1960s psychedelic drug culture prefigured the neoliberal plastic self

Evidence

Whereas the hippie drug culture was notionally an artifact of a rebellious counterculture, in fact the experience of taking these psychotropic hallucinogens provided one of the early testbeds for the discipline of the neoliberal transmogrification of the self. Some of the drugs heightened the experience of being a spectator at one’s own performance, while others fostered dissociation from past behavior; endless analysis of trips after the fact reinforced belief in the plasticity of the self. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 420

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the counterculture’s psychedelic drug experience was actually an early rehearsal for neoliberal self-transmogrification inverts the standard narrative of the 1960s as anti-capitalist.
• SEED: Essay angle: the counterculture as unwitting laboratory for the flexible, plastic, entrepreneurial self — dissociating from one’s past and spectating one’s own performance as proto-neoliberal techniques.
• XREF: connects to: The 1960s psychedelic movement was explicitly framed as an attentional insurgency against media manipulation — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 534; Advertising co-opted psychedelic rhetoric after LSD’s criminalization — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 595; Neoliberalism absorbed countercultural self-fashioning into self-optimization via the neurochemical self — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 421 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism absorbed countercultural self-fashioning into self-optimization via the neurochemical self #expands (0.90) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 421
• Capitalism absorbed the 1960s counterculture as a marketing resource #expands (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 593
• Advertising co-opted psychedelic rhetoric after LSD’s criminalization #corroborates (0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 595
• Capitalist restructuring and neuroscience rethinks evolved in parallel. #corroborates (0.80) — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 142
• The 1960s psychedelic movement was explicitly framed as an attentional insurgency against media manipulation #qualifies (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 534