Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science

By Benjamin Breen

Book Overview

A Los Angeles Times Bestseller

One of The New Yorker's best books of 2024

A bold and brilliant revisionist take on the history of psychedelics in the twentieth century, illuminating how a culture of experimental drugs shaped the Cold War and the birth of Silicon Valley.

"It was not the Baby Boomers who ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents."

Far from the repressed traditionalists they are often painted as, the generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth.

At the center of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists--and star-crossed lovers--Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life's mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. Mead and Bateson's partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists, and the founders of the Information Age.

As we follow Mead and Bateson's fractured love affair from the malarial jungles of New Guinea to the temples of Bali, from the espionage of WWII to the scientific revolutions of the Cold War, a new origin story for psychedelic science emerges.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1538722372
• ISBN13: 9781538722374
• Release Date: January 2024
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Tripping review

Review: Scientists looking into how a horribly written book, basically a nasty and covert smear of two great scientists is eaten up by a hyper gullible public, will find in Breen’s book a wealth of examples. How so many people, including staff at NPR, are unable to judge the intent and worth of a book in 2024 is truly alarming. Breen is an intellectual midget. Bateson and Mead were not interested in promoting psychedelics though they were open minded on the subject and of course were widely consulted as experts. Bateson says they are trivial but Breen claims the two are central figures in his story. Story here in the sense of a lie.  Don’t buy this. Get something by Stan Grof or Hoffer and Osmond instead.