Oh god so much. For every actual radical leftist there are dozens more that became small business tyrants and tech bros, they were big early anti-vaxx evangelists, the environmentalist aspects have been completely absorbed and coopted and much of what's left is people with zero materialist analysis stumbling into eco-fascism. There have been many issues their communes harboring abusers and generally being attractive environments for predators given the whole "free love" era of the 60s and 70s. The most radical hippies weren't even ever organized and just did adventurist shit.
I grew up around hippies so this is anecdotal but also definitely stuff I've had conversations about with other leftists that grew up in similar communities.
I think this is part of where the whole "you get more conservative as you grow older" idea comes from the older assholes. They had some level of leftistish ideas as youth around "free love" and "let's do drugs" and "end war" but then later adapted themselves into the libertarian small business tyrants and other shitheads that they are today. Because the hippie movement was more about rebellion and personal satisfaction than communal benefits.
They had some level of leftistish ideas as youth around “free love” and “let’s do drugs” and “end war” but then later adapted themselves into the libertarian small business tyrants and other shitheads that they are today.
I think a perfect contemporary illustration of this is how easilly modern Q-type conspiratorial thinking got to the Star Seeds / New Age types through things like Save the Children. You get all these (correct) ideas about high-profile sexual abusers and traffickers, and the correlation between wealth/power and depravity; "solved" through liberal-style protests and the posting wars.
I always consider hippies more akin to libertarians than Communists - that is, a focus on their own benefit. Make myself comfortable with no social or future planning.
Hippie "activism" is what leads to movements like Occupy, and Extinction Rebellion. No planning, no goals, just performative
Yeah the whole "mindfulness" and "power of positive thinking" bullshit has just become a bunch of self-help grifters, pseudo-spiritual grifters and basically the new age equivalent of faith healers, and all of it is a product of having the privilege to indulge in that shit while having zero materialist analysis of the societal ills they once were ostensibly trying to overcome
Occupy was like one activist group's project to get class back into the discourse. They never expected it to get picked up by so many places so quickly. There was no way it could have been planned lol. Its lack of planning wasn't the result of a hippy cultural deficiency
My dad is a good example of this. He was quite the hippie back in the day and smoked weed and lived in communes and visited hippie camps and was into eastern mysticism. Today he is a catholic conservative who believes Muslims are doing white genocide, black people are stupid and violent and China is about to enslave us all.
Oh god so much. For every actual radical leftist there are dozens more that became small business tyrants and tech bros, they were big early anti-vaxx evangelists, the environmentalist aspects have been completely absorbed and coopted and much of what's left is people with zero materialist analysis stumbling into eco-fascism. There have been many issues their communes harboring abusers and generally being attractive environments for predators given the whole "free love" era of the 60s and 70s. The most radical hippies weren't even ever organized and just did adventurist shit.
I grew up around hippies so this is anecdotal but also definitely stuff I've had conversations about with other leftists that grew up in similar communities.
I think this is part of where the whole "you get more conservative as you grow older" idea comes from the older assholes. They had some level of leftistish ideas as youth around "free love" and "let's do drugs" and "end war" but then later adapted themselves into the libertarian small business tyrants and other shitheads that they are today. Because the hippie movement was more about rebellion and personal satisfaction than communal benefits.
I think a perfect contemporary illustration of this is how easilly modern Q-type conspiratorial thinking got to the Star Seeds / New Age types through things like Save the Children. You get all these (correct) ideas about high-profile sexual abusers and traffickers, and the correlation between wealth/power and depravity; "solved" through liberal-style protests and the posting wars.
I always consider hippies more akin to libertarians than Communists - that is, a focus on their own benefit. Make myself comfortable with no social or future planning.
Hippie "activism" is what leads to movements like Occupy, and Extinction Rebellion. No planning, no goals, just performative
Yeah the whole "mindfulness" and "power of positive thinking" bullshit has just become a bunch of self-help grifters, pseudo-spiritual grifters and basically the new age equivalent of faith healers, and all of it is a product of having the privilege to indulge in that shit while having zero materialist analysis of the societal ills they once were ostensibly trying to overcome
Occupy was like one activist group's project to get class back into the discourse. They never expected it to get picked up by so many places so quickly. There was no way it could have been planned lol. Its lack of planning wasn't the result of a hippy cultural deficiency
My dad is a good example of this. He was quite the hippie back in the day and smoked weed and lived in communes and visited hippie camps and was into eastern mysticism. Today he is a catholic conservative who believes Muslims are doing white genocide, black people are stupid and violent and China is about to enslave us all.
My dad was a hippie in he 80s,did everything you mentioned but now he’s a leftist.