The dropout: a history

[Celerity]

The dropout was not just a hippy-trippy hedonist but a paranoid soul, who feared brainwashing and societal control

https://aeon.co/essays/the-dropout-a-history-from-postwar-paranoia-to-a-summer-of-love


Woodstock, New York, 1967. Photo by Elliot Erwitt/Magnum



In November 1967, Robin Farquharson ‘dropped out’. After losing his job as a computer programmer along with the flat he’d been renting, he decided to forgo the dwindling funds in his bank account and live on London’s streets. In his short memoir Drop Out! (1968), Farquharson recounted his homeless wanderings and loose associations with London’s underground scene, moving from all-night cafés to ‘psychedelic’ nightclubs; he described being robbed and beaten in the street, and his first experience of LSD. At 37, Farquharson felt too old to be a hippy, nonetheless he saw his disaffiliation within the context of a wider movement towards social and personal liberation, inspired by Timothy Leary’s injunction to ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’: words he interpreted as a call to ‘rid yourself of responsibility, quit the rat-race. Don’t obey society’s paralysing conventions … Step out of the trap.’


Timothy Leary addresses the National Student Association Congress, 17 August 1967. Photo by Bettmann/Getty

The year 1967 marked a high point in this history. That was when San Francisco played host to the ‘Summer of Love’, when thousands of young hippies descended on its Haight-Ashbury district, drawn to its carnivalesque atmosphere, psychedelic hedonism and alternative living. According to Leary, places like the Haight offered a redemptive starting point for ‘everyone that’s caught inside a television set of props, and made of actors’. In London, the major countercultural event that summer was the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation at the Roundhouse in Camden. For two weeks in July 1967, thinkers and activists including R D Laing, Gregory Bateson, Stokely Carmichael and Herbert Marcuse (women speakers were notably absent) gathered to debate new ways forward. Though a more overtly political event than the Summer of Love, the idea that psychological liberation was a prerequisite of political change was a central theme. ‘[W]e are taught, and coerced, to see things through a filter of politically arrived at and socially sanctioned lies,’ said one announcement prior to the event. ‘The entire world as we “know” it must be demystified.’

Though differing in style and scope, both events emphasised dropping out as hinged on a particular set of anxieties about modernity and its threat to the liberal mind. In The Making of a Counter Culture (1969), the academic Theodore Roszak had celebrated this crucial point of resistance against what he called ‘the technocracy’, a regime of governance that sought to rationalise and control all aspects of society, including its citizens. His concerns were not idiosyncratic; Roszak’s worldview drew on other critics of technocratic modernity, including Leary, Marcuse, C Wright Mills, Paul Goodman, Norman O Brown, Alan Watts and Jacques Ellul. All manifested what Roszak regarded as a healthy suspicion of the power structures of Western democracy that, according to Marcuse, had become totalitarian in everything but name. The dropouts embodied in the writings and adventures of Farquharson, Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey offered a potential antidote. To drop out in this sense was to strive for internal freedom through processes of ‘deconditioning’ or ‘unbrainwashing’ and imagine a type of self that could not be controlled or contained.

Cultural historians argue that the postwar period was marked by an acute set of anxieties – what Timothy Melley in Empire of Conspiracy (2000) labels ‘agency panic’ – about the potential for large institutions, states and technologies to control the arena of the personal self. Such concerns, already heightened by the rise of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, were boosted by the appearance of new forms of mass media and mass culture, the growth of the covert security state, and rampant globalisation. But fears of mind manipulation were also driven by the growing influence of the psychological sciences and the belief that the next major frontier in science – the mind and brain – would soon be unlocked. Addressing the American Psychological Association in 1955, the physicist J Robert Oppenheimer warned his audience that every acquisition of psychological knowledge opens up the ‘most terrifying prospects of controlling what people do and how they think and how they behave and how they feel.’

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[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. Haven't read the article yet, but the Alan Watts link lead to an interesting article which I did read

... and enjoy, even though the writer got the science wrong. Modern science embraces uncertainty and ambiguity hence the prevalence of uncertainty bars and p scores.

https://aeon.co/essays/alan-watts-the-western-buddhist-who-healed-my-mind

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