Notes on ‘Peace and Love’

Some years ago, the broadcasting network Canal+ ran a tv commercial in which it ironized
on the figure of the ‘hippie’ to advertise its services. The scene shows a group of hippies in a
campsite, trailer in the background, playing guitar and singing around a campfire, dressed in
classic 60s style. Then appears a friend, proudly holding a sign with the network’s name,
announcing that he purchased a subscription. “Dude, we are hippies, we don’t watch TV”, they
answer, rather self-referentially. “Yeah but it’s at half the price for six months dude”. Answering
with a smile, they give in. “Peace and Love”, they say, remaining in a tone of voice which is meant
to emulate being stoned, but comes across (intentionally) as slow and stupid - and then, changing
their tone to that of your average joe - “and Canal+ for the living room!”. I cannot think of a better,
more compressed version of the narrative that the “counterculture lead to neoliberalism” that Mark
Fisher wanted to deconstruct in the unfinished project he named ‘Acid Communism’1. The
commercial draws from and enforces the received notion that the hippies were but a bunch of
funny looking, stupid, stoned out, alternative wannabes that, despite their vocal commitments,
were quick to sell out into the conformism of mainstream consumer culture. However, one can
also detect in it the anxieties that still pervade the stereotypical figure of ‘the hippies’, which have
always been “variously treated as threats to public order or as harmless buffoons”2. This portrayal
made possible a certain freezing of and defence against their countercultural potential - what if,
after all, they wouldn’t buy into our TV content!? The ad targets not those who would want its
product, but those who - intolerably - would not want it at all. It betrays that it is not a product you
would want if you lived according to the motto ‘Peace and Love’, which might prompt one to ask
why you would want it in the first place.
Acid communism is best understood as an antidote to what Fisher had famously named
‘capitalist realism’ - the widespread resignation to capitalism being the only possible form of social
organization, a.k.a. TINA (There Is No Alternative). In his book by the same name, he already
mentioned the mechanism through which neoliberal capitalism “subsumes and consumes all
previous history”3. By reducing all previous history, in this case the countercultural 60s, into a
cultural object we can see or consume as if it were in a museum, it is firmly placed in a naïve past
which we have (thankfully) overcome. The implication is that we observe it from a position which
has “stripped the world of sentimental illusions and seen it for ‘what it really is’: a Hobbesian war
of all against all [...]”4. We thus become “consumer-spectators” of the counterculture, a perfect
contemporary expression of which is the vast array of ‘hippie costumes’ which await for purchase
only a web search away. While we may dress like hippies for an evening, the logic of the costume
is precisely that it is not ‘real’ - we understand it is a temporary mask we put over our ‘real’ selves,
which are serious enough to know that it's just play-pretend. As an effect of the neoliberal counter-
revolution, writes Fisher, “the sixties counterculture is now inseparable from its own simulation,
and the reduction of the decade to ‘iconic’ images, to ‘classic’ music and to nostalgic
reminiscences has neutralised the real promises that exploded then” 5. To revisit and reignite these
promises is a means to retrieve “what has shifted beyond all recognition since then”, namely “the
existential and emotional atmosphere”6 that gave breath to the confidence that systemically
alternative ways of life existed. As captured by the TV ad, I believe that the (now sentimentalized)
slogan ‘Peace and Love’ is an exemplary expression of this atmosphere. What if instead of
ironically repeating it in a fake stoned-out voice or consuming it through a costume, we tried to
take seriously the consequences of living it from the inside? Why shouldn’t we, or why won’t we,
engage with the ‘love generation’’s notion that we do not live in a Hobbesian war of all against all
after all? And what can help us tune into it?
Of the different factors in whose convergence Fisher detected the “spectre of a world
which could be free” (as his quote of Marcuse goes), the ones out of which the hippie ethos of
peace and love emerged most clearly were perhaps psychedelic consciousness and the
“unprecedented aestheticisation of everyday life”. Compared to class consciousness, socialist-
feminist consciousness-raising and the “fusion of new social movements with a communist
project”, the former - whose link I will refer to as ‘psychedelic aestheticisation’ - seem to have
much less to bear on a ‘postcapitalist’ agenda. 7 A similar tension is mapped out by Martin Lee
and Bruce Shlain in their book Acid Dreams: A Complete History of LSD, where they outline the
multiple points of overlap and discrepancy between the political radicals and the psychedelic
dropouts of the 60s on the issue of how to change society. Many activists were disappointed
about the apolitical (read: complicit) character of the dropouts, denouncing their lack of social
engagement and what they perceived as the privatistic withdrawal induced by LSD. The belief
that only if enough individuals ‘turned on’ - in their heads, through chemistry - would collective
transformation come about aligned psychedelic enthusiasts all too closely with the liberal
individualism radicals were trying to critique. For the former, ‘peace and love’ was merely the
‘inevitable’ result of personal transcendental experience. Others, such as New Left leader Carl
Oglesby, tried to articulate the ‘convergence’8 that Fisher was after, holding that the LSD
experience “shared the structural characteristics of political rebellion”9. I think this attempt at
politicizing the seemingly apolitical is one of the greatest strengths of the ‘Fisher function’. In
expanding the nature of the political, Fisher was able to counter the project of “consciousness-
deflation” which he understood neoliberalism to be - a conception that makes the ‘consciousness-
expansion’ in terms of which psychedelics are often described at the very least a metaphorical
model for correcting that tendency. In discussions of acid communism, drugs are often seen to
be little more than that. Picking up Fishers’ hint that the potentials of 60s were raised “even, or
perhaps especially, in culture which didn’t necessarily think of itself as politically-orientated”10, I
would suggest that taking LSD (and other drugs) seriously, and literally, as a political matter can
help us radicalize ‘peace and love’.

Beyond the Worker-Consumer

In his unfinished introduction, Fisher already developed a first line of thought that can be
seen to politicize ‘psychedelic aestheticisation’, namely, the attempt to recapture the desire for a
world beyond work. He described the ‘existential atmosphere’ that sustained this desire as one
that enabled people to “luxuriate in the moment, a moment that was exorbitantly sufficient”, and
opposed it to the work-discipline that we have become so caught up in as neoliberal subjects.
The mode of engagement this atmosphere requires gathers its subversive quality from its contrast
with our usual competitive fight for survival. In a situation of “artificial scarcity”, this fight presses
us to constantly optimize our value as human capital. This artificial scarcity, which “is
fundamentally a scarcity of time”, results from the colonization of our ‘free time’ by the imperative
of being productive, which has us always rushing towards the next thing (even if it's meeting
friends), stressing us out. Contrasted to these “urgencies of work life” is the “dream calm” granted
by an “access to a certain mode of time, time which allows deep absorption”11 - that is, a slower,
more peaceful one. This is precisely an aesthetic mode of engagement which psychedelic altered
states of consciousness represent best.
Already in his 1954 psychedelic classic, The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley
interpreted his mescaline experience as an aesthetic relaxation of the ‘reducing valve’ of the mind
- a filter which, in normal waking life, only allows in information directly related to survival.
Discussing color-perception, for example, he mentions its relative dispensability for survival yet
the “wealth” and “luxury” that stem from its “innumerable fine shades of difference”. 12 Indeed,
something you are guaranteed during the couple of hours you are ‘high’ on psychedelics,
regardless of what might happen or what else you do, and even in moments of utmost tranquility,
is that a whole lot will be happening - visually, sonorously, affectively... This often leaves users
with a sensation that in everyday life, so much more is in fact usually happening right in front of
your eyes than you normally perceive. Luxury would now appear in this space-time incompatible
with work’s rhythms, and something achieved outside of, rather than through it. “To be rich
nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects”, would write 60s situationist
Raoul Vanegeim about how the accumulation of objects through work suppressed “the richness
of experience”13. Thus, while psychedelic aestheticization bears upon the political sphere by
loosening our subjection as eager workers, this also carries implications for our status as
consumers of “poor objects”, i.e. commodities.
After WWII, when the prospect of a world beyond work was opening, some, incapable of
imagining us outside our loop as consumer-workers, had serious questions about what exactly it
was we were going to do with all that extra free time.14 If we are not working to make more money
to spend it consuming more things, are the alternatives not extreme boredom, meaninglessness,
or, even more heretically, idleness? Are these alternatives not, at bottom, unpleasurable?
According to Marx’s notion of commodity-fetishism, the trick of capitalist consumerism lies in a
sort of spell through which the commodity exerts a magical agency over us and compels us to
desire it, making us forget that it is ‘just’ an inanimate object (and thus hiding the human labor
that produced it). However, some, like Timothy Morton, suggest the opposite is the case:
consumerism relies precisely on developing a relation with commodities as mere objects, such
that they can be constantly disposed of without care (throw it away, buy a new one)15. By contrast,
relating to ‘mere things’ as if they were somehow alive, we might learn to see them as rich and
complex, ‘vibrant’16, beings, unfolding ever more opportunities for joyful participation with them.
Instead of disavowing the pleasures consumerism produces (and thereby sentencing ourselves
to a wish for some sort of return to a primitivist eden), this aesthetic animism offers us a way out
of it through them - the way to consume less things (an environmental necessity)17 is loving ‘things’
more, not less. “The revolutionary cry is not that consumerism gives us too much pleasure, but
rather that consumerism isn’t enough pleasure; we desire a lot more than that.” 18 Again, this
passes through an aesthetic sensibility to which psychedelics offer some insight.
Reflecting on the ‘new (aesthetic) sensibility’ permeating social movements in the 60s,
Marcuse began by noting that “the root of the aesthetic is in sensibility. What is beautiful is first
sensuous: it appeals to the senses; it is pleasurable” and it relates to ‘art’.19 Although often ignored
in research, the main reason people take psychedelic drugs is because it is in fact pleasurable.
Amongst other things, they amplify one’s sensory experience and allow one to see and be affected
by things, others and oneself in different ways, finding in them details one had missed before,
appreciating their beauty, and feeling good about it all the while. They also often trigger quasi-
animistic notions that everything is alive or blissful feelings that everything is connected. It is worth
bearing in mind that hippies are (or at least were) known for their “independence from material
possessions”20 (as the Canal+ ad reminds us) and at the very same time famous for their
hedonism. Wouldn’t it be fun, rather than boring, if we could see the same things afresh, over and
over again, instead of needing fresh new things which we repeatedly treat the same way? In such
a situation, “art would recapture some of its more primitive "technical" connotations: as the art of
preparing (cooking!), cultivating, growing things...”21 - ‘the poetry of everyday life’22 indeed! Isn’t
this ‘post-consumerist hedonism’ the unthinkable disentangling of desire from capitalism that
Fisher sought?23
So far, I have described the aesthetic sensibility induced by psychedelics - or, ‘psychedelic
aestheticisation’ - as a peaceful and loving mode of engagement constituted by deep absorption,
slowed down time, and pleasure in experiencing the richness of what is right in front of you, and
tried to explain its political value in expanding our horizons beyond being worker-consumers24.
Certainly, access to this pleasurable mode of time has always been available only to a privileged
few whilst others scrambled to make ends meet. The counterculture itself was predominantly
middle class. This is true, and (not the disavowal of but) it also managed to bring in many who
occupied this privileged social position into contact with a world they would otherwise not
encounter - turning them into “class renegades”25. Indeed, it is precisely the (white male) middle
class that is most prone to identify ‘upwards’ within oppressive hierarchies. Turning their aesthetic
sensibility into a way of life meant desiring something different than climbing to become more of
a robot-like cog in the machine. The argument is not the condescending idea that we should all
stop complaining and be happy to live with ‘less’. Stress, competition for survival, the ‘choice’ to
work or die - these are not illusory, they are very significant realities. But they are ones which
capitalism thrives from exacerbating and therefore aims to reproduce, so any reduction or
challenging of them eats away at the logics it feeds on. Neither is it that hippietopia has ‘no place’
for work or judges it as undignified or unnatural, or that we should value pleasure at the expense
of dealing with injustice. The point is that, however just, a political project that promises no
pleasures but only hard-core guilty sacrificial political militancy simply won’t work. In any case,
what makes us assume that the pleasures of ‘peace and love’ imply a disavowal of the multiple
structures of inequality? Might the aesthetic mode of engagement facilitated by psychedelics also
have some relation to overtly critical consciousness?

The Aesthetics of Oppression, and Beyond

I would suggest that an aesthetic attunement with one’s experience was a core principle
of certain practices developed feminist and working class movements in the period of 60s/70s,
practices partly constituted by a “coming back to one’s senses”. Two of such practices were
feminist consciousness-raising groups and Brazilian educator Paolo Freire’s “pedagogy of the
oppressed”.26 The latter consisted in engaging workers and peasants in a dialogical method which
would allow them to first of all perceive their own oppression by exploring their ‘thematic universe’
- i.e. their ways of making sense of their own lived reality - in order to detect how it is conditioned
by the internalization of the oppressor’s perspective and to uncover their own viewpoint. Similarly,
the ‘consciousness-raising’ group consisted of a small group of women who came together to
express and pool their individual experiences so as to recognize them as products of inhabiting a
patriarchal (also straight, racist, capitalist) society instead of as isolated personal issues. Their
notion that ‘the personal is political’ is certainly a precedent of the type of extension of the political
which so informs Fisher’s ethos. In a program for consciousness-raising delivered at the First
National Women's Liberation Conference (U.S) in 1968, feminist activist Kathie Sarachild
analyzed the “bitch session cell group” through headings such as “A. Ongoing consciousness
expansion; B. Classic forms of resisting consciousness, or: How to avoid facing the awful truth;
C. Recognizing the survival reasons for resisting consciousness, and; D. ‘Starting to stop’ -
overcoming repressions and delusions”.27 In these headings we can read how these political
projects emerged and were sustained by a certain ‘stopping’ that allowed a close attunement to
one’s own experience of ‘surviving’ in an oppressive reality. Facilitated by the space and time of
gathering together, and as suggested by the reference to ‘consciousness-expansion’, this
stopping enabled a kind of engagement not dissimilar to psychedelic aestheticisation - slowing
down, looking at one’s reality and disentangling the complex ways in which it affects you. One
might object that, unlike psychedelic use, the goal of noticing your situation of oppression is hardly
that of seeking pleasure, and that in this contrast, drug use appears again as a form of avoiding
‘real issues’. Their use in the treatment of mental health issues, however, suggests otherwise.
A surprising insight from the growing ‘renaissance’ of research into the therapeutic
potential of psychedelic drugs is that, contrary to their fame as producing withdrawal and
hallucinations which make users leave reality behind, they actually enable patients to connect
with their troubling experiences. Let us take two examples - the use of MDMA for trauma and the
use of psilocybin (the chemical compound in magic mushrooms) for depression. In the U.S,
MDMA psychotherapy was recently granted ‘breakthrough therapy’ status for treating PTSD - a
condition characterized by “dissociation”.28 Trauma survivors often become numb in an attempt
to stave off the memories and feelings associated with the causes of their condition, and this “not
being able to deeply take in what is going on around them”, i.e. dissociation from their experiential
reality, “makes it impossible to feel fully alive”.29 By contrast, taking MDMA30, which enhances
pro-social behaviour and reduces fear response, allows patients to safely access the memories,
thoughts and sensations that they normally avoid, helping them work through the associated
trauma.31 Similarly, patients suffering from treatment-resistant depression report that in
comparison with other therapies which tend to exacerbate their avoidance of difficult and painful
emotion, the psilocybin treatment allowed them to face and accept them.32 Depression itself can
be understood as a form of extreme withdrawal from participation in the world, a result of ‘lost
connections’.33 An important parallel between both these conditions of general disconnection, is
that they cause anhedonia - “difficulties feeling pleasure, sensuality, and having a sense of
meaning”.34 Thus, in addition to allowing patients to meet their pain, they induced an equally
important, long-lost capacity to feel some form of joy. This passed by newfound or recovered
connection to their senses, which they reported were previously “shut down”, lasting even beyond
the dosing session. Patients described psilocybin experiences as being “rich in sensory
phenomena”, opening an “appreciation of the aesthetics of the natural world”, or as one put it,
feeling like “pure sensory, tactical, sexual bliss”.35 What an irony that drugs which are accused of
producing an escape from reality can actually decrease our dissociation from it - and what’s more,
that this very connection may simultaneously be what helps us transform the reality that traps us
into a more pleasurable one.
To return to the theme of this essay, I would describe these “arts of being directly aware
of the given facts of our existence”36 (to use Huxley’s phrase) as practices of ‘making peace’ with
one's experiential reality. As suggested by their therapeutic use, psychedelics, like “bitch
sessions” or “the pedagogy of the oppressed”, can be tools for those who are dissociated from
their reality, those who - in a phrase which spikes the ‘entactogenic’ properties of MDMA with a
bit of Marxism - are “rarely in touch with the origins of their alienation”.37 As ‘arts’ of getting in
touch with what is right in front of us, I would call these three tools ‘technologies of
aestheticisation’. In this task, these practices might not always produce pleasure, since they
sometimes lead to the awareness that, in Freire’s harsh terms, “the struggle begins with men's
recognition that they have been destroyed”38. As the quote suggests, however, this recognition
does not imply a quiet acquiescence with the painful state of things but is the very ‘beginning’ of
a movement to transcend it. However painful the engagement with ‘the awful truth’, its intended
corollary was always the feeling of liberation from past restraints and of having the power to
transform them. Following Jeremy Gilbert, we might say that these technologies have a “super-
therapeutic”39 function, meaning that they are not merely about ‘coping’ with an existing reality by
trying to fit into its established norms, but of bringing about a new health through a joyous
collective empowerment - a form of pleasure that could be called ‘love’. While part of this
enterprise is ‘making peace’ with the facts, the other, ‘love’, is what takes us beyond them.
Love: Beyond

The type of love prescribed would serve as a remedy to the many ways in which we are
weakened by the conception of love as possession and the narrow standards of the family and
the romantic, closed, heterosexual couple as highest or only acceptable sites of love. My previous
mention of this corny tabooed-yet-omnipresent four letter word in reference to a new type of
relation to literal ‘things’ offers two clues. The first is the weirdness that the idea of loving inanimate
things as if they were alive might produce in us - ‘Surely you cannot mean it literally? isn’t this a
bit of a stretch?’ I do, and that’s the whole point! Why should we accept that love has a proper
object of desire? Why should we not want our love to keep expanding in as many ways and
directions, towards as many beings as possible? To love bacteria, coffee cups, strangers, rocks,
paper-clips, ecosystems, road-bumps, machines, cloths, courgettes...To paraphrase Marcuse,
we might say that the aesthetic pleasures to which psychedelics open us serve us to reclaim the
erotic from its reduction to localized sexual and romantic satisfaction and to open it to the entire
environment that surrounds us - revealing “a gratification that would dissolve the society that
suppresses it”.40 This takes us to the second clue, which is that the gratification that this love is a
cause and effect of is in essence a taking pleasure in transformation41. This mode of relationality
would not be one in which we take for granted that the loved thing ‘is’ one way or another and
attempt to know it in its totality, but one focused on how this thing continuously ‘becomes’
something different. To love something or somebody would mean to see in them fine nuances
which are not visible through other forms of engagement, i.e. to explore their inexhaustible
unfolding richness. Love would be akin to wonder, which always wonders - ‘what else’? In the
best of cases, this exploration can even draw out and materialize the most precious lines of
transformation in others. To see, draw out, support the others’ desired paths - that is love. Instead
of conceiving of love as possession of a definable other, we would understand it as mutual aid42
for transformation. Opening love beyond narrow boundaries means expanding the net of
transformative support, progressively eating away at the domain of Hobbesian competitive
individualism. The counterculture’s experiments with consciousness-expanding drugs blended
with forms of communal living and collective attachment other than the traditional family - they
were fundamentally experiments in love-expansion. Why should we not use the ‘love drugs’ at
our disposal to attune ourselves to this joyful transformative project?
To sum up, exploring the combination of psychedelic consciousness and the
‘aestheticisation of everyday life’ - which I have called psychedelic aestheticisation - has made
possible a politicization of the hippie slogan ‘Peace and Love’. No longer a sign of a withdrawal
from reality that results in political paralysis, we can now see it as capturing a mode of
engagement which has transformation at its core, and is characterized by a slowed down time,
deep absorption, and a subtle discernment of the richness of one’s experience. An amplification
of one’s sensory experience, it often has ambiguous results. On the negative side, we might say,
this mode of engagement facilitates a coming face to face with one’s painful situation of
oppression - even as this also opens the possibility of liberation through joyful empowerment. On
the positive side, we might say, it opens us to desires and pleasures beyond those offered by our
position as worker-consumers within capitalist realism - although this too, might also turn into
something else. Many who take psychedelics for the fun of it are in for a surprise. For if they
connect you to, rather than dissociate you from reality, they might just reveal a world of suffering
whose existence you had not suspected when you remained comfortably insulated. What a
bummer, what a downer, what a buzz-killer. If we want to take pleasure in reality, then perhaps
treating injustice is just the work we need to be doing. Making peace and making love. We’ve
been taken for a ride, on a different trip than we expected. Perhaps, instead of play-pretend,
wearing a hippie costume and squawking ‘peace and love’ can be, like acid communism, a
“serious joke”43. In a serious reversal, the ‘hippie pill’ pulls a joke on us who laugh with the
confidence of knowing what is real. As we dig the chiasm at which the acceptance of peace and
the transformation of love fuse into each other, we are pleasurably touched by the riches that
flash before our desirous eyes.
 Endnotes

1
Fisher, Mark. “Acid Communism”. K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher from
2004-2016. Edited by Ambrose, Darren. Repeater, 2017, np.
22
Lee, Martin A. and Bruche Shlain. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD. Grove press, 1985,
p129.
3
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism. Zero Books, 2009, ch1.
4
Ibid, ch1.
5
Fisher, “Acid Communism”, np.
6
Ibid, np.
7
Ibid, np.
8
The clearest example of hippie ‘militancy’ is probably the anti-war movement, for which they popularized
another slogan that plays on ‘Peace and Love’, namely, “Make Love, Not War”.
9
Quoted in Lee & Shlain, Acid Dreams, p108.
10
“Acid Communism”, np.
11
All quotes from “Acid Communism”, np.
12
Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception. 1954. Vintage Classics, 2004.
13
Vanegeim, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life. 1967. PM press, 2012.
14
Bregman, Rutger. Utopia for Realists. 2014. Bloomsbury, 2017, ch2.
15
Morton, Timothy. Humankind. Verso, 2017.
16
Jane Bennett has also suggested something similar about engaging with the enchanting aesthetic powers
of commodities in her book The Enchantment of Modern Life.
17
Another environmentally significant shift that psychedelics could allow for was already proposed in the
60s, amongst others, by Timothy Leary, who suggested the psychedelic ‘trip’ as an alternative to travelling.
Surely, between an LSD trip or a weekend somewhere you have to fly to, the former is the ‘greener’ option
(at least if the LSD were locally produced!).
18
Morton, Humankind, np.
19
Marcuse, Herbert. An Essay on Liberation. 1969. Beacon Press, 1991.
20
From a Time article in the 60s, quoted in Lee & Shlain, Acid Dreams, p130.
21
Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, np.
22
Vanegeim, The Revolution of Everyday Life, np.
23
Fisher, Mark. “Postcapitalist Desire”. What We are Fighting For: A Radical Collective Manifesto. Edited
by Campagna, F. and E. Campiglio. Pluto Press, 2012, 179-189.
24
The concept of worker-consumer I take from the show South Park, in which it is used by a caricatured
Jeff Bezos.
25
Fisher, “Acid Communism”, np.
26
Freire, Paolo. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 1970. Continuum, 2005.
27
Sarachild, Kathie. “A Program for Feminist “Consciousness Raising””. Women’s Liberation, 1968.
28
Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of
Trauma. 2014. Penguin Books, 2015, p152.
29
Ibid, p153.
30
MDMA was not popularized and illegalized until the 1980s and therefore not part of the 60s
counterculture. Nevertheless, as a ‘love drug’ it certainly has participated in different subcultures with
broadly related ethos.
31
Sesa, Ben. “MDMA and PTSD Treatment”. Neuroscience Letters, 649, 2017, p176-180.
32
Watts, Rosalind, et al. "Patients’ accounts of increased “connectedness” and “acceptance” after
psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression." Journal of Humanistic Psychology 57.5 (2017): 520-564.
33
Hari, Johann. Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression–and the Unexpected
Solutions. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2018.
34
Van der Kolk, The body Keeps the Score, p222.
35
Watts, “Patients accounts of increased…”, 530.
36
The Doors of Perception, np.
37
Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, p155.
38
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p68.
39
Two things are worth mentioning here. First, that many feminists would (very rightfully) be wary of using
the word ‘therapeutic’ to describe what they were doing, at least in the traditional medical sense, since that
might imply some previous ‘pathology’ in need of correction. Whether the word ‘super-therapeutic’ bypass
that issue is up for discussion. Secondly, for a lack of space, I was not able to point out how mental health
is another element of the social field which Fisher aimed at re-politicizing. Pushing against the notion that
mental health problems are merely the result of the chemical imbalances in an individual’s brain, Fisher
aimed to re-emphasize how their etiology is often related to the pressures of living within capitalism.
Suffering from it himself throughout his life, he highlighted the structural similarities between depression
and capitalist realism, such as the infernal self-blaming of depression and neoliberalism’s responsibilization
of individuals, the former’s feeling that one is incapable of acting and the latter’s idea that there is no
alternative system, and the conclusion that if you can’t or don’t ‘make it’, its because you must somehow
be “ontologically inferior”. Understanding depression as a form of consciousness-deflation, Fisher
elsewhere described neoliberalism as a “deliberately cultivated [collective] depression”. Psychedelics then,
appear as another tool to get in touch with the political causes of our disaffection, i.e. neoliberal capitalism.
Gilbert, Jeremy. “Psychedelic Socialism: The Politics of Consciousness, the Legacy of the Counterculture
and the Future of the Left”.https://jeremygilbertwriting.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/psychedelic-
socialism2. Accessed, 29th March 2019.
40
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. 1964. Routledge Classics, 2002. p63.
41
This is a key feature of many psychedelic subcultures, as seen by their presence at ‘transformation
festivals’. For example, in contrast to experiencing a ‘bad’ or ‘difficult’ trip as a undesirable loss of control,
users often value it positively as a transformatory experience - something highly prized in their value
systems.
42
If you were (although you haven’t) to ask me why I am an anarchist, I would have to answer that it's
because it helps me love more and better.
43
Fisher, “Acid Communism”, np.

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--- “Postcapitalist Desire”. What We are Fighting For: A Radical Collective Manifesto.
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Left”.https://jeremygilbertwriting.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/psychedelic-socialism2.
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