Comradeship // Freechat

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.