Reminds me of the Bill Hicks quotes about those few who come back to tell us, "Don't be afraid! Life is just a game!" We then kill those people.
pseudononamouse nailed the thread for me. Psychedelics can help us think about something in a new way, but it's dangerous to romanticise them or treat them as ethical beings with a sense of agency. I'm a firm believer that any meaningful "content" we encounter comes from the unconscious, not elves in another dimension teaching us how to live or something.
I'm personally halfway between Nietszche and Lacan in terms of ethics - or perhaps a combination of the two, I have a close friend who insists they are one and the same revelation. Nietzsche teaches us to think ethics beyond the confines of good and evil. Of course, his whole 'deal' is will to power. To Nietzsche, desire is the ultimate truth of ethics. Moral codes are ways to hide from the full force of our desire, to avoid owning up to it. Nietzsche ultimately teaches us to be active and not reactive; rather than waiting for the outside world to give us an ethical situation to respond to, ethics is about how _we_ choose to go out an AFFECT the world rather than how we think/worry about its likely means of EFFECTING us. A lot of modern philosophers run with that idea of affect/effect and active/reactive. A lot of people seem to think Nietzsche was a Nazi, which is totally untrue. His little sister, however, became one after his death and edited many of his works. He was pretty apolitical himself, but Nazism is all about submission to a leader and Nietzsche would hate that aspect of it at the very least. Plus, feeling the need to harm others to feel good about yourself is reactive, and what Nietzsche calls ressentiment (basically resentment) - not a good way to live life at all. A Nietzschean 'hero' would come to terms with his own existence and relation to the world and learn to love it as it is rather than becoming obsessed with 'purifying' or 'perfecting' external reality by purging its undesirable aspects. It's obvious how that critique applies to Hitler, but in general this is a criticism Nietzsche has of anyone who lives stuck in resentment or concerns about others.
Lacan is the neo-Freudian I always wax poetic (read: ramble) about. His ethical insight is a bit simpler to explaim, IMO. Psychoanalysis teaches us that codified morality (some code of behavior that tells us whether any possible action should be seen as right or wrong) is also just an attempt to avoid confronting our own agency, to make all our decisions in advance when we decide on a code to follow so we never have to own up to a difficult moral choice again - "I just followed the rules," after all. Ultimately, Lacan concludes that, despite our best intentions, the real basis for any such system is our own hidden desire, usually to be a part of a system that tells us who we are and gives us a stable identity. Anyway, long story short, to Lacan, ethics means making a decision which is grounded neither in self-interested pursuit of pleasure nor in some pre-established code of good behavior, but is a decision we reach in the moment, as a totally subjective individual act not grounded in any appeal to some authority beyond your own agency.
In other words, while I don't think it's *un*ethical for someone to say "I don't hit people because violence is always wrong," I find it much *more* impressive on an ethical level when someone without any such "rule" is confronted with a situation where violence is obviously the easy way out but still refuses to do it because it just feels wrong. It is only at these moments that our subjective agency truly breaks free of the narrow-minded pursuit of desire in its various forms and we are forced to confront that infinitely deep void at the heart of our being. While that void is normally confronted as a terrifying lack of reality or presence, in these moments of ethical decision we can think the void positively, as the depth of our own infinite freedom. There is nothing that is at once as wonderful and as horrifying a gift as our own subjective freedom, after all.
At any rate, psychedelics have certainly been a part of my life and have helped me reach the philosophic conclusions I ultimately have, but no amount of acid could replace the books I've read or the conversations I've had about them. Psychedelics can grant a new perspective on something, but in my opinion they don't typically raise questions that weren't already there at least in your unconscious at some level, if that makes sense (sidenote: I'm increasingly a fan of ending complex thoughts about drugs or psychoanalysis (usually the combination of the two) with 'if that makes sense'. I shall avoid the urge to ramble on for another page psychoanalysing myself about that ; ).
(I'm serious, I'm not trying to be a smart-ass. There are multitudes of different ways to live a life, if the way you're living doesn't fulfill you then think up a way that will and bust your ass trying to make it happen. Life is too short to bullshit around on stuff like that, people gotta live a life that makes them happy.
