Psychedelics and ‘felt truth’
How a resurgence in psychedelics is actually about a battle for what counts as knowledge
The widespread reports that Elon Musk consumed psychedelic drugs shows the dramatic transformation of this issue, from outlawed substance to an activity that, in many circles at least, appears to be widely condoned. There is now a rapid re-evaluation underway with campaigner Tara Austin calling psychedelics a frontier in “the new civil rights movement” for what is being called “cognitive liberty,” the right to explore our inner minds as much as our exterior lives.
Until recently the discussion around psychedelics was revolving around the way they might be effective at tackling depression or PTSD, and this continues to be a topic of research and debate. But as illustrated by Elon Musk, we have been seeing a new alignment emerging: the rise of the cosmic right, a loose collection of anti-establishment thinkers, spiritual entrepreneurs, tech-driven self-improvement fans, and distrustful ‘truth-seekers’ who often place psychedelics at the heart of their worldview. They reject the idea that only institutions, experts, or formal education can define what is true, instead claiming that the types of personal experiences offered by psychedelics are just as valid ways of knowing.
While this might seem unprecedented, it is not the first time we’ve seen such a large-scale challenge to the way truth is defined and who gets to access it. In the 17th to 19th centuries, radical millenarian movements mounted their own form of epistemic revolt. They contested the authority of priests, academics, and state-sanctioned knowledge, instead embracing direct spiritual revelation, mystical visions, and the idea that ordinary people could access divine truth without institutional mediation. In many ways, we can argue that today’s psychedelic revival echoes that same struggle.
And this is why this is such an interesting and important issue. Our interest is less about the way groups are pushing at the boundaries of legislation or even the potential for the use of psychedelics for medicinal purposes, and instead we will explore how this topic is influencing a fundamental change in our knowledge environment. And if we are looking at the knowledge environment, then this is something that behavioural science can, and indeed should, be involved in exploring.
Let’s start this examination by looking at the history of psychedelic drug use, although, as we shall see later, this is not the only history lesson that is relevant.
Short political history of psychedelic use
Psychedelics have been used for centuries in Indigenous traditions, particularly across the Americas. These have typically been consumed in communal and ceremonial contexts, under the guidance of shamans or ritual leaders, and are deeply embedded in spiritual, healing, and cosmological systems. Modern scientific interest in psychedelics and their use developed in the mid-20th century in the West and during the 1950s and 60s, psychiatrists investigated substances such as LSD for treating conditions like alcoholism, depression, and anxiety.
And while psychedelics were being explored in therapeutic settings, the CIA was covertly testing them for ‘mind control’. Project MKUltra (from 1953 to the early 1970s) involved the secret administration of LSD, often without consent, to civilians, soldiers, and psychiatric patients. The agency believed it could be used to extract confessions or destabilise minds with experiments run through front organisations, including universities, unaware of CIA involvement.
Of course, it is well known that the public perception of psychedelics developed significantly in the 1960s when they became associated with the counterculture movement. High-profile advocates like Timothy Leary promoted LSD as a means of expanding consciousness and rejecting mainstream norms. This cultural visibility contributed to growing political concern and in response, governments around the world introduced strict drug control laws, meaning that research into psychedelics largely came to a halt for several decades.
Interest in psychedelics slowly resumed in the 2000s, often described as the beginning of a “psychedelic renaissance.” Research institutions such as Johns Hopkins University and Imperial College London began conducting clinical trials, exploring the potential of psychedelics to treat conditions like treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, and end-of-life anxiety. These studies helped reshape public and policy conversations, positioning psychedelics less as illicit countercultural drugs and more as promising medical interventions.
Another turning point in public perception came with the publication of Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind in 2018, which brought the science and history of psychedelics to a mainstream audience. Pollan’s accessible book helped destigmatise psychedelics for middle-class, health-conscious readers, positioning them not as escapist or rebellious, but as tools for introspection, healing, and even spiritual insight. His work helped consolidate a new image of psychedelics which was less about dropping out of society and more about exploring oneself.
As mainstream acceptance has grown, so too has the political positioning of psychedelics. In recent years, they have attracted interest not only from progressive health advocates but also from figures on the political right.
The cosmic right and the notion of awakening
A number of high profile people on the political right, such as Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and RFK Jr. have recently been framing psychedelics as tools for cognitive optimisation, and spiritual awakening. So just how and why did this come about?
Perhaps we can point to the way that institutional trust has declined, leading many people began to seek alternative forms of authority and meaning. At the same time, the mainstreaming of wellness culture and the growing accessibility of information about psychedelics has arguably enabled a broader coalition of individuals to connect and experiment with consciousness and chemical transcendence. For those disenchanted with both mainstream religion and secular science, psychedelics offered something rare: a direct, felt sense of truth.
Historically, the left’s engagement with psychedelics was rooted in anti-war protest, communal experimentation, and critiques of capitalist conformity. But today’s psychedelic discourse often centres on individual optimisation and suspicion of the state. This is embodied by the cosmic right, which draws on elements of 1960s spiritual rebellion, 1990s internet freedom discourse, and contemporary scepticism toward institutional authority.
In this worldview, psychedelics are not framed primarily as therapeutic tools or collective sacraments, but as substances that grant access to hidden truths. This is how we arrive at figures like Rogan speaking of ayahuasca as a portal to deeper realities, and others experimenting with microdosing as a tool for productivity, insight, and nonconformity. This notion of awakening often overlaps with conspirituality (a blend of conspiracy thinking and New Age spirituality) and biohacking (the use of science, technology, and self-experimentation to optimise the body and mind) alongside a suspicion of mainstream science. In this way psychedelics are now less collectivist rituals and more personal tools of revelation. They are considered to help people ‘see through’ official narratives, whether those are about pharma, politics, or mental health.
What matters in this context is less whether a psychedelic experience, that claims to offer insight about the way the world operates, is determined as true by conventional tools (such as randomised control trials), but whether it feels meaningful. In this view, psychedelics offer a route to what we might call personal sovereignty: a way to reclaim authority over one’s mind and identity from systems perceived to be coercive and impersonal.
Theorising this shift
Sarah Thornton’s notion of subcultural capital set out the way that in social movements, such as underground music scenes, subcultural capital is earned not through wealth or institutional status, but through aesthetic fluency and insider knowledge. In the world of the psychedelic cosmic-right, this seems to play out as a kind of experience-based status system, where credibility comes not from credentials, but from having done the “deep work”: big trips, ayahuasca retreats, microdosing regimens, and, perhaps most importantly, knowing how to talk about them in ways that suggest insight, transformation, and being ahead of the curve.
In behavioural terms, this means we are dealing not with a deficit of rationality, but a surplus of felt coherence. People don’t need to be convinced by studies when they are moved by stories. They aren’t necessarily anti-science but choose epistemic intimacy over institutional abstraction. A mushroom trip, told well, becomes more trustworthy than a clinical trial. An ayahuasca ceremony on YouTube becomes more compelling than a white paper from NICE.
What is this telling us about how we manage knowledge?
Sheila Jasanoff’s concept of civic epistemology refers to the ways societies evaluate and legitimise public knowledge: this is about what counts as evidence, who gets to speak, and how trust is distributed. She identifies at least three dominant civic epistemologies:
The authoritative model (e.g. UK), which relies on expert consensus and behind-the-scenes elite governance.
The participatory model (e.g. Germany), which foregrounds public deliberation, ethical oversight, and stakeholder inclusion.
The adversarial model (e.g. US), where truth is produced through contest, scrutiny, and open polarisation.
Each of these models is arguably struggling to contain the resurgence in psychedelics. In the UK, expert-led calls to reclassify psilocybin are met with little apparent political appetite for change. In Germany, public debate and ethics reviews feel slow for a conversation now driven by influencers and fast-moving media cycles. And in the US, psychedelics have been swept into the culture wars with podcasts and celebrity takes on the one side and slow-moving federal regulation on the other.
It seems that this gap offers a space for experiential civic epistemology: this is a mode of truth production rooted in feeling, narrative, and ‘felt truth’ without any formal authority oversight. In this environment, a psychedelic journey shared on Instagram, a microdosing vlog, or an ayahuasca testimonial doesn’t supplement evidence but instead replaces it.
This turns psychedelics into tools of epistemic rebellion. The substances that once powered collectivist protest are now individualised tools of insight and personal vibes that offer a means of authority in a world that is widely distrusted.
But this is perhaps not the first time we have seen a resurgence of this type of rebellion - although to locate it involves travelling back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Have we seen this before?
In his book The Second Coming, historian J.F.C. Harrison sets out the way that the late 18th to early 19th centuries saw the rise of spiritualist leaders like Joanna Southcott and Richard Brothers, who claimed divine insight through dreams and mystical experiences. They set out to bypass the formal authority of church and state that once was the gatekeeper of spiritual lives and instead offered their followers a radically alternative structure of belief. These were grounded in experiences such as visions of angels, apocalyptic dreams, spontaneous prophecies and esoteric interpretation, where everyday events or obscure Bible passages were decoded as hidden messages about the end times
This mysticism was massively popular drawing crowds of thousands, even in an age without internet, microphones, or mass media. Far from being solely the marginalised, followers often included self-educated artisans, smallholders, and others drawn to the promise of direct access to divine truth and a reframing of their place in the world.
Harrison emphasises the way that these movements offered followers the tools to reimagine traditional religious scripture on their own terms, rejecting formal education and academic theology in favour of inner illumination. As with the contemporary psychedelic movement, the appeal lay in it being about trusting your gut, feeling part of something bigger, and finding meaning on your own terms.
The material that the followers had to work with - dreams, revelations, divine encounters - were not considered to be personal delusions, but were instead seen as shared forms of knowledge. Prophets like Southcott offered people ways to interpret the bible but in a way that was woven with esoteric symbolism. This ability to blend religious texts with magic, healing, and omens gave followers a sense of being part of a sacred unfolding plan which didn’t need clergy or scholars to validate their beliefs.
And again, today we see this same tension between institutional knowledge and experiential insight. In today’s psychedelic landscape, the mystical is similarly framed. Just as we can see in the late 18th to early 19th centuries where imagination promised access to divine plans, today’s psychedelic experience claims to offer access to hidden truths and the nature of reality.
So, this is not simply a matter of a resurgence of interest in psychedelics, but arguably we are seeing the re-emergence of a deeper ‘cognitive politics’: who gets to know, how, and under what conditions.
What is the motivation for this rebellion?
In his book, Harrison examined why people were drawn to these spiritualist movements. Foreshadowing some of the very similar discussions today about conspiracy theories, and ‘misinformation’, he rejected the idea that the spiritual followers were simply mentally unstable, arguing instead that many were rational individuals who sincerely believed in their religious interpretations and were active, decent people of their communities. He also questioned the assumption that the spiritualism was merely a reaction to crisis or upheaval. While these movements often emerged during turbulent periods, Harrison noted that they also appeared during more stable times, suggesting a more complex set of motivations.
Instead, in Harrison’s view, these followers were not simply looking for comfort, but they were seeking a way to make sense of the world. The movements offered a way to understand what was happening around them, a sense that events were part of a bigger plan, and that their own lives had special meaning within them. It gave people a sense of purpose and control, feeling as if they had insider knowledge and a role to play in shaping it. And not simply leaving this to the clergy who had in the past dictated religious truth to them, with they themselves having the role of passive recipient.
This perspective is particularly useful when thinking about today’s psychedelic movement which similarly challenges dominant forms of authority, not only in politics or religion, but in science and medicine. Like the followers Harrison described, many contemporary psychedelic advocates may well not be simply rejecting institutions out of fear or ignorance but are instead embracing alternative ways of knowing that feel more participatory, emotional, and spiritually resonant.
In both cases, we see a rejection of vertical, top-down models of knowledge transmission and a turn toward direct experience, personal insights, and peer-to-peer sourcing. Just as the spiritualist movements of the late 18th to early 19th centuries destabilised who was allowed to interpret sacred texts, today’s psychedelic revival arguably destabilises who gets to define what counts as healing, insight, or even reality itself.
But is this quite right?
So we could leave this here, suggesting that the psychedelics movement represents a pressure towards an epistemic pluralism. After all, why should people not be more active participants in the development of knowledge and challenge what counts as legitimate? The opportunity, we could argue, is for more familiar vertical (authority) forms expertise to engage and make the case for their value.
However, perhaps this perspective could also be naïve: this is illustrated by jumping to another (related topic), that of religious belief. In the US today, theologian Katherine Kelaidis suggests that the resurgence we see today in religious belief is less about a return to traditional faith, and more a shift that assimilates religion into political identity. She suggests that, for many, religious faith is no longer about scripture or salvation but is instead about loyalty, nationalism, and a sense of belonging to a particular political order. Indeed, religious institutions are expected to serve the state’s political agenda. The symbols and rituals of faith are still used, but their meaning shifts, they no longer guide moral behaviour or offer spiritual truth, but instead act as markers of political alignment.
And it is possible that we are seeing something similar happening with psychedelics. Where they were once seen as tools for healing or spiritual growth, they’re now focused on an orientation where instead of relying on shared facts or public debate, people turn to personal feelings or viral stories to decide what’s true. This means that if something feels true to your group, then it is true.
Truth becomes a matter of emotional resonance rather than evidence or debate. So, while this may look like an exciting kind of epistemic rebellion, questioning old sources of authority, in practice, it can slip into something more dangerous: a world where feeling replaces fact, and personal experience is used to justify power, not to question it.
In many ways, this turn toward felt truth, where what matters is what resonates, not what’s verified, echoes what cultural theorist Christopher Lasch warned about years ago. He argued that the most powerful in society were pulling away from shared civic life, including shared ways of deciding what’s true. Instead of taking part in a public conversation about evidence, they were building their own separate systems of belief, ones shaped more by personal preference or group identity than by collective standards. So instead of ‘truth for all’, we end up with ‘truth for me’, and maybe for those who feel the same way.
Bruno Latour made a similar point toward the end of his life. After years of studying how science is made and how facts are shaped by social forces, he became increasingly worried that these ideas were being co-opted. Instead of fostering epistemic humility or democratic engagement, the notion that truth is constructed the very tools once used to question power have been retooled to serve it.
Conclusions
The psychedelic movement is no longer confined to therapy rooms, festivals or clubs but seems to be a live testing ground for the ways meaning, identity, and trust are reshaped. Of course, there will be a variety of reasons that people engage in psychedelics, but it does seem clear that they have now become firmly embedded in epistemic politics.
And given the status and power of the “psychedelic elite" as they have been called, then there is every likelihood that the valorising of the principles of feeling over fact and personal experience justifying power will continue spilling into mainstream discourse.
We argue this isn’t a narrow example, only applying to this particular use of psychedelics; rather, it is a wider indication of how knowledge is today created, shared and prioritised. For those involved in more traditional sources of knowledge authority from doctors and pharmacists to teachers, financial advisors and politicians, this challenges how we might advise, how credibility is built, and how trust is sustained. Instead it requires a whole new set of skills that allow us to grapple with the emotional, spiritual, and identity-securing functions of belief in a world where knowledge is increasingly a personal vibe.