Return Of The 1970s!

Hallucinogenics are back, baby. Maybe you know them by their cool name psychedelics. They’re not back in the wild and weird and often destructive 60s way, but in the more reflective pleasant experimental therapeutic 70s manner. Think turtlenecked moustachioed long-sideburned therapists preaching transcendental discovery and you have it. Spock played one these psychologists in the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Yes, with a turtleneck.

Check this peer-reviewed paper from today: “Long-COVID symptoms improved after MDMA and psilocybin therapy: A case report“.

We present a case of a 41-year-old fully vaccinated female with Long-COVID syndrome who obtained significant symptomatic relief after self-medicating with psilocybin and MDMA.

I’ll be she did. I myself stick with Kesslers, just like my old grandad. Even though I was a boy in the 70s and learned my options, I keep with tradition.

I’m in the minority, though, because the 70s are back. Not entirely, not in every reach of culture, and not everywhere in the same color, but definitely in the same shades.

The 70s were weird. We are weird.

In the 70s we invented mental maladies that could be treated with EST (“transform one’s ability to experience living”), primal shouting (“[The] book The Primal Scream…inspired hundreds of spin-off clinics worldwide and served as an inspiration for many popular cultural icons”), and Chakra adjustments. Now we have anxities galore and long covid, which is fixed, appropriately, with hallucinogenics. It takes one to know one, as it were.

Therapy, which ebbs and flows, flowed big in the 70s, and is swelling now. Here’s a recent Time piece “Friends are increasingly going to therapy together“.

Friends come to Atkinson for all sorts of reasons, like reconciling political differences, processing shared grief, or working through tricky life transitions—like one friend having a baby or moving away for a new job. “It’s normal human stuff,” she says.

Processing grief? Could this be called Cuisinart therapy?

I cracked a joke about friend therapy (do they get a bulk discount?) on Twitter, and a fellow remarked, “I was caught in a group of liberals for a work thing. I couldn’t believe how many of them were not only going to therapy, but talking about it. Almost bragging about, like going to pottery classes or dance lessons or something.”

Incidentally, don’t forget Spock was a bad guy in that movie.

Marijuana was recreational in the 70s, and is so now, too, but it’s now legal, more or less.

In the 70s we had swingers and wife swappers, as it was then called when people used to marry. Now we have polyamory practiced in fluid polycules. It was in the 1970s that porn became mainstream. Downtown cinemas ran Rated-X movies. Now all carry them around wherever we go—which is as mainstream as you can get.

Because jargon must needs obfuscate, 70s UFOs became our UAPs, unidentified aerial (or anomalous) phenomena. But they’re once again thick in the skies, my friends, and even under the sea! Academics say so: “Aliens might be living among us disguised as humans — or in a base inside the moon, according to new Harvard study”.

The paper on which this is based is wild, and straight out of Chariots of the Gods: “The cryptoterrestrial hypothesis: A case for scientific openness to a concealed earthly explanation for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena“. Remember how we joked how Hillary was a crypto lizard being intent on conquering earth and enslaving its peoples? Hey, the facts fit the theory. Well, these guys take it seriously. (I think I’ll devote a whole post to this wonderful paper, which is both long and deep.)

It’s not only academics, but the government has reopened the Blue Book it once closed, and is telling us to Watch The Skies.

Psychics on every corner in the 70s. It was, after all, the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius. (It’s often forgotten that this was not a metaphor, but a description of heavenly movements.) Now, too.

New movie out called Look Into My Eyes, which the Washington Post calls an “oddly lovely documentary”. On psychics.

This mellow character study is never gripping — it has the feel of easing into a bathwater-temperature cauldron — but you come away with the desire to strike up a deeper-than-usual chat with a stranger. As one psychic admits, “Even if this is fake, it feels good and I need it.”

Women’s liberation was the defining cultural movement in the 70s. Now we have HR and mandatory DIE and feelings (“sensitivity”) training and toxic femininity run amok.

Hal Lindsay warned us about The End in The Late Great Planet Earth. Now we have climate apocalypsists (you heard me) preaching the same finality, albeit in service to a different deity.

Inflation? Same then as now. Bad. In the 70s we had coup against a President followed by a tepid replacement beloved by the then-teenaged (in age and size) Expertocracy. Sound familiar? The Expertocracy has grown in size and malignancy and reached adulthood since then.

Some 70s things we don’t have now: disco, rock, or inventive popular music of any kind (classical by then being already long dead). Now it’s all autotuned cyborg-sounding AI voices set to midi melodies and electronic barbaric thumping with illiterate lyrics composed by committees of MBAs. The precise music, I am betting, on full blast on all the outdoor speakers of Hell.

Same thing with movies. Sure, there was a lot of dreck in the 70s, but some mighty good pictures. It’s all now cartoons, which the smarter kiddies call capeshit, and DIE lectures. I haven’t been to the theater in a dozen years.

Clothes were loud, brash, and ridiculous then. But they were colorful and reached—for what, who knows. I had a pair—yes—of bell-bottomed jeans. I put them on when I wanted to Kung Fu sticks and boards, because that’s what the guys on Kung Fu Theater wore. Now everybody dresses just like the music they listen to. Abominably. T-shirts with idiotic jokes and sloppy shorts with smelly plastic foot coverings is the norm. The better dressed are walking advertisements for clothing companies: everything has a logo on it. Which people pay and are not paid for.

Meaning that if my thesis about the return of the 70s is correct, we can look forward to better, or at least more interesting, music, movies, and dress. And don’t forget that the replacement President after the 70s coup gave rise to a better man.

Of course, we have to hope our rulers don’t have us killed in WWIII. That’s a modern innovation.

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