The Politics of Timothy Leary

THINK FOR YOURSELF; QUESTION AUTHORITY CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 2 1. BIOGRAPHY 11 2. THE POLITICS OF ECSTASY/THE SEVEN LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS (THE 60S) 18 2.1. Ancient models are good but not enough 18 2.2. “The Seven Tongues of God” 19 2.3. Leary’s model of the Seven Levels of Consciousness 23 2.4. The importance of “set” and “setting” 27 2.5. The political and ethical aspects of Leary’s “Politics of Ecstasy” 29 2.6. Leary’s impact on the young generation of the 60s 31 2.6.1. “ACID IS NOT FOR EVERYBODY” 34 3. EXO-PSYCHOLOGY (THE 70S) 37 3.1. S.M.I.²L.E. to fuse with the Higher Intelligence 39 3.2. Imprinting and conditioning 42 3.3. The Eight Circuits of Consciousness 43 3.4. Neuropolitics: Representative government replaced by an “electronic nervous system” 52 3.5. Better living through technology/ The impact of Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory 55 4. CHAOS & CYBERCULTURE (THE 80S AND 90S) 61 4.1. Quantum Psychology 64 4.1.1. The Philosophy of Chaos 65 4.1.2. Quantum physics and the “user-friendly” Quantum universe 66 4.1.3. The info-starved “tri-brain amphibian” 69 4.2. Countercultures (the Beat Generation, the hippies, the cyberpunks/ the New Breed) 72 4.2.1. The cyberpunk 76 4.2.2. The organizational principles of the “cyber-society” 80 4.3. The observer-created universe 84 4.4. The Sociology of LSD 88 4.5. Designer Dying/The postbiological options of the Information Species 91 4.6. A comparison/summary of Leary’s theories 97 4.7. A critical analysis of the cyberdelic counterculture of the 90s 103 4.7.1. The evolution of the cybernetic counterculture 104 4.7.2. Deus ex machina: a deadly phantasy? 106 4.7.3. This trip is over 115 4.7.4. McLuhan revisited 119 5. CONCLUSION 123 5.1. Leary: a pioneer of cyberspace 123 5.2. Think for Yourself, Question Authority 124 SOURCES 130 Introduction psychedelic: “Psychedelic” – coming from the Greek “psyche”(soul) and “delein,” to make manifest, or “deloun,” to show, reveal – was first proposed in 1956 by [Humphry] Osmond [...] to describe the effects of mind-altering drugs like mescaline and LSD. (Peter Stafford) [...] a psychedelic drug is one which, without causing physical addiction, craving, major psychological disturbances, delirium, disorientation, or amnesia, more or less reliably produces thought, mood, and perceptual changes otherwise rarely experienced except in dreams, contemplative and religious exaltation, flashes of vivid involuntary memory, and acute psychoses. (Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar) cybernetic(s): Norbert Wiener, in 1948, invented the term “cybernetics” to describe control [and communication] systems using computers. Since then the prefix cyber is used in connection with robots and computers: cybersex, cyberfeminsim, cyberpunk [...]. (Joanna Buick and Zoran Jevtic) cyberspace: [William] Gibson invented the word cyberspace in Neuromancer, describing it with these phrases: “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” [Gibson’s] dream of literally “plugging in” to a computer via a jack that goes into the back of your head is still science fiction. The trend in the 90s is to try to get a “plugged-in” feeling simply by using very advanced sound and graphics displays. Thus Gibson’s “cyberspace” has permutated into today’s “virtual reality” [...]. (Rudy Rucker, R. U. Sirius, and Queen Mu) Many people know that Timothy Leary was an advocate of psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, which made him a cultfigure of the hippies. With his famous slogan “Turn on – Tune in – Drop out” Leary encouraged the young generation of the 60s to take psychedelic drugs and question authority. Not so many people know, however, that Leary reemerged in the 1980s as a spokesman of a new global counterculture called the cyberpunks and became one of the most energetic promoters of computers, virtual reality, and the Internet. “No magazine cover story on the [cyberpunk] phenomenon is complete without the septuagenarian Timothy Leary, admonishing readers to “turn on, boot up, jack in” and proclaiming that the “PC is the LSD of the 1990s,” writes cultural critic Mark Dery in Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (Dery 1996: 22). In contrast to the hippies of the 60s who were decidedly anti-science and anti-technology, the cyberpunks of the 80s and 90s ecstatically embrace technology. They believe that technology (especially computers and the Internet) can help us to transcend all limits, that it can liberate us from authority and even enables us to transcend space, time, and body. Originally, the term “cyberpunk” was used to describe a subgenre of science fiction. Cyberpunk science fiction is primarily concerned with computers and their interaction with humans. The first and most influential cyberpunk novel is William Gibson’s Neuromancer (Gibson 1984, 1995). In Neuromancer, Gibson describes a world of outlaw computer hackers who are able to link up their brains to computer networks and operate in cyberspace. In the late 80s, Cyberpunk escaped from being a literary genre into cultural reality. Media philosopher R. U. Sirius describes this process as follows: People started to call themselves cyberpunks, or the media started calling people cyberpunks. [...] The first people to identify themselves as cyberpunks were adolescent computer hackers who related to the street-hardened characters and the worlds created in the books of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, and others. [...In 1988] cyberpunk hit the front page of the New York Times when some young computer kids were arrested for cracking a government computer file. The Times called these kids “cyberpunks.” From there, the performers involved in the high-tech-oriented radical art movement generally known as “Industrial” started to call themselves – or be called - cyberpunks [...]. Finally, cyberpunk has come to be seen as a generic name for a much larger trend more or less describing anyone who relates to the cyberpunk vision” (Rucker 1992: 64). Leary, who called himself a cyberpunk as well, believed that this cyberpunk vision of a world where all limits are transcended has already become reality. The “new world” that Leary means is cyberspace (virtual reality and – in a broader sense – all digitally mediated space), which he sees as a boundless reality where time, space and body are perceived as meaningless. The question arises: Why did Leary’s focus shift from psychedelic drugs to computers? At first sight psychedelics and computers seem to have nothing in common. From a (counter-)cultural point of view, they seem to be complete opposites. The hippies, for example, saw psychedelics as an antidote to technology which stereotypes our consciousness and desensitizes our perception. In the 60s, Leary himself was very much against computers. He saw them as devices that would merely increase the dependence of individuals on experts. As Leary put it: “[A]t that time, computers were mainframes that cost millions of dollars and were owned by Bell Telephone company, IBM, CIA, Department of Motor Vehicles – no friends of mine! So I had this prejudice that computers were things that stapled you and punched you and there were these monks, the few experts, who controlled it”(quoted in Rucker 1992: 84). In the early 80s, however, when thanks to smaller size and cheaper prize computers became accessible to millions of people, Leary changed his attitude towards computers and realized that psychedelic drugs and computers actually have very much in common. He discovered that psychedelic drugs and personal computers “are simply two ways in which individuals have learned to take the power back from the state”(ibid.). Leary argues that both psychedelics and computers can help us to liberate ourselves from authority and “create our own realities.” In the course of his long career as psychologist and counterculture philosopher Leary wrote more than thirty books (several of them more than 400 pages long) in which he offers us very elaborate theories - using concepts from the fields of psychology, neurobiology, ethology, quantum physics, cybernetics, and chaos theory - that explain how we can use psychedelic drugs and computers to escape the “narrow reality tunnels” that authorities force us to live in and create our own individual realities whose limits are determined only by the limits of our imagination. What are those “narrow reality tunnels” Leary is talking about? According to Leary, we have been programmed by our parents, politicians, priests, and teachers to think and see the world the way they want us to think and see the world. For example, they programmed us to think in terms of dominance and submission so that for us it seems normal that there are a few who have power and create the rules while all the others are submissive, law-abiding citizens. Leary makes us aware that the models of reality the authorities are imposing on us are not reflections of an objective reality; they are just arbitrary constructions. What we accept as objective reality is actually a social fabrication, a construction of our minds, that is, our nervous systems. Only if we are able to control our own nervous systems – which means that we know how our brains operate – would we be able to change the realities we live in. Leary describes his books as “manuals on the use of the human nervous system.” (Leary’s Info-Psychology, for example, is subtitled “A manual on the use of the human nervous system according to the instructions of the manufacturers.”) In his theories, Leary explains how we can use psychedelics and computers to “metaprogram” our “brain-software” (the categories through which we perceive the world, our overall cultural worldview, etc).

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