On Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, and LSD

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Scott Alexander writes,

The best I can do in making sense of this story is to think of Kesey as having unique innate talents that made him a potential cult leader, combined with the sudden rise in status from being a famous author and the first person in his social scene with access to LSD. Despite the connotations of “cult leader”, Kesey was overall a good person, genuinely wanted to help people’s spiritual development, and genuinely thought LSD could do this. LSD formed the content of his cult, the same way Messianic Judaism formed the content of Jesus’ cult. It also made his life easier because of the drug’s natural tendency to make people think they are having important insights. When he, attempting to genuinely discover a spiritual path, decided to change the content and go beyond LSD, he lost that crutch, his people betrayed him, he became less confident in himself, and eventually he gave up.

My interpretation of Kesey is a bit different. He could only depict the power struggle between Nurse Ratched and Randle McMurphy because he understood the strengths of both. (Note that more than one pundit has seen an echo in the contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.) So he had a natural sense of personal power, but I think in the end he did not want it. Maybe it bored him. Maybe having a cult following even turned him off after a while. These days, you can watch Jordan Peterson and suspect that he sometimes longs to retire to a life of isolation and anonymity, which is what Kesey did.

When I was in high school, I read and re-read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Alexander gives a good plot summary of the latter. Of the three, I would say that Cuckoo’s Nest holds up the best, followed by Acid Test.

I recommend Alexander’s whole post. The key paragraph:

One of two things must be true. Either psychedelics are a unique gateway to insight and happiness, maybe the most powerful ever discovered. Or they have a unique ability to convince people that they are, faking insight as effectively as heroin fakes happiness. Either one would be fascinating: the first for obvious reasons, the second because it convinces some pretty smart people. If the insight of LSD were fake, its very convincingness could tell us a lot about the mind and about how rationality works.

My money is on the latter.

24 thoughts on “On Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, and LSD”

  1. One of two things must be true. Either psychedelics are a unique gateway to insight and happiness, maybe the most powerful ever discovered. Or they have a unique ability to convince people that they are, faking insight as effectively as heroin fakes happiness.

    Or psychedelics may have been a simple mechanism to help with the suspension of disbelief surrounding a new peer oriented social phenomena. Scott Alexander does a fine job of drawing the parallels to cults but then discusses LSD as if it was an independent variable. Perhaps that goes with his specialization. Every problem looks like a nail etc.

  3. Somewhere in Robert Trivers’ book _The folly of fools_ he notes that the first time he tried cocaine he thought it was great for everything, thinking to himself “This will increase my productivity so much that the drug will obviously pay for itself.”

    I think I’m attributing the quote to the right person.

    http://roberttrivers.com/Robert_Trivers/Book_Reviews_files/Evolutionary%20Psycology.pdf

    Part of the issue is that for each one of us, we shouldn’t be fooled, and “You are the easiest person to fool.” as Richard Feynman told us.

  4. Here is one of the insights (drawn at random) that I have experienced on psychadelics.
    I was sitting on a ridge in Colorado in Estes Park, overlooking the plains. I can’t recall exactly what got me started on this subject but perhaps there was some sort of Native American museum or artifact in the area. I started thinking about the handmade Native American folk arts of the area and how they had disappeared and been replaced mostly by white immigrants, but then it occurred to me that the white immigrants brought their own folk arts with them. So, for instance, clothing made from animal hides and beads was replaced with knitted sweaters made of wool. But on some level these are kind of the same thing, different people having different folkways, but yet sharing the common trait of *having* folk arts – making things by hand, knitting unique patterns into sweaters in the same way that Natives sewed unique beaded patterns on leather. Thus the two peoples are not so radically different, the differences between them are in some sense superficial, and thus the replacement of natives by white settlers is also in some sense a superficial change. Humans lived here and then different humans lived here, and those different groups of humans are all part of the same larger human tribe. So it doesn’t matter that the native cultures disappeared, because humanity as a whole continues to survive and evolve. The past always falls away, and even the folk arts of the white settlers of the time have faded into the past. Just one more layer in the rich mosaic of human history.

    So, what part of that insight is “fake”?

    • 1. The assumption that the psychedelic caused the insight may be erroneous.
      2. Anything that takes you out of the act of “doing” and puts you in a place of reflective observation, especially in a unique environment, can promote insight.
      3. I’ve had various insights while engaged in quiet contemplation and the memory of the time/place is vividly associated with the insight.

      The insight you describe certainly isn’t fake. The question, in my mind, is whether the amount of causation you attribute to the psychedelic is accurate.

      • Psychedelics unquestionably amplify reflective ruminations. That’s why it’s often labeled “tripping” – because your thoughts will go off on really long tangents, and make bigger leaps and connections to different subjects than they normally would. You’re taking a trip in your brain by analogy.

        Of course the point could be made that all sorts of drugs are associated with creative thinking – because that’s what drugs do, they make your brain work differently. Marijuana also tends to produce long ruminations, although in my experience not so many big leaps and connections between different ideas. And others might argue that cocaine also stimulates creativity. I don’t think anyone has claimed that heroin does anything except make you really happy though.

        • …your thoughts will go off on really long tangents, and make bigger leaps and connections to different subjects than they normally would.

          I’m skeptical of the “bigger leaps” and “connections to different subjects” claim. That was certainly Ken Kesey’s belief with respect to his writing. That is a hard thing to prove or disprove but I don’t doubt his sincerity or yours.

          This is probably a good incentive for me to go read Michael Pollan’s book. I’m not familiar with the science but I don’t think erring on the skeptical side is a bad thing either.

    • Is it correct? Is it as profound as it seemed at the time? The change doesn’t appear terribly superficial to me, as white settlers brought other traditions than folk art which had profound implications for the landscape itself, like gold mining, logging, farming, road and railroad building, firearms for killing both the native wildlife and indigenous peoples, etc. Quite frankly, the idea that the differences between white settlers and indigenous tribes was merely superficial, when considering the totality of the divergent cultural practices of the two groups and the fact that one tribe had gone through the industrial revolution and would be putting people in space with rockets within a century or so and the other one didn’t even have metallurgy yet….well, that insight seems pretty fake to me.

      • You could definitely make that argument. You can look at it from different perspectives, whether your primary concern is environmental protection or long-term human progress. You could also take the perspective that the white settlers themselves were representatives of an older European culture that was closer to nature, that was quickly swept away by the industrial revolution. The early settlers didn’t have trains and industrial mining. They used cows to till the soil, not tractors. The combustion engine hadn’t been invented to they traveled by horseback. So then you could say that modern industrial society swept away all of the pre-existing indigenous cultures in both Europe AND America, so the key distinction from an environmental perspective isn’t natives vs. whites put pre-industrial vs. post industrial.
        OR, if your primary concern is overall human progress you can say that of course, the more advanced culture is going to replace the less advanced one, and that’s OK, because we’re all part of the same human tribe. And someday European “white” culture will be replaced by something else, and we shouldn’t worry about that either, as long as humanity continues to move forward.

        I don’t know whether it’s “true” or not is important, so much as it’s a unique perspective that one may not have thought of before. And that’s generally beneficial. After the fact you can throw away the ideas that no longer make sense to you and keep the ones that still seem interesting and relevant.

        • That’s fine, but you at least need to have a good idea which ideas to throw away and which to keep. I think psychedelics probably interfere with this process, as they have a tendency to increase one’s sense of wonder, at least in my experience. So with that in mind, I guess I would call the final paragraph that Arnold quoted above a bit of a false dichotomy, in that to me, psychedelics seem to be good for idea generation, bad for analysis.

          • That’s probably not a bad way to put it. Usually people to do psychadelics will take time to reflect on their experiences afterwards. It’s not something you want to run out and do again right away. You need some time to process. Also, what you remember and what you forget is probably determined by what keeps making sense. A lot of the time you have some complicated insight while tripping and then when you come down you can’t remember or follow the logic of it anymore.
            I do recall having on time where I had like this overarching vision of the universe in which everything was composed of cooperative game types of interactions which natural selection would then act upon to select the systems and entities which produced stable cooperation. (I was really into game theory at the time). Like EVERYTHING in the UNIVERSE. Somehow subatomic particles were like semisentient entities capable of cooperative interaction, or something like that. I can’t really remember.

    • I’m the sort of person who has insights on that level fairly regularly. It makes me wonder if psychedelics would give me some really novel insights, or whether they’d take me past some tipping point where everything in the world becomes a spider with Donald Trump’s hair.

    • When my children were young, I was their primary caretaker and chronically sleep-deprived. A recent book was Bob Bakker’s The Dinosaur Heresies . One of the heresies (now well established) was that many dinosaurs were birdlike and indeed one group had evolved into birds, so that in one sense dinosaurs are not extinct. The book included Bakker’s “heretical” drawings of various dinosaurs looking birdlike. (The Jurassic Park books and movies were influenced by Bakker. One of the characters, Dr. Robert Burke, is even a caricature of him.)

      I found this all a little hard to believe at the time but one morning I was looking into the back yard and a large bird flew down, took a few steps, and flew off. I saw a dinosaur. It was a Bakker drawing come to life. I didn’t even need psychedelics.

  5. The better book:
    Sometimes a Great Notion

    Author Ken Kesey
    July 27, 1964

    Sometimes a Great Notion is Ken Kesey’s second novel, published in 1964. While One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) is more famous, many critics consider Sometimes a Great Notion Kesey’s magnum opus.[1] The story involves an Oregon family of gyppo loggers who cut and procure trees for a local mill in opposition to striking, unionized workers.

  6. Note to readers: As this debate about psychedelics continues in popular and academic media, you may be tempted to try some LSD, just to settle things for yourself.

    Do not do this.

    That is all.

    • I disagree. 🙂

      Maybe you could offer a good reason why not.
      As long as you can actually get a pure source and not some adulterated stuff of the street, I mean.

  7. Its your only precious brain. I speak as a psychedelic veteran of the Kesey era. There is no enlightenment there.

      • But isn’t it only dangerous if you do it without the correct supervision and in an incorrect environment?

        Michael Pollan’s recent book dives deep into this. He convinced me that psychedelics can be tremendously beneficial, but only if they’re administered under very specific circumstances.

  8. Paul McCartney’s famous insight (“There are seven levels”) tells us something about rationality. It tells us nothing about anything else.

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