by Esperaux
Anarchy is an absence of hierarchies. It is a form of order that exists without the existence of rulers. It is a response to imbalances in power. Where there exists class, rulers, and imbalance there are those who seek to overturn these structures. Every aspect of modern life is influenced by hierarchies such as capitalism and the state. The individual is often given an illusion of freedom but thanks to culture and ideology has their mind become their own police.
Merely conceiving of a world based upon cooperation and mutual aid free of rulers is often dismissed as unrealistic or utopian. The material conditions to achieve this end does indeed exist however. Automation and technological innovation continues to demonstrate by the day that barriers of language, specialty, and labor can be torn down. We can produce food, medicine, and housing to help all. We can organize labor in such a manner that we work to satisfy ourselves as individuals cooperating together rather than drones to benefit a master. Work simply for the sake of constant growth under capitalism can be abolished. The truth is that preserving our way of life under states built on arbitrary lines and the cancerous growth of capitalism is unrealistic and utopian. Both these entities work to infringe upon and distort the individual. Despite the machinery for our own emancipation existing there are still many who will object purely because they can’t imagine a better alternative. The hierarchy of the mind must also be deconstructed.
Psilocybin mushrooms also known as shrooms or magic mushrooms are not the only method to achieve this end but under the right conditions can serve as a means of getting the mind to achieve a different perspective of thought. It should also be noted there is no recorded instance of addiction to magic mushrooms or dangers that may arise from simply consuming them. Those who uphold hierarchy and see the freedom of the individual as unrelated to the freedom of society can find these values challenged by the mushroom. Connecting with the mushroom is merely the closest manner one can describe the actual experience. When it is consumed it is as if your body has taken on that energy and translates it into thoughts and language for you to confront.
Mindset and environment also play a role in this experience. Someone who is actively resistant to the journey may find themselves unable to actually communicate with the mushroom. The experience of taking the mushroom can be described as therapeutic and requires one to be willing to cooperate. One may find that their senses such as touch may feel enhanced or start to see colorful visuals but the main experience comes in the form of your interaction with your own mind.
During the session with the mushroom one may find that they are much more willing to critique and deconstruct their own views. Perspectives that they may not have considered before are now available to consider. It is the case that concepts of power and hierarchy rely on the ability to be unable to question their legitimacy. When a system is built in a manner that seeks power and leadership over others it often seeks to solidify this hold on authority by denying any form of discourse that may attack the legitimacy of its structure. When people start to come together and consider if the system they live under is truly necessary to their wellbeing, a blueprint for the death of the status quo begins to take shape. It is not enough that we have the means of our own liberation available but that we are able to visualize how to utilize that means. Mushrooms can work to start the dialogue within the mind required to work to this point. Emotions during a trip are given an enhancement. One who is in a willing mindset during the trip will actually be able to connect with the mushroom and build this dialogue.
Part of the session also involves the social aspect. Consuming mushrooms alone can be done and lead to great forms of introspection but with others you have a greater emphasis on social interactions and connections. Emotions can feel as if they are energy to be exchanged with another. Your wellbeing as an individual can depend on the wellbeing of others during your trip and vice versa. A sense of emotional solidarity is often formed during these sessions that lead to one attaining a firsthand experience of how their individuality relates and depends on the collective. Often these experiences serve to bring people together in healing and solidarity. Such a trip can be seen as a microcosm of social interactions on the world scale. When an individual is experiencing misery the group often works to heal this misery or else this negative experience can spread to others. When an individual is experiencing misery in the world and is ignored this can lead to a smaller problem becoming a bigger problem in the future. A lack of care and mutual aid within the community can have far reaching consequences.
An individual session as well can incorporate many similar related conclusions and forms of healing. One may find that consuming mushrooms alone gives them an experience based around further introspection and dialogue with the mushroom. They may find that being independent of others and focusing on yourself is not an inherently harmful concept but rather an action to be balanced with their interactions with others. Surrendering their individual selves to the interests of others and they may find that these conditions can lead to the same forms of isolation that sealing their individual selves away from others may yield. These solo trips can give one the space required to truly confront themselves and deconstruct their existing values. The mind is opened up into a form of dialogue where your ideas are not seen as merely your ideas but that of another for you to inspect. One can have the time to reflect on thoughts as well they may not be willing or able to reflect with others. An individual may not be opposite to society but is just as complex. Each single person has grown and existed in a different point in space and time within an ever changing environment. An insane amount of factors exist that renders each and every individual unique. The sense of who you are in relation to these facts can often be enhanced and inspected under the influence of shrooms. The experience itself can be described as looking at everything you are in terms of body, mind, and past within a mirror.
Our concept of what we consider culture and art can shift as well thanks to the aid of the mushroom. Instead of merely consuming what is outside of us produced by others we create our own stories and entertainment within our minds in collaboration with the mushroom. Users may find that they further work to think for themselves and form their own concepts and self images. This promotion of individual thought and development can be seen as inherently at odds with the state and capitalism. It can even go as far to attack our previous notions of gender, sexuality, and god. The state as it is can only exist as long as there are those who are willing to support and feed its machinery with their own labor and lack of individuality. To teach its culture as the way to live, never question the legitimacy of its laws, and war on behalf of it. Capitalism in much the same manner too with its subjection of people to constant labor in the name of growth. To work on behalf of a master who inherently benefits more than you. To find yourself in a system that inherently forces you to compete against and dominate others. Hierarchies throughout are related in how they act to separate and pit people against each other. To give one privilege and power at the expense of the other. Laws are made to forbid mushrooms and capitalists will either forbid any substances in general in fear that they may harm productivity or utilize them to boost their own productivity at the expense of the individual. Mushrooms can be applied in a manner that leads one to focus on themselves as a free individual in solidarity with other free individuals as opposed to just another part of a machine. The mushroom emphasizes the organic transient nature of the human as opposed to the cold methodical clockwork that hierarchies like to push us into.
It is pure irony how mushrooms have been vilified by the state and those who seek to uphold what they see as tradition. While they argue mushrooms can be dangerous or harmful they perpetuate an inherently dangerous and harmful system that leads to people being prescribed drugs to cope with it. Depression is on the rise worldwide along with virginity. People despite the prevalence of technology and innovation connecting us more than ever seem to have become more disconnected than ever. Mushrooms emphasize connectivity with others. They have been said to be able to help with depression but furthermore they can be utilized to promote a mindset geared towards destroying the source of this depression and isolation. Where there is hierarchy and imbalanced forms of authority there is misery and isolation. The need to take on these systems of power is necessary for us to realize a world of true solidarity between free individuals. One who has experienced mushrooms can better visualize this alternative world. Once someone is able to truly visualize a solution to the problem they can start to work to shape the current material conditions they have to achieve that end. With their objective in sight they can formulate what means can actualize their ends. Without this promotion of individual thought and imagination one will find it a lot harder to work towards their freedom. One can’t fight to be free if they don’t even know what it means or looks like to be free. They can only revolt without direction and be seen as a slight glitch outside of the current system and not a symptom.
The dialogue with the mushroom is less about experiencing the mushroom but building upon the experience with what you have to work with to create something new. A new idea does not necessarily mean it has to be an idea no one else has ever thought of. Many conclusions and concepts have been born in human minds independently of each other at different times or even the same time. This effort to come to a new idea however is key to being an individual. Instead of merely consuming what is fed to you by your dominant culture or system only to regurgitate it in different words you actively take the view you are given and turn it on its head. Finding out what that view is seeking to achieve, where its basis originates, and how it can compare to the pure opposite reflection. This session of introspection as well can involve one to look into their own personal values and ethics. What beliefs they operate upon and which they build further conclusions on.
The way mushrooms can work to promote one to think for themselves and critique their previous concepts means that inherently authoritarian ideas that require a lack of critique and thinking for yourself are harder to retain from such a session. Those who may find that their lives and actions were motivated by these taught beliefs may find that in their absence they must now completely rebuild what serves as their moral or logical framework. Such a period of rebuilding can lead one to conclude on their own alternative solutions to these structures of control and domination. Furthermore given the material conditions provided they now may be able to finally visualize the tools available to deconstruct these systems that they have just deconstructed within their minds.
Their experiences in relation to others as well works to shape how this form of individuality and solidarity may develop from the mushroom. No more do people simply think that being alone and apart is simply the way things are. We have all this technology designed for us to socialize and travel great distances to one another yet instead we use it to replicate the same ideas of constant growth and competition that our current structures push us into. It is replaced with communities of isolation and mass surveillance seeking to ensure that one be rendered into a harmless consumer of constantly recycled culture. Cities and lives are now dominated and built around not the wellbeing of the individual or the community they live in but rather that of the car and the business. Property itself is protected by the arbitration and legitimization of the state yet is sold to people as a means of realizing their individuality. Then they proceed to build fences and separate themselves from the community. Then they go on to abide by and uphold the laws that preserve the status quo which benefits those at the very top with the most capital and influence just to retain this claim over land that they don’t truly own. Homeless are seen as those who failed to realize this individuality and are subjected to the brutality of police for merely existence and denied basic forms of wellbeing despite the resources existing to grant them this wellbeing. Many times the people who say this as the way things should or ought to be do so because they genuinely can’t visualize an alternative.
Those who take shrooms or other substances are stereotyped by the media and seen as brainless or dangerous members of society. Far from the truth we see that mushrooms serve to heal people and think in terms of themselves and the surroundings they exist within. Seeking to better understand themselves and how they can work to benefit themselves and by extension others. While those who have gone their lives without touching mushrooms can go on to become war criminals and billionaires profiting off the deaths of thousands of others during a pandemic. Alcohol is made socially acceptable yet it serves to impair and dull the senses. Mushrooms are not socially acceptable in part because of the threat they pose to the status quo.
Should mushrooms be legalized or decriminalized however they won’t simply actualize a revolution. Capitalism and the state prove time after time to be able to take movements and concepts at odds with their existence and twist them into their favor. It is not enough that mushrooms simply be consumed but that the liberatory aspects of mushrooms be emphasized and worked towards. A store made to sell magic mushrooms doesn’t deconstruct capitalism, it protects capitalism. Part of the aspect of the mushroom is building your experience and dialogue with the mushroom. Thinking consciously about how one attains their mushrooms and actually applies their usage is important too. Again one must be willing to establish dialogue with the mushroom and not simply consume it. Allowing the state and capitalism to control when and where you take it leads to just another session designed to recycle the culture you were fed and cope with the system you live under. Mushrooms themselves are not the door to freedom they are the key to freedom and it still requires you to turn that key and push open the door.
Senseless consumption is never truly senseless. When you listen to music without considering what it means that is in itself still a choice you have made. When you consume mushrooms purely for entertainment the experience will merely amount to entertainment. The mushroom is not something to depend upon to free you, part of the experience is learning to cooperate and work alongside the mushroom to free your mind. This is what it means to speak with the mushroom. Let the body take in its energy and learn to read that energy back to yourself. Let the experience envelope and fit you. When you are able to speak with the mushroom an ability is open to reflect on every aspect of who you are. Being with others will allow you to experience the more collaborative aspects. It leads to an area where you can experience what it is like to work in solidarity and cooperation with others. When it is just yourself a more concentrated aspect of self critique can be realized. This can lead to a better focus on realizing what your basis is as an individual and what it takes to push towards your own self interest in relation to others.
Engaging with mushrooms in a mindset that you are willing to learn and cooperate with them is part of the experience. Much as how someone revolting against the current order with no idea what the alternative actually is leads to little action being achieved so too is consuming mushrooms without any idea what can be achieved as a result. A journey of change and liberation requires that the individual build their path and mind in that direction. Nothing exists in a bubble, everything has some form of interaction or connectivity. In the words of Peter Kropotkin, “There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have cooperated in the invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of man.” which holds relevant to this discussion. Thinking for yourself and forming your own independent ideas which can often serve to be the same conclusions of other independent individuals can often point towards a point of common interest or similar conditions that may lead to that idea. Mushrooms themselves don’t give birth to new ideas they serve as a way of taking what we know and have and being able to imagine and build with that previous knowledge our own new idea. This imagination is required to further utilize what we have around us to free ourselves.
To conclude, anarchy holds a basis in the deconstruction of the legitimacy of hierarchies. It is individualism and socialism formed from the conditions of the state and capitalism. The current status quo relies on a lack of imagination and visualization of an alternative to exist. Despite there existing the technology, organization, and weaponry to free ourselves the greatest obstacle is the hierarchy of the human mind. Mushrooms can serve as a tool of deconstructing the hierarchy of the mind. They hold therapeutic healing aspects and lack the other dangerous aspects of other substances. A session with them can work to enhance the senses and get people to reflect on themselves as individuals. The experience solo can further focus on this point by getting people to confront their views and currently existing assumptions from a more outside yet introspective perspective they may not have considered before. With others it can serve as a useful teaching session for concepts of mutual aid, solidarity, and reconciling individualism with collectivism. These experiences can help promote better degrees of cooperation and individualism that inherently go against the structures of capitalism and the state. The state and capitalism seek to control the usage of mushrooms in part as an extension to control the individual. Merely legalizing and designating when and where to use mushrooms misses the whole point of emphasizing its liberatory aspects. The dialogue and collaboration must go both ways between you and the mushroom. Senseless or unwilling consumption will yield a completely different session as opposed to working with the mushroom to liberate the mind of hierarchy. The goal is to get people to think for themselves and come to new ideas that while unique to each one is in part born of the collective knowledge, conditions, and experiences we all share. Mushrooms are a tool that can be utilized to kill the cop within the head and visualize alternatives to the current structures of power we live under. The ability to imagine an alternative to the current system means the ability to see what material conditions can be utilized to achieve and actualize this end.
This was written mostly for the fun and sake of talking about shrooms and anarchy. It is not meant to be taken that seriously.