Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science

by Benjamin Breen

“Anthropology had to be done now,” Mead decided. “Other things could wait.”

science created the conditions for winning the war, but science alone could not create the conditions for a lasting peace.

“Anthropologists vs Atomic War.”

Scientists, he said, stood outside the pattern of life, “trying to take the thing apart and see what makes it click.” Wright’s words recalled the visual language of Rivera’s mural. Scientists might think their hands were on the controls of the great mechanism of the world, but in seeking to control society, they had also placed themselves apart from it.

“As I was walking down 125th Street, I suddenly stopped and stared around me in amazement,” Ginsberg wrote. He was seeing something he had never noticed before, something that now inspired awe: the accumulated “intelligence and care” that had gone into molding the cornices and rooftops of the buildings in Harlem. All around him were these relics of the consciousness of people long dead. He had a sudden awareness of a “vast endless space reaching back into time and reaching forward into the future.” And he felt a parallel awareness that he was also one of the “artifacts of that long evolution.” It was a glimpse of something “longer than my own life, extending beyond my life and my former consciousness.”

science had become the weapon of “the advertiser who manipulates the public into buying some particular product; the colonial administrator who uses anthropological insights to maintain law and order in a native population; our friends in Rand who apply the theory of games to the strategies of war.”

in the fight against Communism, the ends justified almost any means.

All of Hoch’s test subjects for his experiments with LSD were institutionalized; a large proportion were people of color, unaware that their physician was feeding their private medical data to the CIA. Hyde, too, had continued testing LSD on his patients at Boston Psychopathic, without informed consent.

“Margaret Mead was a realist who mastered the dark side of her vision.”

“I have become increasingly conscious of the extent to which my life is becoming segmented, each piece shared with a separate person,”

“How to be Happy #1053.” In it, he bitterly skewered a book of pop psychology. Self-knowledge, he wrote, won’t save us from a world filled with “violence and irrationality, with so many human beings murdering themselves, either literally or symbolically.”

Mead argued that if a society’s most pressing problems were anxiety and stress, it meant that it had escaped humanity’s traditional enemies of warfare, famine, and disease. The rising significance of psychiatry and psychiatric drugs in modern life was, she argued, not a sign of growing mental illness, but a sign of progress. It led to “a world in which no individual feels that he need be hopelessly brokenhearted, a failure, a menace to others or a traitor to himself… a society where there will be freedom from want and freedom from fear.”

The underlying question was fascinatingly fundamental: are we truly the same person from moment to moment? Almost all of us feel, intuitively, that there is an inner core, a sense of self, that persists across the days, months, and years. But could this be proven? And what about drugs that promised to dramatically alter that sense of self?

He remembered thinking that if only the leaders of the United States and USSR could experience psychedelics together, the Cold War would end.

Franz Boas had warned Mead that the idea of precisely plotting human personality on a chart was a dangerously bad one. It encouraged an illusion of certainty, he said, offering new ways for prejudice and bias to be scientifically “proven.”

“What will have to happen before we have constructed a world which takes into account that instead of near-starvation we can hope for food for all?”

What was needed, she answered, were tools for integrating the past wisdom of human cultures into a new form—“twentieth century housing for twentieth century people,” as she put it.

Psychedelics, he said, are “more like the radar telescopes now being built to scan the deeps of outer, invisible space. They are not convenient. One cannot go bird watching with them. They explore a tiny portion of an enormous void.” But it was a void that humans would have to learn to inhabit in order to survive. “I believe that these agents have a part to play in our survival as a species,” Osmond concluded.

William Griffith Wilson, the legendary founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (known to the group only as “Bill W.”), paid them a visit one day to try LSD himself; he seriously contemplated making the drug the “thirteenth step” of his famed twelve-step program.

As Margaret O’Mara documents in her book The Code, Silicon Valley’s origins lay in military funding for advanced communication technologies during the Korean War. A parallel infusion of funding was reshaping psychiatry and pharmacology at the same time and place. Cross-pollinations between these two worlds were frequent. Gregory Bateson—whose home sat less than a thousand feet from the garage that would become the first headquarters of Google—thus found himself not just witnessing but shaping the place that would become known as Silicon Valley in the years of its birth.

LSD, for instance, has been shown to increase communication between brain areas involved in sensation, but to decrease communication between areas related to planning for the future. In other words, psychedelics can be both disruptive and integrative.

those who “administered the drug to themselves” were no longer “competent investigators” because they were “enamored of the mystical hallucinatory state.”

Yet while the psychedelic counterculture embraced “non-Western spirituality,” it did so in a superficial and romanticized way that did not truly challenge Western cultural norms.

“We commonly think of animals and plants as matter,” Bateson’s father wrote in 1907, when Gregory was three years old. “But they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.” The elder Bateson likened the stuff of life—the substance of a human mind, or of a bird and its egg, or of a parent and child—to “concentric waves spreading from a splash in a pool.” Twenty-five years later in New Guinea, Gregory Bateson was startled to discover that the secret knowledge of the Iatmul elders, shared in a special, consecrated building set apart from their village along the banks of the Sepik, contained a remarkably similar insight. As Bateson put it, “It is said secretly that men, pigs, trees, grass—all the objects in the world—are patterns of waves.”

“Life is not perfectible. But it could be so much better.”