The Flintstones and the Jetsons

Two tribes in psychedelic MAGA

• Come to this online event on December 3 on ‘Managing risk in psychedelics and extreme sports, featuring Jamie Wheal, Lindsay Bira and Rob Coffey’.

The MAGA coalition is a ‘rebel alliance’ of very different elements,  united against the Democratic Party / the Borg / NPCs / the Blob / the Cathedral. Within the alliance there is the Christian Right / Project 2025; there are the Qanon survivalists, preppers and sovereign citizen conspiracy theorists; there are MAHA back-to-nature sunshine-boffing ayahuasca independents; there are Tech Right transhumanists…and no doubt many other subcultures. RFK has called it the ‘Justice League’ (or, if you prefer, Looney Tunes). 

Amid this rag-tag army, two tribes -  the MAHA whole-grain crunchies and the Tech Right transhumanists, share a common support for psychedelics, even though in many other ways they are very different and even oppositional tribes. 

You could call them the Flintstones and the Jetsons. One wants to roll back the clock, the other to speed it forward. 

MAHA whole-grain crunchie conspiracists are Flintstones. They worship nature and are suspicious of modern urban industrial civilization. RFK, their leader, is against preservatives, pesticides, vaccines, fluoride in the water and chem trails in the sky. He has said that once he is in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, he plans to halt all federal research on new drugs for eight years. He wants to send opiate addicts and those on SSRIs to organic ‘wellness farms’ where they can heal through sunshine and harvesting. He and his followers look back to a pre-industrial pre-Civil War golden age of America, of healthy yeoman, or even further, to Stone Age hunter-gatherer tribes. His advisor Charles Eisenstein preaches ‘a return to Stone Age values, thinking, and spirituality in a technological context’.

The Tech Right are transhumanists and Effective Acceleratonists like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. They don’t worship nature, they want to conquer it. They worship science, technology, and intelligence - human or AI. They believe technological stagnation and population decline are the great enemies, and want to accelerate economic growth to a future of robots, Artificial General Intelligence, neural implants, genetic enhancement, colonies on Mars, immortal bodies, and digital souls in the Metaverse. 

They may be taking the same drugs but they’re dreaming of completely different futures. 

If you read Charles Eisenstein’s 2007 book The Ascent of Humanity, it is a polemic against scientific utopians like Musk and Thiel. It is anti ‘the Machine’, anti-industrialism, anti-economic growth. In 2022 Eisenstein wrote an essay on ‘transhumanists and hippies’, suggesting these are two fundamentally different tribes that are likely to separate into two separate societies. Peter Thiel’s friend and transhumanist colleague, Christian Angermayer, has even suggested they will eventually separate into two different species - the Intergalactic Genetically-Enhanced Superbeings, and the Unenhanced and Left Behind on Earth. 

These two tribes - the Flintstones and the Jetsons, the Hippies and the Transhumanists - have some things in common, for now. They’re both against US involvement in the war in Ukraine, they’re both against the liberal consensus, they’re both pro-alternative media and alternative health, anti-FDA, pro-psychedelic, and COVID-sceptic. But you have to wonder how long the circle of love will last. 

And it’s not just me wondering this. In fact, in an interview published yesterday Bari Weiss of The Free Press interviewed Peter Thiel and asked him what he made of MAHA and its tendency to go down ‘a rabbit hole where there’s no gatekeeping or institutional authority at all’. 

He gave an interesting reply:  

Modern science started in the 17th century as a two-front war against excessive dogmatism and excessive scepticism. But if you asked scientists today  ‘where is science too sceptical’, there would be a long list - climate change sceptics, vaccine sceptics, Darwin sceptics, who are too sceptical and it’s undercutting science. If you asked them ‘where is science too dogmatic?’ I dont think they could tell you a single thing. Doesn’t that tell you we have completely lost the balance? Science has become more dogmatic than the Catholic church in the 17th century. During the COVID pandemic - we cut off scepticism so prematurely so many times. The sceptics were right. There is a point where you go too far, but directionally the science establishment is way too far on the dogmatic side. RFK, Joe Rogan, these people aren’t correct about everything but it’s so much fresher than the group-think of peer-reviewed science. 

Peter Thiel versus Charles Eisenstein would make for an interesting debate… 

Anyway, I suspect my readers are more familiar with Eisenstein-esque crunchy plant medicine whole earth hippies. What about the Jetsons - who are the Tech Right, what do they hope Trump will do, and how likely is it to occur? 

Meet the Jetsons 

The Tech Right is a new force in US politics as leading Silicon Valley investors and founders have come out in support of Donald Trump in the last 12 months. 

Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and investor in Facebook, was ahead of the curve. A long-time supporter of right-wing contrarian political thinking, Thiel backed Donald Trump in 2016, becoming the first openly gay man to speak at the Republican convention. Back then, few in Silicon Valley followed his lead - the culture of San Francisco was so woke and the panic around Trump was so intense that it would have been deeply controversial to do so. 

A few years on, post-the Great Awokening and post-COVID, several prominent Silicon Valley figures followed Thiel’s lead in what Bari Weiss called a ‘preference cascade’.  There was a sudden mass coming out for Trump and MAGA among tech leaders. 

That included various figures in the PayPal mafia, such as Joe Lonsdale, Elon Musk, David Sacks and the All-In podcast ; hedge fund investor Bill Ackman; Shane Mcguire of Sequoia Capital; tech investor Marc Andreessen; tech and crypto guru Balaji Srinivasan; entrepreneur and guru Naval Ravikant; entrepreneur and presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswarmy, Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey; and various anon X accounts like ‘Effective Accelerationists’ Beff Jezos and Autism Capital. 

These figures all hold some variety of what Kara Swisher has called ‘tech religion’ - they’re transhumanists, Singularitarians, techno-optimists, Effective Accelarationists. They’re Jetsons. And they threw in their lot with a hard right populist anti-immigrant Christian nationalist movement. It’s a coalition of the very smart (Elon Musk) and the very sketchy (Matt Gaetz); of the super-high IQ and…well…people who think the Dems started Hurricane Helene. 

This weird coalition is similar to the shaky Brexit coalition in the UK, which brought together tech-can-solve-everything nerds like Dominic Cummings and shady populist-racists like Nigel Farage. It was a sort of Faustian pact - ‘I’ll help you reduce immigration, you give me the popular votes to power up scientific advance’. 

You could call it Effective Populism. 

In fact, I see parallels between Cummings’ call for ‘weirdos and misfits’ for Number 10 jobs and Elon Musk’s call yesterday for ‘super-high-IQ minds’ for his new DOGE commission. 

Why did tech oligarchs shift right and what do they hope to achieve?