Stephen Gaskin was a breath of fresh air in the San Francisco 60s Haight Ashbury. In an acid-fueled youth revolution against the entire square universe, he, with full acid credentials, preached common sense, traditional, square values.
Monogamy, hard work, no welfare, anti-abortion, no alcohol, tobacco, or hard drugs, not even synthetic psychedelics. Connect with your parents, discipline your children, be honest. Take care of yourself and help others.
That message was desperately needed in those times, in that place, for all those young people like myself.
But then he took it too far. He sought, was granted, and accepted, the mantle of a fully enlightened master who could do no wrong.
He exercised that power to create a community in which he dictated, in fine detail, dress, diet, language, sex, child-rearing, politics, economics, marriage, and hair style.
Without the exercise of that kind of absolute power, the Farm would not have been possible. Would that have been a bad thing?
Had Stephen Gaskin been content to just be a normal fallible human being with some good insights, he could have done a lot of good for the young people caught up in the psychedelic maelstrom that was San Francisco in 1967.
Instead he went for the delusion of grandeur. We could have done worse of course. He was, admittedly a cut above the other hustlers like Timothy Leary, Baba Ram Dass, Trungpa, Rajneesh, Yogi Bhajan, Maharishi, and all the rest.
I tell myself that Stephen saved me from doing something even more stupid.