I'd like to ask you to join me in listening in on a conversation that took place in February of 1967 in San Francisco, shortly after the Be-In attracted 25,000 people to Golden Gate Park to celebrate what they thought would be a psychedelic revolution. The speaker is Alan Watts, a British-born philosopher and writer who was teaching at the time at the American Academy of Asian Studies in the Bay area:

WATTS: What's going to happen is this: if we do not encounter the final political catastrophe of atomic war, biological warfare and wipe the whole thing out, we're going to have a huge leisure society--where they're going to reverse taxation and PAY people for the work that the machines do for them. Because there's no other solution to it. In other words, if the manufacturer is going to be able to sell his products, the people gotta have money to pay for the products. All these people have been put out of work by the machines the manufacturer is using. Therefore, the people have to be paid by the government--CREDIT of some kind, so they can buy what the machines produce--then the thing will go on. So this means that thousands and thousands of people are going to be loafing around, with nothing at all to do. A few people who are maniacs for work will go on...

Transcription by Peter Connors, White Hand Society

Such an idea as a reverse income tax was not confined to the "heads" of the psychedelic movement in those days. As cruel a curmudgeon as Milton Friedman had proposed it in his 1962 Capitalism and Freedom. Pat Moynihan talked Richard Nixon into his Family Assistance Plan in 1969, and George McGovern ran on "$1,000 a month" in 1972, at least in the primary campaign. After all, as Watts points out, in a consumer-driven, capitalist economy, it's the only logical step as technology advances to eliminate most of the more routine, mundane and dangerous jobs.

What the hell happened? We live in a 2016 when even the "free college" that was the norm at state schools in 1967 is a bridge too far for Democrats, and a current and a future Democratic President both salivate at the prospect of a Grand Bargain with Republicans that would cut and privatize FDR's minimally humane, 1930s Social Security. At this point, you're invited to embark on your own rant about the Powell Memo, the Deep State and boiling frogs.

I talked to my son and his girlfriend, both students at Cleveland State, about the unfortunate turn things have taken over the last 50 years. Not only has my boomer generation been disappointed because we can't drive George Jetson's flying car and because we haven't witnessed the reality of astronauts digging up black obelisks on the moon, but we also have gone from a society seriously thinking about a guaranteed income to one that is solving the problem of unemployment caused by automation (and outsourcing--Watts hadn't even anticipated that) by castigating the unfortunate as "Eaters" and setting policy to encourage them, i.e. us, to "Die and die quickly." To those fortunate enough to somehow find a job, any job, the message is "Work until you drop" in this age when the defined-benefit pension plan has gone the way of Nehru jackets.

How curious that humanity's continuing technological advancement, though not up to the standards of the Jetsons or Arthur C. Clarke, would result not in a Leisure Society but in a return to Dickensian hardship and squalor.

What then must we do in a world without flying cars where a sadistic elite delights in making the "Eaters" kowtow, suffer and die?

Our speculator about the future, philosopher Alan Watts, was joined in this 1967 panel discussion by poet Gary Snyder, poet Allen Ginsberg and psychologist Timothy Leary. The concern that prompted the "Boathouse Summit," held on Watts's old ferry boat, was that the anti-Establishment counterculture/Left was splitting in two: an activist political side exemplified by Savio, Rubin and Hoffman and a quietist, apolitical side represented by Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and Leary's group that had been headquartered in an old mansion in New York until a young local prosecutor named G. Gordon Liddy ran them out of the state. Some said the cause of the Leftie split was Leary with his exhortation to "Turn on, tune in and (especially) drop out." (That the split still exists today was demonstrated by a highly respected (by all, including me) commenter in a recent essay suggesting that smoking marijuana was akin to bread and circuses.)

Neither Kesey nor Leary had much use for political involvement whether it was of the conventional electoral kind or protest activism. To Kesey, you were allowing yourself to "be in their movie" rather than turning the tables and making "them" be in yours. To Leary, you were still "playing the game" if you were involved in politics since politics was the tool the oppressors used to keep you under their thumb. During the Summit, Leary says that Savio, Rubin and Hoffman have "menopausal minds:"

They are repeating the same dreary quarrels and conflicts for power of the thirties and forties, of the trade union movement, of Trotskyism, and so forth. I think they should be sanctified, drop out, find their own center, turn on, and above all else, avoid mass movements, mass leadership, mass followers.

Throughout the Houseboat Summit, Ginsberg, both a devoted friend of Leary and a committed activist over decades, presses Leary on what he means by "drop out" and demands he specify a destination where this dropping out might lead.

Leary responded with a theory of history:

My historical reading of the situation is that these great, monolithic empires that developed in history: Rome, Turkey and so forth...always break down when enough people (and it's always the young), the creative, and the minority groups) drop out and go back to a tribal form. I agree with what I've heard you say in the past, Gary [Snyder], that the basic unit is tribal. What I envision is thousands of small groups throughout the United States and Western Europe, and eventually the world, as dropping out. What happened when Jerusalem fell? Little groups went off together.

Who would have thought that dropping out was a way to bring down a great empire? I'll leave it to others to evaluate Leary's assertion that "dropping out" led to the disintegration of both the Roman and Ottoman empires, and only note that his Jerusalem example is only partly right. The non-elites were left on their own only after Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem. These non-elites had no part in Zion's fall; they formed small groups that "did their own thing" as a means to survive and thus became the "people of the land" castigated by returning exiled elites like Ezra in the Hebrew Bible and referenced as despised Samaritans in the Greek Bible.

Leary's argument might find some backing in Gandhi's call for Indians to weave their own cloth rather than sending cotton to Britain and having to buy it back as woven cloth:

Machinery in the past has made us dependent on England, and the only way we can rid ourselves of the dependence is to boycott all goods made by machinery. This is why we have made it the patriotic duty of every Indian to spin his own cotton and weave his own cloth.

Gandhi was doing much more than calling for a boycott. He was advocating that his fellow Indians drop out of the whole colonial game, that they quit playing supporting roles in the Brits' movie. He provided the example, wearing a home-woven loin cloth even when he met the King at Buckingham Palace. "The King had on enough for both of us," Gandhi quipped. Ken Kesey could not have put it better if he had ever been invited to the White House and arrived in the East Room with a Day-Glo painted face.

Support for the need to drop out can also be found in the history of Spain's CNT, the force behind the Anarchist Revolution in Catalonia that gave Orwell so much hope. Murray Bookchin tracked the birth and growth of the CNT in The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936, the same Murray Bookchin now viewed as inspirational by the Kurdish PPK. He paints the picture not of a labor union or political party but of a vast confederation of tribes helping people to help each other in the villages and the cities of Spain for decades. Small groups self-organized to feed each other, educate each other, entertain each other, house each other and occasionally to defend each other after the cry of "Viva el comunismo libertario!" went up in their little corner of the world from time to time. These village and city cells cooperated under the Confederation's banner, and when the time came to stop the Fascist takeover in Barcelona, they joined to fight together.

Leary was far too impatient for a decades-long effort to build a movement based on trust and mutual aid. He was so bowled over by the dramatic and rather sudden effect that psylocybin and LSD had had on liberating him, a West Point graduate and happy idiot participant in the "ant hill," that he thought that simply liberating others' consciousness from the robot world was the main part of the task. His fellow panel members saw the issue.

WATTS: But the thing is this. I've found so many people who are the turned on type, and the circumstances and surroundings under which they live are just plain cruddy.

Watts was clearly referring primarily to the scene in Haight-Ashbury and conditions like those described by Tom Wolfe in the Fillmore garage where the Merry Pranksters were hanging out just after the return of Kesey from exile in Mexico: filthy sleeping bags on a concrete floor infested with vermin of every genus and species, copping a pee at the gas station across the street, dumpster diving for food. At one point, Watts brought in Snyder to talk about his surviving not for a summer but for years as a struggling poet who had dropped out.

SNYDER: Well, this isn't news to anybody, but ten or fifteen years ago when we dropped out, there wasn't a community. There wasn't anybody who was going to take care of you at all. You were completely on your own. What it meant was cutting down on your desires and cutting down on your needs to an absolute minimum; and it also meant don't be fussy about how you work or what you do for a living. That meant doing any kind of work. Strawberry picking, carpenter, laborer, longshore...well, longshore is hard to get into. It paid very well.

Leary responded that Haight-Ashbury was not the destination but a way station on the path to your tribe, on the journey to the country where you could truly do your own thing:

LEARY: They may get a little farm out in Lexington, near Boston. They may use their creativity to make some new kinds of machines that will turn people on instead of bomb them. Every little group has to do what every little group has done throughout history.

But Snyder, who has really built his own shack and dumpster-dived and picked strawberries to raise a little cash, won't have it. He knows that it's tougher than that:

SNYDER: No, they can't do what they've done throughout history. What is very important here is, besides taking acid, is that people learn the techniques that have been forgotten. That they learn new structures and new techniques. Like, you can't just go out and grow vegetables, man. You've got to LEARN how to do it. We've got to learn a whole lot of things we've forgotten to do.

Leary concedes. "I agree," he says.

(Remember that amazing round-the-room shot at New Buffalo Commune in "Easy Rider" where they give thanks for "a place to make a stand?" We've just watched, along with Captain America and Billy, as these kids throw seeds into the dust in the middle of the northern New Mexican summer with no acequia in sight. "They're gonna make it, man," Fonda says. This farmboy was skeptical as he watched back in '69, but in fact they did make it for years, becoming successful pot growers as well as raising a lot of their own food.)

What must be done in a world without flying cars where our culture has enticed us first with push buttons and then with touch screens to the point that most people are hard-pressed to change a tire, much less raise a substantial portion of their caloric needs?

The Houseboat Summit is a deep vein of wisdom and foolishness that can be mined for ideas about what must be done. Our society has done a very good job of boxing in our consciousness, and given the level of use of stimulants and anti-depressants even among children, we're not all that happy about it at some deeper level. The psychedelic revolution was looking for a way to help people break out of the box, out of the game, out of The Man's movie, and it succeeded in accomplishing that for a brief, shining moment until J. Edgar and Ronnie and G. Gordon pounded away on them just as those same monsters pounded away on the activists like Hoffman and Ayers and Newton and Seale.

Our four intrepid panelists were trying to get to questions of what then must we do after our consciousness is liberated. While there are a multitude of ideas and lessons to be drawn from the discussion, here's some things that popped out at me:

1) Our situation has changed dramatically since 1967. We no longer live in a full employment economy with benefits and pensions and unions and the rest. Now it's less a question of dropping out and more a question of coping after being pushed out. The points made about the necessity of being attached to a tribe are perhaps even more valid now.

2) Watts's concern about how Haight-Ashbury was perceived and the CNT's example suggests that it's important for tribes that seek to serve as examples to be winsome in how the present themselves and genuinely useful to those who live around them.

3) All of Snyder's points about the necessity of minimizing needs and re-learning skills remain important. As he notes, it's not just skills like planting or plumbing or welding, but the social skills demanded by tribal living. The latter might be made more accessible by various means of consciousness liberation.

4) None of the participants seems to recognize just how ruthlessly and violently the Establishment was prepared to act in order to destroy this threat to "the ant hill." Hippies who handed flowers to cops were viewed as just as dangerous--and expendable--as Weathermen and Panthers. Kesey, Leary, Ginsberg all delighted in making the Straights look ridiculous, and they all were very public advocates for their revolution. The more conventional advocates for LSD use, including Aldous Huxley, were very unhappy with them because the result ended up being that LSD was put on Schedule I and their work investigating the uses of acid in treating psychosis, alcoholism and other maladies was ended. Any attempt to go in this direction would require a very serious look into how the message can get out without it becoming such an immediate threat that persecution comes down hard on everyone.

Below is an audio recording of the Houseboat Summit. A transcription of the entire discussion can be found in an Appendix to Peter Conners's White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg (City Light Books, 2010).