I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of Erik Davis’ High Weirdness. If I may have come across the title before, what brought it to my attention right now is that my oldest and closest friend is reading the physical book, the first serious nonfiction he has read in a long time. I was curious about what finally pulled my friend out of his apathetic depression and video game addiction. While at his house last week, I perused his copy to get a sense of it, partly to appraise it and decide if I was also interested. Though I’ve read other works by Davis, it’s been a long time. I was reminded of how much he is my kind of writer, one who is a voracious reader.

The topic in his book explores the lives of three lesser known thinkers: Philip K. Dick (PKD), Robert Anton Wilson (RAW), and Terence McKenna — he could’ve made it a quaternity with William S. Burroughs (WSB). I’ve long been familiar with them. In skimming through the book, I realized the extent to which Davis’ numerous influences overlap with my own. This includes all the new agey literature like Richard Bachman’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull that I grew up with in the Unity Church and Science of Mind, as well as the far end of the unruly weird as exemplified by Jacques Vallée’s Passport to Magonia — both mentioned by Davis.

As representative of different flavors of disreputable low-brow culture, it’s not a typical selection of reading material, even for the idiosyncratic self-education program of a run-of-the-mill autodidact. That’s the point of his focusing on those three, as they give voice to that unusual style of reading widely and promiscuously, following trails into dark woods, tracking scents down rabbit holes, and slumming in back alleys. It’s a lack of concern for respectability or, in the case of PKD, a failure to achieve that respectability in how his attempt at mainstream literature was a flop.

With that thought in mind, I sensed a resonance with a recent topic that came up again in my writings (To Know or Not to Know). As an undereducated working class intellectual, my curiosity isn’t domesticated and housetrained, doesn’t neatly fit into typical academic silos or conventional mainstream genres. My intellect has a mind of its own. I simply go where curiosity leads and my curiosity is insatiable. It’s not an option for me to not think about things, to control my wild mind by choosing what to accept into my psyche or not — it all goes in willy-nilly where it forms creative chaos.

In that recent piece linked above, I was thinking about what it means, what causes it. I came up with various possible psychological explanations in the main text and in the comments section: personality traits (openness to experience, openness to ideas, intellect), personality facets (tolerance for uncertainty, ambiguity, and cognitive dissonance), psychiatric symptoms (depressive realism, anhedonia, dissociation, derealization), etc. But as I listened to Erik Davis narrating his own book, another possibility occurred to me, one that I’ve considered before in other contexts.

What Davis was talking about, as I fell asleep last night, has to do with one of my favorite ideas that I picked up from PKD — call it divine trash, God in the gutter, or, if you want to be theologically fancy, deus absconditus (hidden god; e.g., Jesus or Zeus appearing as a beggar, the least among us). It’s what is typically suppressed, ignored, and unseen. It appears as worthless, acting akin to what I call a symbolic conflation in hiding behind a symbolic proxy, in being obscured by the fantasies of the Burkean moral imagination (“Why are you thinking about this?”; Moral Imagination: Conservative vs Traditional, Reactionary vs Radical; etc).

This cultural detritus tends to get shoved off into places few venture, tends to get projected upon the stigmatized and oppressed (minorities, immigrants, unhoused, mentally ill, disabled, incarcerated, institutionalized, etc). This includes druggies like PKD, RAW, and Mckenna. But Davis makes an interesting point. If part of the intellectual low class, these three also represent social privilege, albeit not socioeconomic class privilege (Being in the World, According to Privilege or Its Lack). This is the typical profile of the gleaner of trash, of the adventurers into the high weird, of the psychonaut.

Being privileged, even when down and out, offers one a certain advantage and confidence. It’s not that there can’t be any costs and consequences. In falling into depression, it did lead to my own suicidal attempts, along with a generally unhealthy and self-destructive lifestyle. Yet being a white man does give one, as cannot be denied, a certain devil-may-care freedom, a cavalier disregard. That isn’t the lived reality, for example, of a poor minority with no benefit of the doubt, no second chances.

There is a reason a white man, such as myself, can more easily and carelessly tempt psychological breakdown. When at my lowest of lows in my late teens while in poverty, I was offered, accepted, and imbibed LSD without knowing or particularly caring what it was. Sure, part of it is simply personality, an extreme expression of ‘openness to experience’. But it helped that I was raised without major trauma in the white upper middle class. Even as I expected to die young or have some other bad fate, I was still able to maintain a certain amount of disconnect from harsh realities.

It’s not only that I was raised in the white upper middle class but also was, at the time (and still am), living in a white upper middle class community, that of a liberal college town (Iowa City, IA). In my youthful psychedelic experiments, I usually didn’t follow proper protocol. I had no worries about set and setting, nor had any backup plans. Yet I never had a bad trip. Even once when getting some bad acid, I ended up vomiting multiple times and curling up on my bed while hallucinating. I just waited it out and I was fine.

As another example, I once took LSD by myself and wandered into a nearby park. Mistakenly thinking I found a secluded spot, I was later tongue-lashed by some creature, probably a passing dog being walked, although as far as I knew it could’ve been an overly friendly homeless person who wanted to know how I tasted. I was so out of it that the experience of being licked by a tongue became my entire reality. I was oblivious to all else and completely helpless, not something most would enjoy.

Yet even then it didn’t send me into panic, just amused me, and I laughed. Part of my carefree mood was that, if unconsciously, I knew I wasn’t in danger. I wasn’t going to be robbed, beat up, raped, or killed. No one was likely to call the police or other emergency services. This is the kind of town where people are more familiar with psychedelics. If the walker of the dog may have shook their head at my sorry state, they weren’t likely going to bother me and intend me ill will. The ‘dog’ too was, apparently, a kind creature.

To get back to the main idea, divine trash, there is another aspect that came to mind. Though it might be white men who have the privilege of diving into the deep to find pearls to be brought back to the surface, whether or not they cast those pearls before the swine of mainstream culture, those most intimately in touch with the dirt and grime are more often than not of entirely different demographics. Those are the people who are cast out and not allowed back in, hence less able to play the role of trickster in bringing the darkness into light.

But being much further down, buried in the muck and mire, does have its advantages as well. Such conditions are fertile for transformation, typically in unpredictable ways. Think of blacks who, fleeing the terror of sundown towns and mob lynching, became concentrated in Northern inner cities. If a bad situation in one sense, as redlining kept them trapped there, it simultaneously offered a rare opportunity. So many people crowded together with the same shared problem meant they could mass organize in a way that wasn’t possible in rural areas, particularly the South.

The result, after generations of struggle, was to finally achieve success in a nationwide civil rights movement with Northern white and Jewish allies who joined them in actions down in the Deep South during the Freedom Rides. Sometimes the solution is to be found in the problem itself, or rather the problem is a crisis portending opportunity. It’s another way of speaking about God in the gutter, that which is of hidden value. It’s precisely because it goes unseen that it’s so potentially powerful in upending the social order, in changing the collective mind.

One wonders if we are now in a similar situation. Take an entirely different area. There are the real worries about numerous social problems, such as the changes media are having. But as the tech oligarchy is seeking to control us, they may have put us in a something akin to an inner city ghetto. While alienating and deranging us in many ways, the internet and social media has forced a remixing of society. Secondary orality (electronic; see Marshall McLuhan & Walter J. Ong) and tertiary orality (digital; see Robert Logan) has driven people into new group identities, but ones that cross old boundaries of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, etc. And so opens in new directions (Jay Hancock, It’s the End of the Word as We Know It).

Something has escaped Pandora’s box. It means unpredictable results that the elite can’t control and predetermine. This brings back in the issue of the two categories mentioned: privileged, if only relative, and underprivileged. The two, arguably, are inseparable as part of the same movement. Each holds a piece of the puzzle, each playing a separate but necessary role. It’s why, during the 1960s, the counterculture coincided with civil rights activism. The boundaries were being pushed in all directions, until they broke out in ways sometimes unsuspected and unforeseen.

One of the greatest of privileges is that of high ‘openness to experience’. It’s nearly impossible to develop and maintain this trait under stress and duress, fear and anxiety, risk and threat, scarcity and desperation, trauma and overwhelm. So, even if the pearl is buried in the mud, those in the best position to lift it up and bring it to the surface are those with the privilege of ‘openness’, as curiosity and exploratory behavior. That is what I was thinking about in terms of my own style of thinking, my inability to ignore info that is inconvenient, to dismiss ideas that are uncomfortable.

This privilege is a power potentially used for the common good, rather than mere personal interests. Those of us with greater opportunity and access can choose how to wield it. Arnold Mindell talks of how, in a group, there will be someone who ends up the carrier and voice of what’s been collectively rejected and repressed. If that yoke is placed upon the underprivileged, the individuals will likely be scapegoated. But someone with more privilege can consciously take on that role to represent it, give it force and legitimacy. That is how I see my purpose as a thinker and writer. In being semi-privileged while closer to the bottom of society, I’m in the position to bridge between the two worlds.