Timothy Leary and his followers wanted the public to block out the messages of the mainstream media and other institutions, which they saw as little more than tools of mass manipulation. Instead the Federation was setting forth on an inward voyage, with a bit of help: to reconfigure the public mind and its priorities, Leary believed in the great potential of taking psychedelic drugs—like LSD—still legal then.
By the time of his lunch with McLuhan, Leary was growing in fame and wanted to bring his ideas to a broader audience; his great ambition was to reach the young, now understood to be broadly disillusioned with how things were and looking for something different. As he would describe it, “For the first time in our history, a large and influential sector of the populace was coming to disrespect institutional authority,” giving rise to a contest between “the old industrial society and the new information society.”
He believed that McLuhan might be able to tell him how he could reach all the disaffected. McLuhan was fairly sympathetic to Leary’s project. For McLuhan saw the media as having become “extensions of man”—as much a part of us as our skin. To take control of one’s media consumption was therefore a form of self-determination, a seizing of one’s own destiny. And so after hearing Leary out, he finally gave him some counterintuitive advice: “You call yourself a philosopher, a reformer,” said McLuhan. “But the key to your work is advertising.”
Later that day, in the shower, the answer suddenly came to him. All he needed was the right occasion to bring it to a broader audience. — Late in 1966, a “psychedelic artist” named Michael Bowen invited Leary to an event in San Francisco meant to unite various emerging countercultural and “alternative” groups— alienated students, poets, rock musicians, jazz hipsters, and members of biker gangs. His advertising posters billed the event as “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In.” And so it was on January 14, 1967, in Golden Gate Park that Leary first took his carefully con constructed message to a broader audience. His speech centered on the infectious refrain, repeated over and over: “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.” McLuhan’s advice worked.
Leary’s line caught on as well as any advertising slogan and became, effectively, the motto of the counterculture. Most would take Leary’s words as a call to pay attention to where your attention is paid; mind what you open your mind for. If this was not America’s first call to attentional revolt— Packard and Lippmann had each issued his own, as we’ve seen—Leary’s proposed a far broader compass of things to ignore, not only messages from television and government but college, work, parents, as well as other sources of authority. He called for a complete attentional revolution. Some two decades on, Leary would write that “unhappily,” his ideas had been “often misinterpreted to mean ‘Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.’ ”
Indeed, in the 1960s it was earnestly asked where one was supposed to go after dropping out. But enough who got the message understood that it referred to something more profound, and were able to connect Leary’s prescription with the vision of other social critics. Among the most influential of these was another guru of the counterculture, Herbert Marcuse of the “Frankfurt School,” one of a set of German philosophers who’d fled the Third Reich in the 1930s. Marcuse believed that he was witnessing a “Great Refusal”—a term he first coined in the 1950s to describe “the protest against unnecessary repression, the struggle for the ultimate form of freedom—‘to live without anxiety.’ ”
Like Leary—whom he may have inspired in part—Marcuse tended to believe that liberation could not be achieved from within the system, but required its fundamental reconstruction. “Intellectual freedom,” he surmised in 1964, “would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by mass communication and indoctrination” and also the “abolition of ‘public opinion’ along with its makers.”
And so the youth movement held out the promise for something never achieved except in mythology—the radical liberation of the human condition. It was a far more ambitious aim than anything hoped for even by Karl Marx and his followers, who simply sought liberation from an unfair economic system. Marcuse envisioned an end to all forms of repression, whether social, economic, or technological—a sort of return to the Garden of Eden. By this Great Refusal, he dared hope, the people might “recognize the mark of social repression, even in the most sublime manifestations of traditional culture, even in the most spectacular manifestations of technical progress.”