Idiot
One of the things I think about a lot given the nature of my work is the extent to which science is used to keep people on the straight and narrow. My thoughts on this are still disordered, unsystematic. Unruly. Which of course is precisely the thing that science discredits. That’s how it works its magic. Everything in its place. If you stick out it either sweeps you away as if you didn’t exist or it pulls you back into line.
The mythology of science is that it opens the world by clearing away illusions and mistakes and that this frees us. In practice, however, what that usually looks like is an anxiety around things that don’t fit. It’s often in such a hurry to do its job and do it well that it speeds past understanding what’s in front of it and leaps to what to do about it. Instead of “it doesn’t fit, I must be wrong,” science rushes to “it doesn’t fit, it must be wrong.”
One of my favorite parts of studying the history of LSD is just how much it’s pushed me outside of that kind of comfort zone. All the people and theories and ideas that don’t fit press themselves onto me, eager to tell me all about themselves in the hopes that maybe, finally, someone will hear them and figure out where they’re supposed to fit. And I decided right from the beginning that I would take that task seriously and see if I could find where they fit while still treating my work as scientific. Is there a way to find something that is both systematic and orderly and that makes all the weird pieces fit without rushing to discount them right from the beginning? I think that the only way to do that is to never lose sight of the prize. Science may well use systematization as the method by which it achieves understanding, but if it loses sight of a systematic understanding as the goal and finds itself starting and stopping with its method, it sells itself short. Instead of being the understander, it becomes the orderer. And those are very different things.
This is why science has historically been such a magnificent tool in the colonizer’s toolbox. Scientists, bless them, are just so curious and eager to be among the first to rush into a place no one they know knows anything about and immediately set about putting the house in order according to all the houses they’re already familiar with. Funding doesn’t last forever, after all. If your work is funded by the government or a corporation and you aren’t producing results, that money dries up. It turns science into a competition to be the first. The race is on. Corners get cut. We get fast science. We get sloppy science. We get something that orders things well enough to be useful to the funders and keep them happy. The things that stick out and don’t make sense become irritations. They’re holding us back. They’re in the way. Understanding, which only truly comes with slow science, slips away. Science turns into an endeavor to keep things in the place science (or, more to the point, the funders) has circumscribed them to, whether or not those things agree that they have been described correctly.
Still from the 1965 movie Ship of Fools
This slide is made a lot easier since science has decided it is in mortal competition with other methods of knowing things. Early on in this project I had to start tackling the war science seems to feel it is waging against both qualitative/intuitive approaches to knowing as well as against religion and mysticism, since those are some of the major battles that exists in the history of LSD. And right from the beginning people started pressing themselves onto me, both the historical people I was researching and people today who heard about my work and wanted to tell me their stories. One topic that kept coming up was the idea of … I’ll use psychic phenomena, since that’s the best word I have, although I don’t like it because it comes with a lot of baggage. But the idea that someone can know things they shouldn’t be able to know, like knowing the past or future, or being able to read someone else’s mind, or have a sixth sense that they should check on their children right now.
And what I found, when I started being willing to talk about it and take people seriously without belittling them, was that a huge number of people will confess to having experienced something like this (whether or not they embrace believing in it). Many of them won’t confess it in public, because they know what would happen: “you’re crazy. No one should ever take you seriously again.” But the people who were telling me they’d experienced this were relieved, I could feel the relief sliding off them like a wave. “I’ve never told anyone this, but….” They were from all walks of life and not all of them had tried psychedelics. It wasn’t like it was just the “crazy fringe” who all wanted to convince me that every baby should be given LSD on their fifth birthday. They were housewives and Harvard professors and scientists and booksellers and librarians. They were preppers living in the desert, schoolteachers, mechanics. They were straight and queer and everything in between. It didn’t matter. What did stand out, though, was that the closer to science a person was — the professors, the scientists, the tech workers — the more likely they were to have a moment of fear when they started telling me. “Don’t tell anyone, ok? You must think I’m crazy. I’m not sure I believe it myself, I just don’t know how to explain it. Ok? I’m not sure I believe it, I just want to tell you this story that happened to me. Don’t you dare tell anyone else.”
It turns out that when we pick up a weapon against others, we choose the sword by which we ourselves will fall. If we say there’s something that doesn’t sit right, that there’s something wrong that needs to be addressed, we risk being cast out. Cleaned up out of existence. I think this is why respectability politics is, hands down, the most profoundly shaping tool that the tech and knowledge sectors have at their disposal and is the one that these professions wield with the most frequency and impunity. There is a right way and a wrong way, and God help you if you pick the wrong way. You are dead to us.
I get the sense that there is actually a huge desire within the intellectual community to be able to ask these kinds of questions, and an overriding sense that something is … wrong with the way we do things right now. But there’s also a terror there. That if we said that out loud, or asked the real questions that keep insistently pressing themselves on the back of our minds, we’ll lose credibility. And credibility is, at the end of the day, the capital the knowledge profession has staked itself on. Without it, we’re just like all those other people we study. The dangerous idiots who don’t know themselves, or the world, or really much of anything else at all. The ones who need us to order their lives for them because they believe in things like a divine, or that there are things out there that we can’t or don’t fully comprehend. The ones who think that maybe the scientists don’t know it all after all, because they’re only human like the rest of us.
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