Escaping Huxley’s Island: Psychedelics, Scientific Paganism and the Changing Images of Man

Originally published on UK Column

In Aldous Huxley’s final novel, The Island, the Ultimate Revolution and predictive programming guru presents a subtly different and more nuanced version of the original Soma culture depicted in his Brave New World. While Huxley’s earlier novel presented a culture in which a magical drug called “soma” was used to chemically regulate people’s inner worlds to keep them “happy,” Huxley’s last novel presents a more mature vision in which the earlier system of psycho-chemical control evolves into a much subtler system of psycho-spiritual manipulation.

While Brave New World’s “soma” culture dulled the pain of an unfulfilled and innate longing within human beings—which the true philosophers, saints, poets and theologians across the ages have always embodied—the novel Island offers a clever imitation in the form of a magical substance called “moksha” (the name is appropriated from Hinduism). Huxley’s island thus presents a “spiritual” medicine capable of meeting a human being’s most innate and deepest desires for transcendence.

Not surprisingly, the invariant in both Huxley novels is a culture of diverse eugenic practices, sex cults and mass drug use. In the case of the latter novel, the essence of control is based on offering something which imitates genuine transcendence and gives people the feeling of having attained their higher self-actualized self.

As we approach a new critical juncture in the history of Western civilization, which involves regularly priming individuals with the idea of an end to the “age of abundance” and constant doomsday predictions warning of biblical floods and fires unless mankind repents for its sins against “Mother Nature”, we should give careful consideration to the latest fad of psychedelic-infused “spirituality” currently being presented to Western audiences.

Perhaps there’s more than meets the eye?

Flashback 

Rewind to the 1960s. We find ourselves at a pivotal moment in the West’s shift towards a post-industrial society. Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary are musing about a “coming revolution.” The Beatles are dominating the airwaves, Janis Joplin is begging you to take another piece of her heart, and Jimi Hendrix is soaring through a purple haze. A flurry of rebellious anti-establishment rock bands are being promoted by the world’s largest entities in the commercial music world. At this moment, Dr Leary and Huxley discuss the obstacles standing in the way of a new enlightenment. As Huxley explains to Leary, central to any fundamental transformation are new “brain drugs”:

These brain drugs, mass produced in the laboratories, will bring about vast changes in society. This will happen with or without you or me. All we can do is spread the word. The obstacle to this evolution, Timothy, is the Bible.

Leary then reflects on the obstacles they encounter as they seek to flesh out their vision of a new enlightened religion:

We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good-natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.

With Dr Leary and many of the psychedelic proselytizers being CIA and related intelligence assets, one could argue over exactly what “spreading the word” meant. However, setting aside questions of who served as a witting or unwitting intelligence asset for the CIA’s MK Ultra program, then or now, rather than some new idea driven by an organic mass awakening, many of the frameworks for realizing Huxley’s mature vision of psycho-spiritual control were rigorously laid out in a notable 1974 white paper by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) entitled The Changing Images of Man.

Led by futurist Willis Harman, “The Changing Images of Man” authors present a new vision for Western civilization which shifts the emphasis from a so-called “Age of Abundance” to an age of “New Scarcity”:

An ecological ethic is necessary if man is to avoid destroying the complex life-support system on which our continued existence on the planet depends. It must recognize that available resources, including space, are limited and must portray the human as an integral part of the natural world. It must reflect the ‘new scarcity’ in an ethic of fragility, of doing more with less. It must involve not only a sense of mutual self-interest between individuals, but also the interests of fellow men and the more extensive interests among fellow creatures (both near and far, both present and future).

An ecological ethic would imply movement toward a homeostatic (yet dynamic) economic and ecological system, in which the human acts in partnership with nature to harmonize ecological relationships and in establishing satisfactory recycling mechanisms. Such an ethic is necessary to achieve a synergism of heterogeneous individual and organizational micro-decisions such that the resultant macro-decisions are satisfactory to those who made the component decisions, and to society. (The Changing Images of Man p.114)

According to the SRI team, at the heart of Western civilization’s problems lay a so-called “rationalist man”, which they astutely observe came to full fruition with the advent of the European Golden Renaissance:

In contrast to the Greek notion of “man,” the Judeo-Christian view holds that “man” is essentially separate from the rightful master over nature. This view inspired a sharp rate of increase in technological advances in Western Europe throughout the Medieval period. On the other hand, the severe limitations of scholastic methodology, and the restrictive views of the Church, prevented the formulation of an adequate scientific paradigm. It was not until the Renaissance brought a new climate of individualism and free inquiry that the necessary conditions for a new paradigm were provided. 

Interestingly, the Renaissance scholars turned to the Greeks to rediscover the empirical method. The Greeks possessed an objective science of things "out there," which D. Campbell (1959) terms the “epistemology of the other.” This was the basic notion that nature was governed by laws and principles which could be discovered, and it was this that the Renaissance scholars then developed into science as we have come to know it.

The authors premise their proposal for a subtle re-alignment of the characteristic “images of man” based on a very conscious understanding of the tectonic shift that occurred in Western civilization with the Renaissance:

From the warp and woof of new and revived ideas fostered during the Renaissance and Reformation came notions of man as the individualist, the empiricist, and the rationalist. These notions gained irresistible power with the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, and brought about an essentially new image of man and his role in the universe.

While some readers may find themselves agreeing with various observations found in the SRI document, context is everything. The authors never propose new fundamental breakthroughs or the development of new physical principles like Fusion power, greening deserts, or altogether new programs which in any way transform mankind’s ability to act and thrive in the universe. Nor do they ever address the pillaging of civilization by exploitative cliques. For the authors of The Changing Images of Man, the real problem is the Promethean and Judeo-Christian image of man itself: the Classical and religious Western heritage.

Not surprisingly, the SRI hails from the same Stanford University responsible for promoting the scientifically fraudulent Limits to Growth mathematical models used to justify global population control policies since the 1970s. From global warming doomsday predictions to hyperinflated Covid–19 death projections, the Club of Rome and Stanford researchers’ approach has defined the precedent for all the pseudo-scientific doomsday computer modelling guiding Western policy.

Therefore, let us pay closer attention to how the Stanford Research Institute team approaches reframing the “image of man” and their implications.

The Changing Images of Man

Vitruvian Man (after Leonardo da Vinci), Medical Forum, Birmingham, Alabama. Public domain.