Leary at Millbrook Under the Influence of McLuhan 1968

Tim Leary at Millbrook - Interview (Part 1) by Bodhisattva1956


Tim Leary at Millbrook - Interview (Part 2) by Bodhisattva1956


Tim Leary at Millbrook - Interview (Part 3) by Bodhisattva1956


Tim Leary at Millbrook - Interview (Part 4) by Bodhisattva1956

I think two things are particularly interesting about Dr Leary giving his spiel in 1968. First he continually returns to metaphors of visual technology, especially the microscope in various forms is evoked as a metaphor for the LSD experience. The second point that struck me is his references to media more generally. Old people "who drink whiskey and read books" are somehow contra to young people who take "psychedelic drugs and watch TV". The background supplied by Marshall McLuhan at this time plays into many of Leary's assumptions about the media landscape of the time.

Marshall McLuhan Interviewed by Playboy Magazine 1969
PLAYBOY: What's natural about drugs?

MCLUHAN: They're natural means of smoothing cultural transitions, and also a short cut into the electric vortex. The upsurge in drug taking is intimately related to the impact of the electric media. Look at the metaphor for getting high: turning on. One turns on his consciousness through drugs just as he opens up all his senses to a total depth involvement by turning on the TV dial. Drug taking is stimulated by today's pervasive environment of instant information, with its feedback mechanism of the inner trip. The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it's the universal experience of TV watchers. LSD is a way of miming the invisible electronic world; it releases a person from acquired verbal and visual habits and reactions, and gives the potential of instant and total involvement, both all-at-onceness and all-at-oneness, which are the basic needs of people translated by electric extensions of their central nervous systems out of the old rational, sequential value system. The attraction to hallucinogenic drugs is a means of achieving empathy with our penetrating electric environment, an environment that in itself is a drugless inner trip.

Drug taking is also a means of expressing rejection of the obsolescent mechanical world and values. And drugs often stimulate a fresh interest in artistic expression, which is primarily of the audile-tactile world. The hallucinogenic drugs, as chemical simulations of our electric environment, thus revive senses long atrophied by the overwhelmingly visual orientation of the mechanical culture. LSD and related hallucinogenic drugs, furthermore, breed a highly tribal and communally oriented subculture, so it's understandable why the retribalized young take to drugs like a duck to water.

PLAYBOY: A Columbia coed was recently quoted in Newsweek as equating you and LSD. "LSD doesn't mean anything until you consume it," she said. "Likewise McLuhan." Do you see any similarities?

MCLUHAN: I'm flattered to hear my work described as hallucinogenic, but I suspect that some of my academic critics find me a bad trip.

PLAYBOY: Have you ever taken LSD yourself?

MCLUHAN: No, I never have. I'm an observer in these matters, not a participant.