The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 8 of 125
Politics as psychopolitics
LOOKING BACK ON THAT time, what seems so incomprehensible is that we never took LSD more seriously. How was it we failed to grasp its importance? For the concept of deconditioning was at the heart of the New Left of the time. If any single feature set ’60s and ’70s radicalism apart from any previous insurrectionary politics, it was insistence that individual subjectivity had to be transformed. The political was the personal. Politics were psychopolitics. Our own hearts and minds were precisely where the old order was ingrained—and if we couldn’t change ourselves, then what hope was there we could ever change the world? The near hysterical hostility of psychotherapists toward hippies didn’t help. It made us disregard everything else they said, which was stupid. The best summary of research until then, Robert Masters and Jean Houston’s Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, came out in 1966, and there was much we could have learned from it.