{"id":70426,"date":"2017-07-10T13:50:18","date_gmt":"2017-07-10T18:50:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=70426"},"modified":"2017-07-10T13:57:39","modified_gmt":"2017-07-10T18:57:39","slug":"how-lsd-opened-minds-and-changed-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2017\/07\/10\/how-lsd-opened-minds-and-changed-america\/","title":{"rendered":"How LSD opened minds and changed America"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the 1950s and ’60s, a set of social psychological experiments seemed to show that human beings were easily manipulated by low and moderate amounts of peer pressure<\/a>, even to the point of violence<\/a>. It was a stunning research program designed in response to the horrors of the Holocaust, which required the active participation of so many people, and the findings seemed to suggest that what happened there was part of human nature.<\/p>\n

What we know now, though, is that this research was undertaken at an unusually conformist time<\/a>.\u00a0Mothers were teaching their children to be obedient, loyal, and to have good manners. Conformity was a virtue and people generally sought to blend in with their peers. It wouldn’t last.<\/p>\n

At the same time as the conformity experiments were happening, something that would contribute to changing how Americans thought about conformity was being cooked up: the psychedelic drug, LSD.<\/p>\n

Lysergic acid diethylamide was first synthesized in 1938 in the routine process of discovering new drugs for medical conditions. The first person to discover it psychedelic properties \u2014 its tendency to alter how we see and think \u2014 was the scientist who invented it, Albert Hoffmann<\/a>. He ingested it accidentally, only to discover that it induces a \u201cdreamlike state\u201d in which he \u201cperceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the 1950s , LSD was being administered to unwitting American in a secret, experimental mind control program<\/a> conducted by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, one that would last 14 years and occur in over 80 locations. Eventually the fact of the secret program would leak out to the public, and so would LSD.<\/p>\n

It was the 1960s and America was going through a countercultural revolution. The Civil Rights movement was challenging persistent racial inequality, the women\u2019s and gay liberation movements were staking claims on equality for women and sexual minorities, the sexual revolution said no to social rules surrounding sexuality and, in the second decade of an intractable war with Vietnam, Americans were losing patience with the government. Obedience had gone out of style.<\/p>\n

LSD was the perfect drug for the era. For its proponents, there was something about the experience of being on the drug that made the whole concept of conformity seem absurd. A new breed of thinker, the “psychedelic philosopher,” argued that LSD opened one\u2019s mind and immediately revealed the world as it was, not the world as human beings invented it. It revealed, in other words, the social constructedness of culture.<\/p>\n

In this sense,\u00a0wrote<\/a> the science studies scholar Ido Hartogsohn, LSD was truly \u201ccountercultural,\u201d not only \u201cin the sense of being peripheral or opposed to mainstream culture [but in] rejecting the whole concept of culture.” Culture, the philosophers claimed, shut down our imagination and psychedelics were the cure. \u201cOur normal word-conditioned consciousness,\u201d wrote one proponent, \u201ccreates a universe of sharp distinctions, black and white, this and that, me and you and it.\u201d But on acid, he explained, all of these rules fell away. We didn\u2019t have to be trapped in a conformist bubble. We could be free<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The cultural influence of the psychedelic experience, in the context of radical social movements, is hard to overstate. It shaped the era\u2019s music, art, and fashion. It gave us tie-dye, The Grateful Dead, and stuff like this:<\/p>\n