I’ll say weird, subjective things about Brian Doherty’s untimely death last week at 57 because he probably would’ve liked that and because others will cover the encyclopedia-entry basics. Like most people, I saw him write far more reporting than philosophizing, but I learned from him doing both, in part thanks to corresponding with him on and off for three decades. In private, he was happy to confess his befuddlement over various political and cultural issues and still pick them apart in illuminating, opinionated ways.
By the time he died, as it happens, he might’ve been very nearly my pick for “person I would least like to hear had died,” to put it somewhat morbidly.
The world knew him in part for writing books about Burning Man, capitalism, Ron Paul, guns, hippie-era comix, and modern libertarianism (when not writing regularly for Reason magazine). In our era of angry, tripwire-reaction politics, parts of that list would be enough to get him branded a frothing right-winger in many minds, but he was definitely a Burner and de facto hippie (in the sloppy artistic-prankster mode) at heart more than just another Goldwater admirer.
I think anyone who knew him would agree that the manner of his death, if reports are accurate, was thematically fitting, though it was far too soon. He was, among other things, a musician who found himself participating in oddball temporary bands with great frequency, a devotee of the artistic anarchy of the annual Burning Man festival, and an ardent antiwar writer, so the fact that he (from what I understand) fell to his death from or near a World War II gun battery in San Francisco the top of which was being used for an art performance of some kind makes postmodern sense. He wouldn’t have denied it.
In fact, I confess that when I first saw someone online (Dan McCarthy, who’s very conservative but also antiwar and calls himself a “Tory anarchist,” a paradox after Brian’s own eclectic tastes) say Brian had passed away, it crossed my mind to think he might’ve killed himself. There was, I think the attentive among his friends (from all his discordant tribes) will agree, an unsettlingly elegiac quality to his Facebook posts of late, even if it didn’t seep into his more-serious professional writing.
Maybe it was largely coincidence, or maybe despite being a skeptic I’m clairvoyant after all, but I thought he had the tone of a man visiting beloved old friends and places as if it might be the last time he’d see them. But then, that’s always true, as wise people in mourning keep trying to warn us.
A few months ago, I asked him about that tone, just in case I should be worried, but it sounded as though he was just mildly bummed about a problem with his foot that would limit his ability to roam the planet as easily as he’d like. Perhaps that foot did him in at the end after all.
In any case, antiwar writer Scott Horton (who might be pleased to see that his former debate sparring partner William Kristol is opposed to Trump’s Iran war and thus on Horton and Brian’s side for perhaps the first time) said on X that Brian was found early Friday after a “terrible accident” on Thursday night. Horton rightly pronounced it a “Sad day.” I will forgive Brian’s ex-wife, angry-rant-prone antiwar and feminist writer Angela Keaton, for curtly replying “I guess” (and signing the post “Angela,” presumably so it wouldn’t be taken as a policy position of the AntiwarNews account).
Exes are allowed to be angry, especially if they felt blindsided by the mate stealthily, gradually moving all of his stuff out of the house to a nearby dwelling before springing the near-finalized idea of divorce. Doing so may sound harsh, but then again, any uptight nerd prone to elaborate, rational planning knows the temptation to go to heist-like lengths to avoid a big, futile emotional confrontation. I know a scholarly woman who did roughly the same thing prior to a divorce. It’s hard to argue with her fear that the alternative—a lengthy argument while still living together—would’ve been painful and ultimately pointless.
In any case, I wish everyone Brian left behind well, from the Burners to the right-wing cranks, and I’ll take his death as another occasion to remember that we needn’t build unscalable walls between all the cultural factions, though the current social media era makes the wall-building as easy as the community-forming. Remember just a short time ago when messy was okay?
On some level, we all know things tend to be more fun when some strange group crashes the party, and if people learn anything at all from the past decade of watching psychotic wokeness do battle with quasi-fascism, they’ll relax and, instead of leaping straight to areas of political tension, try discussing common interests such as comic books, UFOs, or building your own musical instruments (but not necessarily in a steampunk way—Brian found steampunk annoyingly mannered, which is fair).
Brian’s journalistic eye turned up so many fractal-like little details about the various communities he analyzed that it’s a bit embarrassing to admit one didn’t fully know him. He was just one man, after all—but he contained multiverses (his superhuman speedreading ability helped). I didn’t even realize performance artist Chicken John, who I tried to shoehorn into a typical good-but-square John Stossel special on ABC News when I worked there back in the 1990s, was Brian’s best friend. Brian likely would’ve been pleased to hear that my brief encounter with that veteran of the anarchic, artistic, West Coast-situationist-type Cacophony Society, while it didn’t result in a primetime TV segment, left me thinking mainstream media might not be the way to go, several years before the rise of social media made that obvious.
Just days ago, Brian and I exchanged emails about, among other things, how he could access the recent two-part animated adaptation of the left-anarchist comic book Watchmen, not a bad intersection of some shared interests.
At the risk of sounding as disjointed as the Watchmen movie review I wrote for Reason years ago—which was meant to imitate the time-hopping inner monologue of the godlike character Dr. Manhattan—that comic, with part of its plot revolving around a Caribbean island full of captive artists and scientists creating a Lovecraftian monster that could put an end to nuclear war, in turn reminds me that Brian likely would’ve shared my amusement and genuine curiosity about the fact that today sees the official start of a project on a real Caribbean island to scientifically track the details of participants’ hallucinations while on the drug DMT, in particular to see if the seemingly-conscious “entities” people often encounter during such trips can be communicated with in coherent and replicable ways, perhaps even having some sort of independent, external existence.
Brian would’ve been an ideal writer to assign to cover a psychedelic-but-scientific project like that without sounding either judgmental or mindlessly accepting about it. Cover enough of the details of something—whether readers reach conclusions or not—and you inevitably make the world a little more complicated and weird, which is okay.
Now I’m plagued by the realization that he suggested reading some sci-fi graphic novel, the title to which I don’t quite recall. But I’ve carefully noted at least one other recent reading suggestion of his and will get to it eventually—just nowhere near as fast as he would have. Our final email exchange wasn’t about specific reading recommendations, though. It was about feeling Luddite in the era of A.I.-boosterism. He half-jokingly said he expected to spend his remaining years stubbornly consuming conventionally human-made art in a high-tech world that no longer pays for such stuff. There are worse goals, odd as it may sound for hardcore capitalists to say so.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey.