Knowledge Assembly and Anti-psychiatry

Knowledge is managed in the modern western world not through religion but through the science of the mind, psychiatry. Project MK-Ultra of the 1960’s (MK standing for Mind Control) run by the Anglo-American security services closely involved the philosopher and essayist Aldous Huxley. Historically the 1960’s best demonstrates that the effort to acquire a complete knowledge topology requires and initiates turbulent social and political change that can threaten the stability of political systems as in the near revolutions of 1968.

A great deal of the existential writers achieving popularity in this decade were connected with a NSW (New Social Movement) termed anti-psychiatry.  It is worth noting that anti-psychiatry is a recognised keyword within the British Library Document Supply Centre “Inside Information” catalogue. Anti-psychiatry or phenomenological psychiatry still survives today within for example the PA (Philadelphia Association) which was founded during the 60’s by the military psychiatrist RD Laing. The PA produces a free reading list, which resembles a who’s who of existential writers from this period. Confusingly perhaps, there is an additional term amongst philosophers for this school of thought called “Continental Philosophy”.

Whatever the chosen tag, the angle of approach to knowledge management is based on the principle that altered states of consciousness provide clues to perception necessary to understand and evaluate the sum of human knowledge. These altered states relied heavily upon LSD (synthesised in 1946 by Hoffman and hence sometimes known as “Hoffman’s miracle”) and were used in psychiatry to induce a temporary state of thought disorder close to schizophrenia. This has been used since to challenge biological psychiatrists that schizophrenia is indeed a medical disease that needs cured.

For a period during the 1960’s the pharmaceutical company Sandoz supplied LSD to physicians and in turn they collected and returned observations on patients to whom it was given. Ref jay stevens. It is unfortunate although perhaps understandable that this research has not yet been brought into the digital age and no doubt remains kept in the vaults. However the mental health user movement in the western world tends to keep this piece of history alive through discrete channels since the challenge to the medical-legal-pharmaceutical “conspiracy” formulated by RD Laing has largely lost ground. Furthermore it is in the self-interests of mental health users to guard such knowledge, for if a psychiatrist were to insist any “user” be more heavily medicated with anti-psychotic drugs than he or she would reasonably want to permit, the moral ground of opposition need not be re-invented.

While Indian, Taoist and Buddhist traditions have always dealt with the problematic definitions of knowledge, the anti-psychiatry movement attempted to assimilate them into a framework of western philosophy. Hence the period is known as a time of experimentation with new sociological models. When we bear in mind that much of the pioneering working in the CD-ROM information industry in the early 1990’s was funded by pharmaceutical giants, the niggling question is can KM really exist as a reputable discipline if a rejection of the 60’s experiment is inherent in the technology? Will KM move unintentionally towards rediscovering this collection of knowledge assembled by the 60’s experiment without being able to go further because of modern day taboos? Certainly LSD is taboo and it leaves the modern historian with a dilemma when seeking to professionally to teach this period. Would you skip the psychedelic era as irrelevant? Of course the widespread use of LSD in psychiatry and psychotherapy was at the heart of the psychedelic culture and the social changes. History in effect, even in the universities of today, still has to stop before the 1960’s.

Knowledge Assembly and Anti-psychiatry continued

There are perhaps four key writers (2 British, 2 American) essential to understanding the moral authority behind the 60’s experiment. Aldous Huxley, RD Laing, Tim Leary and Thomas Szasz are when combined, representative of the period’s approach to understanding the application of human knowledge to the political process. They made an assumption that the science of the mind, psychiatry, had a duty to care of the patient that involved taking seriously the root cause of any mental illness as being sociological. A product of social or economic pressures, or even a spiritual or moral collapse, but not a biological malfunction as the medical term “mental illness” now makes most of us assume.

If we consider economic science for a moment, the principle of cost accounting in modern management is similar to phenomenological psychiatry.  Cost accountants will measure the extent to which variables unexpectedly deviate from the norm. This is defined as “management by exception” and tasks the accountant to resolve the issue of why the actual cost has deviated from the pre-determined standard costing measurements. Likewise the psychiatrists within the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960’s were tasking themselves to understand the mad patient as a precursor to the management by exception of social planning and development. This sympathy went to the extent of taking LSD with the mad patient (something RD Laing was famous for).

With the swing to right wing agendas by the electorate in America and Britain at the very end of the 1970’s, the biological model of mental illness completely swept away such experimentation and has almost completely buried the legacy of anti-psychiatry. However, now the electronic database industry has almost exhausted the possibilities of new technical management databases in the 90’s. Perhaps knowledge management is almost ready to dig into the wealth of virgin research material from this 60’s period. The retro-digitisation of LSD research may seem an obvious avenue, but are the interests of the pharmaceutical giants too enmeshed in the biological model of mental illness to allow this? Considering that new animal research cannot be proceeded with until an ethics committee reviews the proposal as a not unnecessary repetition of past experiments, would not having such psychedelic research at the fingertips be an irresistible pressure upon the psychiatric profession to re-introduce limited experimentation with LSD therapy? In the context of this research in the vaults, Knowledge Assembly (KA perhaps?) as proposed by Paul Gilster in his book “Digital Literacy” may be more pertinent to our information economy than KM as you certainly cannot manage the workforce until you have assembled it.  Until we assemble past attempts at KM, be they done with hallucinogens rather than computers, the corporate KM system looks rather incomplete and too dissatisfying to push us into the new era of electronic democracy and the benevolent bureaucracy.