Any dims that want to try to understand the 'new' movement to which they think they're attached need to understand it's roots.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test(a highly experimental account of
Ken Kesey and the
Merry Pranksters) and two collections of articles and essays,
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
Tom Wolfe is not only brilliantly accurate, he is eminently readable
If that's too much for them, I suggest, at the
minimum they read
Wicked Dox IN THE LAND OF THE ROCOCO MARXISTS
Meanwhile, here's some actual history on actual hippies.
I know it's accurate. I lived through it. I lived through the hippie movement. Even thought about becoming one for a time
Civilization And Its Discontents
Ace of Spades HQ
You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone:
Dr. Dylan Evans, a respected behavioral psychologist, and an expert on robots and artificial intelligence...in 2006, sold his house in the Cotswolds and its contents, and moved to the Black Isle in Scotland to found a self-sufficient community in a remote valley, with a group of acolytes he had recruited on-line. The project was called the Utopia Experiment, and the idea was to attempt to imagine, through real-life role-playing, the conditions that might exist in the aftermath of society's collapse.
So was this an earnest attempt at Utopia, or an honest-to-goodness attempt at it?
This reviewseems to think that Evans was a serious nutter who wanted to, and thought he could, create a utopian society out there in the wilderness.
But whatever it the case, it didn't work out so well:
Factions formed with different views about the future of the human race, and competition and fighting broke out. The yurts they lived in leaked rain. The vegetables they farmed wouldn't grow. Dylan began to fear for his sanity, and then his life.
Fighting? In Utopia? Whoever heard of such a thing?
...by the time he came to write this book [Evans] realized he was delusional. Though he had no difficulty recruiting like-minded eccentrics to join him in his 'experimental community'...Evans admits that his utopia was doomed to failure.
But he did write a book about this experiences,
The Utopia Experiment, wherein he presumably learned to appreciate cooked food, clean sheets and a hot shower.
This appears to be a recurring conceit in modern life. Every now and then, someone gets bored with the comfort and prosperity they've grown accustomed to. and thinks they can just do away with civilization and everything will be just fine. Like 50 years ago when a group of people in California started experimenting with marijuana and LSD and soon the drugs so addled their brains that they began to delude themselves into thinking they could build a sustainable civilization on panhandling, free sex, and selling beads to tourists. They were like 3-year-old children who think they're actually flying when their Daddy lifts them up in the air and swings them around.
A number of histories have been written about this cultural breaking point, for example,
this one, which is a .pdf file you can download for free) and I think they tend to be a bit hagiographic, since "the 60s" are looked upon with great reverence by the culturally dominant baby-boomers. However, writer and critic Tom Wolfe
observed things that the boomers would prefer to forget:
In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the hippie movement. At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, there were doctors treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how was it that they now returned?...The hippies sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start from zero...Among the codes and restraints that people in the communes swept aside...were those that said you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s mattresses without changing the sheets...or that you and five other people shouldn’t drink from the same bottle of Shasta or take tokes from the same cigarette. And now, in 1968, they were relearning…the laws of hygiene...by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.
All of this and bedbugs, too.
This was from his article 'The Great Relearning' which was reprinted in
Hooking Up (Ceramic Transactions), an anthology of Wolfe's essays which can actually be read in its entirety online
here.
