455 Words
As people in Western societies are increasingly exposed to, and experimenting with, what William James, Aldous Huxley, and Houston Smith called ‘mystical empiricism’ — direct-knowledge methodologies such as meditation, holotropic breathwork, and the mindful use of psychedelics and plant medicines — I believe it is likely that the values arising from these experiences, but not only from these experiences of course, will eventually find their way into mainstream culture. These are values such as openness, relational care, compassion, and ecological responsibility — changes that research is beginning to document with some rigour (Kähönen, 2023; MacLean, Johnson and Griffiths, 2011; Lyons and Carhart-Harris, 2018; Nour, Evans and Carhart-Harris, 2017).
This shift, which I argue is already beginning (Vervaeke, 2019; Eisenstein, 2013), is then likely to produce leaders less inclined to behave in the egotistical, short-sighted ways that characterise so much of our current political and economic life, itself based on the hegemony of materialistic separation, and more inclined toward the collaborative, compassionate, and longer-sighted approaches that perennial wisdom traditions have long described and that seem to be slowly emerging now. Leaders of that kind would, in turn, create and maintain social institutions aligned with such values — which is the central goal of activism as it is predominantly practiced, and which would then contribute to the deep, fundamental change needed in the very hegemonic basis of culture itself.
This may sound far-fetched if one looks only at today’s headlines. But changes of comparable magnitude have happened before. The Axial Age — that extraordinary period between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, in which figures as diverse as Confucius, the Buddha, Socrates, and the Hebrew prophets independently articulated new frameworks of ethics and interiority — reshaped multiple civilisations simultaneously, and without political coordination. The Islamic Golden Age, between the 8th and 13th centuries, transformed the intellectual inheritance of Greek philosophy, mathematics, and medicine across cultures that shared no common political authority. The European Enlightenment dismantled the dogmatic theological foundations of political legitimacy and installed reason, individual rights, and secularism in their place. None of these shifts were led primarily by political actors. They were led by changes in, among other things, what people believed about the nature of reality and the nature of the human being.
Of course, this is not going to happen as the result of passive faith. The actualisation of a new cultural paradigm requires sustained work at the level of beliefs and values — deeper than most current activism, though that work too has its place. We are the vehicles through which new ways of understanding can come into existence and take hold. That, at least, is the wager.
Whether it will be enough, and whether it will come in time — that I cannot say.
References and Further Reading
Eisenstein, C. (2013) The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
Kähönen, M. (2023) ‘Psychedelic unselfing: self-transcendence and change of values in psychedelic experiences’, Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1104627.
Lyons, T. and Carhart-Harris, R.L. (2018) ‘Increased nature relatedness and decreased authoritarian political views after psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression’, Journal of Psychopharmacology, 32(7), pp. 811–819.
MacLean, K.A., Johnson, M.W. and Griffiths, R.R. (2011) ‘Mystical experiences occasioned by the hallucinogen psilocybin lead to increases in the personality domain of openness’, Journal of Psychopharmacology, 25(11), pp. 1453–1461.
Nour, M.M., Evans, L. and Carhart-Harris, R.L. (2017) ‘Psychedelics, personality and political perspectives’, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 49(3), pp. 182–191.
Vervaeke, J. (2019) Awakening from the Meaning Crisis [YouTube lecture series]. University of Toronto. (Accessed: 20 July 2026).
Huxley, A. (1945) The Perennial Philosophy. London: Chatto & Windus.
James, W. (1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience. London: Longmans, Green & Co.
Vervaeke, J., Mastropietro, C. and Miscevic, F. (2017) Zombies in Western Culture: A Brief History. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers.