Steal This Book
The Yippee manual
I participated in the "counter culture" in the late 60s. I grew my hair and wore bell bottoms and worked at a free school for abused teenagers - kids who were too violent to live at home or go to school.
That was a very counterculture project. We were funded by the LeDain Commission which was studying the harmful effects of drugs. The city gave us the old School Board building for the project. This was a solid 3 story building in the center of the city - just across from the library and next to the YMCA.
As well as running the freeschool we also ran a 24/7 drug crisis line for people having bad trips on LSD. As a part of my training for the job I went to a beautiful place in the country and took a tab of Owsley acid. We were into the idea that having a good trip meant having a good set and setting.
You needed to have a mindset that wasn't afraid of the experience. And you needed to be in a setting that was comfortable and non-threatening.
It's been said that LSD induces a kind of temporary psychosis - I agree - I'd experienced just what that psychosis is like and also that it was temporary.
LSD keeps you awake. Eventually the friends who were looking after me went to sleep and i was left sitting happily just marvelling at what the winter scene was like. It's one of the benefits of LSD - experience becomes front and center. On my first trip I was sitting looking at the falling snow when a twinkle appeared in the distance - it got bigger and brighter and became huge. I was like wow.
My set and setting wasn't telling me that this was a danger
Then it backed away - it was a snowplow
While the drug crisis line was working we were also 'schooling' the abused kids on the third floor. These were kids who were pre-or early teen - they could do stuff like read and write. We offered activities like making a magazine. It caught interest. Kids started submitting articles. We published what they wrote as part of the lesson.
One night I came home to find that 'the Boys' had handed out LSD to the kids on the third floor. The place was a madhouse. I went to the 3rd floor. Ernie was swinging a knife around - what's up -he grinned - just having fun but then stopped.
Fred was sitting outside on an icy windowsill going wow - I took his arm and said come in and he did.
The Awarehouse (where I worked) was not alone - the counter culture was huge then
In that context Appie Hoffman published Steal This Book.
I stole my copy from a pot dealer in Fredericton. I read it quickly and within a week somebody had stolen it from me. When I think of it now that book was a meme long before Dawkins coined the term. Hoffman only printed a small press run but found a distribution system that took the book to a very wide audience without depending on capitalist distributors.
This was a book full of tips about how counter culture people could self-organize against an oppressive state. It had chapters about gardening and food-coops and about civil rights. It wasn't any sort of violent manifesto. We were hippies after all - peaceniks. Anti-war. We were sincere - not like some people I've read about.
Human society doesn't seem to evolve in a straight line. It veers one way for a while and then another way. It's a dialectic process where each movement contains the seeds of it's own destruction. The counter-culture arose after the anti-communist McCarthyist era. Haircuts changed from brushcuts to no cuts.
The MAGA movement shares a lot with those old anti-communists and seems to be broadcasting the seeds of its own destruction. It's collapsing internally and the rest of us are pretty hostile.
What do you think?
I open the floor.
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.