Capitalism Is Driven By Mental Illness

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

I saw a fascinating tweet by BloomTech CEO Austen Allred the other day that stirred up a lot of thoughts here.

“Of the Silicon Valley founders I know who went on some of the psychedelic self-discovery trips, almost 100% quit their jobs as CEO within a year,” Allred said, adding, “Could be random anecdotes, but be careful with that stuff.”

Allred tweeted this in response to writer Ashlee Vance sharing that he’d been told by a venture capitalist, “We’ve lost several really good founders to ayahuasca. They came back and just didn’t care about much anymore.”

There’s some very useful information in those words. They reveal a lot about the insane mess our species finds itself in in today’s world, and provide insight into how we might find our way out.

https://x.com/Austen/status/1838078134215991535

I mean, think about it. How bizarre is it that our entire civilization is structured around values and priorities which are so fake and ridiculous that ingesting an ancient psychedelic potion causes even wealthy CEOs to quit their jobs and change their lives? 

All it takes is a slight shift in consciousness, a little tilt in perspective, and you immediately see that this whole rat race of domination and acquisition and productivity and wealth hoarding that all our political and economic systems have as their foundational premise is completely destructive to happiness and human thriving.

It’s not surprising that this is happening, though. People achieve their goals and become immensely wealthy, and they start wondering why they’re still unhappy. They do a little seeking and wind up taking ayahuasca in Peru, and then they watch all the psychological mechanisms which drove them to claw their way up the corporate ladder crumble before their very eyes.

Of course CEOs are now warning each other to “be careful with that stuff”; it poses a direct existential threat to their CEOness.

Psychedelics are useful not for the hallucinations they provide but for the hallucinations they dispel. You actually have to be mentally ill to achieve what this profoundly sick society of ours defines as “success”. Your head has to be full of a bunch of fantasies and fictional narratives which have no basis in material reality. You’ve got to have a hole in yourself that cannot be filled with any amount of wealth or power or private jets or private islands. That’s the only thing that can propel you to step on top of all the people you need to step on in order to become obscenely rich. And those are the hallucinations that a good hallucinogen can knock right out of your skull.

It isn’t necessary to travel to the Amazon rainforest to be liberated from the madness of this capitalist civilization. It isn’t even necessary to take psychedelics. All it takes is rigorous self-examination and inner work, and a burning desire to perceive life as it really is. Devoutly and sincerely question all your beliefs about reality, right down to your most basic assumptions about the nature of fundamental aspects of your experience, like existence, self, other, perception, thought, and awareness. Find those gaping emotional wounds and maladaptive coping mechanisms within yourself, and with uncompromising self-honesty bring them into consciousness to be healed.

Do this and inner clarity becomes inevitable. The unavoidable fruits of deep, sincere looking make it impossible to sustain the will to do all the backstabbing and throat cutting necessary to obtain that next billion dollars, but they will give you the peace and wellbeing that you are actually looking for underneath that false desire. They will fill that hole you were trying to fill with wealth and achievement and our society’s perverse definition of success. They will allow you to have real happiness, not because of anything you have accomplished or obtained or won from your imagined competitors, but because you exist, and because this world is unfathomably beautiful.

That’s all we’re really seeking. That’s what people are really going for when they dedicate their lives to becoming millionaires and then billionaires and then trillionaires. We all just want inner peace and happiness, which we can have if we do what’s necessary to dispel the hallucinations that keep us from realizing it’s already here.

_____________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Adobe Stock.