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➤was still raging against the deadening effect on the imagination of ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ in London and in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell commented, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infi nite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.’ Similar sentiments were being expressed in the 1960s when the popularisation of LSD in the counter-culture offered the hope of throwing the doors wide open.At the start of the 1960s, a number of dissident currents from the 1950s merged into a torrent to challenge the status quo. ‘The Port Huron Statement’, published in 1962, has been described as ‘the visionary call of the 1960s revolution’. This manifesto of the activist movement Students for a Democratic Society criticised the United States’ foreign and domestic policies, and addressed the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, partisan politics, social inequality and racial discrimination. It called for “the establishment of a democracy of individual participation governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organised to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation”. Finally, Alexander Trocchi’s 'Sigma' statements from 1964 prefi gured the networked world of today by demanding Left:UFO Mark II poster by design duo Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, 1967Below left: Poster for The Crazy World of Arthur Brown at the UFO club in London, June 16 & 23, by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, 1967Below: The Souper Dress, 1966that millions link together to create a universal university of knowledge. This desire for transcendence, a utopia of the mind, was advocated by Timothy Leary in The Psychedelic Experience: “[It] is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of spacetime dimensions, and of the ego or identity… Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD…”Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures. By 1966–67, the counter-culture had engaged signifi cant numbers and the debate moved from ‘if…’ to ‘how?’ All action, however, was set against the increasingly bitter arguments about America’s involvement in Vietnam. The sight of the world’s most powerful democratic nation relentlessly bombing an underdeveloped country to support a widely disliked dictatorship united radicals of all types around the world. Looking back from today’s viewpoint, long after this ‘revolution’ of utopianism fell into decline, a huge amount is still with us. Lines can be traced from the civil rights movement to multiculturalism, from the permissive society to feminism and Images: dress photograph © Kerry Taylor Auctions; posters © London Michael English and Nigel Waymouth.. 42 NADFAS REVIEW / WINTER 2016 www.nadfas.org.ukREVOLUTION