Psychedelics and Social Justice/Movements

[StolenFaces]

This is my first post I believe...I used the search engines, but came up with nothing

Do you guys/gals think that there is a potential link between psychedelics and social justice movements? Is there the potential for psychedelics to play a role in helping future movements of change?

I have been looking all over the web, and here is my conclusion, and would like yours:

Psychedelics can alter/mold the ego, in a way that it will make the user view the world through different lens/door l and feel empathy towards everyone, but this state is only temporary. If humans are able to take with them what they get from a "trip" there is the potential for them to want to change the oppressive and colonial world we live in. It can be a tool to bridge the gap toward a just society.

With Leary in the 60's, he had no political or social motive, and a lot of the users of LSD would've rather been in "lala land" than actually try and change society. There were some hippies who were activists though, but a small percent of those that used LSD (yippies, those that built sustainable communes, etc).

Whatcha think of that?? Also, if you have any literature, that would be greatly appreciate too!

 

[knock]

Welcome to BL!

On a base level, if you spend your time enjoying the wonders of consciousness rather than thoughtlessly consuming and fucking over your fellow man, then you're probably going to be a nicer person.

If you question your ideas about the world deeply enough then at the very least you'll realise than everything is not black and white, right and wrong. This can only be a good thing.

On the other hand, what kind of person takes a drug that does these things? There may be a chicken and egg factor.

 

[killtheego]

Psychedelics definitely have a possibility to bring the world closer, and make people realize that we are all human. This is exactly why psychedelics are illegal, because the dominant forces have realized the power it holds.

United we stand, divided we fall.

Currently in our society and culture, there are divisions between people in almost everything. PC vs Mac, iPod vs Blackberry, PS3 vs Xbox360, Coke vs Pepsi etc. These divisions is whats holding us back.

I'd say read Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna if you haven't already.

On a completely unrelated note, the chicken and egg question always struck me as pretty obvious. The answer has to be the chicken, as it could have slowly evolved from some other animal over a period of a lot of years. For the egg to have been first, it would have just have to have popped into existence, which seems quite ridiculous. Does anyone see any holes in this argument (besides god defense)?

 

[Sentience]

I would ask, 'Which chicken and which egg'? How do we know their common ancestor

But yes, there seems to be an association with psychedelics and questioning reality and things commonly ignored or taken for granted.....simple things and things that are too 'obvious' to consider are often overlooked.

If you ask a fish (if it could talk) about the most obvious part of its environment, water is the last thing it would notice. Psychedelics change that. Instead of just focusing on next days bread or the party this weekend, we start questioning why this all got here, and for what? We start to think outside the box and realize things can be another way.

The only logical conclusion we can get from this is that our government is totally crooked and things can be better, and if we are aware of the possibilities we will know that we can in fact change things for the better by fighting for them.

 

[readthenewsohboy]

Psychedelics definitely have a possibility to bring the world closer, and make people realize that we are all human. This is exactly why psychedelics are illegal, because the dominant forces have realized the power it holds.

United we stand, divided we fall.

Currently in our society and culture, there are divisions between people in almost everything. PC vs Mac, iPod vs Blackberry, PS3 vs Xbox360, Coke vs Pepsi etc. These divisions is whats holding us back.

I'd say read Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna if you haven't already.

On a completely unrelated note, the chicken and egg question always struck me as pretty obvious. The answer has to be the chicken, as it could have slowly evolved from some other animal over a period of a lot of years. For the egg to have been first, it would have just have to have popped into existence, which seems quite ridiculous. Does anyone see any holes in this argument (besides god defense)?

Regardless of what arbitrary definition we provide that offers a hard line between chicken and not-chicken, it would be the pre-evolutionary form of the chicken that would lay a mutated egg, the first chicken egg.

So, by your own reasoning, it's egg first.

 

[agnetha]

Interestingly enough Wolfe described in his book about the pranksters how the Haight Ashbury acid heads literally walked away from the anti-war and civil liberties movement to explore their psyche. This theme surfaces several times in the 'acid test' IIRC. He's not known as an accurate historian (and yeah maybe he's a right wing prick too), so the picture could be wrong, but I can totally relate to the notion that psychedelic discovery can lead to a vantage point from which the attempt to reach social justice by political activism seems fruitless, obsessive and petty. I don't want to prove a point, just wanted to throw it out here because I stumbled over it recently.

 

[knock]

I said chicken and egg as a commonly understood, albeit stupid, metaphor. Obviously the egg came first as the first chicken certainly hatched from an egg. Its parents were not chickens by definition. Its mother laid the egg from which the first chicken hatched.

 

[readthenewsohboy]

Ah, I see. Well, no disagreement then.

 

[killtheego]

Regardless of what arbitrary definition we provide that offers a hard line between chicken and not-chicken, it would be the pre-evolutionary form of the chicken that would lay a mutated egg, the first chicken egg.

So, by your own reasoning, it's egg first.

Wow, can't believe I didn't see that...feel slightly stupid now .