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?

  • QueerCommie@lemmygrad.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    1 year ago

    Theoryless ultras, they did some good, but also thought they could fight the world‘s problems with a CIA supplied drug (LSD).

    • Camarada Forte@lemmygrad.mlM
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      1 year ago

      I understand CIA deeply studied LSD and its potential use in interrogations, but that CIA supplied LSD to hippies is new to me

      • QueerCommie@lemmygrad.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        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).

        • relay@lemmygrad.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

  • OrnluWolfjarl@lemmygrad.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    24
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • TheIvoryTower@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    23
    ·
    1 year ago

    Raised by Australian hippies, they were all just as hardworking as the next person, just they worked on growing crops and landcare.

    As they grew older, a lot dropped their ideology and cashed in on the Boomer property boom, but I am not convinced anyone else could have said no to that.

    They are people like any other, except they smoke more weed and treat nature with a bit more respect.

    8/10 would childhood again.

  • olgas_husband@lemmygrad.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

  • ReadFanon@lemmygrad.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • KiG V2@lemmygrad.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    15
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago
    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.

  • Camarada Forte@lemmygrad.mlM
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    13
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • ButtigiegMineralMap@lemmygrad.mlOP
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    1 year ago

    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

  • su25@lemmygrad.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

  • albigu@lemmygrad.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Putting them in their historical context might help. The 60s were a time of social upheaval in the US, with the BPP (and its sibling the White Panther Party), anti-war movement, AIM, Young Lords and a lot of trade unions and other groups all stacked on one side against the KKK, CIA, COINTELPRO, HCUA, Indian Termination and both parties, as well as the general climate of a possible world ending war anytime now, including the Turkish Missile Crisis. There were also coups happening all over the US international holdings as part of the red scare, though I’m not sure if Yankees ever heard about those.

    This also manifested in the music of the time, with disco, rap, hip-hop and jazz flourishing, as well as some genres that didn’t survive as well like punk, folk and psychedelic rock. The time of both Dead Kennedy’s and Yoko Ono’s participation in The Beatles.

    It was also the time of what’s called the “sexual revolution,” caused partly by the sudden increase in the access to contraception such as latex condoms and birth control pills, in which both men and women (but specially women) could now date and have sexual relationships outside of marriage with less of the biological constraint of pregnancy, while pushing back at the US’s weird social views on sexuality.

    So putting those into that historical perspective, I see the “Hippies” as a particularly white, “libertarian” and idealist “movement,” surrounded by much stronger and more motivated forces. There were lots of people that might be called that who actually stood up for something, for example the riot at the 1968 DNC, but as usual the ones we get to hear the most about in the media are the overly arrogant pacifist drug addicts. There are better lines one can draw the other user pointed out about the Yippies, but I’m just reinforcing how very important it is to demystify this very turbulent and fascinating period of Yankee history.

    Often the propaganda is so deeply rooted that you might as well just throw out your entire understanding of history and start over. And in the case of the “Hippies,” they serve as the “pathetic and degenerate” side of the eternal fascist equations of “all-powerful and destructive but also pathetic and degenerate,” while the non-white groups served as the other side. Meanwhile both got regularly infiltrated by informants and wreckers, making sure to single out and eliminate all effective leaders that got a hold, like Seale, Hampton, Peltier, and to a lesser extent Hayden.

    There was also a lot of overlap and (dare I say it) contraditcion between all of those aforementioned groups. Some “Hippies” destroyed military research facilities with arson and explosives (Sterling Hall), BPP members generally were also part of the broader anti-war movement, AIM is often forgotten despite being the most dedicated fighters in all of these causes. I’m no US specialist, so if you are a Statesian, I’d really recommend you doing your own deeper research on those times as I think they’re possibly the closest the US got to an actual revolution.