This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders
Simeon Wade, a Harvard specialist in intellectual history, and Michael Stoneman, a pianist, are the protagonists who took Foucault to Death Valley to use LSD together. The two were a couple who met in a darkroom in Los Angeles, where a spontaneous inspired conversation about Chopin arose after some groping, much to the annoyance of the other patrons in the darkroom. That’s how their relationship began, according to the book, an amusing work I read in one sitting last night.
Foucault describes his LSD trip in various ways. He says it most closely resembles sex with a stranger. During the trip, he didn’t even want to drink a glass of water for fear that the mental state he was in would disappear. The trip had a profound effect on him—he called it the best experience of his life. It caused him to burn the book he was working on about sexuality (yes, that’s what it says), because he wanted to start all over again.
Foucault also notes that a few hours later, he already had great difficulty recalling the mental state that had so impressed him.
At the end of his life, shortened by AIDS, Foucault expressed the wish to use LSD again and leave this life while tripping, just as Huxley did. It is a wish that did not come true—why, I’m not entirely sure.
After reading this book, I feel that I know Foucault much better. Coincidentally, Boulez, about whom I posted a few days ago, is also frequently discussed in this book: Foucault was a huge fan; he called the work mentioned above his absolute favorite. He never listened to pop music.
How striking is it that LSD had such a huge influence on one of the greatest thinkers of the West, but that he never made any attempt to put the experience on paper? After the experience, Foucault even wanted to move to California, something that also never happened.
**The Philosopher and the Mental State**
Foucault and myself are exceptions in the philosophical landscape: most philosophers stoically guard their so-called sobriety, believing their brains are all they have. Slavoj Žižek puts it differently: he has never drunk a drop of alcohol because he’s afraid he might lose his paranoid worldview and let himself go. His constant hyper-state, to which he owes his success and his livelihood, is not something he wants to jeopardize by entering uncharted territory. That’s the story, but of course, it is a massive cop-out.
**Nietzsche and His Glass of Milk**
Žižek and Nietzsche had exactly the same mindset: Nietzsche, too, never drank a drop of alcohol in his life. Regarding alcohol, I find that somewhat commendable, but would Nietzsche also have been afflicted by his mental illness if he had had broader access to genuinely mind-expanding substances? What if Nietzsche had understood that serotonin is a tryptamine, and that human mood by definition has a hallucinatory character?
Incidentally, the milk Nietzsche drank contains an opioid: casein. And Nietzsche regularly used opium to ease his migraines; he even devoted poems to the blessed effects of opium. So we should take Nietzsche’s supposed stoicism towards sobriety with a big grain of salt.
More fun facts: Foucault read Carlos Castaneda, so he says in the book, but only the first volume, which he could barely remember. Amanita Muscaria is also mentioned, but none of the participants ever tried it themselves.
**Maximizing Serotonin**
Maximizing that which ensures your good mood, serotonin, through MDMA, 5-MAPB, or another cathinone, extracted from the holy khat tree. (Isn’t that Ethiopian tree… the real tree of life?) Only then can you understand what serotonin really is, and what it is capable of. Only then can you experience how clipped humans go through life: and that clipping is no accident; it is a product of predatory capitalism.
The *just-not-happy” state is the core formula of the entire consumer system. Žižek’s paranoia, to which he owes his success, is nothing less than a counter-reaction to that clipped happiness: this way, he can repeatedly restart his *panic-control-system* thanks to that horror.
But isn’t this a massive cop-out? Why are our philosophers so unwilling to explore the mental space? Because they think it should be done by their own strength? But there is no ‘own strength’ at all: you are born into clipped receptor systems, a cultivated product of centuries of manipulation and conditioning. In Žižek, you can see perfectly well what ‘by one’s own strength’ exactly entails: a kind of ultimate state of panic because the conditioning always remains present as a counterforce and can only be avoided ‘by one’s own strength’ in this way.
**A Strange Phenomenon**
Yesterday, someone who recently befriended me on Facebook sent me a chat message with a long-winded rant about corona, something along the lines of: ‘See, corona does exist! It’s still here!’ The man is clearly disturbed because I have never doubted the ‘reality’ of corona: it’s a new cold, something I’ve claimed since March 2020, and such a new cold behaves severely at first and then quickly evolves into something mild. That’s something a scientist should know, and a scientist should also know that vaccinating against a cold is a fool’s errand, simply because colds mutate too quickly. But the sinister plan was already in motion, a plan by figures like the Rumsfelds and the Kochs who entered Big Pharma in 2008 to cash in more with their money than they did with their dirty wars. Yuck.
And now, years later, I get a chat message from some fool about how ‘corona really exists’ as if that’s the burning question everything revolves around? My God, what a sham—it’s a pathetic spectacle to see such a figure wallow in an extended pseudo-confession of their own being wrong.
But the real mystery is: why did he seek me out?
Yesterday, it was revealed that a war criminal in the US Senate could expect no less than fifty rounds of applause. Someone who has been found guilty by the international legal order of an apartheid regime and war crimes. There could not be enough clapping for this guy by the stooges with interests in this Middle Eastern position. Israel and Guantanamo Bay function in exactly the same way: they are meant to lead to conditioning through fear, a conditioning that you can undo rather easily with certain forbidden substances.
One of the major problems with conditioning is that the conditioned person actually has no idea about his own state. As a Westerner living in Turkey, you see that conditioning very clearly: because you come from a slightly different condition, the whole ‘Us versus the Kurds and Armenians’ play that the media constantly dumps on the Turks looks downright malicious. And the other way around: I’ve never met a Turk who believes in the official 9/11 narrative. Not one, really. Even the pro-Western Turks don’t. To believe in that narrative, you clearly have to be a white Westerner. And that points to a very strong form of conditioning, which is hard to undo ‘by one’s own strength.’
The condition. As the word itself indicates, it’s actually the primal form of deception.
Martijn 07-26-2024