I recently watched the Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front, about a generation sacrificed to imperial ambition in the grueling trench warfare of World War I. In the powerful close, our young German soldier protagonist sees a butterfly alight in front of his trench, reaches out to caress it, and is shot and killed like so many of his compatriots before him. For me, the butterfly is a metaphor for the transformation, hope, and promise of humanity, for the better angels of our nature to be born from our current chrysalis of crisis, but here murdered by the dark forces of fascism, bigotry, and hatred that capture too many of our hearts.
The film is based on the anti-war classic by Erich Maria Remarque, and the original was produced by Carl Laemmle, a German Jew who emigrated to the US in the 1880s and went on to found Universal Pictures. Carl was born and raised in the Jewish quarter of Laupheim, the small German town where, right around the same time, my great-great-grandfather Emanuel Heilbronner started making soap in the basement of our family home in 1858. Carl brought the film to Germany in 1930, hoping to counter the rising tide of Nazi hate that was banging the drums of war and revenge amid the aftermath of WWI and the economic desperation of the early 1930s. Goebbels correctly recognized the danger the film posed to the Nazi program, and sent brownshirts to burn to the ground any cinema that dared to show it, and the Nazis formally banned it when they took power in 1933. Dr. Bronner’s parents, my great-grandparents, who expanded the family soap business to a much bigger enterprise based in the city of Heilbronn, were among the millions of Jewish Europeans murdered in the camps.
Us versus them and Bradbury’s warning
As a species, we are prone to tribal us-versus-them thinking, to projecting our own shadow onto the hated “other.” Our challenge, for our collective survival and thriving, is to see the complexity and humanity in each other across religious, ethnic and national divides, and to understand the traumas shaping one another, which is especially hard when we are in a triggered trauma response ourselves. WWI was supposed to be the “war to end all wars,” but WWII and the Holocaust followed in the next generation, and then the Cold War and the threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction right after that.
I recently realized that we just lived through August 2026, the title of a dark and powerful short story by Ray Bradbury. He wrote the stories of The Martian Chronicles in the Red Scare McCarthy era, when fear and paranoia were rampant and “us versus them” nationalism was ascendant globally, then as now. The full title is “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains.” It opens in a California suburban home that tech titans would be stoked about: breakfast is made automatically, the blinds drawn, robotic mice whir around sucking up dust. But no one is home. The house throws away the breakfast, and we pan outside to find it is the only structure standing in a blasted nuclear apocalypse. One wall is charred black, with the silhouettes of the family burned into it: the father mowing the lawn, the mother picking flowers, and two kids with arms outstretched to catch a ball that will never come down.
For me, the children and the ball echo the butterfly in All Quiet on the Western Front: humanity’s hopes and dreams, represented in our children, seeking to create the promised land of thriving humanity expressing and being our own most creative selves, celebrating and taking care of each other. They represent the possibility that we can work out our collective karma, conflict and trauma and come together, unified in conscious loving relationship with each other and Mother Nature.
Interestingly, while researching this post, I learned that the title comes from Sara Teasdale’s 1918 poem about WWI and humanity’s capacity to destroy itself, and the forces of nature that carry on, uncaring, in the face of the harm we do to the natural world and to each other.
Israel-Palestine
All of this resonates for me with the tragedy in Israel-Palestine, linked directly to Holocaust trauma and fed by entrenched historical grievances, imperial ambition, religious fanaticism, and endless cycles of violence. The olive farmers in the West Bank who supply olive oil for our soaps are real time facing an onslaught of state-supported settler militias inflicting waves of terror on Palestinian communities, aiming to drive them off their land into urban ghettos cut off from each other, echoing the pogroms that Jewish communities endured in Europe for centuries. This has ratcheted up since Netanyahu’s fascist coalition took power and accelerated further since the horrific Hamas attacks. The shadow on the Palestinian side, reflected on Oct. 7, was mirrored on the Israeli side in their response.[i]
And to be extra clear, the Holocaust and the nuclear holocaust of Bradbury’s story are on another level of scale entirely, but the same forces of bigotry, hate, and imperial lust for land given by “divine right” are at issue. The Israeli government’s striking reaction to the film NAZA, which attempts to expose the shadow side of Israeli conduct by showing the cruelty of Israel’s revenge on and collective punishment of Palestinians, disturbingly reminds me, in a highly qualified way, of the Nazi reaction to All Quiet on the Western Front. Prime Minister Netanyahu denounced NAZA as antisemitic incitement, while angry mobs descended on the filmmakers’ homes and called for their deaths. The IDF, meanwhile, issued a lengthy rebuttal disputing the film’s allegations. All this unfolded despite the documented use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza and the IDF’s real-time enabling of ongoing settler militia violence in the West Bank, both visible to the world. The vehemence of the reaction, particularly the efforts to punish and silence Israeli filmmakers and the soldiers who shared their stories for exposing alleged wrongdoing by their own military, raises uncomfortable questions about a society’s capacity to confront the darker aspects of its own conduct, that is sadly very much the case in the US as well.
But there is also a window of opportunity, in Israel and here at home in the midterms, to elect leaders and form governing coalitions with a more empathic, expansive vision of democratic responsibility and societal being. Israel could form a coalition of both Jewish and Arab/Palestinian Israeli parties and take a big step toward taming the shadows of its founding and the messianic right wing that now has the wheel. Ethnonationalist forces seek to annex the West Bank and form an apartheid state from the river to the sea, where 7 million Jewish Israelis and 7 million Palestinians live. Those same supremacist forces stand in the way of a truly representative coalition capable of addressing both the conflict’s fundamental issues and the undercutting of democratic institutions in Israel.
Psychedelics are powerful, but not enough
One way our company seeks to bolster the forces of peace, empathy and understanding in the world is by supporting psychedelic healing and therapy. Psychedelic experiences can help resolve trauma, whether from war, sexual assault or other causes, and can aid in treating treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, and other conditions. For sufferers and the rest of us alike, psychedelics can open our hearts and minds to the miraculous living world and help us empathize deeply with others, whether a romantic partner or a hated enemy. I remember as a kid wondering what if I’d been born Muslim or Hindu in India, and as a teenager thinking, wow, Russians like to play the drums, love their families, and have a great time with each other. (Synchronistically a friend reading an earlier draft said I need to acknowledge Sting’s song “Russians” with a very similar theme; I did not know that!).
We’re big supporters of MAPS and MAPS Israel who are champions of psychedelic assisted therapy. With the latter, we’re working to heal both Jewish Israelis as well as Arab Israeli / Palestinian and Bedouin citizens of Israel who were victims and hostages of the Hamas attacks, and we’re helping support efforts to bring MDMA therapy to Palestinians in the West Bank. We’re excited that MDMA and psilocybin therapies are about to be greenlit by the FDA that will help smooth the way for this healing in the Holy Land and worldwide. Though I am concerned that the out-of-pocket cost of medicine plus therapy will be out of reach for too many Americans. That’s why we strongly support policies like Colorado’s, which offers regulated access to psychedelic therapy for all adults without needing a qualifying diagnosis (that is needed for federal FDA regulated access), and importantly has also decriminalized psychedelic medicines so community-centered healing models can flourish. Indigenous medicine societies show how vital it is to be supported in community, to prepare, process, integrate, and be accountable. Community and connection is crucial and often more important than what the psychedelic medicines can do themselves, especially over the longer term. Medical access is important, but the “one and done” magic bullet model is not nearly enough for many.
Albert Hofmann, who discovered LSD in 1943, saw that LSD and the nuclear bomb arrived in the world at the same time, and believed the LSD experience could connect humanity to a deeper moral center, in touch with nature and Spirit, and just maybe help us mature enough not to destroy ourselves. I was recently reading Madison Margolin’s piece in Haaretz on how psychedelics are permeating religious as well as secular Jewish culture. Many leaders in the movement are Jewish, and Rick Doblin, founder and president of MAPS, is explicit that the Holocaust is the dark inspiration for his passion for this healing, as it was for my grandfather Emanuel Bronner. May another Holocaust never happen again! These medicines can help to heal and open hearts and minds to the feared and hated other. Our hope in the Holy Land, is that they can help break through Islamophobic and Anti-Semitic attitudes and caricatures of each other, paving the way to deep listening, healing, soul-searching, and peacemaking on both sides.
Systemic healing needs structural societal change
At the same time, I’ve also grown less enthusiastic about psychedelic experience as a solution in itself. Powerful experiences of divine Love and unity can be deeply transformative. But for someone who is houseless, struggling with heroin addiction and treatment-resistant depression rooted in poverty, or a soldier sent back to the traumatizing battlefield after MDMA therapy, that healing won’t last long. We need to address the social determinants of mental health. I hope and pray for US leadership that prioritizes some version of the Green New Deal: housing and health care costs addressed (Medicare for All), infrastructure built for a decarbonized economy, and families able to make ends meet on living wages.[ii] Bradbury’s roboticized house is nice if you can afford the AI robots, but you’re SOL if you can’t. How do we leverage our incredible technological progress and make the capitalist machine serve humanity, not vice versa, so people and their families can thrive without having to work overtime and second jobs?
We need ecologically and socially responsible policies that enable humanity to truly flourish. Many in our world live in their own Hell on Earth, whether due to income inequality, the mental health crisis, imperial aggression, religious and ethnic fanaticism and bigotry, or the many other shadows that loom over our world. Psychedelic healing and experience can help us heal and taste the dream of Heaven on Earth, but we have to roll up our sleeves as a global society and do the hard political work to make that dream a reality for all.
[i] By shadow, I mean the darker aspects of character that we are reluctant to acknowledge in ourselves but often readily acknowledge in others: especially the capacity for hatred, cruelty, and dehumanization. In this tragedy I see that shadow at work in different ways, shaped by different but linked histories and circumstances, but that are also in dark compact against the forces of peace in either society. Of course, this projection of our shadow is present across all of humanity’s tribes and nations, including, especially of late, in the US.
[ii] We’ve been working on this at Dr. Bronner’s, and I had the insight that businesses like ours already measure and report Scope 1, 2 and 3 greenhouse gas emissions, and we should do the same for living wages:
- Scope 1: workers we directly employ.
- Scope 2: workers at our energy suppliers.
- Scope 3: workers across the extended supply chain (agriculture, mining, intermediate processors, freight, distributors and retail), though we take responsibility mostly for what’s upstream of us.
The idea is to measure the gap to a living wage for ourselves and our suppliers, and over time close those gaps, including by paying into a special worker bonus fund at a given supplier, and inspire others to do the same. Importantly, a living wage is defined as what a person needs to earn to support a typical family where their partner or co-parent also works. In the US, that’s 1.75 working adults with two kids, based on the cost of living within a one-hour commute of work. These costs are being mapped globally in real time, and European directives for large multinationals are helping focus the effort.