Why Donald Trump should try ayahuasca

His first experience takes place in a South American jungle where, under the guidance of a shaman, he took ayahuasca, a strong psychoactive brew made from the caapi vine, which can bring on a state of intense spiritual revelation. This experience led him to the insight: “I don’t feel separate to nature, I am nature”. At a very different, urban setting, during a party, he took MDMA for the first time, the active ingredient in ecstasy. It led him to a thought process closely related to the ayahuasca experience: “All the boundaries are dissolving,” Amstell found. “I thought there were no boundaries any more.”

These are (I am told) typical insights that can result from psychoactive drugs. At the right dose, they appear to dissolve the ego, to make you see the world as one big whole, a unity, of which you are a part. This revelation – that everything is one – is in fact a very deep intuition that goes back at least to the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides in the fifth century BC. For him, the world of change and of material objects is an illusion. The truth is that all is one: what he calls “Being”. This notion that all that exists is fundamentally one thing resonates through western philosophy, as well as eastern philosophical traditions, particularly Buddhism.

So Amstell was certainly on to something – but what does this have to do with politics? One way to make sense of the political divide of our times is to see it in precisely these Parmenidean terms: between those who see boundaries as dissolvable and who believe reality is characterised by unity; and those who value boundaries, and who believe their dissolution leads to a loss of meaning, and to anarchy.

Much of today’s politics is catalysed by the question of boundaries, by the instinctive sense that people need to “build the wall”. From Trump’s fixation with America’s “Southern border” to the anti-immigration rhetoric of Farage, Orbán, and Meloni, some politicians elevate the protection of national borders as the biggest political priority: the foundation stone of their worldviews. For them, national borders define the nature of a people and their institutions.

This political focus on boundaries extends beyond the question of national borders. One of the most divisive issues of our day is the status of transgender people. A political battle has been taking place between those, like the gender-critical feminist Kathleen Stock, who see gender as a well-defined, biological category, and those, like the postmodern philosopher Judith Buttler, who see gender as a social construct that can be remoulded to fit the needs of those inhabiting it. For one side, there are clearly two distinct genders. For the other, the boundary between genders is permeable.

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Once we frame political divides in terms of “unity vs. difference”, we see it everywhere. Consider the environmental movement, which challenges the mindset that separates humans from nature. Instead, it urges us to see ourselves as part of nature. Similarly, the vegan movement seeks to erase the boundaries between humans and other animals, challenging a long-standing species hierarchy that wanted us at the top. 

Amstell’s psychedelic experiences led him to the insight of metaphysical monism: “I am you, I am you”. But, as much as that realisation can be liberating in the moment, it’s problematic if we apply it to our daily lives. If we saw everything as “one”, we wouldn’t be able to function. We wouldn’t get very far if we couldn’t tell apart our shoes from our breakfast. And if I treated everyone with the same level of attention and love that I treat my son, I’d never get anything done. Similarly, advocating for unity in politics, like Biden did, (“We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural vs urban, conservative vs liberal”), can be seen as papering over important differences. Unity can be an ideal, but it comes with its own challenges.

A pragmatist approach, one that someone like Richard Rorty or late-stage Ludwig Wittgenstein might endorse, would be to accept the validity of both unity and difference, depending on the context. In a medical setting, when a surgeon is operating on a patient, what matters most is the human physiology. Differences of nationality or creed fade away to insignificance. But in a romantic context, the reason the other person matters to us has everything to do with their individuality and the ways in which they are unique.  

Applying that pragmatist approach to politics, however, would be more difficult. For example, when dealing with immigration, should we treat immigrants as equals with the same rights, or as outsiders who are not part of our community? Our political divisions often arise from which framework we choose to emphasise: unity or difference.

A solution to this deadlock can be found in the philosophy of Hegel, who didn’t care for the idea of everything ultimately collapsing into one. Instead, Hegel thought, reality is a coherent whole that includes difference. For him, unity and difference are not opposites; rather, they exist in a dialectical relationship, each making sense only in relation to the other.

Hegel argued that many of philosophy’s problems stem from false oppositions, such as freedom vs necessity, infinite vs finite, individual vs universal – and that philosophy’s task is to transcend these oppositions by “synthesising” them. His dialectical method sought to bring together seemingly contradictory concepts in a way that both unified them and preserved their difference. 

Today, our political divisions arise out of a similar instinct to see unity and difference as opposites: as an “either-or” choice. Amstell’s show is so affecting because it reminds us of an alternative to the increasingly dominant politics of borders. But the way out of our present predicament is not to swing all the way to the politics of unity, but to look for a politics that overcomes the opposition altogether. A new politics beyond unity and difference, containing both.

Alexis Papazoglou, managing editor of the LSE’s British Politics and Policy blog, and the host of the podcast The Philosopher & The News, is a former philosophy lecturer at Cambridge University