and such lack of time translates into moreintensive forms of consumption (e.g., flying instead of takinga bus, or buying pre-packaged food instead of cooking). Onthe other hand, while in the 60s, some may have been able toidentify downwards due to a profound sense of economic security,neoliberalism undid that possibility by instilling in the middleclasses a “fear of falling” (Ehrenreich, 1989) that inspired us toidentify upwards instead.

up on its rejection of work and consumptionand its opening of the privileged middle classes to a broadand downwards tending social solidarity, and indeed reject itsindividualist politics of authenticity. First, the anti-work and anti-consumption ethos of the counterculture could help us detachour sense of personal worth from the work we (or others) do.In other words, it could stop us from pinning judgements aboutthose who “deserve” decent lives on the kind or amount of workthey do and on how they spend their income on, which wouldopen up space for solidarity with those considered "undeserving".

the spread of depressionand burnout reflect the ways in which today we are coerced throughfreedom—in other words, how, in the apparent absence of obstaclesyet under pressure to conform to market logic at every step, weassume responsibility for doing more and better, or failing to do so.

the victory of capitalism and liberal democracy provedfinal. What is more, we had all become “middle class”– capitalismhad delivered and “social critique” (concerned with equality andjustice) was no longer necessary. In truth, however, as Boltanksiand Chiapello argued, as the artistic critique was incorporated andsocial critique was dropped, (individual) autonomy was won atthe expense of (collective) security—a flimsy trade-off consideringthe market discipline operative in the neoliberal environment.Marked by increased inequality, the externalization of care ontoindividuals (mostly women, and more often of color), families,and communities (Arruza et al., 2019; Dowling, 2021), an increasein the incarceration of black bodies (at least, in the US, andlargely as a result of the continuing Drug War) (Alexander,2010), and the worsening of our climate predicament throughincreased extraction and consumption (despite knowledge of theirconsequences) (Klein, 2015; Hickel, 2021), it seems like the novelcritiques of gender, race, ecology, and so forth emerging in the 60shad failed to change reality even if they had in fact changed culture,and that the world remained as mad as ever. In another reversal,however, that madness was turned “straight” again by the “decadeof the brain”—and so were psychedelics

, in the immaterial realm of cyberspace.Culminating in this apex of the counterculture-neoliberalismpartnership, it was this decade that marked the final entrenchmentof capitalist realism

Asthese policies enclosed the public sphere and created a sense ofartificial scarcity (an ongoing, structural feature of capitalism),they successfully created the need to “procure individually whatwas once provisioned in common” (Brown, 2015, p. 42). Thisserved the dual purpose of ebbing away at the conditions sustainingcollective solidarity and getting people to compete, and thuswork harder, instead.

that individuals must also act rationally by seekingto maximize their own value as “human capital”—interpreting,aligning and enhancing their personal qualities and capacitiesin order to improve their overall competitive advantage. Thismeant, as Michel Foucault presciently noted in his early lectureson neoliberalism (2004), that subjects would have to behave like“entrepreneurs of the self.” The problem, which these thinkersunderstood, was that people did not regularly behave in suchpermanently self-interested ways, showing instead a propensitytoward collectivism that neoliberals saw not only as mob-likeand irrational but as inherently authoritarian, oppressive, anddamaging to personal responsibility (an aversion to the collectivewhich often conflated the welfare policies of the New Deal,Nazi National-Socialism, Soviet Communism, and the agendasof decolonized states) (Foucault, 2008; Gilbert, 2014; Whyte,2019)

One crucial element to thiswas precisely the association of the countercultural and psychedelicchallenge to the work ethic with, on the one hand, lazy, privileged,and young troublemaking elites and, on the other, to undeservingpopulations (implicitly black) whose improving condition wascoming through government aid instead of individual effort—allat the expense of those who had worked hard to achieve suchconditions (implicitly white). Hence, in an economic climate ofdiminishing expectations in which the fault for stagflation wasincreasingly blamed on the “collectivist” policies of governmentwelfare spending and the wage demands of organized labor (twostaples of the New Deal), individualism was mobilized in the nameof a conservative and pro-corporate vision of the body politic incontrast to which the psychedelic counterculture appeared as theprime example of cultural and moral degeneracy.

the 70s saw a situation in which attempts to expand democraticparticipation met with a diminishing economic pie, making itpossible to break the New Deal order with a new combination offree market policies and white racial conservatism

. For while the “new politics” ofexpanded social enfranchisement would somewhat succeed in theform of what has come to be known as “identity politics” (whoseachievements should not be depreciated), the material rug—anddrugs—would be pulled from under them, leaving only the floatingpromises of individual freedom.

of being a “corporatist” collusionbetween state and business which promoted mass conformityand social exclusion, and opposed it in the name of individualautonomy and face-to-face community. Admittedly, by doingso, the demands of many of these groups would indeed, inthe long run, inadvertently clear space for neoliberalism. Thepoint, nonetheless, is that the political economy embodied inthe New Deal—with its relative checks on capitalism in favor ofsocial concerns—constituted the ground on which the collectivedemands of these movements became intelligible, powerful, andwere experienced as eminently realistic—hence the dreams ofpsychedelic utopianis

. In this scenario, as Fisher suggested, psychedelicsare quite unique for having democratized both neurology andmetaphysics—at once linking the nature of the self to that of itssurrounding reality, providing a first-hand “altered” experienceof their transmutability, and opening them to questioning andintervention. As Carl Oglesby, former president of Studentsfor a Democratic Society (SDS) described it, even if the “actualcontent” of the LSD experience was not inherently linked torevolution, “nothing could stand for that overall sense of goingthrough profound changes so well as the immediate, powerfuland explicit transformation that you went through when youdropped acid,” and as such, “the experience shared the structuralcharacteristics of political rebellion” (Quoted in Lee and Shlain,1985, p. 108). In all, while disagreements certainly existed aboutwhether changing consciousness was sufficient to change theworld, that it was necessary—and desirable—to do so was a ratherconsensual matter

“the personalis political” (another notion pre-existing, but popularized at thetime by feminists).

, far from a solipsistic politics ofconsciousness oblivious to material context, many sought to buildlives “not on stoned indifference but on active social engagementand community-oriented hard work” (p. 3) that would create newenvironments, public spaces (Silos, 2003), “right livelihoods,” andalternative social “games” in line with their values (notably bymoving “back-to-the-land” and setting up farms and communes

as countercultural activist Jerry Rubin,who claimed that “drug use signifies the total end of the Protestantethic: screw work, we want to know ourselves. But of course thegoal is to free oneself from American society’s sick notion of work,success, reward, and status and to find oneself through one’s owndiscipline, hard work, and introspection” (

and theneed, especially after WWII and the beginning of the Cold War,to prove that capitalism could deliver better lives to its citizens.Altogether, and all too schematically, this situation was largelyresponsible for the “great compression” of inequality that made thepost-war period one of “affluence”—a term that often, includingin histories of the 60s counterculture, serves to gloss over theseprior political struggles and their gains. Of course, even as thisprosperity spread across a greater swath of the population, it wasfar from evenly distributed, and this was reflected in a rather rigidand exclusionary vision of society.

neoliberal reaction to the New Deal, and theplace of psychedelics within it—a symbol for the link betweenlaziness and collectivism, both of which had to be done awaywith to produce the conditions of individual entrepreneurialism.

“the 60s led toneoliberalism”

New Deal’s establishment of the “whitemale breadwinner model”

To this end, I will start by situating psychedelic utopianismwithin the New Deal order to explain the conditions under which itwas possible in the first place and the threat it posed to capitalism—especially in its rejection of the work ethic and its associationto other social movements of the tim

It was duringthis time that the vision of the (white, suburban) nuclear family,while far from universal in fact or even accessibility, establisheditself fully as the ideal of the American Dream (and as anothersign of the superiority over communism). Designed as a form ofsocial “containment,” the family was meant as a safe haven andprivate bulwark against the uncertainties and anxieties of theexternal world—communism, nuclear war, alienating corporateand industrial work—but was no panacea, as it also came withheavily entrenched and restrictive gender roles and a sense ofrootlessness as many moved away from their old kinship networksto become part of a middle class grounded in homeownership,consumerism, child-rearing and social conformity to their newpeers (Tyler May, 1989).

second by idea that market forces needed tobe liberated from state controls that were hampering growth,innovation and individual freedom

the first defined by a conceptionof capitalism as disastrous if left to its own devices and thereforein need of state regulation in favor of the social or publicinterest,

New Deal was a rather rigid and normative one marked byracial segregation, strict gender roles, alienating work outside thehome, consumerist conformism, and anti-communist paranoia–certainly not a version of the social we should simply return to[it was also subtended by colonial relations

isher understood psychedelic“consciousness-expansion” as part of the subversive forces that theneoliberal “counter-revolution” had to destroy, capture and buryin order to (re)install capitalist hegemony.

“de-condition”the “cultural self ” and find, underneath it, an “authentic” selfpurportedly free from social conditioning. Thus, the mysticalexperiences induced by psychedelics withdrew the self from thematerial world of consumerism and external validation to theinternal realm of pure consciousness, granting, through directcontact with the divine, authority to a newfound sense ofintrinsic self-worth.

eoliberal capitalism can give usa new understanding of the deflation of our psychedelic horizonfrom the countercultural hope that these substances could radicallytransform capitalist society to the more tempered, expedient,and de-politicized concern with treating or enhancing individualswithin it.

“thepersonal is political.” As neoliberalism displaced this object of reference in favor ofindividualism, the personal was de-linked from the political and the dreams—andthe threats—of psychedelic utopianism were successfully defused and forgotten

in which everyone was destined tobecome part of an undifferentiated consumerist “mass” competingin a meaningless and alienating “rats race” for image, status,and external validation, the counterculture sought to developalternative sources of personal satisfaction and social validation.Starting from a critique of the scientific west and its materialism,it is little wonder many sought answers by turning to—frequentlyeastern—spirituality. Praised for re-enchanting the world and forbeing conceiving of the self more holistically, spirituality seemedsimultaneously a means to reconnect to the wider cosmos. Otherpeople, and to one’s inner self by tapping into and unleashing one’s“human” capacities for love, play, pleasure and creativity. It is herethat we begin to encounter certain tensions between individualismand collectivism that would be reflected in the use of LSD as manyturned to it to find a new form of sanity diametrically opposed tothat of mainstream society

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