Bacchic backlash in Paris

Plus other psychedelic and ecstatic news from around the web

There was a sudden wave of online outrage this weekend in response to the Olympic opening ceremony in Paris, and in particular one scene involving a dancing bearded lady, an apparent tableau of the Last Supper with Jesus replaced by an out-sized lesbian, and a scantily-clad blue man emerging out of a supper dish. 

People were outraged that the Last Supper should be mocked in such a major public event, eagle-eyed Puritans also noted what looked like one of the performer’s testicles hanging out of his leotard (this was later denied). The complaints ranged from ‘woke agenda being forced down our children’s throat’ to ‘this is outright Satanic’. Russell Brand heralded it as a sign of the coming apocalypse, naturally.

The next day, as people picked through the rubble and remembered what fun they had at yesterday’s stoning, it emerged that it wasn’t, in fact, an ironic tableau of the Last Supper, it was a homage to the feast of Bacchus. So the blue dude was Dionysus, god of festivals and ecstatic experiences. This did not do much to mollify the American Right. ‘What has Dionysus got to do with the Olympics?’ demanded one Christian influencer.

The backlash disconcerted me - after all, Dionysus is the patron saint of Ecstatic Integration. You’d expect anti-Dionysiac Puritanism from the American Right, but this was a much more general response on X. It struck me as part of a general ‘vibe shift’. 

5 or 10 years ago, there were frequent waves of Twitter outrage, when some hapless rube became the target of the day’s two minutes of hate. But the Twitter mobs who would descend and destroy someone’s career were almost always left-wing, and the moral crimes they punished were if someone was perceived to have said or done something that was racist, misogynist, anti-trans, or ableist.

Now, it feels like right-wing mobs who prowl the digital streets looking for some left-wing victim to beat the crap out of online. For example, anyone caught making a joke about Trump’s assasination online was identified, publicly shamed on X, and fired in hours. 

What’s behind the Bacchic backlash?

You could argue that what was once a genuinely transgressive and radical subculture (chronicled in the amazing documentary Paris is Burning) has become a clunky and predictable orthodoxy paraded in global events like the Olympic opening ceremony. When a subculture becomes an orthodoxy, the counter-culture becomes whatever resists the orthodoxy - so the right gets to feel like edge-lords for ‘resisting Wokeness’ and mocking Diversity.  

The conspiracy theory version is that Russia is trying to sabotage the French Olympics any way it can, whether by disrupting its train system through sabotage, or by sending its troll armies to foment anti-woke sentiment and make Putin (a murderous kleptocratic gangster) look like the anti-woke defender of western values.

Another explanation is that Elon Musk bought Twitter and has pulled it to the right, even arguably to the far-right. Musk was right in the midst of the anti-Bacchic brouhaha, throwing stones with the best of them. ‘Very disrespectful to Christianity’ he tweeted to his 180 million followers - this, as one X-user pointed out, from the man who recently wore a suit of red armour featuring the horned god Baphomet. 

Other Silicon Valley voices joined the chorus of disapproval. Riva, a British expat venture capitalist and Silicon Valley libertarian influencer, decried the collapse of civilization and the triumph of ugliness. 

Various crypto / tech Muskians also railed against the Wokeness of the ceremony. 

Is San Francisco, the home of beats, bath-houses and Burning Man, showing signs of becoming not just fiscally but morally conservative? 

As Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times this month, there are some indications that some parts of Silicon Valley tech culture are going trad / morally conservative, as weird and paradoxical as that sounds. It’s not just some tech people coming out in support of Donald Trump…it may be deeper than that. 

After all, it’s no surprise if some tech tycoons come out in support of Donald Trump. The Republican party is the party of lower taxes and lower regulation for business - that’s going to appeal to many ultra-wealthy tech tycoons. Donald Trump also made a pitch to crypto investors last week, which appealed to many in Silicon Valley. Balaji, a libertarian crypto guru in Silicon Valley, declared Trump’s crypto speech ‘a historic moment…Trump will make America and bitcoin stronger, richer, freer and greater than ever before’. Yes, bitcoin nationalism, who saw that coming. 

There’s also an antipathy to wokeness among some tech founders, based on a fear that they could be driven out of their own companies by woke employees, woke shareholders or even woke exes; as well as a sense that the left is to blame for San Francisco’s homelessness problem and things would be run much better if tech geniuses were in power. 

A few in Silicon Valley, like Elon Musk, have come to decide that falling fertility is an existential risk to civilization, and therefore we should return to trad values like women being child-rearing housewives. JD Vance, a former venture capitalist and employee of Peter Thiel’s, offended many by suggesting the US is run by ‘childless cat ladies’. And then there are those in Silicon Valley who just like to be contrarian (Peter Thiel’s biography is called The Contrarian), so if wokeness is seen as the orthodoxy, then the opposite must be cool. 

But I also see some philosophical currents swirling around in Silicon Valley, which tend towards the Trad. 

There’s the popularity of Stoicism, of Nietzsche, Jordan Peterson, paleo-conservatives like Curtis Yarvin or Bronze-Age Pervert, even Traditionalists like Julius Evola. These different philosophical strands share a sense that the modern west is decadent, we’re in a twilight of values, and we need a New Order. Douthat noted this ‘congruence between the tech right and what I’ve called the neotraditionalist version of religious conservatism’. 

I’m a fan of Stoicism myself, and of other aspects of Traditionalism like the perennial philosophy. But Traditionalism can sometimes skew anti-progressive, homophobic, misogynistic, authoritarian, even fascist. 

And one has to ask, as Doubtat does, how does moral conservatism and neo-Traditionalism square with Silicon Valley’s libertarianism, its innovation, its embrace of radical new ways of being, its transhumanism? 

You could see this tension between the neo-trad and the transhumanist when venture capitalist Christian Angermayer joined the online dissing of the Olympic opening ceremony, and assured people that the opening ceremony of his and Peter Thiel’s transhumanist Enhanced Games would be beautiful and non-woke. Yes, nothing says traditional family values like a doping olympics. 

It mskes me wonder…what would an Olympics opening ceremony look like that both celebrated traditional family values and also celebrated a Nietzschean futuristic cult of the transhumanist Ubermensch? Hmmm…

I’ve long been interested in the philosophies of Silicon Valley, especially transhumanism. As tech tycoons like Musk, Thiel and Marc Andreessen come out in support of Trump, we are seeing a lot of articles warning of the Tech Right, the ‘Nerd Reich’, and their TESCREAL transhumanist agenda. This discussion is germane to psychedelics, because many transhumanist or accelerationist tech-tycoons are also funders of psychedelics.

It’s a fascinating cultural moment, but also a very complicated one, filled with paradoxes and inconsistencies. There are many strands to this story and some of them lead in completely different cultural and political directions - it is not a monolithic, monodirectional story, although some commentators will present it like that. I want to explore it deeper in one or two upcoming stories.

After the paywall, I’ll share some of the best links analysing the rise of the Tech Right, plus some other psychedelic and ecstatic links that have caught my eye.