Psychedelics made social reality seem plastic and transformable by collective desire

Evidence

It reinforced the feelings of despair, disaffection and rage that bourgeois culture ordinarily makes us distrust. As such, music functioned as a form of consciousness-raising, in which a mass audience could not only experience its feelings being validated, it could locate the origins of those feelings in oppressive structures. Moreover, the ingestion of hallucinogens by growing numbers of the population, and the emergence of a psychedelic imaginary that touched even those who had never used acid, made for a widespread perception that social reality was provisional, plastic, subject to transformation by collective desire. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1381

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: A story/worldbuilding premise: a society where a drug-adjacent ‘imaginary’ makes people viscerally believe social reality is mutable — could stage the engine of a political awakening or its failure.
• DEEPTHINKING: flagged by the selector, no supporting note recorded
• XREF: connects to: Music and psychedelics once made social reality feel transformable. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1381; 1960s psychedelic drug culture prefigured the neoliberal plastic self — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 420; Collective action can reframe self-estrangement from dread into transcendence — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 1089

Broader Connections

• Music and psychedelics once made social reality feel transformable. #corroborates (0.95) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1381
• 1960s psychedelic drug culture prefigured the neoliberal plastic self #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 420
• Collective action can reframe self-estrangement from dread into transcendence #expands (0.75) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1089