As a kid my Dad really warped my perspective on Hippies. He was born in the 60s and loved the music of the 60s and 70s and he’s very Liberal. At first I used to think Hippies were the best people that humanity could ever bring forth: Peace-loving folks who love everyone and believe in preserving nature. And I still appreciate a lot of that sentiment, especially protesting the Vietnam War, but as I became a Marxist I became sorta disillusioned with the Hippie’s dedication to non-violence and how their “free love” was often used as an excuse to be a sex-pest drug-addled parasite who refuses to work. I don’t like Forrest Gump’s portrayal of Hippies exactly, it was written by a right winger, they aren’t all assholes and they usually don’t beat women for sure. Nowadays I can respect their anti-war sentiments and their pro-nature stances but so much of being a hippy seems to be a misunderstanding of what gets shit done. Also some Hippie music is great but FUCK jam bands, nobody’s trying to hear a song that’s as long as a full album and just repeats over and over again with slight variations. That’s all I have to say about Hippies, what are your thoughts?
I was born in 2006 so I don’t know much about them
“Back in the 60’s, we saved the planet! I drove a Prius and had sex with an underage girl while high on acid. I fought the empire, I had long hair and went to Woodstock.”
The cool hippies were murdered, the only ones that survived were harmless libs or people going through a rebellious phase. Most of them try to make a political statement out of the normal teenage urge to fuck, play music, and do drugs. If these values were adopted by a right-wing group, a not insignificant portion of hippies would be putting minorities into camps instead of hugging trees.
Not sure how hippies live in other countries, but the hippies here usually don’t have a house, have nomadic lifestyles and usually sell their arts and crafts. The fact that they live vulnerable lives could place them as lumpenproletariat, though the fact that they produce things to sell and sell it themselves, could place them as a petty-bourgeois. The hippie ideas you describe, “free love”, “non-violence” is perfectly in line with a petty-bourgeois mentality too.
Disclaimer that I am too young to have experienced the hippie era and we never really had a coherent hippie movement like in the US however I have encountered enough hippie adjacent people here to have formed an opinion.
There’s so much about the hippie movement that should make me sympathetic towards it: valuing peace, vegetarianism/veganism, queer-friendliness, being countercultural etc. etc.
Despite this fact, I really really dislike the hippie movement.
It’s idealistic, utopian, individualistic, naive, anti-scientific, orientalist, Walden-esque transcendentalist nonsense, and it tends to encourage really arrogant, sanctimonious attitudes.
The movement had an opportunity to work towards achieving societal change and, at one point, I believe that they could have really made an impact but they were so steeped in individualism that they never really got their shit together and organised because they were too busy pursuing their own individual goals or gratification.
I think that the hippie movement is a really good example of how liberation has to come from a material basis first or otherwise, as with ancapism, if you allow for certain freedoms then you risk increasing the oppressive elements that are pre-existing in society. In the case of hippies, amongst other things it was free love before the liberation of women which I suspect led to many opportunistic men exploiting women and potentially even abusing them.
It’s absolutely no coincidence that a lot of cults, small and large, sprang up within or alongside the hippie movement. Charles Manson’s was probably the most notorious example here but all of the seeds of Manson’s exploitation of vulnerable people were sown by the hippie movement.
Hippies are generally a classic case of what MLK posited as the “white liberal” (in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail) who values a negative peace over a positive presence of justice; they’ll end up opposing righteous anger and violence against the system in favour of maintaining the status quo and the precious negative peace which is characterised by the absence of justice.
They also grossly fetishised eastern and indigenous cultures.
I could go on but I’ll spare you.
Hippie/hippie adjacent music had some really shocking ties to military establishment families and I do wonder if there was more behind the hippie movement than just a grassroots culture that developed organically.
Honestly, I have no time for most hippies. I don’t trust them, I don’t like them, they are insufferably preachy and arrogant. Of course there are some good people who are hippies but I treat them with a ton of well-deserved skepticism. Usually the good hippies are good in spite of being hippies rather than being good because they are hippies, in my experience.
I’m not doubting you, but are there sources I can read more about the gov being involved in Hippie music? It sounds interesting to check out
Lol this ain’t reddit, you don’t need to couch requests for sources like that. I’m not about to get snarky when someone wants to learn more.
There’s this interview with Dave McGowan on his book Weird Scenes inside the Canyon if you want to read on this topic.
A YouTube link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same video on Invidious, which is a YouTube frontend that protects your privacy:
You should check out MLK’S whole letter if you haven’t read it before
spoiler
I am sure there are a lot of good hippies but, I can’t unsee a lot about a lot of hippies that I just can’t stand. A lot of hippies my age nowadays are just poor white lumpenproles (who I get along with well enough), or are insufferable typical middle class “leftists” who feel smug about their grand understanding of life itself. A lot of hippies my age don’t even have the decency to be good liberals, a lot have contempt for black culture (hip hop = violence) and instead choose to hang around redneck/country white supremacists, they overlap a lot with other brands of liberal thought where they think people who are suffering or who have problems are essentially choosing it because they have “chakra blockage” or “karmic debt” or need to “open their mind to the Universe’s love” or whatever the fuck else. Love for nature and peace from them feels less sincere and more like yet another way to feel sugary contempt towards those who are not as enlightened as they are.
I remember hearing during Civil Rights era, some Black Panthers met with some white hippies to try and chop it up. The hippies convinced them to try psychedelics. They were rudely awakened when taking LSD did not make the Black Panthers automatically defer to One Love pacifism above all else. They think their brand of pacifism is some divine mandate instead of what it is, the warped and naive dreams of the privileged who don’t actually understand how bad our enemies treat their prey. Pacifism can come no sooner than total overthrow of capitalism and the war machine, it is a post-socialist ideal not an effective shortcut to utopia (the general striving directly towards utopia with emphasis on aesthetics and cheap talk obviously has a lot of overlap with the similarly middle class corrupted morality-obssessed white anarchist).
I’m speaking both as a former psychedelic user and someone whose spiritual beliefs were partially informed by post-Abrahamic New-Agey spiritual practices, who loves nature and hates war.
I’m sure this is widely shaped by my experience with Carolina hippies, I am definitely no expert, I’m not some Deadhead who frequents interstate music festivals lmao.