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I find it remarkable that Savage has avoided any reference to the pharmacological effects of the hallucinogens. “Outsiders” make up a
prominent segment of the hip culture. Savage puts this in context by citing Colin Wilson, Camus, and Genet. He points out some of the psychodynamic and social forces that bring the Outsider to the point of desperate boredom, and he illustrates the peculiar role that groups play for such people.
However, when it comes to drugs, he mentions “pot” and peyote only in passing. He implies that these are simply toxic substances and that their use is a manifestation of masochism. Considering Savage's pioneer work with hallucinogenic drugs, this strikes me as odd. The peculiar pharmacological effects of the hallucinogens make them play a unique and perhaps crucial role in the defensive struggles of such individuals.
One normal function of the central nervous system reduces activity devoted to redundant or otherwise expected events. This is manifested as an autonomous ego function. In situations of dull or redundant stimulation this mechanism produces a kind of cognitive deprivation. Thus, it contributes to the well-known human hunger for new and novel input.
During states of boredom, a person may feel only “half alive” or even depressed. Estrangements between ego and superego amplify such states and, in turn, are themselves amplified. By contrast, experiences of recreation and elation can be brought about by novel activities and places, and most strikingly by those intrapsychic reorganizations that disclose novel relations and which we call creative acts.
The psychedelic drugs, and LSD in particular, seem to act on the mechanism of cognitive habituation so that dull and mundane percepts become apparently novel and extraordinary. Savage has noted how group activities may play a similar role for the Outsider. Groups, by their remarkably uncritical nature, facilitate the development of mysticism. The tendency of ingroups to develop muddy metaphysi