WHY I REFUSE TO PLAY IN CHRIS BENNETT’S SANDBOX: The Power of Reframing and the Collapse of Psychedelic Pseudo-History

 

 

Chris Bennett—and the wider psychedelic/cannabis subculture he represents—expected a familiar response from me: a defensive, point-by-point rebuttal, delivered on the battlefield he chose. They anticipated a reactive posture, a back-and-forth inside their chosen interpretive universe, where their entheogenic myths and self-congratulatory narratives operate as the unwritten “rules of engagement.” Instead, I did the unthinkable in their worldview: I refused and denounced the frame entirely.

Rather than arguing within the psychedelic narrative architecture, I examined the architecture itself—and found it rotten to the core. What fell apart was not merely Bennett’s particular claims about the Bāb or about me; what collapsed was the entire epistemic apparatus behind those claims. And once that edifice is exposed as hollow, no amount of frantic rebuttal from Bennett can resurrect it. This is not a debate. This is an autopsy.

 

The Game Bennett Hoped to Play—And Why I Declined

The psychedelic subculture depends on one key illusion: that its worldview possesses some special interpretive legitimacy. This is why Bennett always tries to drag critics into his domain:

• “psychedelic insight”
• “plant medicine epistemology”
• “entheogenic interpretations of religion”
• cannabis-fuelled historical fantasias
• shamanic cosplay masquerading as scholarship

Had I responded point-by-point within that framework, I would have validated the assumption that his lens is a legitimate way to interpret:

• history
• metaphysics
• the Bāb
• or myself

Instead, I chose a simpler and far more effective path: I dismantled and denounced the entire framework itself. When the frame is shown to be structurally invalid, everything inside it loses meaning.

 

The Psychedelic/Cannabis Subculture Has No Epistemic Authority

This was the real rupture. Once one exposes the psychedelic subculture as a commercial spirituality, an ideological marketplace, a pseudo-intellectual drug fandom, a domain dominated by glorified dealers posing as shamans, a scene infiltrated by far-right mythologies, a landscape littered with colonial projections, then Bennett ceases to be a “researcher.” I take Marxism and anti-capitalist philosophy as living traditions, not as costumes. Bennett, by contrast, is a willing beneficiary of the capitalist drug-culture economic-complex—a spawn of the very system he pretends to resist behind carefully curated Antifa T-shirt selfies. He becomes what he is: a drug evangelist wearing the costume of a historian. His self-appointed authority evaporates. His “insights” cease to carry weight. His projections reveal their own fragility. The emperor has no clothes—only a bong.

 

Why a Point-by-Point Rebuttal Would Have Strengthened Him

Had I responded in the traditional “scholarly rebuttal” mode, the psychedelic subculture would have received a gift: the illusion that their lens demands serious engagement. But the psychedelic worldview does not deserve academic parity. It is not a tradition. It is not a school of thought. It is not an interpretive method. It is not scholarship. It is branding. It is commerce. It is identity-performance around substances. One does not debate theology with a lifestyle influencer. One does not debate metaphysics with a cannabis personality. One does not debate history with someone who approaches primary sources like paraphernalia. Therefore, the proper response is not line-by-line argument. The proper response is category error.

 

Why My Past Ayahuasca Advocacy Doesn’t Save Bennett—It Exposes Him

Predictably, Bennett may attempt a clumsy rejoinder: “But Wahid used to support Ayahuasca!” This argument is dead on arrival.

First: People evolve. Intellectual maturation is normal. Second: My critique is of the subculture, not the molecule. He cannot rebut sociology with autobiography. Third: The fact that I now reject the psychedelic framework completely makes me:

• an insider-turned-critic,
• someone who saw the culture from within and rejected its illusions,
• someone whose current metaphysical work has transcended that stage entirely.

Fourth: His bringing it up would reveal his worst flaw: projecting his subcultural identity onto others who do not share it. He has tried to drag me into his drug-centric universe. I refuse the invitation and denounce it categorically.

 

I Am Not In His Ontological World—And That Is Why He Cannot Touch Me

This is the part Bennett and his associates cannot tolerate: I do not share their metaphysics, their worldview, their epistemology, their rituals, the values, or their identity structures. They live in a subculture that:

• romanticizes drugs as sacraments
• mythologizes their habits into theology
• spiritualizes their addictions
• defends their substances with crusader ferocity
• manufactures shamans out of commercial personalities
• projects drug mysticism onto every historical phenomenon

I live in a metaphysical lineage rooted in:

• Neoplatonic Illuminationist ontology,
• Akbarian metaphysics,
• Esoteric Qur’anic hermeneutics,
• The Bayān
• philosophical rigor,
• contemplative discipline
• genuine revolutionary praxis.

Our universes do not overlap. His framework cannot interpret mine. Mine can analyze and deconstruct his to shreds. This is the fundamental asymmetry.

 

Why Bennett Cannot Recover the Debate Now

By exposing the psychedelic/cannabis subculture as intellectually bankrupt, I have accomplished three things simultaneously:

1.     I have deprived Bennett of his home turf.

2.     I have denied him the authority to frame reality.

3.     I have situated the conversation at a level he cannot ascend to.

He cannot follow me into:

• metaphysics
• Islamic intellectual history
• Illuminationist ontology
• textual analysis
• doctrinal philosophy
• esoteric hermeneutics
• the Bayān
• intellectual self-critique
• or even Marxian theory.

He only has one tool: drug-culture projection. And I have just burned that tool at the root. Any future attack he makes will now appear:

• disingenuous
• insecure
• formulaic
• reactive
• ideologically biased
• commercially motivated
• and above all: unserious

This is why reframing is the highest art in any intellectual conflict. Perhaps this is the lesson I needed to teach Bennett like a Zen master whacking his student over the head.

 

Why I Stand by Everything I Have Ever Said About the Bahá’ís

Before closing, let me state this without qualification or any hesitation: I stand by every analysis, every critique, every condemnation, and historical observation I have ever made about the Bahá’í faith, its community, its institutions, its figures, its origins, and the ideological machinery surrounding it. My positions have not shifted because they were never rooted in subcultural fashion or fleeting pseudo-intellectual trends. They are grounded in:

• primary texts,
• historical documentation,
• philosophical analysis,
• comparative metaphysics,
• doctrinal study, and
• lived experience within a tradition that predates, surpasses, and intellectually overshadows the corporate pseudo-religiosity of the Bahá’í faith
• anti-colonialism
• anti-capitalism.

Whether addressing:

• the Pahlavi-era propaganda pipeline,
• missionary distortions in the Orientalist archive,
• the sociological mechanics of Shoghi Effendi and post-Shoghi Effendi centralization,
• the erasure of Bābī identity under colonially-facilitated Bahá’í consolidation,
• or the weaponization of “covenant” rhetoric to enforce fascistic institutional orthodoxy—my critiques and condemnations remain consistent, substantiated, and internally coherent.

They do not arise from intoxicated cannabis fantasies, psychedelic reconstructionism, or the commercial myth-making that animates Bennett’s worldview. They arise from the same commitments that animate the entire Illuminationist and Akbarian projects: truthfulness, metaphysical clarity, and fidelity to the reality of phenomena as they are—not as ideological structures demand they be.

So if Bennett wishes to defend figures such as Susan S. Maneck, he is welcome to do so—but he should understand exactly whom he is defending. Maneck remains one of the most widely discredited online Bahá’í polemicists of the 1990s and early 2000s, particularly among those who witnessed the era of hyper-aggressive digital “covenant enforcement” on early internet forums. Her reputation became so toxic within those circles that even long-standing Bahá’í loyalists—figures like Mark Foster, himself once a prominent defender of the Administrative Order—publicly distanced themselves from her conduct and rhetoric. Among dissident and ex-Bahá’í communities, her name became shorthand for the most authoritarian tendencies of that era: a symbol of institutional zealotry and doctrinal policing pushed to extremes. This is not my personal invention; it is the historical memory of those online communities. Maneck came to be regarded, not affectionately, as a kind of digital apparatchik—an enforcer of ideological conformity whose behaviour many associated with the worst excesses of centralized cultic religious power. If Bennett chooses to align himself with that legacy, that is his prerogative and he is more than welcome to it. But he should at least be aware that he is defending someone who, in the eyes of virtually every critical observer of the period—Bahá’í, ex-Bahá’í, and dissident alike—embodied the most heavy-handed face of fanatical Bahá’í institutional dogmatism qua fascism.

Thus, Bennett’s failed attempt to drag me into the hallucinatory universe of psychedelic pseudo-history changes nothing. The historical and philosophical issues I have raised for thirty years concerning the Bahá’ís remain exactly as I have articulated them. I neither apologize nor retract anything I have said. In fact, I stand by all of it. And what I have said will continue to stand long after the smoke of his subcultural theatrics clears. The Duginist doxxer of 2016 whom Bennett plagiarized also attempted this line of attack—and lived to regret it.

 

Conclusion: When You Reject the Battlefield, You Win the War

What happened here is simple:

• Bennett brought a knife to a metaphysics symposium.
• He tried to force a low-resolution worldview onto a high-resolution system.
• He attacked from a subcultural paradigm.
• I refused the paradigm.
• And by refusing it, I collapsed it.

This is why you will not see a defensive, footnoted, point-by-point rebuttal from me. I do not debate inside egocentric and delusional psychedelic sandboxes. I examine the sandbox itself, reveal its flimsy plastic walls, knock it down, and walk away while its self-appointed guardians shout at the clouds. The conversation has moved on. He will not be invited to follow because he is an unhinged clown with no shred of integrity—and he definitely cannot keep up with me.