Eat, Drink and be Stoned…

Considering the 60s if it Feels Good Do It Philosophy

We boomers were an ambitious lot of liberators back in our day. Our parents had liberated Europe, and now we—enlightened and idealistic youth that we were—set out to liberate America. We saw through all the hypocritical pretend goodness of our vainly proud nation. Liberty and justice for all—yeah, sure. With the gimlet-eyed clarity of youth, we saw through society’s false facade—and set about to smash it down to its rotten core. We were determined to shake things up and set things right. Our agenda was to liberate the poor from capitalist exploitation; to liberate our black brothers and sisters from racist discrimination and oppression; to free women and families from society’s pervasive patriarchal structures—and finally, to deliver, Moses like, all of society from the crimped and outdated moral values imposed by religion. So many fronts on which to fight!

Even we ourselves needed liberation! We boomers were plagued and oppressed by inhibitions which had been drilled into us by parents, religion, school, and society. These forces had conspired to thwart our natural freedom and innate desires—especially regarding sex. We set out to break free from such inhibitions. Our uptight/straight culture believed youthful desires needed to be restrained and constrained. If not, then society would collapse into chaos, depravity and licentious debauchery. This Cassandra warning was slipped into our worldview from our earliest youth. Rarely, if ever, was it expressed to us explicitly.

We encountered society’s stingy and puritanical rules of right behavior everywhere we turned—on TV shows we watched at home, at church through Sunday school and sermons, in the classroom by books and teachers even older than our parents. We were being brain-washed! This blanket of indoctrination would be tough to free ourselves from, but we were determined to do so. We would break the chains of inhibitions and taboos which had restrained us from living freely and naturally. After all, this was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius—a whole new way of living, with …harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding, no more falsehoods or derisions, golden living dreams of visions, mystic crystal revelation, and the mind’s true liberation… We would fight the battle for liberation, not with guns and bombs, but with sex, drugs and rock-and-roll! No wonder this powerful trinity of ours was so warned about and railed against by conservative preachers and straight society.

My generation waged a concerted campaign against one of straight society’s favored virtues: self-restraint. We derided it as being a remnant of a stale and passé morality, one which had passed its relevance date. We blithely tossed out this innocent baby of self-restraint along with what we considered America’s tainted cultural bath water. My generation saw anyone with a moral reservation—or hesitation—about sex as having what we termed a ‘hang up.’ This implied you were prudish or inhibited. Such inhibitions were implanted in our minds through parental or societal indoctrination. Hangups were something one had to get rid of and get over. Religion had imposed these restrictions upon society. Society enforced them with penalties of shame and disapproval—and sometimes even criminal penalties as well. We boomers felt compelled to liberate ourselves from all these psychological and cultural shackles. We believed the sexual revolution we’d launched would free our neurotic and uptight society as well. This society would owe us a debt of gratitude once everyone could experience the freedom of sexual liberation for themselves! Of course, most people of the older generation were beyond reaching. They were clinging to their straight values and cultural norms like barnacles to a pier. But we were young and sure to have our way… Those were the days, my friend…

Sha-la-la-la live for today…

Lookin’ for fun and feelin’ groovy…

Everybody must get stoned…

Let’s spend the night together…

If it feels good, do it was a popular slogan and a cheeky bumper sticker in the 60s and 70s. This slogan summarized what liberation was all about. 50s parents held religious or moral values which forbid certain pleasures—especially sexual pleasures. The pleasure of sex, we understood, could/would be allowed—although to married people only. There were all the other unmentionable/taboo sexual pleasures—the ones considered perverse by the old fogies of our parents’ generation. Overall though, this despised pre-marital sex restriction was the main thing which the if-it-feels-good-do-it slogan mocked.

There were other pleasures denied us as well. Wonderful—and sometimes wild—pleasures of marijuana, LSD, and other drugs. Such pleasures were extolled in a poster of two hippie couples standing on a street in San Francisco. It featured the slogan, better living through chemistry. In high school, I had this poster taped to my bedroom wall at home. The not-so-inside joke about this poster was that the slogan it touted had been used by the DuPont chemical company to promote their products. The poster was a way of cleverly flipping the bird at both capitalism and straight society. A real two-fer to our snickering delight!

The zeitgeist of the 60s drew and charmed my tiny teeny soul. Naturally, as a sentient human child, I already loved pleasure—who doesn’t? But as my early and mid-teen male hormones began percolating, I ran into the perplexing conundrum of my generation: My body and I both craved sexual pleasure, yet to my chagrin, I found I’d internalized the very rules I opposed! These rules were quite clear about which pleasures were licit and which illicit. To my recollection, my parents never once listed which pleasures were off limits. Yet—as if by osmosis—the list of restrictions had seeped into my adolescent conscience. And here’s the rub: you can’t just line out the restrictions you don’t like from that list. Sure, you may reject them intellectually, but violating them—or even the thought, intention, or imagination of violating them—awakens your conscience, which then wags it finger of shame at you. The degree of shame was dependant upon how deeply and thoroughly the despised puritanical values had been woven into your psyche. I and my generation were determined to yank out whatever puritanical threads had been woven into the warp and woof of our natural noble-savage souls.

Thus, a concentrated effort would be required if we were to be liberated from the ‘baggage’ and ‘hang-ups’ we’d been burdened with. Our minds, morals and consciences would need to be reprogrammed. This is where new/popular books, music, TV shows, art and philosophy were instrumental and quite effective. Aldous Huxley was one of the older generation who promoted our cause. He inspired our efforts to free ourselves from our misshapen and wrongly informed consciences. It was a revolutionary project. A storming of the Bastile-like prison of our conscience, setting free the wrongly imprisoned lusts of our innocent noble-savage natures. And since it had been priests and religious figures who had imprisoned us and our society, perhaps we needed a priest of our own—a secular one—to spearhead our liberation. Someone who was himself an example of a liberated life. Then, as if by divine providence, who should appear on the scene? Timothy Leary. This extraordinary figure’s moniker was—I’m not kidding—(drum roll) the High Priest of LSD. (You young whipper-snappers can Grok his name).

I heard him speak at UC-Riverside in 1968. Hundreds of others—perhaps thousands—came to hear him as well. His speech on The Hedonic Community was a big hit. In 1963, Leary had founded a commune/organization based on his philosophy of hedonism. The commune was on a two-thousand acre mansion. This enterprise of Leary’s has been described by one of its members as, “a cross between a country club, a madhouse, a research institute, a monastery, and a Fellini movie set.” Many luminaries of the Beat Generation made pilgrimage to Millbrook, NY, where Leary had established his community/commune to explore psychedelic drugs and experiment with alternate ways of living based on a hedonic and ‘free’ lifestyle.

Leary had come to Southern California to promote himself and his philosophy of hedonism. His young audience and I received him and his message enthusiastically. In fact, some students gave him a special welcome. Overnight, these students had changed the huge hillside letters, UCR, to read LSD. We all got a kick out of this, as did the good professor himself. Of course, we heard Dr. Leary’s famous tag line, tune in, turn on, drop out. For anyone unsure what this quip was shorthand for, he explained each of the three steps in his speech.

_______________ III _______________

In next weeks post—if I can pull it off—I’ll describe how these steps to/toward liberation and radicalization worked out in my life.