Drugs, Brain Curcuits and The Chemical Per Diem Conspiracy: Fanciful Myth or Horrfying Reality

So i did post a new thread.

See, like, when you take LSD or any other powerful psychedelic, you feel changed after the experience. You wonder how you could have seen stuff the way you did before. That's a common reaction, I think. And all those kids back then thought that what they had seen and felt with the drugs was something that they could use to fix stuff up. You know? But society was hostile to that, kind of. It was operating under a different philosophy. And eventually the 60's love and drugs counterculture was defeated.

And they slipped back into that first circuit feeling, wanting safety and to be comforted. So, they took heroin and became junkie types.

And some slipped back into that second circuit feeling, wanting, uh, power, I guess. So, they took amphetamines and became stock brokers.

Because the LSD counterculture was defeated.

And what about MDMA? I think that's more a fourth circuit drug than anything. It kind of deprograms all that stuff you learned about how to be social. The stuff you learned when you were a kid. Especially in a rave sort of setting, eh.

Okay, so I think there are several holes in this theory, but let me pick one - I don't see the acid => optimistic. Acid isn't all fluffy clouds and rainbow colors and flowers in yr hair. It's got a whole dark edge to it, too; it can be menacing and frightening and disturbingly introspective. Also, coke and speed were used in the '60s, too (and far before then) - they didn't just surface in the '70s.

Acid isn't all fluffy clouds and rainbow colors and flowers in yr hair. It's got a whole dark edge to it, too; it can be menacing and frightening and disturbingly introspective.
That depends on the state of mind of the taker. Its like that "potion" that Louis Jordan took in the first Swamp Thing Movie. "It makes you more of what you already are."
Also, coke and speed were used in the '60s, too (and far before then) - they didn't just surface in the '70s.
True, to a degree. But hippees in the 60s were very much into the idea that only "natural" drugs were any good. It wasn't until the 70s that Coke got reaaaaalllly big. A very narcisstic drug for a narcissitic era.

Yeah, although I think there seem to be holes in the theory, I think it's a good first cut.
Here are some of my thoughts(which might seem slightly irrelevant at first to the whole circuit thing, which I brought up)

I agree that when heads took LSD it gave them the realisation, the awareness that they didn't need to live like their parents had, they didn't need to think in the same way, be subject to the same mundane routine. It gave them awareness, I think, I don't know, I haven't took it myself. They thought, maybe if everyone thought this way, we could change society, it was worth a try, no-one, apparently had thought like this before. That's prolly why the 60's is considered such a special time, it opened up new possibilities, whereas nowadays it seems there are very few new possibilities (in the arts anyway). So, with this incredibly naive attitude, without any full realisation of how society is run, they thought that with flower power they could change the world, you can hear this in interviews with old hippies, or even try talking to some when they're begging for change (the ones that aren't running multinationals nowadays anyway). But, obviously, trying to take on society without really having a clue how things are (or at least without a good enough model), you end up losing. At the same time, the advertisers and the corporations were getting worried, how are we gonna manufacture mass produced goods to a bunch of individuals unlike in the 50s where everyone is the same (I learned a lot of this from the excellent BBC2 TV series, the century of the self) ? So, LSD opened up some doorways, but in a sense it seemed that it didn't give the whole story, the whole picture.

So, what was gonna happen next, well the hippies thought, fuck trying to change society, that's too much hard work. They started looking inwards ("maybe if I change myself, then eventually society will change") . The marketing men went back to their psychology textbooks and decided that the way forward was to cater for these individuals, with individual products, for their individual needs, their inner growth. So, we get Goddesses, Yoga, meditation, NLP, etc, etc being marketed. The hippies, putting their solidarity with the proles  to the back of their minds seemed to really go for this, it became lucrative, there was no crisis of capitalism due to overproduction of goods. We get arty adverts, we get counterculture of 60s completely appropriated, Dennis Hopper selling cars. Then we get the 90s, where there seemed to be another awakening, partiallydue to Ecstacy maybe also computers, we get resurgence of this high-level awareness, spirtuality, magick, millenialism also springs up. We get new gurus, aside from Leary we now have guys like R U Sirius , Terrance McKenna, Burning Man, Mondo 2000, Cyberspace, Virtual Reality, Fractals, etc, etc. R A Wilson and Leary also get their dues paid in full. But this time there's no pretence of doing this for anybody but the self. This is self-improvement. The marketing men seem to have been there from almost the start, the big corps weren't stupid. Socialism seems incredibly stupid and passé, capitalism is the philosophy of the futurists, the 60's kids learned their lesson. Clinton tailored his policies to what the baby boomers wanted even if this made them even more inconsistent than would normally be expected, although the basic principles of govt in US and UK remained the same, welfare for the corporations, scare the populus into paying up.

Of course this isn't the whole story, political consciousness was raised after Vietnam. And it has meant as CHomsky says that it has been harder for the US to carry out their millitary manouveres covertly. And it seems more people seem to be aware of the fact that capitalism is compeltely destructive and dangerous, and inefficient. But that really is another story.

Anas my parents were "60s kids" and they haven't learned their lesson. They could give a shit about "personal awareness". Why don't you stop making generalizations and start thinking? For instance, it's just a guess, but I bet far fewer people took acid in the 1960s than do today.

Anas, you make some interesting points in your generational analysis, but I think you give too much credit to LSD for influencing the counterculture of the 60s. Lord Custos was on the money with his Swamp Thing quote. LSD doesn't have a political affiliation. It's just as likely to make someone more reactionary as more radical, or to have no effect on their political views. Of course, people who take drugs in general are probably more likely to have libertarian views, since they don't want the government telling them they can't get high, and psychedelic-users tend to be more self-righteous about their desire to get high than coke or smack users, perhaps not without reason, but I think the political movements of the 60s would still have happened without psychedelics, although the music coming out of the period might have been less interesting.

Anas, you make some interesting points in your generational analysis, but I think you give too much credit to LSD for influencing the counterculture of the 60s. Lord Custos was on the money with his Swamp Thing quote. LSD doesn't have a political affiliation. It's just as likely to make someone more reactionary as more radical, or to have no effect on their political views.

Maybe I was talking more about the hippy movement than political consciousness in general. I mean, fair enough black power and all that prolly wasn't influenced much by LSD. And probably LSD wasn't the main/root cause of awareness, probably there were lots of factors, the cumulative affect of post-WW2 prospertity in US probably being another major one. But LSD probably was a major factor in terms of allowing people to see a "wider picture", that there was more to life than being a corporate robot. And what people were these, people in general, or mainly children of the middle classes going to university for the first time, and thus having the opportunity to see things afresh, not weighed down. This is, maybe, why they initially saw that society had to be changed, even though I don't think LSD makes anyone a commie, it might want more than was being offered at that time. There was a gap in the market, you could say. So, maybe specifically the youth of the country in part lead a burgeoning political movement, being the first to try and cast out their predetermined roles. But, in comparison to the late 19th century when the labour movement was much more active, and wage slavery was actually widely recognised as such. It is difficult as, I confess I know very, very little about the period and am mostly blagging.

I'm not at all sure there aren't more people taking LSD now than there were then. There are certainly more people now than there were then. But the government's not giving it away/testing it on poor suckers any more, either, so who knows? I think part of the "musical malaise" you mention was a result of supply drying up/being contaminated or weak (that is, I think I disagree). I see LSD, definitely, as an optimistic drug, but I DON'T see the others as, by nature, "pessimistic". I suspect the country went into a political/financial funk at the same time as the original drug-music makers realized that their music was documenting the world rather than changing it.

This thread has wandered far from musical discourse, so let me bring it back for a second: music tends to sound wonderful, important, on LSD, and many hidden meanings, etc., come to mind. On heroin, music becomes more of a cocoon, hence the many fans of Low (I'm joking, but correct). Speed and coke make music sound like a roar, a whooshing in your ears, sometimes an annoyance, hence the irritating nature of music that attempts to "reproduce the experience" (I'm talking metal, I guess). What I can't figure is why the mavens of cokehead California rock came up with such turgid, acoustic-based music.