

Spiritual utopianism

In the late 19th Century, the psychedelic drug mescaline started to circulate through certain intellectual groups in New York and London. The drug was rapidly adopted as a tool for many proponents of what was known as evolutionary spirituality. Followers of this tradition, which goes back to 18th Century enlightenment philosophy, claim human evolution can be steered in the right direction by an elite group.

In his 2023 paper in Frontiers in Psychology “More evolved than you," Jules Evans confidently argues evolutionary spirituality has been a dominant cultural container for psychedelic use in the West for 130 years. From W.B. Yeats to Aldous Huxley, many early 20th century mescaline experimenters came away from their experiences with the view that these psychedelic drugs are likely crucial to enhancing our human potential.

It is no coincidence that many psychedelic-using evolutionary spiritualists were also eugenicists. And Evans has previously chronicled the uncomfortable crossovers between psychedelic culture and eugenics — from Huxley to Leary.

But over recent decades, ideas around society-level eugenics have been usurped by the more modern cult of self-improvement. Psychedelics are still aligned with spiritual evolution but the focus is now on the individual. Evans says what this has led to is a kind of simplistic spiritual utopianism evangelized by many leaders of the modern psychedelic renaissance.

“There's a seriously simplistic utopianism at the highest levels of the psychedelic industry,” Evans told Salon in an interview. “Like Rick Doblin seriously saying that psychedelics would lead to net zero trauma by 2070. Michael Pollan believing that psychedelics are crucial to save the human race. That's how he ended his Netflix series. The leading figures in the psychedelic renaissance have all fallen prey to a very simplistic utopianism.”

Evans says this simplistic notion of psychedelic utopianism often leads one to ignore the more challenging truth, which is that these drugs are simply cultural amplifiers that turn up the volume on whatever pre-existing tendencies are already present. Evans uses the Aztecs as a pertinent example of a society that employed psychedelic use in a way that did not necessarily make them kind and gentle.

Psychedelic use was at the heart of several Aztec rituals, Evans explains. These rituals were often violent, bloody and deeply hierarchical. Human sacrifices melded with psychedelics in ways that destroy any notion suggesting the drugs inherently create “nicer” people.

“You give psychedelics to David Icke, he becomes even more of a conspiracy theorist,” Evans adds. “The QAnon shaman takes psychedelics, he becomes even more into QAnon. The idea that they lead to a predictable outcome, I mean, it's possible, but they can actually amplify all kinds of cultural tendencies.”

Mindset, setting, neurology and culture. All are fundamental to the direction and nature of a psychedelic experience. Psychedelics can’t intrinsically save the world. But they can make you feel like you alone are the one anointed to save it. So are people who go to Burning Man or visit shamans in the Amazon really a member of this hallucinogenic elite?

According to Rushkoff, if you are asking that question then the answer is likely no. For most of us, having a modicum of self-awareness is enough to insulate from the worst ego-inflationary aspects of psychedelics — a kind of real-world inversion of the infamous Am I The A-Hole subreddit. Simply asking the question "Am I a self-righteous psychedelic narcissist?" is enough of an answer.

Unless you are rich, in a position of power, or Elon Musk. For the psychedelic billionaire elite, "they're in a different place,” Rushkoff said. “So much of their life is about insulating themselves from the externalities of their own actions. And you would have thought, you drop acid and they're gonna cry and realize they're evil s**ts, right? That's what we would have thought. But it doesn’t. That's not what happens.”