Challenges — Part 2

PART 1

A 60s Revolution?

The very first psychedelic revolution was of course the one that awakened proto-man from his 200,000 year cognitive slumber. And we can view ancient Greece and the Rite of Eleusis, and perhaps one or two additional ancient societies [1] as ongoing psychedelic revolutions. But does anyone yet fully understand what happened in the 1960s, especially during the last years of the decade? I have a rather large collection of books about the 60s and 70s, and although they are filled with an amazingly detailed collection of facts, stories, theories and opinions, I don't think so. And I am loathe to call a merely momentary societal upheaval whose stated goals remain woefully unfulfilled a “revolution”. A rebellion that fizzled might be the more appropriate term. A true social revolution, a revolution of collective awakening, is not something that happens overnight with the seizure of power by a group whose collective behavior is usually as reprehensible as of those whom they overthrow. [2] Gilad Atzmon recently wrote:

While [...] so-called revolution is occasionally fueled by ideological or social ‘insight,’ the ‘revolutionaries’ are more often anti-insightful by nature. They spend their energy reducing an ‘insight’ into a fixed regime: a doctrine, a dogma, a strategy, a pile of commandments, a kosher jargon or a list of ‘deplorables.’ While Marx, for instance, offered an insightful materialist vision of our past as well as our human future, Marxists are generally an anti-insightful bunch. Their doctrine reduces Marx’s insights into Torah and Mizvoth, restricting and suppressing creative thinking. So-called ‘revolutionaries’ are too often a collective of ‘counter-revolutionaries;’ people who do little but kill insightfulness. They identify symbolically with the ‘revolution,’ while they sustain a reality of stagnation. [3]

Most people today, I would venture, identify the concept of revolution with the political and/or military overthrow scenario, a regrettably common and widely-reported phenomenon in the modern world, the very thing we would need to remedy and outgrow as a goal of a revolution of awakening. It seems few are even aware of the possibility of a collective awakening kind of revolution that leads to a radically changed-for-the-better society as exemplified by Eleusis. Something important did happen in the 1960s, but revolution it was not, although there certainly were several revolutionaries who played important roles, individuals whose ideas might have incited true revolution. Those with a penchant for denigrating the 60s—a common agenda for some of the books I have purchased—may well call it revolution in their quest to show that the 60s “failed” and led to no valuable result, just like so many other violent and confused seizures or attempted seizures of power.

Although the events of the 60s therefore do not qualify as the kind of revolution promoting lasting insightful changes in our modern world as did Eleusis for the Greeks, the fault lies perhaps more with the difficulties of igniting true revolution today than with the revolutionaries behind the 60s changes. The revolutionaries for the most part were insightful and might have succeeded in another epoch that was not subject to the anti-enlightment tsunami of the modern age, a suffocating wave of conspicuous consumption and commercialism, advertising, multimedia saturation, false propaganda and MainStreamMedia rabble-rousing, and Fake News, Social Media ersatz discussions, comfortable living, entertainments, hobbies and vacations and a multitude of trivial distractions,

When life is a struggle, experience is vivid, simple joys are profoundly felt, intelligent choices are critical to survival and acts of heroism are both necessary and valued. When life is comfortable, people become satiated and hard to satisfy, tastes become decadent and effete, questions of safety are pushed off on specialists and spontaneous acts of individual heroism and bravery come to be treated as symptoms of social maladaptation. [4]

The Inside Dope

So what did happen in the 1960s? As I recently remarked to a friend, jokingly at first, but then the phrase revealed something important: “The 1960s could only have happened after the 1950s.” At first glance, the statement would easily qualify as a Yogi Berra-ism. But more importantly, it implies a prediction: such changes as those that happened then are unlikely to happen again. The 1950s ushered in a unique combination of events and political situations in the West, and spreading further afield; a post-war and post-50s attitude of optimism and enthusiasm, above all centered in the“baby-boom” generation; a rapidly expanding standard of living for Western populations; a prosperity never before seen for the middle class; but then the abrupt appearance of rebellion and protest by the very group having benefited so handsomely from the new affluence: university-age students. Parents, grandparents, the older generations and establishment society didn't catch on right away, wondering why the baby-boomers were not appreciative of their never-seen-before freedoms and wealth. Established power was of course doing what it always had done, exploiting, warring, capitalizing, accumulating, scheming, investing, acquiring, but that was so normal and on-going throughout history as to seem a minor blot on the landscape of “modern prosperity.” Salience networks were inured to the business-as-usual specter. And then...

It was the sudden introduction of that notorious salience-detection activator, LSD, which awakened a core group of the young—mostly university students—they became the revolutionaries of the 60s for whom the reality of the centuries old staus-quo antics of the Power Elite became intolerable. The shameful barbarity of America's destructions in Southeast Asia was the principal focus that then magnified perception of what had been done to Japan with the A-Bomb, what had been done to North Korea, what was being perpetrated on planet Earth through business-as-usual practices. All became issues as intense and salience-awakening as if they had suddenly appeared in a true age of peace.

Nearly all chroniclers of the 60s have been loathe to credit psychedelics as the principal catalyst of the 60s revolutionary spirit, the unrest and protest movements, but without understanding the core function of psychedelics as salience-awakeners, and how that would be the very thing that could produce an outbreak of revolutionary motivation. Adopting that ignorance, the importance of psychedelic awakening was—and still is—easily ignored, or even denied outright. Many of the books I have that tell the story of the 60s do not even have an index entry for LSD. And when they do, it typically leads to a paragraph about Timothy Leary and surely not Huxley, Watts, Osmond, et al.

Now a great many youngsters took LSD in the 1960s, but only a few of them became the true revolutionaries. No matter, since the 80% who are neither the biophiles or necrophiles common to all societies [5] will reliably blow with the wind, following those who have the most exciting agenda, or who shout the loudest... Normally it is the necrophilic types who shout the loudest and lead entire nations off to perpetrate ridiculous crusades and crimes against humanity, but this time it was different. The revolutionaries had an agenda that was itself an awakening for a great many. The Age of Aquarius beckoned, and with it a vision of a New Age that might overcome the evils of the time. Naïve perhaps, but we were young and very few had even an inkling of just how entrenched was that evil. Today it is all too obvious.

In the 60s we used to insist that merely being in the presence of someone undergoing a psychedelic experience could induce a “contact high,” and perhaps it was so and rallied a great many youngsters around the ideas and motivations of the revolutionaries. And for those youngsters who did take LSD but needed direction and guidance, the revolutionary message of the insiders could not be ignored. Later in the decade and into the early 1970s, the perceptions of urgency concerning Vietnam and other issues began rubbing off on a great many who obviously had not taken any psychedelic salience-activators: parents and grandparents, religious leaders, labor union members, even a few Congressmen began to see the light. A collective contact high?

And who were these true revolutionaries? Probably not many of the usual suspects I fear, but out of respect I will not name them, many of them brought to prominence by the same wave of commercialism, advertising, and multimedia saturation that puts the trivial on a pedestal and pretends the profound is too difficult for the public to grasp. But I will go ahead and mention a few who were 60s revolutionaries:

Certainly the early SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) members who published the Port Huron Statement, written in 1962 by Tom Hayden, a University of Michigan student and then the Field Secretary of SDS, with help from 58 other SDS members. [6] The document was ahead of its time and remains a most revolutionary statement, largely because we can easily see that little has changed for the better, the Statement's criticisms are more valid than ever on issue after issue:

Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era...

The American political system is not the democratic model of which its glorifiers speak. In actuality it frustrates democracy by confusing the individual citizen, paralyzing policy discussion, and consolidating the irresponsible power of military and business interests.

[T]he localized nature of the party system does not encourage discussion of national and international issues: thus problems are not raised by and for people, and political representatives usually are unfettered from any responsibilities to the general public except those regarding parochial matters. Second, whole constituencies are divested of the full political power they might have: many Negroes in the South are prevented from voting, migrant workers are disenfranchised by various residence requirements, some urban and suburban dwellers are victimized by gerrymandering, and poor people are too often without the power to obtain political representation. Third, the focus of political attention is significantly distorted by the enormous lobby force, composed predominantly of business interests, spending hundreds of millions each year in an attempt to conform facts about productivity, agriculture, defense, and social services, to the wants of private economic groupings.

What emerges from the party contradictions and insulation of privately held power is the organized political stalemate: calcification dominates flexibility as the principle of parliamentary organization, frustration is the expectancy of legislators intending liberal reform, and Congress becomes less and less central to national decision-making, especially in the area of foreign policy. In this context, confusion and blurring is built into the formulation of issues, long-range priorities are not discussed in the rational manner needed for policy-making, the politics of personality and "image" become a more important mechanism than the construction of issues in a way that affords each voter a challenging and real option. The American voter is buffeted from all directions by pseudo-problems, by the structurally-initiated sense that nothing political is subject to human mastery. Worried by his mundane problems which never get solved, but constrained by the common belief that politics is an agonizingly slow accommodation of views, he quits all pretense of bothering. ...

Past senselessness permits present brutality; present brutality is prelude to future deeds of still greater inhumanity; that is the moral history of the twentieth century, from the First World War to the present. A half-century of accelerating destruction has flattened out the individual's ability to make moral distinction, it has made people understandably give up, it has forced private worry and public silence.

It may be astonishing to some unfamiliar with 60s happenings that such a document was penned in 1962 and that it was such a penetrating critique of those times, the entire post-war era in fact, and that the document might as well be analyzing today's world. Exactly the same situation persists today, but in spades: today's version of such problems is greatly magnified. Nothing important criticized by the Statement has been improved, and much has gotten far, far more threatening.

The manifesto that in another age might have been a blueprint for collective awakening was ignored by mainstream “intellectuals” not to mention the mainstream media and the Power Elite. Instead the promoted images and stories showed that we indeed had a “revolution,” but of the trivial, one of styles but not substance, of hair-styles but not styles of use of that powerful 1.3kg organ just beneath... and thus was the momentum of the university protest scene siphoned off into largely irrelevant side-issues. Oh yes, we got a little womens' lib, a reinforced civil liberty or two, some gay rights, a little ecological consciousness (we banned DDT, wowee!), but the only real enemy of mankind remains as omnipresent as ever: WARFARE.

Some 60s revolutionaries may well, like the president who didn't inhale, deny that LSD played a role in their personal awakening. As I have made clear in previous chapters, a few individuals in every age seem to have an inherent ability to discern salience to its full degree while the great majority may need some assistance. So although a claim to self-inflicted revolutionary motivation may be true for a few, I will nevertheless maintain my claim above that the 60s may well have been as unproductive of revolutionary spirit as the 50s except for LSD. Perhaps as the truth about what a psychedelic experience is—presented in the several chapters here—becomes more widely known, some who have been loathe to admit their own involvement might come clean. I consider it very lucky indeed, and an honor and certainly not a personal stain or error to have been awakened by psychedelic experience.

I will mention but one other of the 60s revolutionaries, and in this case I am not even sure of his actual identity, but have only a pamphlet that was written by him, What is the Psychedelic Revolution? What I find exceptionally interesting in this document is that the author anticipated to some extent that the core effect of psychedelics is salience enhancement. He calls it an increase in noticement, i.e., a psychedelic drug increases one's noticing. He seems not to be aware of Huxley's or Watts' similar conclusions discussed earlier here:

When we talk about psychedelics “expanding awareness”, we are really talking about one of two kinds of awareness—man’s awareness of what he experiences, as opposed to his awareness of what he feels or does in response. The flow of our lives is rooted in the dialectic of the two—in the tension between objective experiencing, and subjective responding. Substances like LSD and mescaline are unique, as stimulants that accelerate the perceptual, experiential awareness with far less acceleration of behavioral response. Most stimulants accelerate behavior, or speed everything up in lockstep; psychedelics speed up the rate at which you notice. Now normally, as we interpret reality, we pick and choose stimuli, so that as we construct an ideology, we create a reality, which is tested and defined through further behavioral response, emerging as “material reality”. Psychedelics speed up “noticement”, the concrete perceptual awareness which elicits response from the organism: you have far more stimuli, for which you develop stronger, (more compact, inclusive interpretations... In effect, a consciousness-expanding drug is a deconditioning agent. It speeds up “noticement” [salience detection] so much that, cinemagraphically, noticing becomes continuous. [7]

What is the Psychedelic Revolution? also anticipates my model of psychedelic experience as involving a suspension of habit routines. It is, of course, an entirely different type of document than The Port Huron Statement in many respects. I hope the present reader will spend a little time with these two essays since—despite their age—they are critical for understanding our present precarious situation and what might be done about it. They both cover much of the same territory, but from radically different perspectives, the PHS from an almost mainstream, university-intellectual position, the Revolution paper from an underground, and radical insider viewpoint. The two documents are separated by merely six years, but a great deal had changed during this period.

What is the Psychedelic Revolution? begins with an observation similar to mine, that the original revolutionary spirit of the early 60s had been largely siphoned off into irrelevancies, and then straight away insists that meaningful revolution would necessarily involve widespread use of psychedelics as catalysts and teachers. The Port Huron Statement of course makes no reference whatever to drugs of any sort, nor should it have since it is above all an analysis and critique of the faults of the American system of government, a dissection of its glaring deficiencies at home and deplorable actions on the international stage. The latter part of the document makes a great many recommendations of what needed to be done to remedy the problems, and these recommendations act also as penetrating criticism, for in reading each one I can well imagine a hypothetical member of the Power Elite reading them and at each one snorting, “fat chance of that, kid”. Nevertheless, if you should read them you will conclude as I do that they are the most level-headed and obviously necessary measures that still need to be taken to ensure not only world peace, but now the very survival of life on earth.

The Power Elite—along with the rest of humanity—will of course finally loose the game in the not too distant future, and it is curious that no significant reformist alliance has formed among them because it is they who have the most to lose. There will be no escape to alternate mansions, or on yachts beating a path to southern Pacific Isles, or to far-northern bunkers and hideaways, or on spaceships to destinations that don’t even exist. At least we, middle-class commoners, will lose at most a small house, and (joy!) perhaps an abusive mortgage and other debt, and (I hope it is over rapidly) our lives...

The main thing we have to lose under the current system is a livable earth. As Marx (a great devotee of science) would certainly recognize if he were granted a posthumous research trip into the 21st century, capitalism has not produced its own working-class “gravediggers” (the “revolutionary” industrial proletariat he thought he saw coming into being in his time). The profits system is not the “dialectical” midwife of socialism. It is an environmental as well as social, political and spiritual cancer—an exterminist endgame wired to take us beyond mere precarity to full-on extinction. If all of us—from the bottom up and top down—don’t figure out how to become the undertakers of this commons-plundering rentier regime, the insight of onetime leading neoconservative philosopher Francis Fukuyama will be borne out, though not in the sense he meant: Capitalism will indeed mark “the end of history and the last man,” through literal extinction. [8] (italics mine)

Rich dudes! Wealthy Ladies! Listen up!! Are you hip to what we are saying here? You are going to lose the whole shebang! And it won't be 50 years down the road, make no mistake about it. Maybe you are just an old fossil for whom an admission of accessory to ecocide matters not a wit since you think you will be long dead when the hard rain begins to fall. You would be embarrassed to admit you were wrong? Oh! the shame and disrespect! OK, I accept your reticence, but actually you are of little importance and no one would even remember whether you atoned, unless... unless, use your gluttonous fortune to do something truly redemptory? Why bother?

We are addressing instead the youngsters among you, the new money, those who will not only themselves lose the lot, but your even younger youngsters, sons and daughters, who will not even inherit a wind that is not radioactive [9] or so charged with poisons that life after 30 will be just waiting around to see what flavor of cancer will be your fate. So, rich youngsters, you have the most to lose, and oddly, just perhaps, the most to gain as well. What's that I said?

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> to be continued

Coffee - The Writer’s Fuel - Click the photo

1 For instance the very early tribal societies which lived on the Tassili Plateau of southern Algeria, and Çatal Hüyük in central Anatolia, discussed by Terence McKenna in his Food of the Gods.

2 I suppose I am at odds with the political science definition of revolution as it appears at Wikipedia, but if “Scholarly debates about what does and does not constitute a revolution center on several issues,” for my purposes here I will consider a “revolution” not merely as “a seizure of power by a group whose collective behavior is usually as reprehensible as of those whom they overthrow,” but rather as a series of events which leads to a new, enduring, more enlightened version of a society, one that has solved and outgrown its previous collective contradictions that required the revolution as a remedy. One that parallels our original awakening ca. 70KYA, or the awakening of Greek society from its “barbarous and savage mode of life.”

3 From the website writings of Gilad Atzmon, “Insightfulness and Palestine”, October 14, 2018.

4 Dmitri Orlov: "Barbarians Rampage through Europe's Cemetery"

5 From the research and writing of Erich Fromm, see The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, online.

6 see Wikipedia and Port Huron Statement Original Draft and Still Radical at 50 and a slightly corrected (spelling and typos) version I have taken the liberty to prepare, at The Psychedelic Library

7 From What is the Psychedelic Revolution? (signed) - a provo - early 1968. Provisionally attributed by an expert of the literature of the times to Chester Anderson.

8 Paul Street, “Our 'Rentier Capitalism' Is One More Nail in Earth's Coffin” Truthdig.com

9 Readers who think the danger of intentional or accidental nuclear war is the least of our worries should pay close attention to Daniel Ellsberg’s just published book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Ellsberg was the insider’s insider, held every known and unknown-to-many security clearances that ever existed, and he knows his stuff in spades. He reveals, for example, that there are and have always been a great many fingers (not just the president's) poised over—and authorized to push—the Big Red Button, many of them very itchy indeed. And he documents that the world came much, much closer to nuclear holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis than has heretofore been revealed. The problem, as he shows, is that during such crises, even though the presidents and prime ministers may show great restraint and willingness to compromise, the top levels of military command begin to escape from their control and tend to be quite gung-ho on going to war on their own volition no matter what the consequences. Again and again, Ellsberg documents Dr. Strangelovian scenes that have actually happened and that might well have had the same consequences as in the film. During the Cuban Crisis, unbeknownst to the U.S., there were four Soviet submarines in the Caribbean, each carrying a nuclear-tipped torpedo. Only due to a rather miraculous chain of events, two days after everyone thought the crisis already resolved, were the nuclear torpedos not fired. The book is a testament to the monumental insanity of infatuation with and belief in the effectiveness of “nuclear deterrence” and the quite obviously deranged coterie of “war planners” inhabiting that accursed pentagonal insane-asylum just outside of Washington D.C.