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Unfashionable GuffPostsAboutContactThe Psychedelic Renaissance Will Not be ContainedDecember 11, 2018 By Nathaniel Allen As psychedelics gain influence, an arms race sets off to control usePsychedelics are primed to go mainstream in 2019. Riding positive media hype and the tentative approval from the cultural elite, industry leaders are starting to bank on the “psychedelic renaissance,” the coolest drug since marijuana. Already embraced by pop-culture leaders such as Joe Rogan and Vice, psychedelics are now receiving the long awaited endorsement from bespectacled scholar types, as evidenced by famed food and botany author Michael Pollan landing his exploration of psychedelics at #1 on the NY Times Nonfiction bestsellers. Pollan has put together the most in-depth work in recent decades, building on the scientific discoveries of influential researchers with the cultural grounding of famous psychonauts.Receiving such a calm and measured outlook from Pollan is an important step in the effort to bring the molecules out from dark internet forums and silk roads of the online marketplace to the front pages of respectable newspapers and science journals. After fifty years of banishment and righteous opprobrium from moral leaders, the public are now in no place to dismiss these drugs which have proven to be such a remarkable counter to modern malaise.Cast aside as grandiose delirium from Sixties festival groupies and their guru Timothy Leary, Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind makes the case that psychedelics  in their various forms ought to be reconsidered as respectable options in mental health treatment. Joining others sounding the alarm bell, Pollan presents the case that behind glossy profile pictures and smart phones ceaselessly buzzing with notifications, likes, and follows, the West is on the brink of a depression crisis.Michael PollanFor the past 20 years, Americans have adopted mental health pharmaceuticals at a sinister pace, while the declared rates of diagnosis only continue to rise. Prescriptions for antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, opioids and stimulants have reached such saturated use that marine life is suffering under the effect of the secondhand waste. Despite the abundance of these state of the art medications, Pollan points out that there are still 45,000 suicides each year in the US, which is “more than the number of deaths from either breast cancer or auto accidents.” Somewhat understating it, he writes, “Broken does not seem too harsh a characterization of such a system.”A large portion of the book summarizes psychedelic research efforts that have so far demonstrated a stunning effectiveness in treating a wide range of mental ailments such as depression, OCD, and substance addiction. Pollan suggests the wide availability of such drugs in a controlled and therapeutic setting would have the potential to treat a variety of mental malaises all at once. For example, Robin Cahart-Harris, a neuropharmacologist cited by Pollan, recently published a trial that showed more than a third of patients achieved full remission from depression with psilocybin treatment at a 3-month follow up. This would be an astounding result compared to typical antidepressants, some of which are indistinguishable from placebo.Despite the promising results from today’s medical trials, the golden age in psychedelic research has like already come and gone, occuring in the late 1950s – 1960s when the drugs were synthesized. The psychiatric establishment saw such spectacular results from early trials, Pollan writes that they referred to them as “miracle drugs.” It was with this enthusiasm the word psychedelic, meaning “mind manifesting,” was termed by Humphry Osmond in 1957. Seen as affecting a temporary state of psychosis in otherwise normal human brains, scientists had the first tangible evidence for a neurochemical explanation of mental conditions that were thought to be purely psychological. This discovery is one of the major theoretical leaps to the modern “disease model” of mental illness, the basis for the pharmaceutical explosion seen in the last few decades. If mental states were bio-chemical at their core, undesirable conditions could be “drugged out” of existence.Current science maintains that psychedelics act on the brain through the tryptamine pathways, which include commonly known neurotransmitters serotonin and melatonin, but also psychoactive hallucinogens – DMT, psilocybin, and LSD, among others. Pollan explains that LSD in particular has a stronger connection to serotonin’s 5-HT2A receptor than serotonin itself, “making this an instance where the simulacrum is more convincing, chemically, than the original.” In other words, the body prefers a synthetic version to the natural product. Pollan finds that some scientists believe this bizarre phenomenon indicates a “natural psychedelic” flows naturally in the human bowels, potentially during normal dream states.Such advances in chemistry and brain imaging have allowed for writers like Pollan to have a more complete narrative of the psychedelic network, allowing for informed speculation perfected by science lingo. For example the “default mode network” (DMN), one of the top buzzing topics of today’s neuroscience has recently been implicated. The DMN refers to a recognizable pattern of human brain activity that is activated when we are at rest and silent while we are engaged in goal-directed activity like playing chess or calculating a tip. Cahart-Harris believes that this network “shuts off” during psychedelic use, allowing for emotion, memories, and other mysterious thoughts to escape from the depths of our “automatic processes” and receive the full focus of consciousness.When all that sensory information [during a trip] threatens to overwhelm us, the mind furiously generates new concepts (crazy or brilliant, it hardly matters) to make sense of it all—“and so you might see faces coming out of the rain. “That’s the brain doing what the brain does—that is, working to reduce uncertainty by, in effect, telling itself stories. ”During his trip around the country interviewing various leaders of the psychedelic community Pollan personally experimented with many of the compounds, having positive experiences with the likes of LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. Putting his insights into words was almost embarrassingly pedestrian for the accomplished writer, but each revelation burst with emotion and spiritual ecstasies that had vacated the man of writerly routine. He realized that the ego-directed habits that he clung to as a writer who achieved “success” had increasingly dulled his joie de vivre. He writes of one of his trips, “Suddenly I saw my ego in a new light, and it was something I could control a little bit better…Now, I might have gotten that in ten years of psychotherapy, I don’t know. But I got it in an afternoon.”All it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight… Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities — call them spirits if you like — other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. Pollan wonders if we manage to maintain the current trajectory of caution and scientific respect for psychedelics, could we avoid the mass paranoia that derailed the movement 50 years earlier? He and other enthusiasts hope psychedelics can be responsibly utilized “without the spirit of a revolution” and importantly keep the drugs inside the laboratory walls—lest the youths get ahold of them and derail the movement with similar “antics,” “misbehavior,” and “evangelism” of ole Tim Leary.LSD Bicycle Day, Alex GreyOutside of corrupt psychiatrists and those enriched by the Pharmacopeia, you would be hard-pressed to find any defense of our current mental health philosophy, with its dedication to tranquilizing discomfort and stimulating away inattention. Yet the flawed treatment system can’t be the cause of our national dysphoria. A better sweeping generalization of the issue would be Durkheim’s anomie, the feelings of alienation individuals face as long-standing norms are discarded and cultural values and traditions are increasingly viewed as outdated obstructions on the road to the New Way. We saw the rise of the this feeling in films Office Space (1999), American Psycho (2000) and Fight Club (1999) where Tyler Durden articulated the sense that,Our Great War’s a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. As the pace of technological immersion has dramatically increased, many are convinced we are entering the dawn of the “Digital Revolution” which more or less began in 2007, the year of the modern bible, the iPhone. As consumer eyes drifted away from television, newspapers and print for mobile apps that miniaturized desired content, information and entertainment became not only free but condoned for use at all waking and sleeping moments by Saint Jobs himself.Esteemed professors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have been at the forefront of all this, receiving crop after crop of further degraded college freshmen. In their new book, The Coddling of the American Mind, they show that the mental health trends listed by Pollan are only magnified in their Universities, which they find filled with ever larger flocks of anxious and paranoid students, overparented and underprepared. Immersed in the youth culture of campus life, they rail against swelling bureaucracies and the neurotic students they cater to.The professors are convinced that something drastic has changed in how the youth are prepared for adult life. The social life of the average teen changed substantially between 2007 and 2012: in came the iPhone, Instagram and Snapchat, and Facebook expanded its services to anyone over 13. They quote Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, who famously admitted that Facebook was designed with the foresight to unleash a new and limitless source of dopamine as a reward for users who achieve the status of social media junkies. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he laments.Fortunately this age group is far too young to dominate the broader culture, which is still ruled by the notion that Americans are merely temporarily displaced millionaires, one good hustle away from career and life satisfaction. Yet the results of workplace surveys have not been so encouraging. Gallup’s 2017 State of the American Workplace shows that roughly 51% of Americans are “not engaged” at work, defined as “just kind of present,” while an additional 16% actively detest their jobs. That leaves 33% connected enough at work to qualify as “engaged.”Though it is hard to imagine a time in history that a majority of workers actively enjoyed their jobs, Americans could often count on family and civic obligations to keep them busy. A recent Pew Research report found that 40% of Americans said “family” was the most important source of meaning for them, followed by “religion” at 20%.  But despite fears of job automation and robot workers, technological change appears to have already impacted the social realm, where the fabric of relationships has been ruptured by the blur of digital surrogates.The New York Times cited data reporting that in the 1980s of Americans said they were “often lonely.” Today, that figure has doubled to more than 40%. The nuclear family is no longer; as David Brooks writes, “most children born to mothers under 30 are born outside of marriage. There’s been a steady 30-year decline in Americans’ satisfaction with the peer-to-peer relationships at work.” The disintegration of face-to-face community, combined with the rise of a digital propaganda war for our attention has left many lost and bewildered as the technological tides have rolled on without them.While we find historically high rates of mental suffering, general skepticism of the technological society’s ability to co-exist peacefully with humanity dates to at least 1932, the year Brave New World was released by Aldous Huxley. In the book, Huxley imagines a futuristic society that successfully eliminated dissent by achieving symbols of  “advanced progress” we remain seduced by today: fine-tuned genetic trait selection, radical sexual liberation, the fountain of youth, and a culture that values leisure and pleasure seeking, fueled by a perfected form of opium engineered to keep dark thoughts at bay.As fate would have it, Huxley would soon discover psychedelics via mescaline and become one of the first proponents and prolific writers on the topic. The impact on his philosophical outlook was immediate as the drugs helped him conceive of a spiritual alternative to his dystopian ennui. According to his second wife, he considered discovery of psychedelics to be one of the three major scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century, along with splitting the atom and the discovery of gene-editing. 1In his final novel, Island, published shortly before his death, Huxley distilled many of his ideas over the years into a world effectively described as a “psychedelic utopia.” The culture was based on balance with the local environment, fueled by the belief that overcoming the all too human desire to over-consume would require a full-on religious effort with regular ceremonies, scriptures, and symbols designed to support “the modest ambition to live as fully human beings in harmony with the rest of life.” Like Keynes, he viewed man’s desire to out consume his neighbor to be the primary problem of the 20th century. What are boys and girls for in America? Answer: mass consumption. And the corollaries of mass consumption are mass communications, mass advertising, mass opiates in the form of television, meprobamate, positive thinking and cigarettes (p.235). Replace the 1950s sedative meprobamate with Xanax and cigarettes with the Juul and it appears we have maintained the same schedule of distractions, staving off anxiety and spiritual malaise perusing the selections personalized by Amazon’s algorithm. In fact, a growing number of highly functional professionals have resorted to taking small amounts of psychedelics as the latest and greatest “productivity hack” to reach untapped creativity needed to crush their sales goals, highlighted by Ayalet Waldman’s recent book, A Really Good Day.Despite these and other recreational uses gaining popularity, Pollan naively hopes to contain the drugs “behind the laboratory walls,” favoring medical professionals and therapeutic guides to lead the private re-calibration of the ego. Sadly, this conservative approach was similar to Aldous Huxley s fifty years ago, when he criticized Timothy Leary for hijacking the transformative effects of psychedelics to accelerate the crazed social upheaval of the Sixties. Leary believed that once a few million Americans had achieved psychedelic enlightenment, he would have materialized a radical revolutionary force set to dismantle the structural engines of Cold War capitalism that degraded humanity and plundered the environment. There can be no dispute that psychedelics have repeatedly produced similar anti-establishment sentiments throughout their history.While Huxley did not want to be another Mr. LSD, riling up the youth with delusions of grandeur, he too saw the need for a new system of organization, seperate from capitalism and also soviet authoritarianism. Island was built with the principles of “fertility control and the limited production and selective industrialization which fertility control makes possible, the road that leads towards happiness from the inside out, through health, through awareness, through a change in one s attitude towards the world; not towards the mirage of happiness from the outside in, through toys and pills and nonstop distractions” (259).From various media shamans and mainstream psychonauts, we are taught that under the “trip” we will, for a little while, know and experience the shattering of ego and existence within the universal whole. But, Burning Man aside, any employed experimenter knows that such blabbering is incompatible with the sober demands of corporate culture. It will be impossible, if the drugs are used on a mass scale, to limit the experiences to simple blips of immense pleasure for the weekend, forgotten on Sunday, so we can show up to work with the right attitude Monday. Private re-calibration may work for successful boomers like Pollan or Waldman, who are simply looking for a little zest in their golden years. For the rest, psychedelics will support the next wave of rebellion and a new Timothy Leary to censor and excommunicate.Weeks ago I stepped out to a rare spring morning, relishing a clear blue sky and the flourishing plant life unique to the downtown of Washington DC. Here I was, [Continue reading]Filed Under: Uncategorized They Call it a Scandal: The Folly of Social Media TargetingApril 25, 2018 By Nathaniel Allen Timeless Voter Persuasion Tactics Are Only HumanCambridge Analytica and Russian bots are the tip of the iceberg! Treasured Facebook quiz information is being sprawled across the web. Democracy is under threat! The sanctity of social media has [Continue reading]Filed Under: Uncategorized The Rise of Jordan Peterson and the New RightFebruary 28, 2018 By Nathaniel Allen Saavy Social Media Tactics and Dramatic Video have made a new star Enter your email address to receive new posts by Unfashionable Guff via email. Email Address

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