this is from a paper

by jules27

Posted to Utterances on 2002-12-07 17:20:00

Parent message is 335745
i wrote last year for a chemical dependency class. Some of it may apply, some may not.


John Marks, author and historian called the the psychedelic movement “a kind of crisis cult within Western industrial society, formed by children of affluence and leisure who were inadequately assimilated culturally and homeless psychologically.” Marks contended that what had turned the Plains Indians to peyote in the 1870s turned some college-educated whites to LSD in the 1960s. He said their old cultural forms seemed meaningless, and they needed new symbols and rituals to shape beliefs and guide behavior.
The intellectual foundation that was being laid in 1950s for the psychedelic movement started with the beat poets. Many of them were LSD advocates, extolling the virtues of the drug in their poems, novels, and plays. Allen Ginsberg and novelists Jack Keroac and Tom Wolfe were all writing about—among other things—the metaphor of sanity versus insanity. In simple terms, the feeling at the time was that sanity was masking the truth. The beat poets and other literary figures regarded the normal world as corrupt, and insanity represented the unmasking of this false and corrupt reality. On some level insanity they felt was a path to purity. Ken Kesey who wrote, “One Who Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest” addressed the issue directly in his story about a man who was placed in an asylum for the insane, while he was sane.
This idea, which manifested in the popular literature of the 1940’s and 50’s, was similar to a movement in psychology known as transactional psychology. This new approach treated social roles and behavior as a series of games, each with its own rules, rituals, strategies, and tactics. Some psychologists believed these games interfered with people truly being themselves. However, in this case it wasn’t sanity covering the truth it was the roles people played covering their true selves.
According to writer, Aldous Huxley, the generation of young people coming into adulthood in the late 50’s and early 60’s was also looking for new spiritual paths. In 1955, Huxley spoke of “a nation’s well-fed but metaphysically starving youth reaching out for beatific (heavenly) visions in the only way they know” (World Wide Web: Huxley)—through drugs. In an article on mescaline in the Saturday Evening Post in 1958, he suggested that it might produce a revival of religion or spiritualism. The fulfillment of this prophecy began when college students who were trying to free themselves from the complacency of the 1950s fell under the influence of academic and literary figures promoting psychedelic drugs as a means for the permanent transformation of consciousness.