Guest essay: Rob Faure Walker - The Chemically-Induced Immaturity of Toxic Masculinity
Rob Faure Walker, author of the forthcoming Revol Press book 'Radical Jung', on the drug-induced psychology of ketamine-using tech oligarchs.
Rob Faure Walker is the author of 2024’s Love and The Market, on economics and the Enlightenment, and 2022’s The Emergence of Extremism.
He returns this year with Radical Jung: Emancipatory Politics and the Search for Meaning in the Ruins of Late Capitalism for Revol Press.
This guest essay is part of Bram E. Gieben’s ongoing essay series Crisis Masculinity, published by Strange Exiles.
Carl Jung, the father of deep psychology, dedicated his life to understanding the hidden aspects of our psyche. Infamous amongst these parts of ourselves is the shadow, that part of us from which our least desirable thoughts, feelings and actions come. Uncovering our shadow can help us to understand why we sometimes act in ways that we regret or are ashamed of, or even in ways that we don’t realise are causing harm. On the face of it, we might attribute much of the horror in the world today to the shadow — in my book Radical Jung (out May 2026) I explore the increasing privilege of the 1% whose wealth grows unencumbered by the global oligarchy that we live under.
Novelist Kim Stanley Robinson suggests that this immense privilege, which “is more often seen in men than women”, functions as a shadow to their increasingly despotic rule over us and the environment. These “privileged and entitled” men:
…become extremely angry when their privileges and sense of entitlement are being taken away. If then their choice gets reduced to admitting they are in error or destroying the world, a reduction they often feel to be the case, the obvious choice for them is to destroy the world; for they cannot admit they have ever erred.
This is explored in The Ministry of the Future, Stanley Robinson’s fictionalised account of how humanity grapples with and ultimately makes the right choices to mitigate the global catastrophe of out of control human led climate change. Sadly, this utopia remains a fiction, as precious few national governments or industries are making meaningful efforts to address the climate emergency. Yet, as Trump signs more executive orders for the destruction of the natural habitats that might help to mitigate the worst aspects of climate instability, and as the most aggressive coloniser of our minds Mark Zuckerberg recently said that “most companies need more ‘masculine energy’”, we might understand the destructive rage of our privileged decision makers, and people more generally, as a way to avoid facing those aspects of themselves that are too painful to face. Uncovering these hidden aspects of the psyche — for everyone and not only for our maniacal leaders — was an overarching concern that Jung explored throughout his life’s work.
While we would all do well to engage in Jung’s “shadow work”, there are other aspects of our psyche that we neglect at our peril. Foremost amongst these are the gendered aspects of our selves. The masculine that Zuckerberg, Andrew Tate and their ilk call for is associated with logic and rationality, the Greek Logos. The feminine, or Eros, is associated with love, care, and desire. These aspects of the psyche are archetypal. That is, they are remnants of the evolutionary history of our mind, and shared by us all. As such, the shadow and gendered aspects of our psyche have a profound and healing ancient wisdom if we can integrate them into our conscious awareness. This “individuation process” of the shadow, gendered, and other hidden aspects of our psyche was fundamental to Jung’s approach. He describes it as:
…a relatively rare occurrence, which is experienced only by those who have gone through the wearisome but, if the unconscious is to be integrated, indispensable business of coming to terms with the unconscious components of the personality.
This process is “indispensable” as our conscious agency demands that we understand the source of our feelings and actions. Without this understanding, we are merely the automata of the unconscious ghost in the machine.
Jung, along with his wife Emma, who developed much of their theory around gender, suggested that men were born into the rationalist disposition of Logos and women into the loving and caring disposition of Eros. Through the individuation process, we come to understand that these gendered dispositions always exist as a polarity within us. For those enmeshed in the rationalism of Logos, this is a process of coming to uncover the anima or feminine aspect of themselves. Likewise, those who spend their early life in the caring and loving disposition of Eros uncover the animus or masculine aspect of themselves via the individuation process.
When Jung was writing, homosexuality was deemed to be criminal and a psychological illness. Yet since then, and in the face of increasing opposition from the far right, millions of queered and trans lives show us that we don’t need to tie Logos, Eros, or the animus or anima to biological gender. Though, whether straight, queer, or trans, we ought to hang onto our appreciation of the polarity between the aspects of gender that run through us.
Fundamental to Jungian psychology is dream analysis and interpretation. It is often through our dreams that these hidden aspects of ourselves start to emerge in symbolic form. Jung saw this as a recovery of a way of knowing that modernity had lost, yet could still be found in indigenous cultures and mythology from around the world.
Melissa Lucashenko explores how her indigenous Australian culture receives the constant guidance of “Dreamings”, and the disaster that ensues from Europeans “recognising no Dreamings at all”. A situation that results in our lives being “‘an endless nightmarish struggle for dominance over other men”. This is a situation that anyone alive today will be more than familiar with. Every strata of society seems to be dominated by this nightmarish struggle: welfare systems of care are gutted to enable the flow of more capital to the already wealthy; nature is destroyed for profit; murderous military action is threatened and enacted; online influencers like Tate sell the image of what it means to be a “real” man while systematically exploiting women for profit and sexual gratification — and even our interpersonal conversations are fraught with division.
Fellow indigenous Australian author and thinker Tyson Yunkaporta observes that Elderhood in his culture “comes with lots of exchanges between Men’s and Women’s business” — a theme that is masterfully portrayed in the 2020 film High Ground, that explores the genocide of native Australians by European settlers. While the Europeans are presented in traditionally gendered roles, the indigenous elders show an understanding of their nuanced and gendered sides. Thus, in the final scenes of the film, the leading elder man (played by Witiyana Marika) advises against violence and retribution, while the leading woman Esmerelda Marimowa calls for anger and revenge; for more destruction.
Following Yunkaporta, we can say that Tate’s promotion of the manosphere, Trump’s environmental destruction and phallic military projection, and Zuckerberg’s call for more “masculine energy” is telling of their immaturity. Despite their extreme wealth and power, these men have much to learn about themselves.
Jung’s individuation process is often brought on by a major life crisis. When we become overwhelmed by the trials of life, we are forced to find new dispositions to navigate our way through. The wealthy are not immune to the internal battles that we all face, and we know of fellow tech oligarch Elon Musk’s mental health difficulties because his discussion of the treatment of his depression with ketamine has received much media attention.
Musk’s choice of ketamine over the increasingly popular use of psilocybin for treating depression is telling of the different psychomimetic qualities of each drug. Ketamine is known for its dissociative effect. In a recent paper comparing the effects of ketamine and psilocybin, ketamine’s effects are described as “partial or complete loss of the normal integration between memories of the past, awareness of identity and immediate sensations, and control of bodily movements”. Psilocybin and its sister tryptamine alkaloids such as LSD and DMT on the other hand are enhancers of our minds, often drawing up distant and forgotten memories. And psychedelic-assisted psychiatry that was developed in the UK by Dr Ronald Sandison in the 1960s and 70s adopted a Jungian lens to work with the archetypal images that were manifest in the trips that these chemicals invariably induce.
So, while Musk may be receiving relief from his depression through his regular dissociative doses of ketamine, he is perhaps blocking himself from the elderhood that could otherwise be brought on by these struggles. In my own practice as an ecotherapist, I often work with patients who are spurred on to major life changes by episodes of depression. Yet I know almost as many who have been diverted from this change of life’s course when the effects of their prescribed antidepressants have kicked in. The effect of the individuation process and integration of the hidden aspects of our psyche is, once we have passed through the initial horror, to lead us towards a more aligned, harmonious and sustainable life. This leads us to wonder to what extent Musk, Tate, Trump, Zuckerberg and others’ destructive masculine behaviour is enabled by medication that stems the initial horror of the individuation process and prevents the uncovering of the archetypal (often feminine) elder wisdom that is so sorely needed to divert us from our destructive path.
Pre-order ‘Radical Jung’ from Revol Press
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