Followers of evolutionary spirituality believe that all beings exist in a bell-curve of self-actualization. Some humans are more evolved, more conscious, more vital, more ‘fully human’ (Maslow, 1971, p. 45). This often leads to the idea of an evolutionary elite, what Abraham Maslow called “advance scouts for the race” (Ferguson, 1981, p. 56). The concept of a hierarchy of initiation leading to a spiritual elite is found in many religions, of course. And obviously, other religions’ idea of ‘the elect’ can lead to spiritual narcissism and casteism. However, it is my hypothesis that evolutionary spirituality leads to higher collective spiritual narcissism than other religions, due to two beliefs.

Firstly, following Friedrich Nietzsche (who has exerted a huge influence on the tradition), apostles of evolutionary spirituality tend to reject humility and self-abasement as important virtues, and instead celebrate humanity’s capacity to become gods (Dunnington, 2019, p. 105). That’s not necessarily a problem if one believes that all humans share this potential. But in practice, believers in evolutionary spirituality often believe only a few humans are evolving to a higher stage – especially themselves – while others are failing to evolve. Secondly, followers of evolutionary spirituality believe they are superior to the masses not because they hold certain beliefs or follow a particular lifestyle, like Christians or Muslims. They believe they are essentially superior, the next step in evolution, the first buds of homo deus. In Richard Bucke’s case, he thinks he is as superior to homo sapiens as humans are to dogs.

Let us take one example of this tendency to spiritual narcissism in evolutionary spirituality: Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory. Wilber’s intellectual achievements are impressive. But his theory does seem to appeal to a narcissistic strain in his followers. This is the promotion for his online course, Superhuman OS:

The implication is that, by buying into Wilber’s theory, you prove yourself a member of this exclusive group. Numerous former disciples have testified to a tendency for Wilberites to become ‘puffed up’ in the words of former Integral acolyte Jamie Wheal (Evans, 2021a,b,c). The author Mark Manson records his disappointment at attending an Integral conference and discovering it was a self-congratulatory talking-shop, “We’re ‘second-tier’ thinkers. We’re going to change the world … as soon as we are done talking about how awesome and ‘second-tier’ we are” (Manson, 2018). The film-maker Nora Bateson tells me she saw a similar spiritual narcissism emerge in the human potential movement:

Evolutionary spirituality’s tendency to collective narcissism overlaps with class privilege. Pre-war spiritual movements like the Theosophical Society, the Golden Dawn or the Society for Psychical Research tended to attract upper and middle-class affluent, educated followers (Urban, 1997), readily inclined to see themselves as more evolved than the urban proletariat. One sees a similar overlapping of spiritual narcissism and class privilege in the post-war human potential movement. Abraham Maslow, the pioneer of humanistic psychology, believed only a few humans reach the top of his hierarchy of human needs and become ‘fully human’. He found these higher beings particularly in the executive class. He worked as an in-house psychologist at one Bay Area company, Saga Corporation, where he congratulated the executives on their superior evolutionary level:

In transhumanism, a modern variant of evolutionary spirituality popular in Silicon Valley today, the business elite are sometimes as spiritually and genetically superior, almost a different species. Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of the Rationalist movement and a leading transhumanist, recalls spending time at one venture capital conference:

When the Silicon Valley business elite take psychedelics within the frame of evolutionary spirituality, it can be easy to see oneself as a highly-evolved superbeing - ‘the hallucinogenic elite’, in Eric Weinstein’s phrase (Ferriss, 2016), or what Sean Parker (the investor and psychedelic philanthropist) calls ‘immortal overlords’ (Perrigo, 2017). Christian Angermayer, the world’s leading investor in psychedelics, lives in a London penthouse apartment filled with statues of gods, emperors and immortal heroes, and aspires to divinity as well. He told Steven Bartlett’s podcast, ‘Maybe we are meant to play God … Maybe we are there to escape the evolutionary velocity, to be gods in our own way” (The Diary of a CEO, 2021) However, Angermayer thinks not all humans will necessarily make this leap, and there could be a bifurcation into two species—the gods and the left-behind (The Rubin Report, 2021).

Today, spiritual-but-not-religious Americans tend to be better educated than the average, with 71% of SBNRs having attended college, compared to 59% of other Americans (Lipka and Gecewicz, 2017). This educational gap could strengthen the cultural tendency to collective spiritual narcissism. Taking psychedelics at luxury retreats costing thousands of dollars, affluent psychonauts could be inclined to believe that, in the words of psychedelic author James Oroc:

This sense of evolutionary superiority is often accompanied by a tendency to look down on the masses as less evolved, less conscious, degenerate, unreal, bestial, not fully human. Again, this habit of thinking can be traced back to Friedrich Nietzsche. He suggested there is a sharp dichotomy between the ‘natural aristocracy’ and the mediocre masses. He wrote:

As John Carey explored, this Nietzschean contempt for the degenerate masses became fashionable among Modernist spiritual seekers like DH Lawrence. He believed in a hierarchy of self-actualization in nature, with natural aristocrats like him at the peak, and the ignorant masses below. In his novel Kangaroo, Lawrence writes, “The mass of mankind is soulless … Most people are dead, and scurrying and talking in the sleep of death” (Carey, 1992, p. 11). Aldous and Julian Huxley both also believed in a natural hierarchy leading to a genetic aristocracy, including the Huxleys and other talented families, with the unevolved and ignorant masses far below. Aldous Huxley wrote:

The early transhumanist thinker and novelist HG Wells had a similar sense of a dichotomy between the intelligent minority and the idiot masses. His one-time mistress, Margaret Langer, wrote:

Spiritual movements of the late-19^th and early-20^th century often shared this view of a spiritual-biological hierarchy in nature, with an evolved elite and the slavish masses far below. This was a view held by many members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, for example. Israel Regardie, a disciple of Aleister Crowley who wrote a book on the Golden Dawn, declared:

In some variants of evolutionary spirituality (certainly not all of them³) the bell-curve of self-actualization is racial. This is the case with Theosophy. Although the Theosophical Society aimed to be a multi-racial brotherhood of man, Madame Blavatsky told her disciples that spiritual evolution ascends through various races. Some races — particularly the Aryan race — are more evolved, soulful, ‘elect’ and ‘God-informed’, while other races in the past and today are less evolved, ‘unholy’, ‘inferior’, ‘savage’, ‘soulless’, ‘monsters’, ‘accursed’, ‘black with sin’, materialistic (Jews), more bestial or ape-like,‘degenerate in spirituality’ and possibly even demonic (Blavatsky, 2012, pp. 185, 1,157, 1,479, 1,509, 1,549, 1,551, 2,411). German Theosophists like Rudolf Steiner and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels adapted this spiritual-evolutionary racism and pronounced the German race the most spiritually-evolved, while other races were lower on the evolutionary scale.⁴ Steiner wrote:

One can find a contempt for the less-evolved masses in later forms of evolutionary spirituality as well. Abraham Maslow, whose theory of self-actualization shows the influence of Nietzsche (Valiunas, 2011), wrote, “Only a small proportion of the human population gets to the point of identity, or of selfhood, full humanness, self-actualization” (Maslow, 1971, p. 24). Beneath that tiny percentage (which included him obviously), “it is perfectly true that the mass of society is still like a dead weight” (Maslow, 1971, p. 223).

Theories of evolutionary spirituality became popular in the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, thanks to figures like Timothy Leary, who suggested LSD was producing a ‘new race of mutants’ (The Harvard Crimson, 1966). This sense of oneself as a higher species could lead to psychedelic snobbery. Tom Wolfe, in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, noted:

Wolfe overheard one psychonaut lecture a policeman at an acid test: ‘Listen, I’ve got more Awareness, more … Awareness, in my little fingernail.. My Awareness is so superior to yours that… uh…’ (Wolfe, 1968, p. 283).

In the 1970s, Leary suggested that he and his friends were part of a ‘genetic elite’ in California (Evans, 2022b), while the rest of the world was far lower on the evolutionary scale:

A graph from Leary’s Intelligence Agents (1979) depicting the varying development of various ‘genetic castes’ (Figure 1).

The most extreme example of evolutionary elitism in the human potential movement is Rajneesh Bhagwan, also known as Osho. He predicted the evolution of ‘the new man’ from within his movement, and told journalists: ‘only the very rich, educated, intelligent, cultured can understand what I am saying’ (Osho, 2022, vol 1: 1). Everyone else is retarded:

This contempt for the less-evolved masses can feed into Silicon Valley transhumanism, and the dichotomy between the ubermensch-like ‘founder’, the tech-genius, the ‘10X engineer’ on the one hand, and the drone-like hordes of ‘non-player characters’ on the other.

This sense of a sharp divide between the evolved elite and degenerate masses can lead to Social Darwinian and Malthusian attitudes: there are too many humans, and there are too many unfit humans. Let nature do its work to select the fittest while letting the unfit die off. This is one way that evolutionary spirituality can be quite different to older religions like Christianity, where those at the bottom of society are seen as having a place in the cosmic scheme of things, and part of serving God involves trying to help the poorest, weakest or least fortunate.

This new attitude can be traced back to the Reverend Thomas Malthus, a founding theologian of evolutionary spirituality, whose Essay on the Principle of Human Population in 1798 suggested that nature (created by a Supreme Being) selects the vigorous specimens while getting rid of the listless, malformed and wasteful, thereby creating progressively better beings. Malthus thought welfare for the poor was misguided, as it would merely encourage them to reproduce more, leading to greater misery and vice (Huzel, 1969). His Essay was a defining influence on Darwin, and on champions of evolutionary spirituality like the sociologist Herbert Spencer.

Spencer believed that evolution was guided by a spiritual force he called ‘the Unknowable’, and it naturally led to progressively higher forms through the ‘survival of the fittest’ (a phrase he coined). He wrote, “The whole effort of nature is to get rid of [the unfit], to clear the world of them, to make room for better” (Spencer, 1892, p. 205). He suggested that “a finer type of man than has ever hitherto existed” would naturally evolve, as long as governments do not impede natural selection by excessive support for the poor. His evolutionary spirituality was popular with Gilded Age oligarchs like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller (Hofstadter, 1944).

Friedrich Nietzsche, arguably a more enduring influence on evolutionary spirituality than Herbert Spencer, also thought the world was over-populated and the weak and ‘unfit’ should be left to die so that higher beings can evolve. He wrote, “Far too many live and far too long they hang on their branches. Would that a storm came to shake all this rot and worm-food from the tree!” (Nietzsche, 2006, p. 54). His social Darwinism influenced early-20th-century spiritual thinkers like Aleister Crowley, whose Book of the Law declares:

To which Crowley adds the commentary, “there is a good deal of the Nietzschean standpoint in this … It is the evolutionary and natural view. Of what use is it to perpetuate the misery of Tuberculosis, and such diseases, as we now do? Nature’s way is to weed out the weak” (Crowley, 2004, p. 11).

HG Wells and Julian Huxley, two early prophets of transhumanism, were both socialists who believed in social provisions for the poor. But they were also members of the Malthusian League (Bashford, 2014, p. 1) who believed that ‘overcrowding of the planet’ is “the fundamental evil out of which all the others … arose” (Wells, 1923, p. 1060). They thought over-population leads to demagogic politics, war, pandemics and environmental collapse. Malthusian attitudes could often be found in later prophets of environmental spirituality, like the biologist Paul Erlich, a preacher of ‘conscious evolution’ and author of the doomsday book, The Population Bomb (Erlich, 1968), which wrongly predicted that over-breeding in the Third World would lead to mass starvation in the 1970s.

Another member of the Malthusian League was Annie Besant, the Victorian radical who converted to Theosophy in the middle of her life. Like other Theosophists, Besant believed in spiritual evolution, which guides the “survival of the fittest nations and races” and enacts a ‘cleansing process’ for the “unfit ones – the failures” (Blavatsky, 2012, p. 1565). Besant wrote that when she walked through the slums of Britain, she felt “that for those men and women, as they were, degraded, brutal, drunken, profligate … the best mercy that God could show them would be an earthquake that would swallow the whole great city” (Besant, 2020, p. 31).

One encounters an apocalyptic tone in later prophets of evolutionary spirituality as well. Timothy Leary wrote a ‘declaration of evolution’ in 1968, announcing that the ‘new mutants’ must “acquiesce to genetic necessity [and] detach ourselves” from previous generations. It is time, the declaration announced, “for the old mind to die, so that a new one, with expanded sensitivities, could be born” (Leary, 1970). Rajneesh Bhagwan/Osho declared:

A good example of this desire for an apocalyptic separation of the fit from the unfit can be found in the thinking of Barbara Marx Hubbard, a champion of evolutionary spirituality and transhumanism from the 1970s to the 2010s. Hubbard claimed her cosmic mission was to midwife the birth of a new species, homo universalis. In books like The Evolutionary Testament of Co-Creation (Hubbard, 2015), she channeled and interpreted the message of God/Evolution to the ‘evolutionary children of God’ (Hubbard, 2015, p. 126). She described evolution as a mountain — most only get a little way up, but a few special beings get to the top and become intergalactic immortal gods:

Not everyone will make the evolutionary Leap. There will be a ‘bifurcation of humanity’ and selection of the fit from the unfit. It’s up to humans if they make the cut or not:

As Nietzsche had argued, the elite need to be steely in their acceptance of the passing away of the unfit.

It is, of course, offensive for a rich white heiress to suggest those less fortunate than her have somehow ‘chosen’ not to evolve and failed a cosmic evolutionary test. Her prophecy of a bifurcation between the evolved superbeings and the left-behind masses finds echoes in contemporary transhumanism.⁵ Psychedelic entrepreneur Christian Angermayer, who founded atai Life Sciences, has suggested:

One notes Social Darwinian attitudes in some psychedelic transhumanists, particularly in their rejection of mass welfare democracy in favour of offshore crypto-libertarianism. The Extropian movement of the 1990s, who included some of the founders of cryptocurrency, were typically anarcho-libertarians who believed in exiting the nation-state and starting up their own crypto utopias, where they could engineer themselves into superbeings, free from the intrusion of the IRS and FDA (Evans, 2022c). That dream lives on in contemporary transhumanists like psychedelic and crypto investor Peter Thiel, who funded the Seasteading Institute to explore the possibility of crypto-libertarian offshore utopias, in expectation of the collapse of mass welfare democracies (Lanier and Glenn Weyl, 2022).⁷

The sense of a coming bifurcation between the Elect and the Passed Over is not unique to evolutionary spirituality. But in Abrahamic religions, it is God who selects the Wheat from the Chaff. In evolutionary spirituality, in some instances at least, it is humans who select the fit and the unfit. As Nietzsche put it, “the ruling caste of the future … must now take the place of God … They deliver the physiologically botched by teaching them the doctrine of ‘swift death’”(Nietzsche, 1911, p. 266).

It is not the case that all the leading figures in pre-war evolutionary spirituality supported eugenics in one form or another. Many did not, and a few actively opposed it, like William James and Alfred Russell Wallace. But it’s worth noting how many leading figures did support eugenics in some form: Friedrich Nietzsche, George Bernard Shaw, Ernst Haeckel, Julian and Aldous Huxley, HG Wells, Gerald Heard, WB Yeats and several other members of the Golden Dawn, Rudolf Steiner and other German Theosophists, Jan Smuts, several members of the Society for Psychical Research, Sri Aurobindo, Luther Burbank, John Harvey Kellogg, and Alexis Carrel all supported positive and/or negative eugenics to steer evolution and produce higher beings. One also occasionally finds a support for eugenics in post-war evolutionary spirituality, for example in the thinking of Abraham Maslow, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Teilhard de Chardin, William Luther Pierce and Osho.⁸

Eugenics was a science-religion launched by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, in 1883. Galton noted that many human characteristics, including intelligence and some illnesses and disabilities, seemed to be hereditary. He suggested that the science of heredity could be combined with animal breeding techniques to steer evolution and create ‘master-minds’ (Galton, 1865). Although eugenics has typically been described as a pseudo-science, it was embraced by its followers as an evolutionary religion (Galton, 1909, p. 42), which would replace homo sapiens with a ‘new born Apollo’ (Pearson, 1930, p. 217). Scientists would be the priests of this new religion, measuring and quantifying the value of humans through psychometric and biometric tests to sort the superior from the inferior. These scientist-priests would guide human evolution by encouraging the ‘fittest’ to breed more and with each other (positive eugenics) and discouraging those deemed ‘unfit’ from breeding at all (negative eugenics) through voluntary or involuntary sterilization, segregation, racial miscegenation laws and, at its most extreme, euthanasia, or mass murder (Bashford and Levine, 2010). This ‘jehad or Holy War’ (Galton, 1909, p. 99) would save civilization from being swamped by imbeciles (Huxley, 1994, p. 150).

The eugenic ‘religion of the future’ was extremely popular from the 1880s to the 1940s, across the political spectrum and in many countries of the world. Many different policies and activities were promoted in eugenic terms as helping to create a superior race or species, including everything from body-building and yoga to organic farming and psychedelics. For example, in 1941, the German poet-soldier-physician Gottfried Benn called for a “systematic educational effort in the direction of conscious enhancement of vitality. One could, by increasing visionary states say with mescaline or hashish, supply the race with a stream of spiritual insights which could lead to a new creative period” (Benn, 2007, p. 44). The fact that psychedelics could be promoted using eugenic rhetoric does not mean one can say psychedelic culture ‘is’ eugenicist (or body-building, organic farming or yoga). Rather, it is indicative of the general popularity of eugenic rhetoric before World War Two.

But quite often, those who used eugenic rhetoric to promote a particular policy or activity also supported positive and/or negative eugenics. Gottfried Benn, for example, wrote in his 1933 essay ‘Eugenics’, written following the Nazis’ ascent to power, “It seems to me certain that once again a new man will emerge from this transformation in Europe, half as a mutation and half as a result of eugenics” (Benn, 2013, p. 207). Several other important figures in western psychedelic history saw both psychedelics and eugenic breeding laws as technologies to assist the evolution of superbeings, and this overlap highlights an illiberal tendency in evolutionary spirituality.

For example, the first British paper on psychedelics was published by Havelock Ellis in 1897. Ellis was a free-thinking, left-leaning physician, one of the first English disciples of Nietzsche, and a follower of evolutionary spirituality. He believed in the possibility of steering evolution to develop ‘the divine possibilities of man’ (Ellis, 1912, p. 404), and he suggested that mescaline was one method to enhance humans’ evolutionary potentialities (Ellis, 1898). He also believed some humans are degenerating, and that the ‘feeble-minded’ ‘dilute the spiritual quality of the community’. Ellis was a member of the Eugenics Education Society from 1907 to 1939 and supported the voluntary sterilization of those deemed ‘unfit’. Eugenic policies would bring about a new millennium, he believed, “Not until the earth is purified of untold millions of its population will it ever become the heaven of old dreamers, in which the elect walk spaciously and nobly, loving one another” (Ellis, 1912, p. 404).

One of the participants in Ellis’ mescaline experiments was his friend WB Yeats, the Irish poet and member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (Jay, 2019, p. 92). Yeats, like other adepts, used occult techniques in his attempt to ascend up the spiritual-evolutionary scale, including mind-altering drugs such as hashish and mescaline. At the other end of the evolutionary scale, Yeats suggested that western civilization was in danger of collapse because “the better stocks have not been replacing their numbers, while the stupider and less healthy have been more than replacing theirs.” He thought state-enforced eugenics was necessary, “Sooner or later we must limit the families of the unintelligent classes” (Yeats, 1962, p. 423).

HG Wells and Julian Huxley, two early transhumanists, promoted both mind-altering drugs and eugenics as technologies to guide human evolution towards the creation of superbeings. In The Science of Life, a 1929 book co-written by HG Wells, his son Gip Wells and Julian Huxley, the authors note the recent discovery of psychoactive drugs like mescaline, and remark, “It is not only that these drugs illuminate our capabilities. A time will come when they may be used to assist and enhance them” (Wells et al., 1934, p. 1388). They also say the new science of eugenics is essential for counteracting a steep rise in “defectives,” “pockets of evil germ-plasm responsible for a large amount of vice, disease, defect and pauperism” (Wells et al., 1934, p. 1470). In his 1901 book Anticipations, Wells suggested a biological underclass might need to be exterminated (Wells, 1902, p. 300), although he later moved to the slightly-more-liberal position of Julian Huxley, who suggested the ‘unfit’ could be bribed into getting sterilized (Weindling, 2012).

Julian’s brother, Aldous, promoted eugenic policies from the 1920s until his death in 1962, as a means of lowering the quantity and raising the quality of the population. His 1931 novel, Brave New World, is frequently read an anti-eugenic dystopian satire. However, his essays from the late 1920s and early 1930s show the extent to which he supported the sort of caste-based scientific-eugenic dictatorship proposed in Brave New World.⁹ In a radio broadcast in 1932, Aldous said, “in a scientific civilization society must be organized on a caste basis. The rulers and their advisory experts will be a kind of Brahmins controlling, in virtue of a special and mysterious knowledge, vast hordes of the intellectual equivalent of Sudras and Untouchables.” He called for “a society compelled by law to breed more and more exclusively from its most gifted and socially most successful members.” (Huxley, 1994, pp. 113, 152).

In the last decade of his life, Aldous embraced an optimistic evolutionary spirituality influenced by his brother’s transhumanism. In 1961, he declared:

He thought psychedelics were one method to expand human potentialities – his friend, the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, suggested psychedelics would enable a new form of human to evolve. And Aldous still endorsed eugenics as another method for expanding human potential. In his 1958 lecture series at UC Santa Barbara, he said:

Abraham Maslow also believed humans could evolve through ‘peak experiences’, attained by psychedelics or other means. And he privately expressed support for negative eugenics and even euthanasia to raise the genetic quality of the species. In his journals one can find comments such as:

In a paper on ‘Humanistic Biology: Elitist Implications of the Concept of Full Humanness’, which he delivered at the Salk Institute in 1968, he suggested the ‘biological aristocracy’ should become ‘a kind of priestly class’, which decides who gets to reproduce and who does not:

Another leading figure in the human potential movement, Osho, argued that, to create the ‘new man’, there needs to be a global eugenic law:

He said there should be a total global ban on births for 20 years, and then a medical-spiritual board of control should regulate all reproduction, authorizing births through artificial insemination so that only genetically-gifted children were born. The human population should be reduced by 75%. Aid to the third world “should completely stop.” (Osho, 2022, 1: 5).

From the 1970s on, transhumanists have tended to propose voluntary genetic enhancement, rather than coercive eugenic breeding laws, as a means to steer evolution and create superbeings. Figures like Timothy Leary in the 1970s, or Nick Bostrom and David Pearce in the 1990s, argued for humans’ right to genetic enhancement (see Evans, 2022b,c). Leary suggested that a genetic ‘elite of elites’, 5,000 humans selected for their genetic superiority, should jet into space, establish an off-world colony, and there use genetic technologies to create a more intelligent, blissful and longer-living species (Leary, 1974). This may be far-fetched and elitist, but is not an illiberal as 1920s-style enforced mass eugenics.¹⁰ Instead, transhumanists defend what Nicholas Agar has called ‘liberal eugenics’ (Agar, 1998) – your right to modify yourself and your children, free from government interference.

But sometimes transhumanists still argue for state-sponsored programmes of biochemical and genetic enhancement, and these do seem potentially illiberal and coercive. For example, www.eugenics.org is a website launched by British philosopher David Pearce, who co-founded the World Transhumanist Association in 1994. He suggests ‘a bio-happiness revolution is imminent’ and wants to create a more blissful ecosystem, using techniques ranging from psychedelics to ‘wireheading’ to genetic engineering. He says, “Genome reform to engineer lifelong loved-up MDMA-like consciousness would be my vision of paradise” (What’s It Like To Be A Philosopher, 2022). He looks forward to the day when the World Health Organization can alter our genes and raise our hedonic level with one injection. His plan to ‘abolish suffering’ entails the genetic modification not just of humans but of all species. He insists this is eugenics, but ‘not 1920s-style eugenics’ (Evans, 2022a). His intentions are of course altruistic, nonetheless, here the line between ‘liberal eugenics’ and enforced eugenics seems perilously thin.

The biggest ethical problem with evolutionary spirituality, as I see it, is its marriage of science and religion. Every religion has its particular values and prejudices, but apostles of evolutionary spirituality insist their dogmas are objective ‘empirical facts’, as Aldous Huxley liked to say. They invariably commit what GE Moore called the naturalistic fallacy—they shift from the Is of scientific data to the Ought of moral preaching. And often the data is extremely weak. With eugenics, psychiatrists could deem someone a ‘moral defective’ based on a snap judgement, confining them to incarceration, sterilization or even extermination if, for example, they had a child outside of marriage, or were the wrong ethnicity, or even if they smiled too much. This was William James’ critique of eugenics. He wrote, “The trouble is that [eugenicists] use the descriptive names of symptoms merely as an artifice for giving objective authority to their personal dislikes. The medical terms become mere ‘appreciative’ clubs to knock men down with” (Richardson, 2006, p. 338). Eugenics is obviously an extreme case but I see a similar risk in any science-religion that claims it can quantify people according to their level of self-actualization as more or less ‘fully human’.

If the dogma of science-religions become enshrined in laws, you have a risk of what Alfred Russell Wallace (referring to eugenics) called a ‘medical tyranny’ run by ‘an arrogant scientific priestcraft’ (Wallace, 2003, p. 214). All religions are potentially illiberal when imposed onto an entire population, but science-religions are insidiously so, because their devotees insist they are not imposing their particular theology onto a populace, but rather an ‘objective science’ of flourishing/self-actualization/mystical oneness (Evans, 2018). It’s worth noting that many of the leading champions of evolutionary spirituality argued for illiberal and anti-democratic utopian projects. HG Wells, Julian and Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Alexis Carrell, Sri Aurobindo, Abraham Maslow and Osho all put forward political schemes in which a Platonic caste of scientist-priests decide how the rest of us should think, live and breed. In all of their spiritual utopias, there is one presumed goal for the entire population – the evolution of humanity to a higher state. All means and all lives serve that goal and those who do not agree with it are excised from the body-politic. Multicultural, liberal, secular society is replaced by a medical-mystical cult.

Aldous Huxley’s Island, for example, is often celebrated as a hippy utopia, and it inspired Esalen and later spiritual communes. Huxley describes Pala as a decentralized democracy which encourages non-dogmatic critical thinking. Yet it is a completely closed, static, theocratic society, in which there is one presumed goal for all: mystical self-actualization. There is one neuro-theological culture, established by the Raja and an enlightened Scottish doctor a century before and unchanged since. Every citizen of Pala is indoctrinated in this culture, through the island’s bible, mantras, hypnotherapy and the psychedelic ritual that every child must go through to become an adult. Population is strictly controlled, and the nuclear family is replaced by collective ‘mutual adoption clubs’. Second children are encouraged to be born via artificial insemination from genius sperm banks, to raise the general IQ of the society. Any delinquents are spotted as infants and given drugs for the rest of their life. Huxley suggests this will be about one fifth of all males. And if they are not cured? “In the long-run … they always are” (Huxley, 2005, p. 154).

His friend Gerald Heard, another important influence on psychedelic culture in the 1950s and 1960s, preached a similar medical-spiritual utopia in his 1939 book, Pain, Sex and Time. Heard argued that humanity had reached the limit of its current evolutionary phase, and needs to advance to the next level and become superbeings. This required intense spiritual training. Heard sees two possibilities. Either the mass of humanity will degenerate and go extinct, while a few special humans gather in spiritual ‘Collegiums’ and evolve to the next stage; or a new type of human arises, which he calls ‘Neo-Brahmins’, and through sheer charisma they lead humanity into a ‘new order’. This goes beyond liberal democracy, which Heard says is ruled by lower appetites, and is instead a medical-spiritual caste-based theocracy with one central goal, “the further evolution of consciousness beyond individuality.” He writes:

This new order would be non-violent, he insists, though he also says all of humanity would be guided by an ‘International Police Force’, a cross between policemen, psychiatrists and priests, dedicated to helping humanity achieve ‘complete liberation from the self’. Again, this is a rejection of secular, liberal, multicultural society in favor of a medical-mystical theocratic cult.¹¹