From Myron J. Stolaroff's "Thanatos To Eros" to Herbert Marcuse's "Eros and Civilization" – A Psychedelic Exploration of Critical Theory.
Psychedelics do not merely appear as escapist intoxicants or simple feel-good pills. Rather, they prove to be a potent antidote to capitalist alienation – capable of breaking open our psychic armor and paving the way from socially enforced destructiveness (Thanatos) back to life-affirming love (Eros).
It is important to demonstrate the significance of intellectually and critically confronting the repressed pain of conformity. Furthermore, we should warn against the current co-optation by the system: when LSD and its counterparts are used in Silicon Valley as performance-enhancing "microdosing" for the local "hustle culture," their revolutionary and subversive potential is completely assimilated by capitalism.
At the heart of this is the thesis that intoxication can serve as a somatic preliminary school for liberation. However, it must be inextricably linked with rigorous, theory-driven social critique. Without a dialectical-materialist perspective, the psychedelic renaissance will likely never reach its full potential.
☝🏻 Disclaimer: Please note our risk warnings.
1. The Shattering of Ghostly Objectivity (Karl Marx)
More real than the global and empty reality dictated by profit-driven exchange value often appear love, music, nature, art, and philosophy. Psychedelics play in a similar league: in their highest highs and deepest lows, the experience seems supernaturally incommensurable, priceless, and invaluable, because it is there that the naked essence of human existence unfolds.
This is only absurd, inaccessible, or clumsy and naive from the relentless perspective of instrumental reason, which reduces all being to its utility and predictability. The fundamental question is: utility for whom – and for what?
“The animal snatches the whip from the master and lashes itself to become master, and does not know that this is only a fantasy, produced by a new knot in the master’s whip-lash.” (Franz Kafka)
It is no coincidence that everything that steps out of line – the unique, the non-conformist, and the non-identical – is rejected, debased, and destroyed by our capitalist reality. In a world that operates solely on efficiency and cost-benefit calculations, the consumption of psychedelics can act as an antidote.
They are potentially capable of briefly breaking through the social delusional context – that is, the collective veil that seeks to sell us the current conditions as having no alternative.
For our bourgeois society, as a pure system of capital valorization, is what sociologist Helmut Reichelt calls a "system of absolute inversion": not the economy serving man, but man serving the economy. We allow ourselves to be debased into mere objects of a blind and mechanically unfolding profit dynamic, and structurally exclude ourselves from real life, just to be able to pay our bills somehow.
What appears to us as an unalterable natural given – as if capitalism had somehow grown on trees – is in truth a "ghostly objectivity" (Karl Marx). It is a man-made system that has become autonomous and now wreaks havoc behind the backs of the actors.
The tragic thing is that we have long internalized this system: with our everyday reality testing, which is completely shaped by the economic law of value, we usually embody precisely this untrue, emotionally cold form of society.
In the end, what remains is an unconscious society that paradoxically lives by the fact that everyone is excluded from enjoying the truly useful things in life – and for that, permanently kills living life. Climate crisis and famines are just a few obvious examples of this.
2. From Thanatos to Eros: The Abolition of Historical Repression of Drives According to Marcuse
Myron J. Stolaroff’s book “Thanatos To Eros, 35 Years of Psychedelic Exploration” describes the psychedelic journey as a breakthrough through layers of fear and trauma, towards love and life affirmation. This model astonishingly closely mirrors the core theses of Herbert Marcuse’s work “Eros and Civilization”.
Marcuse argues, following Freud, that civilization is based on a permanent repression of drives and the suppression of inner nature. Capitalist society forces the subordination of Eros to the performance principle, whereby blocked life energy inevitably transforms into aggression and destructiveness – the death drive (Thanatos).
Bringing Stolaroff and Marcuse together, we get a powerful hypothesis: psychedelics can temporarily break through this psychic armor. They can release Eros, which signifies a somatic rebellion of repressed nature against the blind domination of nature that the subject inflicts upon itself in the name of purposive-rational self-preservation. Or as Timothy Leary would say: “Turn on, tune in, drop out!”
3. The Crossing of Pain: Against Identification with the Aggressor
Stolaroff emphasizes the necessity of confronting pain and one's own "shadow." This is consistent with Critical Theory, which warns against false, escapist reconciliation. Bourgeois society forces individuals into a powerless technique of adaptation, which is usually psychologically processed through an identification with the aggressor: the subject convinces itself that the oppression suffered is right and an unalterable natural given.
True insight, however, absolutely requires allowing the suffering of the reified world to be unfiltered, because: "The need to allow suffering to become eloquent is the condition of all truth" (Theodor W. Adorno).
Psychedelics are therefore not "feel-good pills" for escapism, but instruments or "unspecific amplifiers" (Stanislav Grof), which shatter this false harmony and make the pain caused by adaptation tangible again in the first place.
4. The Danger of Repressive Desublimation Today
Marcuse, however, explicitly warned against repressive desublimation. This means that when sexual or psychic energies are released while the societal system of domination remains untouched, this liberation becomes a mere technique of adaptation.
Drive needs are channeled into socially constructive forms, which merely prepares the organism to spontaneously accept what is offered.
When psychedelics are used in Silicon Valley for so-called "microdosing" for their "hustle culture" to increase performance, or primarily serve in medicine to restore working capacity, they completely miss their emancipatory potential.
The supposed drug is then assimilated by instrumental reason, which degrades absolutely everything – even the formerly subversive – into means of profit maximization.
5. Psychedelics as a Somatic Preliminary School for Social Critique
To bring about real change, Stolaroff's model must be politicized and interwoven with materialist critique of domination. Intoxication alone does not create a new society, as the domination of capital is not merely a phenomenon of consciousness, but is based on the objective mechanisms of "real abstraction" (Sohn-Rethel) in commodity exchange, which has become autonomous from individuals.
However, intoxication can function as a preliminary school of critique: it allows the subject to physically experience categories of non-identity, the objective possibility of freedom, and mimetic closeness.
A critically reflected engagement with psychedelics understands intoxication as an existential spark. The sensibility unearthed by it, however, must necessarily be translated into rigorous, theory-guided critique of social conditions – as existential self-defense against a system that suffocates living being through abstract value valorization.
6. Outlook: The Exertion of the Concept in the Psychedelic Renaissance
The current psychedelic renaissance holds enormous potential, but also the great danger of regression. Without rigorous intellectual work and the "exertion of the concept," a famous philosophical dictum by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the psychedelic experience degenerates into mere narcissism or devolves into irrational mythology.
Only by linking the utopian surplus of the ecstatic experience with the relentless analysis of economic and psychological structures can we prevent this renaissance from being merely absorbed by capitalism as another conformist form of consumption and turned against us, to disenfranchise us at a new level of intensity.
Risk warnings: The content described here is for theoretical, philosophical, and contemporary historical information only and does not constitute instruction or recommendation for the consumption of psychedelic substances. Any consumption of psychoactive substances, whether legal or illegal, carries risks. Persons who are underage or who have a mental illness or a suspicion thereof are explicitly advised against consuming psychedelics.
The experiences described here are subjective reports. They do not claim to be universally valid and aim to stimulate a culture of awareness for engaging with the topic. This includes, in particular, a thorough study of further sources (e.g., other experience reports and scientific studies), the risks, and the legal situation in one's own country. The presentation on this blog is made to the best of our knowledge and belief, but cannot replace one's own critical engagement with the topic, but only contribute to forming as complete a picture as possible.
Thoughtless and unsupervised consumption, as well as abuse for mere intoxicating purposes, is dangerous and does not correspond to our conviction. We position ourselves as part of the culture of consciousness and appeal to the personal responsibility of all interested parties, as well as to adhere to country-specific laws on the handling of psychoactive substances (e.g., BtMG in Germany, BetmG in Switzerland, SMG in Austria).
We explicitly do not refer to research chemicals such as ALD-52, 1P-LSD, 1cP-LSD, MIPLA, 1V-LSD, 1D-LSD, 1T-LSD, 1S-LSD, which generally exist, or 1Fe-LSD or 1BP-LSD in our shop, as these are not intended for human consumption.
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