Review: Tripping on Utopia Complicates the History of Psychedelics

Mind-altering drugs have long been seen as tools for both liberation and control.

In one common account of modern psychedelic culture's origins, LSD was initially monopolized by the national security state, which saw such drugs as tools for "control of human behavior." The results included MKULTRA, an infamous CIA program that experimented on people without their consent. But in the 1960s, the story goes, the establishment lost control of these tools. Suddenly, utopian individualists like Timothy Leary were urging people to use drugs to seize control of their own consciousness—and the deep state was less interested in deploying LSD than in cracking down on its unauthorized use.

Benjamin Breen's Tripping on Utopia complicates this tale. The book focuses on the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, who in the 1930s developed their own utopian visions of fluid identities and resistance to psychological manipulation; while psychedelia was not at the center of their work, it was in their constellation of sources. They also developed strong ties to the national security state during World War II, and in the early Cold War their social circles included people directly tied to MKULTRA. Bateson backed away in horror, but Mead maintained her CIA connections for years.

Some of the book's conclusions have been disputed, with Bateson's daughter Nora arguing that Breen misconstrued archival documents and otherwise botched his facts. But no matter how that debate plays out, Tripping on Utopia makes it clear that these two conceptions of psychedelic drugs—as tools of liberation and as tools of control—were uncomfortably entwined well before the 1960s. The '60s crowd does not always come off well here either, but I'll say one thing for Leary: For all his overstatements and opportunistic personal behavior, which Breen recounts unsparingly, he believed it was just as wrong to coercively "alter the consciousness of thy fellow man" as it was to "prevent thy fellow man from altering his own consciousness."

Comments

[Rev Arthur L kuckland]

Anyone that thinks fluid identities is a thing is a crackpot. The CIA is full of traitors,
If the author botched his facts there is no defending him even if you read that he is somewhat libritarian

[SQRLSY One]

The context here of ” fluid identities” here is mind-altering drugs, for those of us who can read AND comprehend! It generally has nothing to do with being bipedal, which in turn, (bipedal) means walking on two legs, having nothing to do with bisexuality or pedophilia… Just FYI.

So in the larger picture, if I get in a nasty accident, I can turn my identity from a fully-bodily-abled person to that of a cripple. The decades will inevitably change my ID from young whupper-schnuper to old-fart geezer. If I take WAY too many brain-destroying drugs (including booze), I can change my ID to “gibbering idiot”. Diseases can do the same kinds of things.

And if I allow stupid and-or evil ideas to take over my mind (one method being reading too much stupid and-or evil shit from too many stupid and-or evil people on not-moderated web sites), I can turn my ID from benevolent and wise person, to BLEEVER of Stolen Erections Cunt-Spiracy Theories! And then I can say things like “Anyone that thinks fluid identities is a thing is a crackpot.”