Subjects or Citizens?

Nearly half of Americans don't know what we're celebrating today. Here's what's actually at stake.

Dear Friends,

There is a tension in the air in this country that I have not felt in my eighty-seven years. Fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, children — everyone is uneasy. They feel it walking down the street, and even when they cannot name it, they know it’s there.

We also have the data substantiating my feeling: a new Cato Institute survey, done with Morning Consult ahead of this 250th Fourth of July, found that nearly half of Americans — forty-six percent — didn’t know what the Fourth of July commemorates, and fifty-six percent worry the country could stop being free within fifty years. And yet the same survey found that eighty-six percent of us are grateful to be Americans, and seventy percent believe the founding principles still matter. We love the thing; we have forgotten what the thing is.

Meanwhile, thirty to forty percent of the country report anxiety or depression, and more than seventy percent are living paycheck to paycheck. Some of us are frightened of the climate and of nuclear weapons; some of us are frightened because of the color of our skin, our religion, or our sexuality; some of us are frightened of our own government. Our fears point in different directions, and the politicians and their anointed media have used our fears to set us against one another — and way too many of us have forgotten that we are all Americans.

I want to step back from the noise and say something that took me a long life to see clearly: what we are living through is, on the surface, a fight between the political right and the political left. But the real fight is older and bigger, and it runs right down the middle of the human animal.

For almost all of recorded history, the people of the earth signed on to be led — by a pharaoh, a king, a dictator — and the many were ruled by one. In ancient Egypt, a tiny few at the top ran everything, and nearly ninety-nine percent lived and died serving them. That arrangement, in one costume or another, held for thousands of years. People were born into their position in life. This is how it is, this is how it should be, and this is how we live.

Then the Enlightenment thinkers — Locke, Hume, Franklin, Jefferson, and others — put a new idea into the air, and a group of farmers and printers and merchants picked it up: we can rule ourselves, write our own rules, and call that the rule of law instead of the rule of the king. The American founders rebelled against England — the largest army and the greatest empire in the world — and against the Pope himself, for kings ruled by divine right, and created a democracy and a republic. That took some doing. It wasn’t clean, either: a country that shouted liberty also screamed slavery, owned women, and acted like a bully on the block, including the slaughter of millions of Native Americans. I say this not to run my country down, but because a fairy tale won’t help us understand the choice in front of us.

Here is what I believe, and I probably will not live to see it. We are headed for a world government — not because anyone votes for it, but because of a pattern that repeats at every scale of human life: caves to villages to towns to countries, and now countries pulling together, the way Europe did to create the EU. Where power is the rule, the large eat the small, and that momentum ends, on its own, in one government over the whole earth.

So the question is not whether there will be world rule, but what kind. Will it be one person at the top ruling by force, the way the pharaohs did, with most of the human race as wage slaves below them? Or will it be something closer to what those American farmers and printers reached for: a rule of law that treats food, water, shelter, education, and healthcare as basic human rights?

That is the division at the core of our species, and it is the one we in America now face as we go to the polls in November.

Do we want to be a world of citizens, or a world of subjects?

Happy 250th birthday, America.

Golden Light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

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A note on working together

For those who feel drawn to working together more directly, I offer a limited number of one-on-one sessions.

These are not traditional therapy sessions. They are quiet, practical conversations focused on calming the mind, easing anxiety, and working with simple tools that support steadiness in daily life.

We move at a thoughtful pace. We work with what’s present. We focus on what helps.

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My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicineswas recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)