Hacker News Reader

Comment by ldjkfkdsjnv | Hacker News Reader

Recently read a description of 1960's ideology. The claim being that its all propaganda, and what we know as 60s ideology (peace love etc) actually never really happened for a real duration of time. What did happen was that those that prescribed to that line of thinking either moved to communes, or they dropped so much acid they were societally irrelevant. There werent many people actually out and about that were pushing those lines of thinking, the ideology died within a year or two, but mass media keeps it alive.

Weird to think about how media can amplify a set of ideas, that itself didnt last very long. We keep having this renewed consciousness of ideas, like a microphone blowing it into everyones ears. Even funnier is to think that an ideology that hates mass media (anti corporate 60s culture) may actually just be a product of mass media, much like mickey mouse.

View on HN

I love the way Hunter S. Thompson described it. I'll strip it a bit for brevity, but the whole book (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) is worth reading.

San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world.

...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Another relevant quote from Fear and Loathing that was posted on HN a little over a week ago by isoprophlex:

... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

This is such a great succinct summation of my feelings on “psychedelic culture” as someone who has actually participated. It drives me crazy when people act like psychedelics open a window into deep spiritual truths and that taking them makes you some how more enlightened.

This culture is still pervasive - probably accounting for the majority of people who actively argue for decriminalization and research - and a bad spokesman. It reminds me a lot of the people who think Cannabis can’t be addictive, cures cancer, and has no negative effects. In some ways, it fetishizes and ascribes magical properties to drugs just as much as the “drugs are bad with zero exceptions” crowd does. Except, in many aspects it’s worse, because it downplays risks and pressures people to partake. Normal people notice it even if they can’t articulate it, and it does a lot to discredit reasonable people.

Could not agree more. I have tripped countless times. But in the late 80s and early 90s. No hippies to be found. I did have some interesting revelations but nothing I wouldn't have come to via other means of conversation or introspection.

For me, and most people I was doing this with, it was just an affordable, long lasting drug. Sure, I had read various books about opening the doors of perception but at some point you realize it's just more "you" that you are finding.

I do think psycadelics can be used therapeutically in the right conditions but I'm not convinced ad hoc trips will get you there unless you are already skilled at introspective techniques.

The one thing I'll say I agree with is it does change your perspective and can give you a break from your ego. Seeing how nice it is to not be a slave to all the negativity, dwelling in the past, and obsessing over the future is very freeing and taught me that pursuit of meditation was worth doing.

Ultimately, I'd say meditation can give you the benefits that people associate with psychedelics if you are consistent in the practice.

> it's just more "you" that you are finding

surely "just" more you still offers "deep spiritual truths", and surely finding them makes you more enlightened.

> I'd say meditation can give you the benefits that people associate with psychedelics if you are consistent in the practice.

I don't see how this in anyway devalues the psychedelics

Enlightenment is not something you have more or less of. :)

If you have experienced what people often refer to as enlightenment, you'll know the feeling fades. It's like trying to hold onto water. Knowing it is there can change the way you think about the world, sure, but chasing it is the ultimate ego trip. It's probably better to be open to it than to run around looking for it.

And I have to tell you, listening to Slayer on the second day of an acid binge in some dingy basement apartment while you try to figure out who you know that has some weed is not the same as hanging around in an alpine meadow with the cast of Hair. It's just not.

I never meant to devalue psychedelics, I was agreeing with the removal of that magical cache they seem to enjoy. For a lot of people they are simply affordable party drugs that let you drink your face off and have a good time for 8 hours or whatever. Their clinical use is very different and I love that it is being explored in a rigorous manner.

The psychedelic drugs themselves do not operate in a vacuum. They are neither good nor bad. I don't mean to devalue their therapeutic use but if anything they are a shortcut to give you a taste of what is possible with your existing hardware.

For an adult trying to lead a responsible life, regular meditation (or walking, playing an instrument, etc) is probably better than self-dosing after work on a Friday. For someone struggling with PTSD, I would imagine a dose in the right environment alleviates that burden in a way most other things cannot. Seeing that it is possible to not feel like you have been feeling could give you the motivation to try to hold on to that and find other ways to experience it. That's incredibly valuable.

> surely "just" more you still offers "deep spiritual truths", and surely finding them makes you more enlightened.

Or maybe it just makes "you" more crawled up "your" own esoterical butt?

> Sure, I had read various books about opening the doors of perception but at some point you realize it's just more "you" that you are finding.

But that's what opening the doors of perception means. Of course you're "only" discovering things about yourself, but that is still valuable and I think that is what a lot of people find 'mystical' about these drugs.

I agree that shamanistic woo-woo doesn't do any good though.

I disagree, but ignoring this somewhat, I offer this:

One remarkable thing is how the hippie stuff often induced by chemical manipulation of serotonin receptors mirrors a lot of religious messages. You can take slogans like "peace on earth, love your neighbor, love is all you need" and say, is that hippie stuff? Or is it, say... The message attributed to Jesus? In that sense, you don't really need the drugs or counterculture to come up with that. It's been an authentic part of history before. Nor can it totally be dismissed as only coming from drug culture, or a brief source for a small moment in time. We've had similar movements and ideas become popular before. I'd go one step further and call it objectively a good thing.

Maybe because psychedelics wake up the part of the human psyche that understands religion

That doesn't seem right.

I think of the brain as a "rationalization machine". It observes environmental inputs, and reflexively seeks to ascribe a cause for those inputs. In so doing, a causal model of the world is constructed (whether accurate or not), allowing the agent to make intelligent decisions about what actions to take in order to produce desired outcomes.

What hallucinogenic drugs tend to do is overwhelm the brain with sensory inputs that are sui generis and cannot be folded neatly into a pre-existing causal model of reality, but that are so numerous that they cannot simply be ignored.

So the "protective mechanism" of the brain, rather than abandoning or risking damage to this highly valuable causal model of reality, is to shunt these experiences over into an "other" category of mystical and religious significance. The fact that these experiences are inexplicable, rather than being an indication of any "malfunction" in the brain which might prompt us to doubt our perception in general, is instead proof of their cause: the incomprehensible divine.

This isn't academic, just my 2c.

At the end of the day, you can either see a beautiful thing and share it with a bunch of people. Or you can see an ugly mechanistic thing and think that you're smarter than the people seeing the beautiful thing

I don't think whichever one you see is a choice either, more like the yanny vs laurel thing

At one point I made the same argument you make. Now I don't see it that way. And I feel much better honestly

For what it's worth, I don't think it's ugly.

I think you're right that it's a personality thing, maybe connected to how strong the "rationalization drive" is? I don't know.

I guess I'd rather tickle the rationalizing side of my brain with a rationalizination of the tendency to stop rationalizing rather than just stop rationalizing :)

At least we know rationalization is not possible without free will!

> highly valuable causal model of reality,

It's important to not become too confident in this either. Our perception of that is as you say useful but also subjective and flawed, and I think if you get down to pure materialism, it's harder to pin down than you may think.

Even something basic which seemingly we all agree on at a basic level and require to function, trying to answer questions like "what is time?", you quickly can end up with mind bendy examples from physics where the intuitive understanding falls apart.

That would require that religion exists outside of human experience, to be discovered and understood and awoken to - which is a nice story, but not strictly true.

There is no religion, outside of what we imagine. We made it up. It isn’t like the water cycle, it’s not something just waited to be discovered by humans who know how to look for it. Religion is fantasy.

> There is no religion, outside of what we imagine.

You're making a metaphysical claim here, good luck proving it

Someone mentions religion and you come along and decide to attack it with the same cliche. Why?

I'm not totally convinced objective reality exists either. This kind of existential question cannot really be answered. You presumably think, as I tend to also, that what we describe in our scientific understanding exists independently of us, and it is there to be discovered, understood, and awoken to. But we can't really know that we're not "imagining" in a similar way as your derisive description of religion. Further, if objective reality exists, it's very, very vast, and we are very small, our senses and cognition limited, and we are likely unable to comprehend it.

Really in all cases, religious and secular, we make the best guesses available to us. I think we need to be humble about all of this.

There is a not insignificant amount of evidence pointing to psychedelics as playing an outsized role in the formation of religions.

A shaman brewing a mystical drink that gives you visions of supernatural forces is pretty convincing evidence of a god(s) to your any 2000 B.C. person. How else could you explain such a trip while having no concept of chemicals much less neurochemistry.

Alternatively you can also meditate/pray your way to similar states as the ones psychedelics induce. It takes a ton of practice, but I was able to generate very notable open-eyed hallucinations after just 2 years of low-intensity meditative practice (roughly equivalent to 120ug of LSD).

It is totally believable that a true religious zealot would be able to achieve much, much more with decades of practice.

Ram Dass told the story about how he visited the guru Neem Karoli Baba (AKA Maharaj-ji) and gave him a bunch of LSD, which supposedly had no effect on the guru because he was already having open-eye hallucinations from his meditation.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/baba-ram-da...

Probably BS, but matches with what you say.

Hehe maybe the guru had a severe psychosis and that’s why the lsd didn’t do anything.

In your experience, how common is this? I must know at least thirty people that have meditated for over 15 years, and none have mentioned open-eyed hallucinations.

I have also had this experience. Meditating for 12 minutes a day for a year or so.

It's an interesting theory that I've heard before, and I think it did probably play a role at least some of the time, but I think we need to be cautious about attributing too much to it. I think people who have interest in drugs often may get excited about this idea and push it a little far.

My point is you don't necessarily need chemical inducement to start or sustain the idea. Centuries of religious people believed in transcendent consciousness at times in history where they demonstrably had no access to drugs. You don't need to partake to be moved by John Lennon's all you need is love either; a lot of the people listening did not. And part of our cultural norms have these ideas baked in, with or without drugs.

Fever will also cause hallucinations.

And in the three main monotheist religions formation stories there is a good amount of time spent/lost in the desert.

It's pretty convincing evidence to a 2000 A.D. person too!

Sam Harris recently interviewed historian Brian Muraresku about just this topic. Brian studies ancient mystery religions, in which a central part of the “faith” was often an experience that was likely induced by psychedelics. It’s frustrating how little first-hand literary evidence there is, but archaeologists have managed to find actual ancient wine jars laced with all sorts of interesting crap — wine back then wasn’t the pure stuff we have today.

Peacefully loving all is just a natural state of relaxed mammal. It's an idea you might try to verbalize if you are cut off from disturbing sensations by a chemical or perhaps when your are comfy, warm and fed, without extending any effort because you have all your needs taken care of by disciples you sweettalked into doing it.

Hippies like many modern leftists are really puritans. They don’t know themselves as such, but this Puritanism you see in such “movements” is quintessentially American.

There's almost universal opinion on the mainstream, left and right that a cultural shift happened in the US between Eisenhower leaving office and Woodstock. It's not some narrative invented and pushed out.

The media does manufacture narratives. Youth in New York and San Francisco had a subculture in the 1950s which was framed as beatnik, and soon sitcoms were mocking beatnik. Small basement performance places would have patrons not clap to avoid noise complaints, so patrons would snap their fingers as applause. This was then presented as something unusual and pretentious, minus its original context. The same thing with San Francisco hippies - they arose organically, the mainstream culture took notice of them and presented them a certain way, and the cycle goes on.

Every social movement that arises is met with an attempt to coopt and to commodity by the corporate media and corporate America, this has happened for a long time.

In the same way, Woodstock '99 broke all that was left of the mainstream hippie movement, giving rise to the new metal one

Metal hippies? Is that a thing? I'm more familiar with the 2010s hippy festival goers eating mushrooms and research chemicals while listening to a combination of jam bands and various electronic genres

Sorry, Nu metal. It was more in the sense of the hippie movement falling out of mainstream for good around the 00's, at least on my view of the world, of course

Oh, ok that makes sense.

If you want to read a very smart book that really digs into this concept may I recommend:

https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Cool-Business-Counterculture...

One thing which immediately reveals the lie in this is that it pretends the counterculture was the only thing going on in the 60s and ignores the New Left, Civil Rights movements, various arts movements, the cementing of the MIC, the rise of the PMC, etc etc. The 60s were a massive rupture and while it’s true the counterculture wasn’t the only influence its bizarre to say it didn’t really exist to any extent.

And beginnings of the labor market having its back broken of course.

IMO that’s concomitant with the PMC since it’s the concrete moment workers stop thinking of themselves as workers and a big paycheck is sufficient to make people class-dumb, but I know that’s a contentious view.

That's more the mid-late 70s.

If you follow the long-wave (Kondratiev wave) theory of economics, the 70s was the beginning of the real "drop" while the 60s were still (relatively) boom times.

At the beginning of the downturn, there were large strike waves and dissent ... which were then, yes, broken, leading to the collapse of the socialist left wing in western countries (those parties calling themselves [or being called] socialist or social democratic now generally aren't and haven't been for a long while), and a brutal weakening of the organized labour movement.

> The claim being that its all propaganda, and what we know as 60s ideology (peace love etc) actually never really happened. What did happen was that those that prescribed to that line of thinking either moved to communes, or they dropped so much acid they were societally irrelevant.

This sounds like something you'd read in a pop psychology book, not an actual piece of historical analysis.

Given the visible cultural impact that the "ideology" (to use your word) had, and the sheer number of artifacts we have to attest to that, it's almost impossible to imagine how this claim could be substantiated.

Ironically, the only thing in that that's close to a correct statement is the line about communes and acid, which were actually a very small part of the "ideology" that you're referring to, and relatively rare, but which were amplified in public perception due to media portrayals.

No this opinion comes from Academia. A large volume of media was created in a very short time, and then essentially disappeared/stopped production over night

You say this but having an actual source would be great.

LSD is a hell of a drug, but it's nothing compared to consciousness + culture.

This is an incredibly difficult position to defend, and I would challenge you to do so.

Couldn't we make the same claim about all polarized views (both right and left) that the media love to amplify today, but not many people actually hold?

Unless we are defining that “ideology” very narrowly, the sheer volume of cultural output (fashion, music, cinema, etc) would be a clear counterpoint.

How long did that period last? It died very fast, and was really only 5 years at maximum. Probably not much longer than the time that covid started until now. A flash in the pan.

The lingering effects might very well last longer than the actual event itself though. Hell, the effects of LSD last much much longer than the drug itself lasts in the body. So to me, you're harping on the wrong thing. Sure, maybe the movement lasted a short time, but the mindset is still out there

1960s is only 10 years so if something went on in the public mind day on and day off for 5 years (like COVID did for 3 years), I think it's a good candidate for the decade-defining theme

There’s a related occurrence of the same principle — we have had movies/stories about the wild west for longer than the archetype frontier period existed.

Cultural output pushed by media, continuously and inarguably well after the movement ended?

If there's one thing that's clear beyond all else involved in the topic of popular culture, it's that the media chooses what culture to push and what to ignore.

I think that the "Mondo" films played a part.

For those not in the know, Mondo films (that's usually the start of the title, like Mondo Freudo) gathered together very disparate samples of different slices of life, with a heavy emphasis on the titillating, the criminal, the bizarre, not to mention almost anything that might be numbered among the counterculture, and presented them in a vaguely documentary-like format. How much was staged, how much wasn't? Still, aside from the almost obligatory nudity, you got a very strong feeling of "look at the strange stuff these people get up to!"

My guess is that they had kind of an outsized impact for what seemed like half "nudie cuties" of the 50s married to a casual National Geographic feel of different cities in Europe, the United States, and associated territories.

the actual impact of the 60s counterculture was that the hegemonic mainstream culture had its legitimacy broken -- but it was not replaced by the counterculture, or anything else

The French Revolution was also 4 years btw and nearly anybody involved in it that did matter was killed. Still it has a profound effect on society to that time And maybe to today.

My opinion is also that it is more amplified then justified part of the 60s. The more important part was the social revolution and not the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution was more the pill. People did fuck before.

Here is that book written by someone born in 1968 who is a conservative hack https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Politically-Incor... The idea that psychedelic and the alternative life styles not being widespread was true, but the author was coming with his mind set from the start.

As we can see, some people have been deluded by some kind of propaganda which makes it difficult for them to grasp the way an anti-war movement could have had any long-lasing or widespread effects, much less this far into the 21st century.

While anybody who has been paying attention to reality for very long will recall that the preference for peace & love over war & hate was so overwhelming that it was the war that was over within just a year or two after critical mass was reached among young people. Yes it was only a small portion who took the LSD, but the entire generation was influenced in some way or another too numerous to mention. For one thing it was just too stupid to continue being drafted into the army to go and fight for somebody else's country. There were not major anti-corporate attitudes, that was the least of considerations and really just a little bit of collateral fallout against military contractors. Nothing compared to the number of people today who are truly anti-corporate.

The entire nation grew to a point where a US President known to be dishonest by millions of citizens, was embarassingly ushered out by the combined attitude of the rest of the country (including those who had voted to re-elect him), way more respectably than deserved.

Think how much more widespread a collective attitude among young people against dishonesty would have to be before it could spread further enough for anything comparable like that to be accomplished today. Someone born in the 21st century would be the easiest to be taken advantage of by current disinformation since they simply have no frame of reference, there's nothing modern that compares. When someone born as early as 1968 can come up without a clue.

What's really hilarious is whoever is swallowing this propaganda is spending so much time so misinformed it's like (not even) trying to grasp reality while never venturing outside of Disneyland, and having nothing but imaginary characters as a source of guidance. This wouldn't be the first century where some people's perceptions can become far more distorted without any drugs compared to others who are under the influence.

I guess you can't trust everybody's description, especially when it comes to ideology.

Plus I would think it makes sense to do whatever one can do to discourage the spreading of propaganda.

>Weird to think about how media can amplify a set of ideas, that itself didnt last very long.

I feel like something similar happens with various woke/cultural issues

The way we understand history is limited to the mechanisms we have for recording it and reliving it. We experience history through imitation, parody, critique, imperfect recollection and the marketing and resale of cultural artifacts. Media can reduce ideas and people to stereotypes but it can also provide you with hours of raw documentary footage to wade through if you're willing.

To be honest, if you've used psychedelics, you'll know many people have that experience. I definitely have that over-encompassing all-is-one feeling. To be honest, it feels like a lower level of consciousness, less sophisticated, that is just making connections between random things.

I think most revolutions are done by relatively small (and surprisingly small) percentage of the population (social revolutions, political revolutions, etc). I believe there is quantitative evidence of this out there if you look for it.

They're selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man.

It is refreshing to read a description of a claim somebody read online, it really makes you think

This is such an absurd overgeneralization of the cultural lives of millions of people

Reply on news.ycombinator.com