This is an excerpt from my first book, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, which explores how people use practices from ancient Greek philosophies in modern life.
Read More- Accelerationism
- Activism
- Adam Rutherford
- Adhd
- Adrian Wooldridge
- Andrew Tate
- Anti-eugenics
- Asia
- Behavioral economics
- Bitcoin
- Business
- California
- CBT
- Conspiracy Theories
- conspirituality
- Conspirituality
- Costa Rica
- Cryptocurrency
- Culture
- Culture Studies
- Darwin
- Defi
- depression
- Digital Nomad Lifestyle
- Digital Nomads
- Dune
- Entrepreneurship
- Eugenics
- Evolution
- Fantasy
- Francis Galton
- Genetics
- Hinduism
- History
- History of eugenics
- Inegalitarians
- Jordan Peterson
- Ketamine
- Korea
- Latin America
- Liberalism
- Literature
- Luther Burbank
- Magic
- Masculinity
- meditation
- Mental Health
- Meritocracy
- Mythology
- Narco Economy
- Narcos
- Nazi spiritual eugenics
- Nazis
- Neo-liberal
- Netflix
- New Age
- New Age spirituality
- Nick Land
- Nietzsche
- Nomad
- Occult
- Paranormal
- Philosophy
- Politics
- Psychedelic integration
- Psychedelics
- Psychic
- Psychology
- Religion
- Rhetoric
- Robert Anton Wilson
- scepticism
- Science
- Science Fiction
- Sedona
- Social Media
- Spiritual Ecology
- Spiritual Eugenics
- Spirituality
- Startup
- Steve Hsu
- Stoicism
- Superman
- Tech
- Technology
- Theology
- Theosophy
- Therapy
- Tourism
- Transhumanism
- Travel
- TV Series
- Wellness
- Writing
- Yoga
- Abortions
- Accelerationism
- Adhd
- AI
- AI Art Programme
- Aldous Huxley
- Alexander Chizhevsky
- American Liberalism
- American Religion Of Wellness
- Andrew Tate
- Anna Neima
- Anti-eugenics
- Balaji Srinivasan
- Barbara Marx Hubbard
- Behavioral Economics
- Behavioral Psychologists
- Beyond The Brain Conference
- Brave New World
- British Culture
- Burning Man
- Business
- California
- Cartels
- Challenging Psychedelic Experiences
- Cocaine
- Conspiracy Theories
- Conspirituality
- Cosmism
- Culture Studies
- Dancing On My Own
- DEA
- Demis Hassabis
- Depression
- Ecstatic Experiences
- Ego Inflation
- Entrepreneurship
- Environmental Eugenics
- Erika Bourguignon
- Esalen
- Eugenic
- Eugenics
- Garsington
- Genes
- Genetics
- German Occulture
- Greg Davies
- GWAS
- Habit Building
- Hari Krishna
- Hinduism
- Hitler
- Huxleys — Thomas
- India
- James Montier
- Jean Toomer
- Jordan Peterson
- Julian Huxley
- Kathryn Paige Harden
- Ketamine
- Kremlin
- Larry Page
- Lawrence
- Lev Gumilev
- Life Worship
- Luther Burbank
- Madison Grant
- Marilyn Ferguson
- Masculinity
- Meditation
- Mein Kampf
- Men
- Mental Health
- Mexican Coast
- Mikhail Kovalchuk
- Narco Economy
- Narcos
- Nazi Ideology
- Nazis
- Nazism
- Nick Land
- Nietzsche
- Nils Gilman
- Noel Annan
- Octavia Butler
- Online
- Oprah Winfrey
- Pascal Beverley Randolph
- Patrick Deneen
- Pelley
- Peter Thiel
- Philosophy
- Psychedelic Integration
- Psychedelics
- Putin
- Rape
- RD Laing
- Rhetoric
- Robyn
- Rusia
- Russia
- Russian
- Sexual Abuse
- Silicon Valley
- Social Media
- Space
- Spirit
- Spiritual Eugenics
- Startup
- Stoicism
- Swastika
- Tech
- Teens
- Ten Tips To Write And Sell A Non-fiction Book
- Terrance Odean
- The End Of Men
- The Queen
- Theodore Roosevelt
- Theology
- Theosophy
- Thomas Huxley
- Time
- Transhumanism
- Transhumanists
- Tsiolkovsky
- Ucrain
- UFO
- Ukraine
- USSR
- Vladimir Vernadsky
- War
- Wellness
- Wellness Influencers
- Yoga
What do you get if you cross the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual with High School Musical? TikTok! Occasionally some data appears that looks so awful it makes you do a doubletake. That was the case for me this week, when the Centre for Disease Control released data suggesting that American teen girls are ‘engulged in a wave of despair and violence’. Apparently 59% of teenage girls felt persistently sad or hopeless, and one in three considered suicide.
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It’s every liberal parent’s nightmare. One day they happen to glance at their 14-year-old son’s laptop, and they see he is watching videos by Andrew Tate, the mullah of misogyny. They start to notice red flags in their son’s conversation: ‘bitches’, ‘choke-holds’, ‘feminism is cancer’, ‘Hitler wasn’t all bad’. Could their sweet little Quentin have been radicalized by the online far-right manosphere?
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Ketamine clinics are booming across the US. According to psychedelic fund PsyMed, there were around 20 ketamine clinics in 2019. By the end of last year, there were reportedly over 600 independent ketamine clinics, as well as chains like Mindbloom, Field Trip and Delic with multiple clinics and home delivery services.
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This is a story about dangerous ideas, and words’ magical power to heal and to harm. It’s about AI, Charles Manson, dubstep, Neo-Nazis, occultism, and a lot of amphetamine, but it’s mainly about Nicholas Land.
Being an entrepreneur is arguably the highest status job in the world at the moment. In the 1960s, it was the rock star. In the 1980s-1990s, investment bankers were the ‘masters of the universe’, the object of cultural fascination (and loathing), depicted in books like Bonfire of the Vanities or American Psycho. Now? No one could give a crap about investment bankers — they’re souped-up traders who bet with other people’s money and the only thing they invent are bullshit derivatives. But the entrepreneur? The ‘founder’? All kneel before their genius.
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At the moment I live in a town in Costa Rica called La Fortuna. There was nothing much here apart from farming until the 1980s, when the nearby volcano of Arenal erupted, and it kept on erupting for the next 20 years. Suddenly all the springs and rivers around Arenal warmed up and became thermal baths. There was a thermal bath boom, a spa-rush, as hotels and spas scrambled to grab access to the springs and sell it to tourists. Today, La Fortuna is one of the most popular towns in one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. Everything is booming, until the volcano erupts again.
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In 2015, Google engineer Anthony Levandowski started The Way of the Future, a church to worship super-intelligent AI. And now we have the Religion of the Future Police, began by former Google manager Malcolm Collins and his wife Simone.
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Anyone hoping to ‘solve’ the mental health crisis should think very carefully: am I going to make it worse? Unfortunately, every decade a new intervention becomes the hot new thing, the magic bullet that is going to save the world, and the people promoting it become wide-eyed evangelists. ‘We are saving the world! We are doing such important work!’ Such is their enthusiasm, they never stop to ask, ‘is it possible this intervention will harm some people?’
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There are at least four definitions of ‘mindfuck’:
1) People fucking with other people’s sense of reality via disinformation or pranks for their own purposes (which could be to amuse themselves, to liberate other people, or to advance some other agenda)
For example: ‘Cambridge Analytica mindfucked the British voters over Brexit’
…
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My girlfriend Kattya at a bookstore in Porto, Portugal
I quite often get asked for advice on bringing a book to market. I’ve written four books so far, and had very different experiences with each of them. My first book, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, took a long time to get published, but when it finally did (by Random House) I had the pleasant experience of it being a success — it was published in 25 countries and sales and publicity far exceeded my and the publishers’ expectations.
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In 2016, while working on The Art of Losing Control, I conducted a survey on spiritual experiences. The results were interesting — 85% of participants reported having one or more such experience, but 72% said they thought there was still a taboo around such experiences.
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Last weekend I took part in the Beyond the Brain conference, run by the Scientific and Medical Network, a venerable organisation to which I’m proud to belong. Their annual conference gathers together leading scientists, philosophers and paranormal investigators who are committed to venturing beyond materialist theories of consciousness into a new post-materialist paradigm.
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This book was born in March 2020, the month when the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a pandemic. I had been researching Aldous Huxley for a year or so, and was curious about his support for eugenics. I noticed other New Age thinkers also promoted eugenics in some form or another. I kept on following the thread, and ended up writing this project on ‘spiritual eugenics’.
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Once upon a time there was an obscure mailing list. It only had about 100 people on it, yet in this digital village was arguably the greatest concentration of brain power since fifth-century Athens.
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The accusation that ‘X is a eugenicist’ is thrown around a lot on Twitter these days, as a way to try and cancel someone.
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A new biography has just been published of the Huxleys — Thomas, the great Victorian man of science, and his grandson Julian, the great 20th-century public scientist. The book, by Professor Alison Bashford, is quite sympathetic to Julian, who would be cancelled today for his lifelong support for eugenics, if anything besides a Wetherspoons pub had been named after him.
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This week the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences project launch our study of difficult psychedelic experiences and what helps people who have them.
The first step is this online survey.
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In the 1970s, Timothy Leary, high priest of LSD, starting preaching a new gospel. He become obsessed with the idea of a hierarchy of different genetic castes spread throughout the Earth, at different levels of evolution, culminating in a super-caste of Californians destined to leave Earth and continue their evolution in space. He preached selective breeding to enhance intelligence, and even suggested Hitler was ahead of his time in his plan to breed ubermenschen.
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I feel about the monarchy like most British people — I don’t have a huge problem with it, except in egregious moments like Prince Andrew getting away with his various crimes, but I don’t have a huge love for it either. The Queen has ruled my entire life, largely invisibly, so the monarchy is something I’ve largely taken for granted, like Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4 — kind of weird, but not that big a deal either way.
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It’s been a strange week. On the one hand, it’s given me a sharp sense of the limits of human intelligence and our capacity to govern ourselves. In eastern Europe, an ape in a suit murders hundreds of thousands to expand his territory by a few miles. In the UK, a clown exits 10 Downing Street, and a goose enters. The goose confronts the climate and energy crisis and declares the solution is…fracking.
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