r/MarkFisher • u/StandardCook2289 • 13h ago

What's "left" of psychedelics?

Fisher, Berardi, Fong on psychedelics: https://sbhager.substack.com/p/whats-left-of-psychedelics

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u/dumnezero 13h ago

While Fisher challenges the traditional leftist critique of the counterculture, Fong doubles down on it. For him, counterculture luminaries like Timothy Leary, Alan Ginsberg, Alan Watts, Ken Kesey, and their ideas about the transformative power of psychedelics, were “just kind of dumb.” The New Left, in its uneasy alliance with the counterculture, ended up engaging in forms of activism that were “breathless fun, but ultimately just escapism.” Though their 1960s proponents promised a revolution, psychedelics left the structures of capitalism firmly intact.

It's just a lateral move. Anything that detaches you from the rat race to the death ideology also gives you a chance to see it differently and to see more differences in reality. There's no guarantee of success, and I doubt that drugs can really be effective for it, since the brain requires a longer duration to reorganize connections.

To be clear, if there was the possibility of a pharmaceutical cure for this wetiko, capital would've invested in its opposite long before. They haven't, and that's a good sign.

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u/MadCervantes 8h ago

I'd argue capital kind of is what with the explosion in ketamine.

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u/dumnezero 4h ago

The alienation? Or the sunken place? https://nofilmschool.com/get-out-sunken-place-meaning

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u/MadCervantes 2h ago

Yah something along the lines of both.

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u/dumnezero 44m ago

And "socialists" still complain when I point out that individual action is required.