An interesting review. I'm surprised they only mention MKUltra in passing. It actually was the first example that popped into my mind. This is more joke than serious argument, but not entirely. The CIA wasn't just dosing innocent citizen victims. They were dosing themselves with LSD at the time, too. The water cooler was a prank attested to in several places. If acid had the effects it allegedly does, then the CIA should have been a decidedly different place to work in the 1960s than it was.
Anecdotally, my strong psychedelic trip dissolved a bunch of illusions for me. Including several that I had used to justify the value and importance of human life itself. I managed to retrieve or reconstruct them after, but I honestly felt completely out of it for days after. Seeing other humans the same way I feel when I look at a pig or a wolf. A large, possibly dangerous animal, with no real intelligence behind its eyes, only cunning. And I saw a capacity for all manner of evil in myself only barely contained. I wouldn't be half-surprised if some of that experience made me more conservative in a few ways. Who knows.
Anecdotally, my strong psychedelic trip dissolved a bunch of illusions for me. Including several that I had used to justify the value and importance of human life itself. I managed to retrieve or reconstruct them after, but I honestly felt completely out of it for days after. Seeing other humans the same way I feel when I look at a pig or a wolf. A large, possibly dangerous animal, with no real intelligence behind its eyes, only cunning. And I saw a capacity for all manner of evil in myself only barely contained. I wouldn't be half-surprised if some of that experience made me more conservative in a few ways. Who knows.