In a single widespread account of contemporary psychedelic tradition’s origins, LSD was initially monopolized by the nationwide safety state, which noticed such medicine as instruments for “control of human behavior.” The outcomes included MKULTRA, an notorious CIA program that experimented on folks with out their consent. However within the Nineteen Sixties, the story goes, the institution misplaced management of those instruments. Abruptly, utopian individualists like Timothy Leary had been urging folks to make use of medicine to grab management of their personal consciousness—and the deep state was much less desirous about deploying LSD than in cracking down on its unauthorized use.
Benjamin Breen’s Tripping on Utopia complicates this story. The guide focuses on the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, who within the Thirties developed their very own utopian visions of fluid identities and resistance to psychological manipulation; whereas psychedelia was not on the heart of their work, it was of their constellation of sources. Additionally they developed robust ties to the nationwide safety state throughout World Battle II, and within the early Chilly Battle their social circles included folks instantly tied to MKULTRA. Bateson backed away in horror, however Mead maintained her CIA connections for years.
A number of the guide’s conclusions have been disputed, with Bateson’s daughter Nora arguing that Breen misconstrued archival paperwork and in any other case botched his details. However regardless of how that debate performs out, Tripping on Utopia makes it clear that these two conceptions of psychedelic medicine—as instruments of liberation and as instruments of management—had been uncomfortably entwined properly earlier than the Nineteen Sixties. The ’60s crowd doesn’t all the time come off properly right here both, however I will say one factor for Leary: For all his overstatements and opportunistic private conduct, which Breen recounts unsparingly, he believed it was simply as incorrect to coercively “alter the consciousness of thy fellow man” because it was to “prevent thy fellow man from altering his own consciousness.”
This text initially appeared in print beneath the headline “Tripping on Utopia.”