Timothy Leary and Marshall McLuhan, turned on and tuned in

INTRODUCTION

There is no other 1960s intellectual figure whom Timothy Leary came to
admire more than Marshall McLuhan. He considered McLuhan’s famous
statement – “The medium is the message" — the most important cultural
insight of the ‘60s, a decade saturated with insightful and lasting
one-liners, some of the most famous coming from Leary’s own brain. Leary
has even credited the world’s foremost media theorist with giving him
the pep talk that resulted in his own famous mantra: “Turn On, Tune In,
Drop Out.”

In 1964, when LSD was fast becoming a national issue on a trajectory
that eventually made it the most vilified drug of the decade, McLuhan’s
treatise Understanding Media became (alongside The Tibetan Book of the
Dead) the latest roadmap for Leary’s positioning on the subject that had
increasingly preoccupied him since he and Richard Alpert had been forced
out of Harvard, where they had been doing groundbreaking research on
psilocybin, LSD and DMT during the early 1960s.

McLuhan argued that all media are “extensions” of our human senses,
bodies and minds, that “amplify and accelerate existing processes.” It
was the medium itself, regardless of the content, that was the message.

He could have been speaking of LSD as much as a television screen.

In McLuhan’s estimation, the “only sure disaster would be a society not
perceiving a technology’s effects on their world, especially the chasms
and tensions between generations.” During the culture wars of the ‘60s,
this became known as the “Generation Gap” and led to a suppression of
youth protest culture by the ruling class. The new medium of television
broadcast it to every living room, from civil right protestors being
attacked by sheriffs’ dogs to hippies being busted for smoking pot to
anti-war demonstrators being beaten by cops to the rows of body bags in
the jungles of Vietnam.

During the spring of 1963, as they were being excommunicated from
Harvard, Leary and Alpert’s parting shot was the publication, in the
Harvard Review, of their manifesto, “The Politics of Consciousness
Expansion,” in which they claimed:

“The effects of consciousness-expanding drugs will be to transform our
concepts of human nature, of human potentialities, of existence. The
game is about to be changed . . . . Man is about to make use of that
fabulous electrical network he carries around in his skull . . . .
Prepare your intellectual craft to flow with the current.”

It was around this time that Leary and McLuhan met, a pivotal meeting
Leary wrote about in his autobiography Flashbacks. They had lunch at the
Plaza Hotel in Manhattan in the spring of 1966, following Tim’s
appearance at the U.S. Senate Hearings on the psychedelic drug “crisis,”
and shortly before he gave a talk on “The Molecular Revolution” at the
first non-academic LSD conference in San Francisco. Leary commented that
there was no need to turn on McLuhan to LSD since the professor got high
on the yoga of his art form: talk. “He talks in circles, and spirals,
and flower forms and mandala forms,” Leary said.

McLuhan urged Leary to promote LSD the way advertisers promoted a
product: “The new and improved accelerated brain.” He advised him to
“associate LSD with all that the brain can produce—beauty, fun,
philosophic wonder, religious revelation, increased intelligence,
mystical romance.” But above all, he should stress the religious aspect.
“Find the god within.” He encouraged Leary to come up with a winning
jingle or catch-phrase along the lines of: “Lysergic Acid hits the
spot/Forty billion neurons, that’s a lot.”

McLuhan told Tim to “always smile” and radiate confidence, never appear
angry. He predicted that while Leary would “lose some major battles on
the way,” he would eventually win the war. “Drugs that accelerate the
brain won’t be accepted until the population is geared to computers.”

Leary wrote: “The conversation with Marshall McLuhan got me thinking
[that] the successful philosophers were also advertisers who could sell
their new models to large numbers of others, thus converting thought to
action, mind to matter.”

Inspired by McLuhan, Leary took LSD and devoted several days to creating
a slogan. He claims he was in the shower when he came up with “Turn On,
Tune In, Drop Out.” By the end of the summer he was also telling readers
of Playboy that “LSD is the greatest aphrodisiac ever discovered.”

Psychedelic and empathogenic plants and drugs are historically entwined with electronic and digital technology. The lysergamides, tryptamines, beta-carbolines, phenethylamines and cannabinoids — “tools of enlightenment and transcendental communication” in the words of Sasha Shulgin — are chemical compounds that act as alternative media.

The molecule is the message.

McLuhan’s Unpublished Letter In Support of Prisoner Leary

In the spring of 1974, Leary archivist Michael Horowitz was gathering
texts from notable writers, scientists, and cultural figures in support
of Leary, who since a year earlier had been incarcerated in the
California State Prison at Folsom, facing what amounted to a life
sentence, officially for cannabis possession and escape, unofficially
for his psychedelic drug research and for broadcasting widely, as
McLuhan had suggested, the benefits of LSD and marijuana. The plan,
which was hatched with Leary during a prison visit, was to publish a
festschrift (a collection of essays written in honor of a scholar by his
peers) to bring attention to his achievements, his draconian treatment
by the law enforcement arm of the U. S. government, and current plight.
In the days before internet petitions, one hoped to kickstart a movement
that would grow into protest rallies, bring media attention to the
injustice of jailing a philosopher for publically expressing his
thoughts, and eventually free Leary from prison.

McLuhan responded right away with the letter published here for the
first time.

Dear Dr. Horowitz:

How about Tim as the Ulysses of the inner trip? Or the Homer of the
electric age? Electric technology, by virtue of its immediate relation
to our nervous system, is itself a sort of inner trip, with drugs
playing the role of sub-plot or alternate mode. It may well appear a few
years hence that the panic about psychedelic drugs relates less to the
chemistry than to the hidden terrors which people feel in the presence
of electric technology. It was the same with the onset of the radio age
in the twenties which inspired a booze panic.

Acoustic men are inclined to be alcohol addictive . . . that is, all
pre-literate societies, and also the post-literate, ourselves. It was in
the TV Guide for September 15, 1973 that an article appeared, explaining
the experimental discovery of the addictive character of TV as medium.
Nothing to do with programs. Tim may be a martyr of this hidden
addictive power of TV. Tony Schwartz in The Responsive Chord (Doubleday,
Anchor book, 1973) points out that ”TV uses the eye as an ear.”

Best wishes,

Marshall McLuhan