In 1979, a punk band from San Francisco recorded a song about the Governor of California. It was a joke, mostly. Jerry Brown was a Democrat, a Buddhist, a man who dated Linda Ronstadt and discussed limits and simplicity at a moment when America was in no mood for either.
The Dead Kennedys called him a "Zen fascist" and suggested, with cheerful malice, that he would one day run concentration camps fuelled by organic food. I’m not sure that anyway, even the band, took it entirely seriously.
They should have.
The word that the song never uses, but engages with constantly is purity. Jello Biafra wasn't writing a political science paper but structurally, “purity” runs all the way through it. The Zen fascist doesn't want to punish you out of hatred. He wants to cleanse you for your own good. He has done the work. He has achieved a higher state. And he would very much like you to achieve it too, whether you want to or not.
This is the thing about the politics of purity[1] that makes it so durable, and so dangerous: it doesn't require malice. It requires only the conviction that you know what clean looks like, and the will to impose it on others, for their own good.
Both the counterculture and the authoritarian right are obsessed with purity. The targets differ wildly — the body, the race, the culture, the blood, the food, the mind. But the cognitive shape is identical. And that shared shape is the on-ramp. It's how you can get from granola to fascism without ever feeling like you've made a wrong turn.
It’s August 1969. Half a million people are in a field in upstate New York, and Joni Mitchell is not among them. She watched Woodstock on a hotel television in New York City, having been advised by her manager not to go — there were television commitments, logistics, the usual stuff of a successful music career.
She wrote a song about Woodstock anyway. And it contains, in two lines, much of the ideology of the counterculture at its most hopeful and most revealing.
We are stardust, we are golden. This is the counterculture's central claim about human nature, compressed into eight words. We are not merely human — we are cosmic, made of the stuff that stars are made of. It's the Human Potential Movement set to music. Nobody listening to the song, then or now, hears it as elitist. It definitely wasn't intended as elitist. Mitchell was expressing something she genuinely felt, something that was, in its way, beautiful: a refusal of the diminishment that ordinary life, and the expectations of 1960s parents, impose.
But strip it down and look at the structure. We are golden is, first of all, a note about the rarity of humanity. Gold is rare because it's made in the hearts of stars. Humanity is rare, too.
But it's impossible to use "gold" as a metaphor without acknowledging that it is also a claim about elevated status. It contains a hierarchy. The person who knows they are made of stardust has access to a truth that others are missing. They have, in some meaningful sense, woken up to their own cosmic significance.
And if some people have woken up to this and others remain asleep — well, that's a ladder. Somebody is at the top of it, and some people are at the bottom.
Then the second line. And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden. The garden is Eden, of course. And Eden is not just nature. It is the prelapsarian state, the condition of original purity before contamination entered the world[2]. The Biblical Fall was a corruption. The desire to return to the garden is a desire to be clean again, to recover what was lost, to expel whatever (or whoever) defiled us.
This is, structurally, identical to blood and soil romanticism: there was a pure original state, we have been corrupted, we must return. The sandals and the jackboots are walking along the same path. The reasons for traveling that road might differ. The longing is the same.
None of this is Joni Mitchell's fault. She was not a fascist. She was not even close to a fascist. She was a profoundly humane artist, writing from genuine feeling at a genuine moment. But the point is not what she intended. The point is that the cultural water of the time was so thoroughly saturated with purity logic — so completely marinated in the idea that humanity had a golden original state from which it had fallen and to which it must return — that it was present in the most beautiful songs, sung by the most gifted people, at the most hopeful moment anyone could remember. And nobody seemed to notice. Nobody thought, “this is a purity myth”. And that meant no one really asked the obvious question: “pure, compared to what? Contaminated by what - or whom?”
Purity logic doesn't barge in. It usually arrives as poetry.
To understand how we got here from there, you have to go back to a place that appears, on the surface, to have nothing to do with politics at all.
Esalen. Big Sur. 1962.
A former Stanford wrestling champion named Dick Price and a former Stanford psychology student named Michael Murphy opened a retreat centre on the California coast. The premise was simple and, at the time, genuinely radical: human beings were capable of far more than ordinary life allowed. Psychology, spirituality, bodywork, psychedelics — all of these were tools for expansion. The potential was there, waiting. Most people just hadn't accessed it yet.
This was the Human Potential Movement, and it would produce some of the most ambitious and some of the most dangerous ideas of the late twentieth century, ones which are still haunting us today.
The ambition is easy to understand. The sixties were intoxicating — new therapies, new drugs, new ways of thinking about consciousness and the self. If ordinary human life was an artificial constraint, then removing the constraint was liberation. That felt good. It felt progressive. It felt a lot better than dying in a pointless war Vietnam.
What nobody wanted to examine too carefully was the hierarchy buried in the logic. If some people had unlocked their potential and others hadn't, that was, structurally speaking, a claim about superior and inferior human beings. The language was therapeutic. The underlying architecture was hierarchical.
The Human Potential Movement didn't create a new type of person. It created a new vocabulary for an ancient idea: that some people are simply more evolved than others, and that their higher development confers upon them special authority. The crystals and the encounter groups were the wrapping. Inside was something older and more troubling.
Stewart Brand noticed something in 1968. He put it on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog, a question he'd been trying to get NASA to answer for years: Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?
When the photo came — Earthrise, from Apollo 8 — it was a symbol of change. Here was the planet, fragile and whole and borderless. It became the emblem of a new kind of environmental consciousness, of global thinking, of the idea that humanity was a single tribe on a single fragile lifeboat. Brand put it on the cover of his catalogue and built a small media empire around the idea that individuals, armed with the right tools and the right information, could remake the world from the bottom up.
The Whole Earth Catalog was a genuinely strange object. Part hippie bible, part mail-order directory for geodesic dome components, it celebrated self-sufficiency, technology, and the idea that the right tools in the right hands could replace the need for institutions entirely. You didn't need the government. You didn't need corporations. You needed knowledge and will and the right equipment.
Fred Turner, in his 2006 book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, traced what happened next. The people who grew up with the Whole Earth Catalog went to Silicon Valley. They took the anti-institutionalism, the utopianism, the faith in individual transformation, and they applied it to computers. The personal computer wasn't just a machine. It was an instrument of consciousness expansion. The computer was the acid trip made silicon.
In 1995, two British academics named Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron looked at what Silicon Valley had become and named what they saw: the Californian Ideology. A bizarre but remarkably stable hybrid, countercultural bohemianism fused with aggressive free-market libertarianism. The commune and the stock option. Jefferson Airplane and Ayn Rand. And it seemed to work.
The contradiction at its heart was never resolved because resolving it was never the point. The point was the story it told about itself: that technology was liberation, that the market was freedom, that the people building this stuff were, in some meaningful sense, better — more creative, more visionary, more evolved — than the suits who'd run everything before. They were doing the Human Potential Movement's work with microchips instead of encounter groups.
In 1979, the same year the Dead Kennedys were warning San Francisco about Jerry Brown, a man named Werner Erhard was running something called est — Erhard Seminars Training[3]. You would pay to spend a weekend being berated by a trainer in a hotel conference room. You could not leave. You could not use the toilet without permission. By the end, if it worked, you would have broken through your own mental limitations and achieved a new relationship with responsibility — which, in est's vocabulary, meant accepting that everything that happened to you was, on some level, your own creation.
est was not fringe. It was fashionable. Celebrities did it. Business executives did it. It fed directly into the self-help industrial complex that would dominate the next four decades and make a lot of people pretty rich. Every single influencers you see selling a course around turning you into better you is, knowingly or unknowingly, following a path created by est.
It also made something explicit that the Human Potential Movement had kept implicit: that your suffering was your fault, that your failure was your fault, and that transcending both was a matter of will and clarity[4]. This was purity logic applied to the psyche. The contaminated mind — limited, victimised, stuck in old patterns — could be cleaned. The clean mind was free.
You can draw a straight line from est to the productivity cult of contemporary tech culture, to the biohacking movement, to the particular flavour of self-optimisation that has become the dominant religion of the Silicon Valley overclass. Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur who spends millions of dollars a year attempting to reverse his biological age, submitting his body to a programme of measurement and intervention so comprehensive it makes Victorian-era medical quackery look modest, is doing est with better lab equipment. He has decided his body is a problem to be solved. Contamination — entropy, age, ordinary human physicality — is to be defeated by will and resources.
Peter Thiel's investments in parabiosis — the transfusion of blood from younger bodies, in pursuit of the vitality it supposedly contains — has the quality of alchemy. Or, if you're feeling less charitable, something older and darker. This is a billionaire trying to absorb life from the young because he has decided that ordinary mortality is an affront. The purity obsession has become vampiric.
This image of the powerful feeding on youth to purchase their own escape from mortality is not new. In 1969 — the same year Joni Mitchell watched Woodstock on a hotel television — the science fiction writer Norman Spinrad published Bug Jack Barron, a novel whose central villain, Benedict Howard, runs a foundation dedicated to achieving human immortality. What he doesn't tell anyone is that the process works. It also requires children. The eternal life of the wealthy is purchased, directly and without metaphor, from the bodies of the young.
The novel was serialised in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds magazine and promptly condemned in Parliament, refused by WH Smith, and declared obscene. What the British establishment was reacting to, beneath the surface scandal, was probably the image itself — the transaction it made visible, the thing it refused to dress up. Spinrad was writing fiction. He was also writing a critique. Faced with the same choices as Benedict Howard, Thiel continues writing cheques.
There is a philosopher who sits at the centre of all of this, largely unacknowledged, and his name is Friedrich Nietzsche.
The Dead Kennedys knew this, even if they didn't say it directly. California Über Alles — the title tells you everything. Über isn't just a German intensifier. It points at Nietzsche's Übermensch, the Superman, the figure who has transcended ordinary human limitation. The word sits in the middle of the title of the song like a splinter.
But Joni Mitchell heard it too, in her own way, on that hotel television in 1969. We are stardust. We are, each of us, our own Übermensch. Inside you is your our own golden being, waiting to transcend. The counterculture democratised the Superman. Everyone could be golden.
Which sounds like the opposite of fascism, until you realise that a world of seven billion self-identified golden beings still requires someone to decide who has done enough work to have truly earned the designation.
The Übermensch runs like a piece of coaxial cable strung from Esalen through Silicon Valley to the present moment. Nietzsche himself would have been appalled by many of its manifestations — he despised nationalism and antisemitism — but his concepts proved incredibly portable. The idea of the higher man, the man beyond conventional morality, the man whose exceptional nature exempts him from ordinary rules: this is the founding myth of every cult of elite consciousness, in every decade, in every age. And very especially now.
Curtis Yarvin — a software engineer who blogs under the name Mencius Moldbug and who functions, with remarkable openness, as Peter Thiel's house philosopher — makes the connection explicit in a way that most tech figures are canny enough to avoid. His neoreactionary politics rest on a single claim: that democracy is a system designed to empower the mediocre at the expense of the genuinely capable. The solution is to hand power to a cognitive and managerial elite — a CEO of everything, essentially — and stop pretending that all human judgement is equally valid.
This is the Human Potential Movement with the therapeutic vocabulary stripped away. The hierarchy of consciousness that Esalen spoke of in the language of growth and healing, Yarvin speaks of in the language of management (and political) efficiency. The underlying content is identical. Some people are more evolved. They should be in charge. The rest of us should be grateful to be guided by the golden.
The "red pill" metaphor that saturates contemporary online right culture is the same structure again, rendered in the vocabulary of a 1999 science fiction film[5]. You were asleep. Now you're awake. You were contaminated by mainstream thinking, liberal institutions, fake news, the Cathedral — Yarvin's term for the combination of academia, media, and government that he believes manufactures consent. Now you're clean. You can see.
This is a purification ritual. The content — the specific beliefs you acquire when you "wake up" — matters less than the structure. You have been initiated. You have separated yourself from the unclean. You belong now to the community of the knowing.
It is, structurally, identical to the yoga retreat, the est weekend, the Esalen workshop. You arrive limited and leave transformed. The guru differs. The logic doesn't.
Little of this happened accidentally. The far right actively recruits from wellness communities, from conspiracy spaces, from the ragged edges of countercultural scepticism because it understands the structural affinities better than most of the people being recruited do.
The wellness-to-conspiracy pipeline that became visible during COVID — the yoga teachers sharing QAnon memes, the organic food enthusiasts finding themselves on Telegram channels with people whose other interests they would, under other circumstances, find alarming — wasn't spontaneous radicalisation. It was targeted. The pipeline was built, deliberately, by people who understood that a person who already distrusts pharmaceutical companies, already believes in hidden knowledge, already thinks they've seen through one layer of official reality, is most of the way there.
The epistemological structure of the conspiracy theory is identical to the structure of spiritual awakening. In both cases, there is a surface reality that most people accept unthinkingly, and a deeper truth accessible only to those willing to question, to seek, to undergo the discomfort of knowing. The content differs. The initiatory logic is the same.
David Icke is useful here not because he's important but because his trajectory is so legible. Green Party spokesman. New Age healer. Shape-shifting lizard conspiracy theorist. Figure whose audiences now overlap substantially with the explicit far right. The antisemitism[6] of his cosmology — a hidden elite of inhuman beings controlling the world — was structurally present in the conspiracy framework from the beginning. The lizards were always a metaphor. The question was always what for.
In the Third Reich, Heinrich Himmler ran organic farms at the concentration camps. The SS had strict anti-vivisection laws. Walther Darré, Hitler's Agriculture Minister, built an ideology called Blut und Boden — Blood and Soil — around the mystical connection between the German peasant and the German land. The Nazi regime was, in significant respects, an ecological movement. It romanticised the natural, the pure, the uncorrupted.
It wanted to get back to the garden.
This is not a gotcha. It is not an attempt to smear environmentalism by association, or to suggest that everyone who has ever wanted to live closer to the land is a secret fascist. I’m a member of the Green Party, and the environment is something I care about deeply.
But it is a data point about what purity logic does when it is given political power and stripped of ethical constraint. The obsession with contamination — of the body, the land, the race, the culture — follows its own logic to its own conclusions. Those conclusions, historically, are not good.
The line from the organic farm to the death camp is not straight. It requires many other things to be true simultaneously. But the fact that it is possible to draw the line at all should give us pause, every time we find ourselves in the presence of someone who is very, very concerned with purity — of whatever kind.
Jello Biafra updated the song in 1980, after Ronald Reagan won the election. He replaced Jerry Brown with Reagan in the lyrics and re-recorded it. He updated it again when Arnold Schwarzenegger became Governor of California in 2003. The same song, again and again because the same type keeps appearing — the figure who combines cultural authority with authoritarian impulse, who has transcended ordinary limitation and would like to help you do the same, at gunpoint if necessary.
The type has been updated for the present moment. It no longer wears a kaftan, Zen robes or cowboy boots. He wears a black T-shirt and talks about first principles and rational thinking and the need to be based. He has a net worth that he regards as evidence of its own superior cognition. He is building a rocket, or buying a social media platform, or funding a political movement that would, if successful, remove the democratic constraints that prevent the most capable people from running things properly.
He believes, with complete sincerity, that he is one of the good guys.
The Zen fascist always does.
"We will make the future California's dream / California Über Alles"
The dream is still being made. The dreamers now have more money than most countries, direct access to the levers of state power, and a philosophy that tells them their dominance is not exploitation but evolution.
The granola became the brown rice became Huel became blood and soil. The encounter group became the est weekend became the biohacking protocol became the cognitive elite became the reaction. The Whole Earth became the platform became the firehose became the feed, and somewhere in the feed, the purity logic is still running, clean and patient, waiting for the next person to decide that they have woken up. That they are clean.
Joni Mitchell watched Woodstock on a hotel television and wrote a song of such aching beauty that five decades later it can still make you cry. It makes me cry, sometimes. She meant every word. She wasn't wrong about the stardust — we are, literally, made of it. She wasn't wrong about the garden — something has been lost, some connection to the world we actually live in rather than the screens we've replaced it with.
But the logic she was swimming in, the logic everyone was swimming in, was older and more dangerous than any of them knew. Purity doesn't announce itself. It arrives as poetry. It arrives as someone's hope.
Jello Biafra was writing a joke about a California politician.
He was also writing a warning about a kind of person.
That kind of person, today, is doing very well for themselves indeed.
- I should make this clear up front: when I talk in this essay about “purity politics”, what I’m not talking about the kind of instant condemnation that happens on social media platforms (Bluesky, I am looking at you). That’s interesting, but it’s not what I’m interested in right now. ↩︎
- The same is true of that most popular of authors with the hippies, JJR Tolkien. The Shire is Eden, the garden. The orcs are the products of industry, literally things which were made. Michael Moorcock is excellent on this. ↩︎
- Despite being a classic TLA (three letter acronym) est is never capitalised. ↩︎
- I’m being a little simplistic here. est’s core concept was responsibility, but Erhard defined it in a specific, almost Zen way: you are the "source" of your experience. Not that you caused your circumstances in a simple causal chain, but that your relationship to your circumstances is itself a choice. The suffering isn't your fault in the sense of being a moral failing — it is your fault in the sense that you are choosing to experience it as suffering rather than as something else. ↩︎
- Which, ironically, was a trans allegory written and directed by two trans women. ↩︎
- Is Icke really an antisemite? I remember reading something about how Louis Theroux followed him around for a documentary, and Icke was denied entry to Canada because his claim that the world was ruled by lizard people was seen as coded antisemitism. Theroux explained that no, the lizard people weren’t Jews - he really did believe the world was ruled by actual lizards. But, that cute story aside, yes, Icke probably is an antisemite. ↩︎
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