Why Psychedelics Make Us Vulnerable to Conspiracy Theories
Welcome to the Psychedelic Blog. I write about the impact of Psychedelics on Grieving, Relationships, Culture & Death.
This Week: Why Psychedelic states make otherwise rational people vulnerable to conspiracy thinking.
Hanlon’s Razor
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
If you spend enough time in Psychedelic circles, you’ll notice a pattern. The Anunnaki. Area 51. Bohemian Grove. 9/11 was an inside job. The moon landing was fake. A vague but confident “they” pulling the strings…without ever specifying who they actually are.
In Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, Skeptic founder Michael Shermer explains how conspiratorial thinking forms…not from stupidity, but from pattern-seeking brains operating under uncertainty. Humans evolved to connect dots first & question later. Once a belief locks in, evidence tends to be recruited after the fact, not before.
Shermer gives a clean example:
In the late Cold War era, commercial pilots occasionally reported seeing aircraft that appeared fast, silent—and most unsettling—absent from radar. At the time, stealth technology was classified. The F-117 Nighthawk flew operational missions years before it was publicly acknowledged in 1988. To a pilot in the mid-80s, the most reasonable conclusion wasn’t “classified U.S. defense tech.” It was UFO.
Not because the aircraft was literally invisible to radar, it wasn’t, but because its radar cross-section was dramatically reduced relative to anything previously known. When reality exceeds the available explanation set, the mind fills the gap.
Of course, some conspiracies turn out to be real. If none ever were, the false ones wouldn’t survive. This isn’t about debunking or validating specific claims. It’s about why Psychedelic spaces are unusually fertile ground for conspiratorial thinking…and why that matters once insight turns into ideology.
Selection Bias
Psychedelic spaces aren’t a random sample of the population. They attract people already open to novelty, skepticism & unconventional ideas. The archetype of a Psychedelic traveler is typically someone porous to new, alternative ideas.
Psychedelics don’t create this disposition…they select for it, then amplify it.
Pattern Hunger
Psychedelics increase salience & meaning attribution. The brain wants coherence. When everything feels significant, the mind looks for systems that explain everything at once.
Conspiracies satisfy that hunger with minimal friction.
Anomaly Hunting
Psychedelics normalize the anomalous. When the mind experiences reality breaking its own rules, it becomes primed to privilege exceptions over base rates. Coincidences start to feel meaningful; gaps in evidence feel intentional.
Conspiracies thrive in that space.
Epistemic Style Shift
Psychedelics bias cognition toward intuition, synthesis & narrative over analytical verification. This isn’t irrational…it’s context-appropriate during altered states. But it becomes maladaptive when carried back into consensus reality.
Conspiracies reward this style.
The Authority Vacuum
When trust in institutions collapses—medicine, religion, government—it doesn’t leave a neutral void. It creates demand for explanations that feel complete. Mythic cosmologies rush in to fill that space: archons, lizard people, ancient engineers, simulation gods.
Not because they’re persuasive, but because they explain everything at once.
The Continuity Fallacy
One common conspiratorial fallacy is pointing to events like MK-Ultra & saying, “See! That’s what they do!” But MK-Ultra occurred in the 1950s. There has never been a single institution that retained coherent power, personnel & secrecy across multiple decades. This framing ignores bureaucratic decay, turnover & the legal gutting of intelligence agencies in the late 20th century.
The assumption isn’t skepticism…it’s historical illiteracy.
Revelation Without Verification
“It felt true” becomes the epistemic standard. Insight is treated as evidence. Subjective certainty replaces falsifiability, and skepticism is reframed as spiritual immaturity.
Once subjective certainty is elevated to moral or spiritual status, counter-evidence isn’t debated…it’s dismissed as unenlightened.
Agency Restoration
Trips dissolve control, then provoke a rebound: the urge to reassert agency. Conspiracy theories offer causal clarity & villains—someone is doing this. That restores a sense of grip after ontological looseness.
The appeal isn’t truth but orientation: a story that assigns cause, blame & intent where the trip temporarily dissolved all three.
Mythic Literacy vs. Literal Belief
Ancient myths were symbolic technologies…ways of encoding meaning, ethics & cosmology. Modern Psychonauts misread metaphor as history, mistaking allegory for archaeology.
Without symbolic literacy, myth stops functioning as meaning-making and instead becomes a misapplied claim about history, power, or hidden rulers.
Community Reinforcement
Beliefs rarely harden alone. They solidify in Telegram groups, podcasts, retreats & social circles where doubt is subtly penalized and certainty is rewarded.
Consensus replaces inquiry.
Why This Appeals Post-Trip
After ego dissolution, people want cosmic significance. Conspiracies restore hierarchy: insiders versus sleepers, those who know versus those who don’t.
Meaning returns, but discernment doesn’t always come with it.
Psychedelics don’t make people irrational. They make meaning cheap.
They amplify salience, flatten probability & reward coherence over accuracy. That can produce insight—or ideology—depending on what disciplines follow the experience. Without constraints, the same tools that dissolve rigid beliefs can just as easily harden new ones.
The danger isn’t curiosity. It’s mistaking revelation for verification. When intuition becomes evidence and certainty becomes status, insight stops updating…it calcifies. What began as openness turns into a closed loop.
Psychedelics widen the aperture…they don’t install epistemology. That part still matters.
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Up Next for Paid Subscribers
A brutal murder at a retreat in Peru…and why the Ayahuasca narrative stuck.
In Sunday’s Insider, I unpack the court record, the toxicology gaps, the incentive structures around Ayahuasca tourism, and the uncomfortable question most coverage avoids: whether this was ever about the medicine at all…or about individual behavior, accountability & a story that arrived on time.
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Unwind intentionally.
Psychedelics experiences without foundational guardrails based on logic and self doubt will lead to delusions. We all create our personal internal reality and sufferings. Most never acknowledge or even comprehend that fact. Yet, it’s the first step to freedom.
Psychedelic use accompanied with dedicated and disciplined meditation can accelerate this understanding.
What about evil? I am wondering if this is relevant, a concern, or ??? I believe in evil and good ( benevolent or other descriptor) that is present in the universe and in individual souls. I also like the Hanlon's razor principle and agree that large groups/corporations can not maintain/control a unified agenda. I do, however think that one person or a couple at the 'top' could feasibly misguide using misplaced/misaligned intentions a group of unknowing/unsuspecting people. I hope I explained that effectively.