Autistics and hippies

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I am reading 'Promise of a Dream: Remenbering the Sixties' by Sheila Rowbotham, a British socialist feminist writer and historian, in which she remembers her life in the 1960s. She was born in 1943.

For years she had been regarded as stupid until she was accepted for a place at Oxford University to study history and literature, whereupon she was classed as clever. This left her "permanently perplexed by the arbitrary nature of what was defined as 'intelligence'."

Although more involved with socialist groups in London, she was on the fringes of the counter-culture, the hippie scene. She used cannabis and occasionally LSD. She writes about her experiences with acid. "Each time it brought some insights I valued. Acid stripped away many of the socially acquired buffers and reminded you of the wonder of the ordinary. It intensified for me the capacity to see beauty in details which my eye would normally have lazily passed over, and it deconstructed the customary".

She writes that "in rejecting the ways of 'straight' culture, hippies surreptiously introduced implicit conventions of their own. Exclusivity and hierachy appeared and were policed with the sneering snobbery of 'cool'."

In 1967 she became friends with Lawrence, an American guy who was a surfer from California and a draft dodger. They travelled to Spain and Morocco together. Later that year he returned to the USA. He was arrested in Hawaii and put in prison for refusing to serve in Vietnam. When he refused to eat he was put in a strait-jacket and kept in jail under observation for a month; being diagnosed as "a chronic schizophrenic manifested by severe hallucinations, loose associations and autistic behaviour."

I would guess that there were autistics who were part of, or on the fringes of, the hippie scene in the 1960s or later, as a place where they could be accepted for their differences, where they could fit in.

Hmm... I can't back any of this with anything other than anecdotal evidence... but I can tell you that I get along extremely well with hippies and Pagans, in part because those cultures are more forgiving of personal differences. Similarly, I get along very well with homosexuals, because they've had to learn that "normal" is a dangerous trap, if only to be able to love and respect themselves.

I was a child of the 60's and it was the only time I felt acceptance by a specific group of people.
Peace out man.

The stuff of the 60s and 70s was WAY before my time (I was born in 1986), but what I've read about the counter-culture makes it seem that it was filled with the same social conformism and notions of "coolness" the hippies themselves claimed to hate. It's seems like it is impossible for NTs to free themselves from social conformity, all that happens is that you get subcultures (Hippies, Goths, Emo, Punks) that are just as conformist as the main culture.

Same here.

I don't hate the hippies but the hippies hate me.

Hippies seem to hate me, as well.

There are still hippies!? Show me where. I heard Hippie chicks put out.

Snootchie Bootchies

i guess to NTs i'd be classed as a punk, but thats only in my general music taste. i like it because it expresses the need to be different and free from society's stupider unwritten rules, and not be embarrassed to show who you are. i can imagine a lot of aspies around in the hippie and punk movements.

There's a term that I apply to certain (by no means all) Churchie type people. the term is "The Smugness of Piety". This also applies to other social groups with an elitist attitude and, in my experiences with the counter culture, it was painfully obvious that contrary to their stated lack of hierarchy, they had their own groups of "cool kids" that most of them wanted to belong to. Once they got into the work force and acquired property they were as quick as anyone to put up No Tresspassing signs and enact code enforcement statutes to protect property values. So much for the "do your own thing" and "antimaterialistic" crap that they spewed. While there are some that I have known and liked from that milieu I find most of them to be tiresome hypocrites. And I live next to one of their major centers - Marin County California.

I don't hate either of you.

I wonder if I'm really a hippie, of if it's jut that I live in utah. .

With each other.

I hung out with hippies and neopagans in the 1990s and overall I would say they are very open-minded about individual differences. And they will adopt just about anyone who wants to be adopted. Potlucks, places to crash, events to go to. They don't care what you're like as long as you're into the same things they are. If you're not into the same things they are, however, they can get very boring very quickly. I no longer hang out with them. But it was fun while it lasted.

I'm not sure they were autistic, but they weren't your typical NT's. They were more accepting of different things.

I am still a bit of a bo ho!! Sixties was a bit early for me, I only got going in the seventies!!

Still like the bangles, beads, plant life and nature!! P E A C E!

When I was a kid in the 60's, I remember hippies being very nice people. Other adults often made me uncomfortable.

Hippies hate me because I'm a proud technology-loving, atheist, "scientistic," materialist, transhumanist "Square."