Continuing an argument begun in a first part that drew on Joseph Chilton Pearce and Iain McGilchrist, Pinchbeck argues that political derangement is the collective symptom of a civilization that removed initiation from its life cycle and replaced it with screen-mediated substitutes. He describes cortisol and dopamine loops driven by outlets such as Fox and Newsmax, and the state social psychologists call identity fusion, in which criticism of a leader registers as an attack on the self. He surveys remedies including psilocybin, MDMA and LSD acting on 5-HT2A receptors to loosen the default mode network and produce ego dissolution, alongside contemplative practice, wilderness, art and grief, and invokes Walter Benjamin to argue that private practice cannot substitute for collective initiation.
In brief
- The absence of initiation leaves developmentally stalled adults whose need for belonging is met by parasocial media communities, producing identity fusion reinforced by oxytocin and dopamine rewards for loyalty and existential fear as the penalty for doubt.
- Genuine initiation differed structurally in that it broke down the egoic self through ordeal, placed the initiate in contact with the ancestors, the land and the cosmos, and relied on elders to interpret the resulting visions for the community.
- Psychedelics offer a currently accessible analogue, since classical compounds acting on 5-HT2A receptors destabilize the brain's predictive model of self and open a plasticity window in which long-running patterns become revisable, compressing work that traditional cultures spread over years.
- Contemplative practice, encounters with wilderness, sustained attention to art, unavoided grief, ritual and sustained love are presented as slower routes to the same encounter.
- Walter Benjamin's To the Planetarium and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction supply the political argument that a culture which abandons communal ecstatic ritual will have the experience inflicted on it as war and mass destruction, so that individualized psychedelic self-optimization cannot substitute for collective initiation.
Full text
Welcome to part two of two. In part one, we asked why the world has gone insane. We arrived at a particular answer. The derangement starts with a developmental failure. Industrial civilization stripped initiation out of its life cycle and replaced it with nothing, leaving hundreds of millions of adults whose nervous systems never completed the work required for us to reach our full development. Joseph Chilton Pearce mapped the biology. Iain Mc Gilchrist documented the hemispheric inversion that follows from it. The consequence fills the headlines we scan every morning. This file takes up what we can do about it, and what, on its own, no individual practice will fix.
In almost any house in the developed world on any evening of any week, there is the adult, often an older parent, who never encountered the mystery or found a personal path to transcendence, whose developmental sequence stalled somewhere in their 20s or 30s, and whose life since has been a slow stagnation, an erosion of curiosity and play. You usually find them sitting in front of a screen. In the United States, networks like Fox or Newsmax induce a steady rage drip of cortisol and then dopamine as perceived enemies are attacked. For people alienated in vacuous private lives, fusing with the electronic ether provides them a small sense of belonging. For others, the algorithmic feed, the infinite scroll, gives them a drip of dopamine that keeps them wired and addicted.
Mounting evidence suggests that smartphones may be as bad for us as two packs a day of cigarettes. We are trapped in developmental lapses that take political form. We understand the mechanisms that trap people inside these loops, but we don't know how to break them. The media ecosystem creates a parasocial community that fills the social void aging populations face. Over time, it produces what social psychologists call identity fusion, a state in which the follower's self-concept becomes indistinguishable from the leader, the in-group, or the worldview itself. Once that fusion is set, the follower's brain processes any criticism of the leader as a literal attack on the self and reacts accordingly.
Tribal bonding triggers the release of oxytocin and dopamine. The indoctrination is reinforced through a biological reward loop. Loyalty is rewarded with belonging and a measurable physiological pleasure. Doubt is punished with the existential fear of being cast out. The base becomes effectively mind-controlled through continuous, technologically mediated conditioning. This is what substitute initiation looks like at the level of the nervous system. The genuine right in any culture that ran one produced something structurally different. It put the initiate through an ordeal that broke the egoic self down and brought it into contact with deeper realities, the ancestors, the cosmos, the dead, the land, the gods. The initiate returned as a mature adult knowing their role in the community and the cosmos.
The elders of the society had a critical role in helping the initiate to interpret their visions for themselves and the community as a whole. The political derangement, the collective psychosis we see around us now, is the symptom of this underlying process. Hundreds of millions of developmentally stalled adults sitting in front of glass rectangles, trapped in artificial loops, and cut off from the nurturing streams of gnosis and illumination that create true fulfillment. So, what can we do? At the level of the individual nervous system, the work has not changed across millennia. The encounter with the mystery has not gone anywhere. The forms it has historically taken still function, and a few new forms have opened up in our particular moment.
Psychedelics offer one such form. And at this moment, with psilocybin and MDMA approaching clinical legitimacy after a 50-year prohibition, one of the most accessible. The mechanism by which a well-supported psychedelic experience produces something resembling initiation has now been mapped in detail. Classical psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD activate the 5-HT2A serotonin receptors that regulate the brain's default mode network, the circuitry that maintains the predictive model of self, the model that keeps the everyday ego stable. For a few hours, that model loosens. Brain regions that ordinarily speak only to their neighbors begin to communicate across the whole cortex. Researchers call the resulting state ego dissolution. The older traditions called it death and rebirth.
After the experience, a plasticity window opens in which patterns that have run on autopilot for decades become available to revision. A single afternoon, well prepared, can do work that traditional cultures once spread across years of rite and instruction. The clinical evidence at this point has grown substantial. And almost no one in serious public conversation has yet adjusted to its implications. Sustained contemplative practice does similar work on a longer timetable. Meditation, prayer, breath work, disciplined inward attention of any kind. The encounter reaches the practitioner slowly through repetition. The cost, time, and the willingness to remain bored long enough that something underneath the boredom becomes audible. Direct encounter with wilderness works the same way.
The body knows what to do in the presence of a greater wisdom informed by deep time. Deep encounter with art and beauty does the same. Standing in front of certain paintings, or hearing certain music, or reading certain books slowly enough to feel them, triggers the circuits of higher consciousness and empathic connection. Grief, when it does not get avoided, also opens the door. The encounter with death belongs to the oldest of all initiations. Ritual and ceremony, entered with sincerity and drawn from any tradition the practitioner can stand inside, opens it, too. Sustained love opens it as well. We are now seeing revival of certain forms of initiation in Western society, but it still tends to be a very individual pursuit.
Psychedelics are linked to personal healing or self-optimization, touted as invaluable for being better at innovation in your corporate job. But one aspect of initiation we have lost concerns community and communion, which also has an intrinsic social and political function. The purpose of initiation in indigenous and traditional societies was to deepen social cohesion and community care. These communities did not continue these practices over thousands of years by accident. They were needed to preserve the integrity of the society as a whole, to keep men from becoming ego maniacs who tried to take all of the resources for themselves. Walter Benjamin, a German Jewish thinker and critic, wrote extensively about humanity's innate need for periodic rituals of regeneration and initiation.
In his 1928 essay "To the Planetarium" from "One-Way Street", he observed that the modern world had become heavily entranced by the new realm of commodities and had subsequently lost touch with the ecstatic trance that traditional societies relied upon to to sacred continuity. In ancient cultures, these initiatory rights, such as the Dionysian festivals and annual mysteries, were essential communal events that celebrated and re-enacted the transformation of primordial chaos into order. Benjamin believed that modern civilization's forfeiture of ceremonies that compel ecstatic contact with the cosmos posed a severe and existential threat to humanity. He argued that the human need for transcendence and initiation cannot simply be erased. If a culture does not consciously create safe, structured ceremonies for this experience, it will inevitably be inflicted upon the population through catastrophe.
Without these periodic rituals of regeneration, humans are driven to seek the exact same release by falling into hypnotic episodes of feverish destruction. Benjamin explicitly warns about the consequences of abandoning communal initiatory experiences in favor of rational modernism, which inevitably leads to convulsive acts of war and destruction. He wrote, "It is the dangerous error of modern man to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights. It is not. Its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it." For Benjamin, this unmet psychological and spiritual need for an initiatory ordeal explained the true occult meaning of the First World War, which he described as an attempt at a new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers.
Because modern society replaced authentic ecstatic contact with a consumerist commodity trance, it forced humanity to seek its ecstatic trance through mass violence. Writing again in the closing pages of his 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin recognized that humanity's alienation from itself was deepening to such a severe degree that people could experience their own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the highest order. We are now further down that path and need a collective initiation to avert the most catastrophic outcome. It is Tuesday morning. You are scanning the news. The atrocities continue. The same president, the same 5-year window. The headlines have not changed.
You read them now as the record of an uninitiated civilization undergoing the initiation it refused. You can wait for history to complete that work on a timetable no one chose. Or you can begin it yourself. The private practice that prepares the nervous system and the collective work the private practice cannot replace. The choice is yours. Subscribe to follow the investigation. Like and share if this is the kind of work you want more of.
Transcript of the video essay, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.