34 ms·

I'm not sure I follow your logic here. Although there are reasons to believe the incidents in the book are to some degree real, it is a story told with a purpos

• ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  No, I think the book makes something akin to a moral point. That Our Humble Narrator was as much victim as perpetrator of the Better Living through Chemistry era. It's precisely the opposite of a medical evaluation. It's a reductio ad absurbum on the idea that there's a potential Utopia within us revealed by drugs. Drugs apparently make you a new man but the new man may not be perceptually ... congruent with the old man. I think he's describing the collapse of the experiment that included the Summer of Love. "And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” Can the medicos provide structure to ameliorate this?