Racism, Atheism, And Psychedelics: My Conversation with Peter Boghossian

"One of the things the last ten years has taught us is how easy it is to brainwash people."

On Monday, January 13th, I appeared on Conversations with Peter Boghossian to discuss my new book, Redefining Racism. Since Peter and I are both affiliated with Atheists for Liberty, we also discussed the social utility of religion, how atheists can replace it, and how DMT trip-reports should change our metaphysical understanding of the universe.

Peter’s work on atheism, persuasion, and exposing the fraud of academic “social justice” has all had an enormous impact on my own work, and I’m proud to count Peter as a friend. I first met Peter when we were both helping to establish the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism in early 2021 and getting to know him was one of the biggest highlights of my time there. If you don’t already, make sure that you follow Peter’s Substack, where he conducts some of the most interesting conversations on the internet.

Below the embedded video, you’ll find an edited transcription of some of the most interesting sections from our discussion.

— Jake

The Biggest Things I Learned In Researching My Book

Peter:

What do you think the two or three most important things you've learned about this have been?

Jake:

I think one of the big things I learned was about how these ideas enter institutions. Like what we saw after the Black Lives Matter movement. I think now in the last couple of months it’s started to tone down a ton, but this idea that you would have these crazy radical Marxist ideas, and that you would have some of the most major capitalist enterprises supporting their advocates.

So how did that happen? One of the major vectors of the spread of Racism Awareness Trainings were corporations from the very beginning, and that was in reaction to riots that took place in Detroit in the summer of 1967. You had all the industry in Detroit at that time saying, “We need to heal our city,” wanting to do a wonderful thing but going in a really bad direction with it.

So what did they do? They asked, “Okay, who can we bring in to help us with this? Who are the people around us that say they're anti-racist?” And it was these radical white educators.

I should explain that really quickly because it’s an aside, but it's an important one. Why were they all white? They came out of the Black Power Movement, but under Stokely Carmichael's leadership in the late 1960s of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—a misnomer in terms of “nonviolence” under his leadership, but it very much was that way before under John Lewis in its previous incarnation—Carmichael kicked all the white people out of SNCC and said, “the race problem is in your community, so you shouldn't be working with us. We need to be separate. You go back into the white community and teach my ideas.” That's how you ended up with all these white educators that were teaching very radical ideas. But they further developed upon Carmichael’s ideas themselves, including coming up with the “Power Plus Prejudice” redefinition of racism. The name of the cult they created—this name isn't used anymore, but you still see its ideas with Robin DiAngelo—was “New White Consciousness.” That's the name of the movement developed by a man named Robert Terry, who wrote the book For Whites Only, which is where a lot of these ideas come from. He didn't come up with the “Power Plus Prejudice” redefinition, that was a woman named Patricia Bidol, but he developed the whole framework behind it. If you read DiAngelo's White Fragility, Terry’s For Whites Only is almost exactly the same, except he wrote it in the year 1970, so DiAngelo totally ripped him off.

Anyway, so these white “anti-racist” educators get contracted by the Detroit corporations, General Motors, all the auto companies, etc. to come in and teach their ideas. The group providing the trainings was called the Detroit Industrial Mission. And Terry wrote about their thinking when putting their trainings together. They had something called an “insider-outsider strategy,” where they would get people inside the corporation to be sympathetic to their really radical views; they wanted a total revolution in society. Then outside, there would be agitators: the rioters, the protesters, etc. And the outside agitators would put pressure on the compromised people inside to make the changes that they wanted to see. That was clearly proven to be a very effective strategy in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. I think that's one of the major ideas explaining how this spread.

I can talk about so many other things that I learned that were important from this too.

Another important thing is the fact that the vast majority of black people didn't agree with the ideas that were being taught by these white “anti-racist” educators. Polling of the black community at the time demonstrates that. It’s also demonstrated by the fact that the white educators did a literature review of all the mainstream writing on how to fight racism within institutions, literature largely produced by black social scientists and agreed with by the majority of black people, and after undergoing this literature review they decided, “nah, we're gonna throw all that out. Actually, we're just gonna do the radical thing that we came up with ourselves.” They did all this under the name of the black community and it was just a total lie, a total fraud. That was very clear at the time, but people just believed them, and these educators were able to take the stolen valor of black people and build their work off of that.

Another important thing I learned is just how much you can accomplish in political activism by conquering words. To be able to take the word “racism” and to be able to call yourself an “anti-racist” when what they were doing was by every traditional usage of the word racist—discriminating and enacting prejudice based on race—just calling themselves “anti-racist” got them so far.

On How America’s Political Divide Might Heal

Peter:

We need some way to heal the divide. It sounds cheesy, but we need some kind of rapprochement. I don't really know what it would be, but some kind of a way to realize that there were witch hunts against fellow citizens, struggle sessions, just a bunch of crazy shit. And that these people are still among us, completely gaslighting us, and in denial. We need some way to move forward. Some kind of like a truth and reconciliation committee or something; I don't know. What do you think about that?

Jake:

Well, I don't think that's gonna happen in some event like that, but I think it will be a gradual process over maybe a decade. I think we're in a position where because the establishment knows that they're not trusted by the majority of Americans anymore, we know that they know, and they know that we know that they know—there's complete 360º transparency around this now, and they can't maintain the facade of being the establishment or mainstream anymore—they're going to have to start appealing to our information spheres a lot more than they used to. And then we’ll see a re-merging of the discourse.

Of course, there's always going to be online information bubbles and silos, and that will continue to cause problems, but I think they're going to be much smaller and will have more frequent contact with each other, rather than the former establishment’s one mainstream media bubble that's massive and speaks to half (or more than half) of Americans. Once the old establishment knows that’s the situation, they’ll have to start engaging outside their bubble more. They're going to have to reflect what's going on in our spaces more accurately because otherwise they'll keep losing elections and keep losing their audience.

Peter:

All the Democrats need to do is show that they can govern a city. Not only have they shown that they cannot govern the cities, but they’ve shown radical incompetence.

Jake:

Yeah, that's definitely part of it.

I do think a lot of it is just about the information ecosystem, though. And again, as we see this re-merging, I think it'll just be a gradual process. People will start to inhabit the same information spheres, and then they'll forget over time that they ever had opinions that were so wildly divided on COVID, anti-racism, or any of the other things.

On What DMT Experiences Say About Reality

Jake:

For me, my atheism has always been very driven by evidence. What can I see with my sensations? What can I derive from my sensations? And I can't derive the existence of angels, or God, or heaven, or anything through that. And so I discredit all these religious claims where they claim to have access to that information. They're just trusting a book, and I don't trust the person who wrote that book.

But when you have hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people reporting that when they take DMT, they have this sense of going someplace that’s realer than real, that they've been to this place before, that they will come to this place again, and that they're interacting with entities who are showing them the cycle of life and death, I don't know what to do with that information. I'm not gonna hear that and just become a believer, I’m gonna become an agnostic, but I think that it’s something that needs reckoning with. I wanted to ask your thoughts about all of that.

Peter:

So there's regular DMT and 5-MEO DMT, but before I continue this, I will say I do not recommend that anybody do anything illegal. And do not do anything if you're a minor.

Okay, so I interviewed a guy, he was on the show, he was an atheist and he became a believer after he took 5-MEO DMT. 5-MEO DMT is the stuff that comes from a toad, and they call it the god particle. I've spoken with many people who were atheists and took 5-MEO DMT and then they became believers. But I have not spoken to a single person who was a believer, took 5-MEO DMT, and became an atheist. And I just think that that's really interesting.

I do think Andrew Gallimore was telling me because of the taboos around this it hasn't been researched effectively, or anywhere near effectively. The research is still in its infancy. So any claim that people could make, I would suggest that it's probably under-evidenced because we just don't have the data and the research yet. We have countless testimonies you can see on YouTube, etc., but we just don't have the information to make reasoned conclusions yet.

Jake:

So one of your major books is called A Manual for Creating Atheists. Would you say that you're an agnostic now? How have your views developed thanks to your DMT experience?

Peter:

I’m a complete atheist. Just to be clear about that, I've defined “atheist” repeatedly for people, but they mischaracterize or misquote the definition. I define an atheist as: I don't think there's sufficient evidence to believe in God, but if I were given that evidence, I would believe. I don't think there's sufficient evidence to believe in unicorns, but if I were given that evidence, I'd believe.

Jake:

So what would you say that your experience with this substance gave you evidence of?

Peter:

Well, there are two schools of thought on this. I've done a fair amount of reading on this because I find it so fascinating. One school of thought is that the experiences give you access to a different ontology. And so it's a different plane of existence if you will. So can a sufficient amount of subjective evidence justify the existence of aliens, the existence of God, or the existence of DMT entities? So one is that it has ontological status. And the other one is that it's in your head. My strong tendency is to believe that it's in your own head.

Again, I'm open to it though. That's the problem with creating taboos around research. It doesn't matter what it is. Race and IQ is the big one right now, but if you don't have access to enough data then you can’t make better decisions.

I'm just telling you like the camps, one is ontological and the other is it's in your own head. It's true that it feels realer than real. It's something that in retrospect—both immediate and longitudinal—I find it amazing that my mind came up with what it came up with. It just would never have occurred to me to think those thoughts.

So I don't mean this as a cop-out, but we just need to do more research. The taboos have to be broken down. We have to research these chemicals because they're fascinating. I hope the Overton window moves on that.

On The Perceived Failures of Capitalism

Peter:

I think one of the things the last ten years has taught us is how easy it is to brainwash people. I always thought that capitalism's built-in corrective mechanism would prevent it from falling. Because it's the social responsibility of businesses to increase profits, it really shook my trust in capitalism when I saw all of these corporations and businesses fall to some exotic values. It was kind of crazy to me.

Jake:

Can I push back on that?

Peter:

Of course.

Jake:

As I said, I'm a really committed libertarian. I'm a maximal capitalist. And when I hear what you said, I have a bit of a different conception of what capitalism is supposed to be and what it’s supposed to do. I would not call what you described a failure of capitalism.

What capitalism does, which is so amazing, is that it’s the most efficient and effective production mechanism for providing people with what they want. But capitalism is not a system, and never claimed to be a system, that tells people what values to hold.

So if people want bad things, if they want to gamble, to eat unhealthy food, to pursue bad social goals like supporting Black Lives Matter, or if they want corporations to do ESG, then capitalism is going to be hyper-responsive to all of that. But you don't want to blame the economic system for that, you want to blame the values that people are holding. You want to make people want better because the only alternative is to use government force to plant ideas into people's heads, or else ban the production of things people want.

I think we do have a social sickness right now. If we don't have some kind of “meaning-making system”—something like religion, but not necessarily religion—binding people together to communally pursue positive goals, then it becomes so easy for people to fall prey to the worst of human instincts. But to blame capitalism for that I think is mistaken.