Tripping on Utopia (2024)

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Written By spacewhy

This is a wonderkammer of a book. Principally following the adventures of anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, the story wanders through the hot and heady middle of the 20th century following a wicked trifecta of psychedelic research, utopian social planning and CIA mind-control programs. The rather sci-fi implication of structural anthropology is that, just as a society may be taken apart, so might a society be designed. This was Margaret Mead’s scientific and utopian dream, underwritten by psychoanalysis, fast-tracked by the transformative power of psychedelics, commandeered in the cold war psy-ops of CIA and MK Ultra, and totally destroyed by Timothy Leary. It depicts a long gone era when science and expertise were the ultimate prerogatives of the state, for both utopian and dystopian ends. Starring: Alan Ginsberg, Cary Grant, Ram Dass, John Lilly and his dolphins on acid, L. Ron Hubbard and Allen Dulles. Five stars; must read; action packed. 

Margaret Mead

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The Empiricist Witch and the Flying Ointment