A billionaire wants to dose the world against the twenty-first century. The idea is more interesting, and more wrong, than it first appears.

In March of 2026, Christian Angermayer — biotech financier, founder and chairman of the psychedelic pharma company AtaiBeckley, largest shareholder in the same — published a short essay with a large claim. Its title was Psychedelics: The Missing Tool for a Prosperous and Human AI Future, and its argument, stripped to the bone, runs like this. The danger of artificial intelligence is not the machine. It is us. Specifically, it is the transition: the interval in which half the world's jobs vanish and several billion people are asked to rebuild their sense of purpose from scratch, at speed, without a manual. Humans, Angermayer notes, have a terrible record with sudden change. Last time the ground moved this fast, we produced two world wars. His proposed prophylactic is a controlled substance. An annual psychedelic session, he suggests, might one day sit in the medicine cabinet beside the statins — a preventive dose against the coming epidemic of what he calls adjustment disorder.

It is easy to laugh at this. A man who sells psychedelics has concluded that what civilisation needs is more psychedelics; the disclaimer at the foot of his own essay concedes, with disarming candour, that as founder, chairman and largest shareholder he is naturally biased regarding its potential. One could stop there. But that would be a mistake, because buried inside the sales pitch is a genuinely serious question, and the interesting thing about the essay is the precise point at which the serious question and the sales pitch come apart. This is a note about that seam.

The good bones

Start with what is right, because a surprising amount of it is.

Angermayer's central move — the problem is not the end state, it is the transition — is not a psychedelic idea at all. It is an economic one, and the economists are arriving at the same doorstep by an entirely different road. In a 2025 paper with the cheerful title Techno-Feudalism and the Rise of AGI, the Newcastle economist Pascal Stiefenhofer argues that machine intelligence is historically novel precisely because it is both a worker and an owner — it produces value while concentrating the ownership of that value in whoever controls the infrastructure. His prescription is a renegotiated social contract: universal AI dividends, progressive taxation, decentralised governance. Note what is doing the work there. Angermayer and Stiefenhofer diagnose the same disease. One reaches for a molecule; the other reaches for the tax code. Hold that thought; we will need it.

The clinical hook is legitimate too. Adjustment disorder is not a coinage. It sits in the diagnostic manuals — the ICD-11 defines it as a maladaptive response to an identifiable stressor, arriving within three months of the thing that caused it — and involuntary job loss is one of its best-documented triggers. In one study of people who had lost work involuntarily, better than a quarter met the full diagnostic criteria. So the scaffolding is sound. Change frightens people; frightened people get ill; there is a name for the illness. None of that is controversial.

And the history rhymes, as Angermayer says it does. The years from 1850 to 1914 really were a technological detonation — telephone, electricity, the automobile — greeted by elites with rapture and by everyone else with dread, and it is not a wild reading to trace a line from that dread, through the search for someone to blame, to the ideologies that burned the century down. Fear, as the man quoting Dune correctly notes, is a mind-killer. So far, so defensible. The essay has good bones.

Where the foot slips

Then it reaches for anthropology, and this is where it puts its foot through the floor.

To reassure us that a jobless future need not be a catastrophe, Angermayer offers a familiar consolation: our ancestors barely worked. Before agriculture, he writes — crediting Yuval Harari — hunter-gatherers spent only a few hours per day on subsistence, and passed the rest sleeping, socialising, telling stories round the fire. Idleness, in this telling, is our natural state; the forty-hour week is the aberration; a world of universal basic income and abundant leisure is not a fall but a homecoming.

This is one of the most seductive ideas in all of anthropology, and one of the most thoroughly dismantled. It descends from Marshall Sahlins's 1966 lecture The Original Affluent Society, which took Richard Lee's fieldwork among the Ju/'hoansi of the Kalahari — who appeared to secure their needs in twelve to nineteen hours a week — and spun it into a thesis: foragers are affluent not because they have much but because they want little. It went viral before virality had a name. Time magazine called the Kalahari an Elysian community. David Graeber suggested Sahlins deserved a Nobel.

The trouble is that the number was wrong, and it was wrong in a revealing way. Sahlins had counted the hours spent hunting and gathering — and stopped counting there. He left out the walk home. He left out the butchering, the food processing, the toolmaking, the firewood, the childcare, all the unglamorous labour that happens back at camp. By 1979 Lee himself had redone the sums and arrived at nearly forty hours a week. When the anthropologist Vivek Venkataraman and colleagues repeated the exercise across every well-studied foraging society, folding in the work that Sahlins had waved away, the average came out at forty to forty-five hours — which is to say, almost exactly the industrial working week the story was invented to indict. A separate meta-analysis of two hundred–odd studies put foragers at roughly six and a half hours of work a day against the farmer's and factory-worker's nearly nine: a real gap, and a meaningful one, but a country mile from a few hours.

And the campfire idyll quietly omits the bill. The pre-agricultural world Angermayer invokes as a lost paradise was one in which, on current estimates, only around half of children lived to fifteen; a world of high infant mortality, endemic disease, and — some seventy thousand years ago — a population bottleneck that came within a hair of ending the species outright. You may still prefer it. Venkataraman, who has actually lived among foragers, movingly argues that we have lost something real in the trade. But you cannot sell it as a low-effort Eden, because it was neither.

Why does this matter for Angermayer's argument rather than merely embarrassing one paragraph of it? Because the hunter-gatherer is not decoration. It is load-bearing. It is the move that lets him say worklessness is natural — and therefore that the coming unemployment is a return to something rather than a rupture, a psychological adjustment rather than a structural catastrophe. Naturalise the destination and the only remaining problem is helping people feel at ease about arriving there. Which is, conveniently, a problem a pill can solve. Kick the anthropology away and the destination stops looking like a homecoming and starts looking like what Stiefenhofer was describing — a question of who owns what — and no molecule has ever answered that.

The leap of faith

Which brings us to the load-bearing wall itself, the beam the whole structure rests on: that psychedelics can do the job at all.

Here the essay's honest evidence and its grand claim are separated by a chasm it never acknowledges crossing. The honest evidence is real and it is narrow: AtaiBeckley and Compass Pathways have produced striking results treating treatment-resistant depression — a diagnosed illness, in a clinical population, under supervision. The grand claim is that an annual dose could immunise a healthy population against the psychological weather of civilisational upheaval. Between "this compound lifts severe depression in sick patients" and "this compound will help billions of well people metabolise the collapse of the labour market" lies an inferential leap the width of the thing itself. No trial supports the second claim, and none can yet, because preventive psychedelic dosing of the well is not an approved indication anywhere on earth — it is a hope with a market attached.

The statin analogy, doing so much quiet persuasive work, is where the sleight of hand lives. A statin corrects a measurable biochemical fault — too much of a specific lipid — in a specific individual. Angermayer's proposal treats the human response to mass economic dispossession as though it were the same kind of thing: a deficiency, sitting inside the person, correctable at the level of the individual nervous system. But the fear he so accurately diagnoses is not a chemical imbalance. It is, quite often, an accurate perception of a real situation. The person who is frightened of losing their job to a machine is not suffering a cognitive distortion in need of correction. They are reading the room. To medicate that response is not obviously to heal it. It may only be to make it quieter.

There is a name for the intellectual manoeuvre underneath all this, and a literature that names it. A 2025 discourse analysis of the tech elite calls it the techno-supremacy doctrine — the reflex to frame diverse social, political and economic problems as narrow technical ones with a single technical fix, a reframing that lets the harder, slower, structural work go quietly unfunded. Read through that lens, dose the population against adjustment disorder is a pharmacological answer to what was, a paragraph earlier, a distributional problem. If the true bottleneck is who owns the machines and how their output is shared, then optimising the serenity of the dispossessed is not a solution. It is a sedative mistaken for one. The psychedelic advocates at Psymposia — no enemies of the drugs themselves — have put the point more bluntly, filing Angermayer's vision under dosing the water.

The steel version

It would be too easy, and slightly dishonest, to end on the sneer. So here is the strongest form of the argument, the version worth taking seriously — which is a good deal smaller than the one Angermayer is selling.

Conditional on a just transition actually being achieved — the dividends paid, the contract renegotiated, the ownership question answered — the residual difficulty of adapting to a radically altered world, at a pace evolution never rehearsed us for, is genuine, and there is real signal that psychedelics help human beings sit with change: loosening fixed patterns, softening fear, restoring some flexibility to a frightened mind. That is a defensible, evidence-adjacent, genuinely humane claim. It is also enormously more modest than without psychedelics, an AI-driven future might fail. The gap between those two sentences is exactly the gap between a working chemist and a chairman talking his own book, and the essay's rhetoric depends on our not noticing when we cross from the first to the second.

The final irony is one the essay walks right up to and fails to see. Venkataraman closes his own account of the foragers not with the campfire but with the Jevons Paradox: the nineteenth-century observation that making an engine more efficient did not reduce coal consumption but increased it, because efficiency breeds demand. Every labour-saving technology since has told the same joke on us. The smartphone did not hand back our afternoons; it filled them, and then fractured what was left. The promised leisure never comes, because the freed-up hours are immediately colonised by new work. If AI runs true to this two-hundred-year pattern, the danger is not a species drowning in idle time and needing a molecule to bear the emptiness. It is a species that automated half its jobs and somehow ended up busier, more fragmented, and more anxious than before — and was offered, by way of remedy, an annual dose to help it not mind.

Fear is the mind-killer. Quite so. But a fear that reads the situation correctly is not a malfunction to be dosed away. Sometimes it is the last part of the mind still doing its job.

The Cabinet of Marginalia collects the speculative, the contrarian, and the not-yet-settled. Primary source: Christian Angermayer, "Psychedelics: The Missing Tool for a Prosperous and Human AI Future" (Substack, 19 March 2026). On the anthropology: Vivek V. Venkataraman, "Lessons from the foragers" (Aeon, 2023); Marshall Sahlins, "The Original Affluent Society" (1966); Ross Sackett's meta-analyses via the standard summaries. On the economics: Pascal Stiefenhofer, "Techno-Feudalism and the Rise of AGI" (2025). On the pattern: "Tracing the Techno-Supremacy Doctrine" (arXiv, 2025).