A historical counterfactual I've often wondered about is, what would have happened if Timothy Leary didn't exist? Prior to psychedelics going counterculture, there was a lot of evidence that they could help with alcoholism and other disorders. But then he went all "tune in, turn on, drop out", threw acid parties, and then psychedelics got tangled up with counterculture ideas instead of psychology, and we got the drug war instead. Maybe that was all inevitable, but maybe it wasn't?
Whatever drug the anti-war crowd was going to use was going to get banned by Nixon.
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Take the same mentality and apply it to the politics today; gets interesting. What’s being vilified? What are the associates that may or may not be factual? Everything is propaganda
> Propaganda - The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.
It pays to collect a breadth of news / information from all sides and dive deep into any subject you want to know well (can't do everything).
In terms of identifying it, typically you'll see general discussion without diving into facts and / or name calling. Alternatively, you'll see downplaying of particular events, specifically of ones own "side" so to speak.
Here's a few articles that are clearly propaganda:
1. Omission - A group of similarly aligned pundits, reports, etc will not report on a topic. This is when the topic is likely partially true, but they have no response. Think "Hunter Biden Laptop" - which was reported pre-2020 election; but only reported on by the left wing news in 2022 (https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/hunter-bidens-infamous-laptop-...)
2. Propaganda - The more common thing you'll see is spin or dismissive name calling. Things like...
You'll see the name calling "denier" or "anti" a lot in the spins (think: "climate change denier", "election denier", "anti-vaxx", "anti-science", etc). Most of the time, if you actually read articles about said "denier", they really take a more nuanced view. The article itself is titled to attract a particular kind of reader. Often you have to read between the lines or go to a transcript to get a clear understanding of the persons views.
If you can't tell, I take particular beef with CNN. But most news on all sides of the spectrum are effectively doing the same. My particular beef with CNN started when they said (paraphrased): "It's illegal to read documents from wikileaks, you must get your news / interpretations from us" - https://streamable.com/6g5v
Sure, I am familiar with these talking points and I agree completely with your perspective.
What I was wondering aloud is, do some people have ideas about a way to discern what's more or less propagandized? IE, even being propagandized, it is relatively less so and safer for mental health (since being scooped up into a culture war can be pretty taxing). I was asking hoping someone might chime in with different perspectives/strategies. Something I might glean insight from.
What’s more mind boggling to me is Americans driving around with freedom written on our big ol trucks but we’re not legally allowed to take…a mushroom. The cognitive dissonance is huge.
Damn, this is some peak hackernews vibes. Bringing up eating poison as a way to deflect from thinking too hard about the contradiction of America's cultural meme of intense individual freedom against extremely restrictive governments policies against psychedelic consumption
We both know that the above poster wasn't trying to make the point that mushrooms are intrinsically innocuous. It's obvious from context which mushroom they're talking about. Your comment serves only to make discussing the original point harder, and erodes everyone's ability to have an interesting conversation by adding inconsequential fluff to the thread.
Let's be fair. There is not ever be a movement of individuals from HN banding together to win the ability to take whatever medicinal they want. Given that no conversation here will result in any meaningful movement, let alone an actual policy change, the whole conversation in inconsequential fluff.
I don't think it's illegal for you to possess or cultivate a toxic mushroom, unless there's additional evidence to show you're planning to poison someone else with it.
The reason they were banned from Harvard is (allegedly) mainly because the researchers were having sex with the undergrads, not because Leary was telling kids to drop out. IIRC it was Andrew Weil who wrote the article about it in the crimson.
From what I understand the psychedelic frontier in the 60s was largely unaware of existing cultural frameworks around psychedelics, like the shamanic tradition in south america. It appeared they had made a revolutionary discovery of mental territory, revelatory and subjectively meaningful like to meeting your local deity.
Presuming the psychological magnitude of their experiences I can find my way into the psychology of someone being propelled into some decade long mania of propheticism and hubris (not to justify or sugarcoat the consequences).
I'm pretty sure James Fadiman has said if it wasn't Leary, someone else would have probably done what he did - although his charisma made him particularly effective. Hard to imagine a world where humans were able to keep the magic of LSD solely inside the confines of a lab.
Leary seemed to have been much more public, radical, prestigious and famous. He had the authority as a popular Harvard professor, so when he began to influence the counterculture on matters of policy and action it was duly noted by the mainstream media and governmental establishment. President Nixon called him "the most dangerous man in America." Nixon rightly recognized that Leary personified every force opposing him: anti-war, anti-authority, anti-consumerist. He was the head of the snake to be culled, and Nixon was so successful we are still grappling with the aftermath more than 50 years later.
You're probably right. I just have the impression that Kesey was the reckless one performing "acid tests" en masse on an unsuspecting public.
My perhaps misinformed impression of Leary was that he held the view psychedelics were best used by the intelligentsia who should then pass on what they learned to the general public. Maybe it just shifted after Leary was ostracized by academia and pushed into the same camp as Kesey in the fullness of time.
It's not something I've spent much time researching.
it is possible that there were widespread uses of psychedelics in multiple earlier civilizations, but those social systems either did not last themselves or were defeated in wars and erased. Some of the vigorous rhetoric about "pagans" in the middle ages Europe for example.. psychoactive substances are not new
The primary thing that happened is the rise and power of the catholic church, which saw the "direct" spiritual experience offered by psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelic plants as a threat to their gatekeeping role and violently stamped out knowledge and use of such substances.
Similarly, the moral panic about psychedelics was because it threatened vested business and corporate interests (and the economic war with communism), especially when slogans such as "Turn on, tune in, drop out" because associated with them.
Alternatively, see John Allegro's (one of the people who worked on deciphering the Dead Sea scrolls) The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross which posits that Jesus actually was a mushroom.
My point was more to say that mainstream Christianity has an established view on drugs. I'm far from an export on Allegro's work, however I'm pretty sure it is rejected by most Christians.
If he is correct then you could argue that drugs have not been seen as witchcraft since the beginning of Christianity. But I wasn't really trying to argue historical fact, simply that it's a long held mainstream belief within Christianity.
well.. so lets be broader here.. I listened to "Guns, Germs and Steel" on audiotape and that book gives great examples of innate advantages to the peoples in Europe, about grains and farm animals and a few other things.. that were multiplied over time for advantage.. However, they do not talk about the particular collection of psychoactive substances in that part of the world -- they occur all over the globe. But some of the drugs used in Europe were pretty awful actually. I imagine that taken badly, some fairly awful results could happen over time.. see the Baba-yaga group of stories, or just plain old bad health outcomes..
So yes it is easy to fault the Church of Rome and others like it, but also there is benefit in gentler means of enlightenment.. is that not the higher evolutionary goal? Having more powerful black-metal shows or whatever, is not fertile and not productive over time.. Whereas the focus of the Church of Rome now is the family, stability and arguably forming the social strength to make strong military. There are other groups to pick on that way, not exclusive to the Church of Rome.
I go out of my way to explain this because I also have Catholic-or-not conflicts in my own family tree.. so it is a real issue, for sure. I will also add that schizophrenia is a real and serious condition, and could be ignorantly connected to some strong drugs. Sadly, marijuana is now linked to schizophrenia in a small percentage of the population that is prone to that.. So .. more research needed.
European indigenous psychoactives were primarily deliriant nightshades and amanita muscaria mushrooms - both of which are very interesting to read about but I've never felt compelled to try.
Taking nightshades and "speaking with the devil" seems entirely plausible to what people of that cultural mindset would have experienced. Erowid's Datura experience vault has a collection of first hand accounts of the experience, and they sound quite terrifying: being in a dream-like state for days at a time with heavy amnesia, hallucinations of people who aren't really there, dark ominous imagery and out of body experiences. Much more realistic hallucinations than are reported from psilocybes. See also "flying ointment" for some interesting (nsfw) context to 'witches riding brooms".
Everything I've read about the amanita muscaria experience makes me never want to experience it... thankfully we have a fair set of varied experiences with other mushroom varieties and many synthetic tryptamines with more pleasant experience and risk profiles.
