From Crowley heralding the Age of the Child, to Leary defining extra-terrestrial brain circuitry, both ultimately served the purposes of Corporate Fascism.
I was always a fan of Crowley, and of the sixties' countercultural heroes associated with him such as Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson. So you can imagine my feelings of cognitive dissonance while reading Chris Hedges' brilliant examination of the historical choices that led to The Death of the Liberal Class (2010) as I came across the following:
The new ethic of the liberal class, Cowley wrote, was one that embraced “the idea of salvation by the child,” which proposed a new educational system “by which children are encouraged to develop their own personalities, to blossom freely like flowers, then the world will be saved by this new, free generation.” It championed self-expression so that the individual can “realize his full individuality through creative work and beautiful living in beautiful surroundings.” It fostered the cult of paganism, the idea that “the body is a temple in which there is nothing unclean, a shrine to be adorned for the ritual of love.” It called for living for the moment, to “dwell in it intensely, even at the cost of future suffering.” It defied all forms of Puritanism and demanded that “every law, convention or rule of art that prevents self-expression or the full enjoyment of the moment should be shattered and abolished.” It supported female equality. It embraced the therapeutic culture, the belief that “if our individual repressions can be removed? by confessing them to a Freudian psychologist? then we can adjust ourselves to any situation, and be happy in it.” The environment no longer needed to be altered, and “that explains why most radicals who became converted to psychoanalysis or glands or Gurdjieff [a popular mystic] gradually abandoned their political activism.”
Cowley noted that self-expression and paganism, however, only encouraged a demand for new products, from furniture to beach pajamas. The call to live for the moment, he argued, led people impulsively to purchase consumer goods, from automobiles to radios. Female equality was used to double the consumption of products such as cigarettes. The restlessness and fondness for self-imposed exile, embraced by Bohemians, intellectuals and artists, gave an allure to foreign objects and turned exotic locations into tourist destinations. (The Death of the Liberal Class pg. 101-102.)
The idea of class struggle was forgotten in the West, as the external "terrestrial" world and its "brain circuits" were "tuned out" and the internal "extra-terrestrial" world and its "brain circuits" were "tuned in."
These extra-terrestrial levels were the somatic/body pleasure level, the meta-intelligence level where you create your own reality, the genetic level where you can experience your genetic past and future history, and the quantum level of consciousness where the conscious mind is free of the body. The old terrestrial levels were the bio-survival level, the bio-political level, the laryngeal/symbolic level, and the social/sexual level.
So rather than fighting against the growing danger of corporate fascism we "tuned in, turned on, and dropped out." We learned how to experience bliss and pleasures beyond our parents' comprehension.
The quantum mechanics many worlds interpretation was often connected with the meta-intelligence level of consciousness. So there was this idea that you could "change your reality tunnel" like changing channels on a TV. And now I read this:
The link above leads to a story about TV's, reality tunnels, and prison. The message I take from it is that maybe we should pull back a bit from the creating our own reality level of consciousness.
