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

by Benjamin Breen

In a widely read essay from October 1945, George Orwell predicted that the age of atomic weapons would split the world between “two or three monstrous super-states,” each dominated by a “machine civilisation” overseen by a “self-elected oligarchy”: the United States and its European allies, the Soviet bloc, and “the third of the three super-states—East Asia, dominated by China.” Orwell predicted a future in which science was permanently weaponized in the service of a shadow conflict that depended on the mobilization of vast reservoirs of technical expertise—for, as he put it, “a complex weapon makes the strong stronger.” In this eerily prescient essay, Orwell coined a term that would define an era. The future, Orwell believed, would be locked in “a permanent state of ‘cold war.’” Margaret Mead fundamentally disagreed. Rather than envisioning the postwar world as split between three hermetically sealed empires, she began describing it as an interconnected whole. Human society, she said, was now “a great complicated machine” in which every part was mutually dependent. “We,” she declared, apparently meaning not just scientists but everyone who cared what scientists like her had to say, had a “responsibility for keeping it in good repair and improving it.” The machine was not, as more skeptical commentators like George Orwell saw it, an inhuman juggernaut poised to trample the human spirit. The machine was us. Mead saw not despair but enormous opportunity in this fact. She bel...