European tourists showing up in the American South this summer are posting memes about the gap between what they were told and what they found. Wesley and Karen think the psychedelic community is running the same error just pointed inward at Western civilization instead of outward at Alabama.
This conversation traces how the field’s entry through therapy culture produced a glass-half-empty or glass-entirely-broken view of American society. Wesley and Karen talk through what that costs the movement, who benefits from keeping it in place, and what a broader tent would actually look like.
Key topics covered:
✅ Why World Cup memes are a diagnostic tool for information bubbles
✅ How therapy culture’s political tilt shapes the psychedelic worldview
✅ Terence McKenna’s verdict on Western civilization and why it matters that he’s considered a founding intellectual of the field
✅ The difference between outsourcing agency to external systems versus building it from the inside
✅ Why MAPS commemorates oppressed peoples of June but would never mark America’s 250th anniversary and what that reveals
✅ What the gay rights movement got right that the psychedelic community is getting wrong
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