by “Tripping on Utopia” convincingly demonstrates that Mead and his cohort were key players in the first wave of psychedelic science, which began not in the 1960s but in the 1920s. “Timothy Leary and the baby boomers did not usher in of the first psychedelic era,” Breen writes. “They finished it.”
Mead’s interest in psychedelics arose from his lifelong quest to find a way to help humanity design peaceful, culturally diverse societies filled with self-actualizing individuals; In essence, a utopia. For her, the dream only intensified during World War II and the Cold War, when the specter of nuclear apocalypse (and the less totalizing but still dire “psychochemical war”) loomed.
But while she and the rest of her generation were going through “the most rapid period of change in human history, sooner or later,” Breen explains, Mead participated, both inadvertently and intentionally, in government projects more commonly associated with dystopia. In 1943, she worked for the Office of Strategic Services, a pre-CIA intelligence agency, on a project exploring the use of drugs to assist in military interrogations. And he became intimately involved in the Macy Foundation, a philanthropic organization focused on medicine and health, which was heavily funded by the CIA in the 1950s. The source of the money was a fact that was kept secret from most, but not all, Mead’s former colleagues and friends, one of whom was a career CIA agent.
Mead and her former husband, Gregory Bateson, were morally opposed to the weaponization of science, but Bateson, like Mead, had his own sad role to play in American military efforts. Bateson, an “awkwardly tall Englishman” and the only surviving son of a famous biologist father, met Mead while working in New Guinea in 1932. In 1943, he joined the OSS in the belief that “if the Nazis were using the science for manipulation, the scientists on the other side had a duty” to “fight it.”
But the work he did there, on hypnosis and drug-assisted interrogations, It haunted him for the rest of his life. Worse still, immediately after the dropping of the atomic bomb, he wrote a report proposing a new intelligence agency “specialized in unconventional warfare.” This letter was later credited with prompting the creation of the CIA. In 1952, Bateson “looked with horror” at this world of “covert activities and psychological manipulation.”
