I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…

…expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull…

Allen Ginsberg, Howl
Ithink I finally understand the full meaning of the famous desperate words of the Beat poet quoted above. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl laments the decimation of his generation, in part due to drug abuse and mental illness. (That much I got, even as a college kid.) But I have always suspected something more profound lay buried inside Howl, something beyond my comprehension.

Decades after its publication, it was revealed that much of the mayhem described in Howl was inflicted upon Ginsberg’s generation by – you guessed it – its own government. Numerous 1960’s countercultural figures such as Ken Kesey and Robert Hunter were survivors of the CIA’s illegal and evil MK-ULTRA mind-control program, which of course was also the genesis of the 60’s LSD culture as a whole. Other purported MK-ULTRA casualties, whose career paths turned very dark indeed, included the likes of Charles Manson, Whitey Bulger, and a teenaged Harvard undergraduate named Ted Kaczynski – later infamous as the Unabomber.

We cannot know to what extent Ginsberg may have been aware of the government’s role in the generational destruction he described in Howl at the time he wrote it. But the deeper theme, the one that eluded me for so long, goes even further, and is more intuitive than factual. Those “best minds” were destroyed – and cast out of the academy – not by their own madness, but by the madness of the society around them. That society was a violent and unmerciful one, run by amoral and unaccountable men. It was a society that refused to accept alternative viewpoints and demanded conformity and submission. When the best minds failed to comply, it annihilated them.

A variation on this theme is playing today.