Ego tripping: Why do psychedelics "enlighten" some people — and make others giant narcissists?

In the 1968 counterculture classic “Wild in the Streets,” a musician in his early 20s petitions to lower the voting age in the United States to 14. “I think sometimes when people talk about ego death, maybe what they're referring to is what you might call total ego dissolution: a state of consciousness in which there is no experiential sense of self at all.” Letheby has been studying the nexus of psychedelics and philosophy for several years. He says scientists have worked to quantify “ego dissolution” in relation to psychedelics, developing simple questionnaires that can rate the level of ego death a person experiences during a trip. "When people talk about ego death, maybe what they're referring to is what you might call total ego dissolution: a state of consciousness in which there is no experiential sense of self at all.” But pretty quickly in our conversation we hit a controversial philosophical roadblock, one that has been debated for a long time. “There's capitalists having intense psychedelic experiences, blowing their f**king brains out, but still processing the experiences in such a way as to reinforce the worst of themselves,” Rushkoff said in an interview with Salon.