Interconnection Is Not a Politics: Why the Insight Doesn’t Point One Way

A few years ago I watched a workshop facilitator respond to a pointed question about social determinants of health and intersectionality. She smiled and said, “At this level, we’re all one anyway.” The material inequality that had just been named simply dissolved into oneness. Nobody had to answer it. The mystical insight had been used to make a real political question disappear.

That small moment is the whole argument of this post in miniature. A felt sense of unity is not itself a politics, and it can be recruited to almost any politics.

Many clinicians in our field believe that psychedelics make people more open, tolerant, or progressive. That belief often comes from what we see in our own clients and ourselves. As an empirical claim about populations, though, it rests on very little. The most cited studies are small, with at least one including only fourteen participants. A few suggestive findings do not establish a causal link between psychedelic use and progressive values.

Psychedelics may have some average prosocial or nature-relatedness effect. I do not claim the progressive-psychedelia hypothesis is false. I am saying the evidence is much thinner than the confidence that surrounds it.

Brian Pace and Neşe Devenot, in their 2021 analysis, argue that psychedelics are politically pluripotent. The compound does not carry a fixed political valence. It amplifies whatever set, setting, and ideological frame the person brings. The interconnection is real. What it means, and what it attaches to, comes from the context.

This should not surprise clinicians who take set and setting seriously. We already know that context shapes outcome. Pluripotency extends that principle to values and politics. If setting shapes the experience, then ideology is part of the setting.

Pace and Devenot present case studies of figures on the reactionary and far right who use psychedelics, describe mystical experiences of interconnection, and emerge more committed to oppressive ideologies. The history of psychedelic use includes much that does not fit the egalitarian narrative the culture prefers. Mystical experience has coexisted with racial hierarchy, ethno-nationalism, and strongman politics.

At this point, the debate rests on analysis and case study, not tested hypothesis. The claim that psychedelic experiences reinforce existing ideology has not been directly tested empirically. Most critical engagement is essayistic, not experimental. I hold this as a serious argument that reframes the question, not as a proven mechanism.

The distinction I find most clinically useful is this. A mystical experience of unity is one thing. Mystification of structural injustice is another. The first is a phenomenological relationship a client can have with the universe. The second is what happens when that event is used to cover over material reality, as in that workshop. "We’re all one" is true in one frame and a dodge in another.

Clinicians need to tell the two apart, because clients will not always. A person can have a profound experience of interconnection and then be handed a frame that turns it into a reason to stop asking who has power and who does not.

If the medicine amplifies rather than dictates, then the clinician’s assumptions become part of the amplifier. A therapist who believes the experience shares their values will project that, and a suggestible client in a non-ordinary state will feel the pull. This is the clinical companion to a broader problem I address elsewhere: the belief that the medicine carries a built-in morality. It does not carry your politics. Assuming it does is a way of not noticing what you are doing with your influence.

The practical move is modesty about what the experience means. Help the client make meaning. Do not supply the meaning and call it theirs. That is harder than it sounds because their state can make your framing feel like revelation.

Right-wing psychedelia refers to the documented use of psychedelics within reactionary and far-right movements, and to the argument, developed by Pace and Devenot, that psychedelic experiences do not reliably produce progressive politics. It challenges the popular belief that these substances make people more progressive, pointing instead to their political pluripotency.

The evidence is much thinner than the popular belief suggests. It rests on a few small studies. Psychedelics may have some average prosocial effect, but there is no demonstrated reliable link between use and progressive values. The more defensible view is that psychedelics amplify whatever ideological frame surrounds the experience, rather than pushing in one direction.

If the experience amplifies rather than dictates, the clinician’s assumptions become part of the setting. A suggestible client in a non-ordinary state can absorb a therapist’s projected values as their own insight. Practicing with modesty about what the experience means protects the client’s autonomy and guards against imposing your worldview.

If the medicine amplifies whatever frame surrounds it, the frame you hold as a clinician is a clinical instrument. This course is about holding it deliberately rather than by default.

Peter H. Addy, PhD, LPC, LMHC is a Portland-based licensed therapist and the founder of Psychedelic Affirming Education, an NBCC-approved continuing education provider for licensed mental health professionals and Oregon Psilocybin Services facilitators. His research background includes work at Yale School of Medicine on psychedelic substances.

For the clinician-facing version of this problem, see the companion piece on psychedelic exceptionalism as a clinical risk.