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?
So the problem with thinking about "hippies" is that we've kinda been handed a shitload of people with otherwise nothing in common except a penchant for psychedelic drugs and a few hairstyles. There are probably more ways to do this, but I'm going to separate "Hippies" into 3 categories:
Youth Movement: The boomers understood that they were a generation bigger than any other and that they could affect some real tangible change in the world if they put their minds to it. They got burned out or otherwise found their place in flatland around 1972. Ideologically they had some sound footing, and even got some big wins (lowering the voting age to 18, abolishing the draft, title IX) but they grew up and the new kids just didn't feel the same way.
New Communalists: An even bigger mixed bag. The New Communalists were eager to explore new ways of building communities and living together. Noble enough intentions, and it even led to some really cool stuff like the way we're interacting over the internet right now. However, one of the new ways of building community they got really into was psychedelic drugs, and this is how we get into all the horrible things that people did in the name of "free love."
And then there were The Freaks: They were libertarians before libertarianism had a foothold in American conservatism. They were in it for the sex, the drugs, and the music. They also often got confused for Youth Movement types because they were hairy, they were smelly, they smoked pot, and they were broadly critical of the US Government.
"Hippies" is term that really only helped the Nixon administration crack down on their political opponents with draconian anti-drug laws.
Edit: Come to think of it, there were probably a fair bunch of radical leftists among the Freaks, but again, who was actually listening to their politics? Besides, radical leftists and libertarians used to be able to find common ground in their exclusion from, and subsequent disillusionment with, American politics.
The Freaks is who my Dad loved the most, weirdos that popped into San Francisco’s drug scene to make “surreal” music on shrooms, barefoot, headband soaked in liquid acid, flowers in the hair and yelling about “the man”. I went once back in ‘09 or so and the scene is still the same in like one or 2 blocks of the city, fun place but not a pretty spot to look at, despite their colorful murals
It wasn't psychedelics that got the communalists and freaks into dark places, it was the speed. By 67 speed was all over the place and would really fuck people up.
Theoryless ultras, they did some good, but also thought they could fight the world‘s problems with a CIA supplied drug (LSD).
I understand CIA deeply studied LSD and its potential use in interrogations, but that CIA supplied LSD to hippies is new to me
They supported the spread and popularization of LSD because they wanted to test it on as many people as possible. Originally it was probably just experiments with whoever they could get, but people realized it could be fun to use and spread it. (I may be misremembering, but this is what I think from what i read of MKULTRA).
Might be violating Mao's rule about investigation, but I did hear how it is in the realm of possibility that project MK ultra was doing experiments in haight ashberry.
The hippie movement at its core is escapist. Hippies recognize that capitalism is evil, but they choose to not really do anything about it and instead simply avoid it and live a hedonistic lifestyle.
It should be recognized that some hippies did good things (protests, organizing).
But most of them ended up forming the core of what the Americans now call "progressive liberal", becoming just another support mechanism for capitalism.
Failed to commit, particularly to left politics, and we all paid for it.
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
as far as i know, brazil didn't have hippies. some white shamanic movements appeared after redemocratization, but they are mostly composed of petty bourgeois, they are mostly reactionary since it has no political content, just middle class common sense privatization good big bad state, just groups of people with money to spending on drugs and beach parties.
like a caricature of usian hippies.
i didn't read much about usian hippies, only that they did great songs.
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.
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.
"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.
Also wanted to add in one more thing: Child Poverty was quite the issue in Height-Ashbury (the epicenter of the Hippie movement) because so many teens and adolescents wanted to run away from their strict, born-in-the-20s/30s parents and do drugs and fuck, obviously that didn’t work well often times, the world is a scary place no matter where you are, and people get taken advantage of, especially when the thing binding your “group” together is sex and drugs. I saw the Woodstock documentary and it was something else seeing so many parents with signs apologizing to their children and asking them to come back. Heartbreaking stuff
hippies are an annoying side effect of the american "new left" of the 60s. a revival of leftism, sure, but not one that was too effective or theory-based at all. the entire thing was kinda centered around the vietnam war, which was a fantastic mobilizer for the years that it was happening, but once the united states was defeated in vietnam and pulled out and the war ended, all the hippies stopped caring and settled down while they gave birth to one of the most wretched groups, the yuppies. the hippies were basically like the first iteration of the "calls themself a leftist but still buys some CIA propaganda" type you see all too often nowadays. america was bad, sure, but the soviet union was JUST as bad. lets just have world peace and everyone in harmony, man. there were of course active radical marxist-leninists, and not to mention the incredible black panther party, but i think they were kinda overshadowed in general by the "new left" hippies who were so high on CIA LSD that they didn't really do much in the country aside from protest the war that was already on its way out thanks to the brave soldiers of the NVA.
nowadays, you can find hippies living in million-dollar homes in cities that were once cool and radical and are now just havens for the rich (think san francisco), living out all the ideals that they "rebelled against" in the 60s and posting 5G covid conspiracy theories online.
