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

by Benjamin Breen

Bateson was evoking the widely held belief that there would soon be breakthroughs in the human sciences to rival the Manhattan Project. After all, scientists in those years were celebrating not just a new era of wonder drugs such as penicillin, but a genuinely revolutionary approach to thinking about consciousness and communication. Starting with a series of Macy conferences that began in March 1946—later dubbed the “cybernetics conferences”—Mead, Bateson, and colleagues such as Norbert Wiener of MIT and Claude Shannon at Bell Labs were reimagining the brain itself as a computer. History’s first general-purpose digital computer, ENIAC, had been announced at the beginning of that year. ENIAC was a weapon of war, used to calculate atomic bomb yields. Crucially, however, it could be reprogrammed—altered for peacetime use, gifted with new potentials. What if the human mind was the same? Perhaps assuring human survival meant developing a new science of sanity, a new set of tools for reprogramming minds and societies stuck in self-destructive feedback loops.