LSD without the psychedelic visuals of the 1960s, repositioned for our dismal times as something to eradicate whatever might be left of your ego. Thanks a lot, American culture.
July 18, 2022
"Tall and bald with the build of a swimmer, Pollan is no Timothy Leary — he isn’t asking anyone to drop out..."
"... and the medical trials described and shown in 'How to Change Your Mind' shouldn’t be confused with Ken Kesey’s freewheeling acid tests of the ’60s. Back then, when psychedelics left the laboratory and entered the counterculture, the power structure freaked out. 'Kids were going to communes, and American boys were refusing to go to war,' Pollan said. 'President Nixon certainly believed that LSD was responsible for a lot of this, and he may well have been right. It was a very disruptive force in society, and that is why I think the media after 1965 turns against it after being incredibly enthusiastic before 1965.'... Given evolving attitudes, one challenge facing the filmmakers, including the directors Alison Ellwood and Lucy Walker, was how to depict the psychedelic experience in a sophisticated way, without stumbling into the territory of a ’60s exploitation movie.
'We didn’t want to fall into the trap of using psychedelic visual tropes — wild colors, rainbow streaks, morphing images,' Ellwood wrote in an email.... 'The ego is a membrane between you and the world,' [Pollan] said. 'It’s defensive and it’s very useful. It gets a lot done, but it also stands between us and other things and gives us this subject-object duality. When the ego is gone, there is nothing between you and the world.'"
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24 comments:
This seems dangerous and the Netflix audience might well be influenced.
LSD always meant least significant digit to me.
I have a friend who is beginning his trial with microdosing LSD. This seems to be the newest, most 'cutting edge' therapy among the ultra-liberal, wealthy, white middle aged to early senior aged. Michael Pollan is just another confirmation for them. I'm well past inquiring deeply about any of the 'next great things' that they stumble on. There is always a next great thing. These are the same folks who get their information from MSNBC and CNN...or Netflix. Who think Portland is cool and cute and don't notice the boarded up half of downtown. The same who are unaware of what our society has turned into, while they are aghast and beside themselves at the horrors of restrictions on abortion. More microdosing will help alleviate their pain.
They're my friends. I love them. But man...we have moved down different paths over the years. The older I get, the more clearly I want to see and smell and touch the world around me and take part in my life. They seem to have the need to be drugged when possible.
I saw the title on Netflix and I thought it was about a Leftist changed his opinion about climate change.
I grew up in that era. Most of my friends were doing it. I had one friend tell me she went home and her stuffed animals were alive. That was enough for me to say NEVER. I don't need to expand my mind like that.
"President Nixon certainly believed that LSD was responsible for a lot of this, and he may well have been right. It was a very disruptive force in society." Is that true? I never thought it was that important, just dangerous. Kids didn't want to go to war because we did a bad job of convincing them that they should. They get blown up, you know. You really need to demonstrate to them that their whole society depends on them.
Meh. Michael Pollan's biggest achievement is being Michael J. Fox's brother-in-law.
Author is a guy who went to Bennington College. Should be enuf said; never read him. But also: wrote about food. Hates GMO crops. Like psychedelics. Teaches at Berkeley. EOM
A pretty good book might be written about boomers and drugs. Of course there was lots of booze before 1960. The English speaking world kept congratulating itself for freeing itself from Prohibition. Cheers! Another martini! Drink and drive! So there wasn't exactly a transition from sober prudence to boomer wildness. But: the contrast between incredible claims about becoming wise through drugs, and the pathetic results; if the West is evil, it's essential to study Eastern religion; this is hard, but taking drugs is easy; I think I've got it now. Leary, much older than the boomers, a boozer before he was a druggie; surely his talk about wisdom and the East always had a P.T. Barnum quality. Maybe Uma Thurman's parents took it all more seriously, I don't know.
And now the rivers of drugs, including plenty that are likely to be fatal. Nietzsche says in the Last Man speech that there is a little poison to get through the day--this might be our cannabis users--and much poison to end a painful life--medically assisted suicide, somewhat preposterously requiring an M.D. I guess because "something might go wrong." What? The young still want to flirt with danger, and explore the unknown; I guess powerful drugs achieve both of these results. Boomers generally got over their fatal overdose period, if they survived, and settled on health and longevity as key goals; are the young always just being young, or have they been taught by boomers that the embrace of the irrational and the unconscious are keys to wisdom?
"No shepherd, and one herd." This might have been boomers until recently: Trump was a warning that someone with vaguely conservative views might somehow slow or stop "progress." So a very powerful shepherd is necessary to suppress speech and lock up dissidents. Also the woke have discovered that the herd is still clearly divisible into identities; it might be desirable to deliberately foment hate in the short term in order to bring about a truly herdlike existence in the long term. "Formerly all the world was insane!" Surely this is now a widespread view--no matter how crazy we become, we are not as crazy as the 50s, the Victorian Era, or the Middle Ages. Going to space will be like Columbus, but "we" (probably excluding heteronormal white cismales) will not be evil this time.
Why use psychedelics when a lobotomy can fix all your problems? Jack Nicholson's treatment in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest from the same era as LSD seems a sound alternative to Soma psychedelucs.
I never experienced visual effects while my fellow tripping companions did. Transcending the ego during a psychedelic experience is a very cool experience, however. The nice thing about it is that for a 99.99% of the people that try it you only do it a few times it's not addictive non habit forming.
I do like how I post like this always brings out the constipated prudes.
It does seem like there is a push for the use of psychedelics, especially psilocybin. I predict these will follow the path of marijuana and become huge cash cows by the end of the new roarin' 20s.
I suppose that there are some people who have benefited from their psychedelic experience, but, if you play the percentages, most people do not benefit from a transient psychotic lesion.....Life sucks, but if you eat right, exercise regularly, and don't watch the news too much, life is a mostly tolerable experience. The attempt to hot wire existence into something fine and joyful and noble is doomed to futility, but we are hard wired to make the attempt. Shrooms, air conditioning. Some attempts are more productive than others.
I read an article recently from someone who described herself as overdoing mindfulness meditation, the breaking down of the ego thing. She said something similar: A lot of what the brain does to make the world understandable and consistent is broken down by mindfulness meditation. She felt she actually had to "unlearn" much of the effects of her meditation.
I can't find the article now but googling, "bad effects of mindfulness meditation" brings up a substantial number of returns.
Complete with a Country Joe and the Fish soundtrack.
Escapism, preferably with social sanction, to smooth the transition.
I saw Tim Leary in my youth. He was led around by a female companion, as it appeared that he didn't really know where he was. His eyes looked like black buttons, all dilated pupils, nothing else. He had a plastered smile on his face that never changed. I thought that that was a dismal way to go through life, and never contemplated acid.
Anxiety is the only moral compass we have left and we have now been conditioned to ignore our anxiety only because things have become so chaotic it’s too distracting for productivity.
"Kids didn't want to go to war because we did a bad job of convincing them that they should. They get blown up, you know. You really need to demonstrate to them that their whole society depends on them."
There was no way to convince young people they should join the military to fight in Viet Nam, as there was no valid or good reason they should have, or why we should have taken over from the French in what was originally a colonial war--Vietnam wanted to free itself of France's control...you know, sort of like our forebears who wanted to break free from England's control. We have not fought one war since WWII that can be truthfully argued as necessary. The claims that our military defends our freedom is only true when we fight because our freedom is at risk (from a foreign power), and WWII is the only war in which we have been involved in all of the 20th Century and up to today that even comes close to being described as such a war.
Had many offers to drop, but I like what I got, what little it is.
The only way to suppress the ego is the ancient remedy, available to all: daily practice of the virtue of humility. Placing the needs of others before your own. Detachment from honor, glory, riches, fame.
Escapism, preferably with social sanction, to smooth the transition.
This is suspicious, how we are simultaneously legalizing recreational drugs and in effect endorsing them as helpful to handling the psychic load of modern life as it’s turning ever less human oriented. Meanwhile we continue to demonize nicotine, as though that were the dangerous aspect of cigarettes, when in fact it’s a nootropic, a performance enhancing drug with known cognitive and other benefits and the harm profile of caffeine. Tough to make sense of it all.
Psychodellics isn't escapism, it's immersion. The eggo isn't suppressed, it's merely side stepped.
This conversation harkens Col. Jessup.
Read the book when it first came out. I recommend it.
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