I have come across a few older people who described themselves as hippies in the 1960s and 70s and most of them like to wax nostalgic about how they changed the world. The big changes that came about in the 1960s, or, at the least, the ones I can think of off the top of my head are things like the Civil Rights movement for blacks, a new wave of feminism, in addition to new rights for Latinos, homosexuals, and even Native Americans. I know the hippies were involved in the anti-war movement as well many of the movements I’ve already mentioned, but, expect for the anti-war movement, I don’t really associate hippies with any of them.
What , if any, long term and profound impact did the hippie movement have in the United States?
Odesio
PS: This is a genuine question. Although I’m not really seeing the impact I fully recognize that I might be mistaken. In the interest of curing me of my ignorance I thought I’d ask.
Only a small minority of “hippies” had any kind of altruistic motive or political goals. Overall, the movement was about partying, drinking, taking drugs and having a lot of sex. (And there’s not a damn thing wrong with that - in fact, I think it is better to just have a good time and fuck than to try to impose socialist bullshit on America.) From everything I understand, that was what 90% of “hippies” were looking for, and the rest were radical activists and pseudo-Marxists who were closer in spirit to people like Abbie Hoffman and the Black Panthers and all the other woefully misguided “revolutionaries” than the true spirit of the hippie movement, which was ultimately centered on music and partying, not politics.
IMHO, it has been mostly a negative lasting influence that has hurt, not helped progressive political objectives. The image of hippies as lazy, dirty, freaky, naive, pot heads who opted out of society and their association with environmentalism, for example, has prevented a lot of people from taking it seriously as an issue.
“They talk about saving the world but all they do is smoke pot and smell bad.”
I agree with ms smith. They have influenced style and fashion big time.
Just right now the Hippie-Style is very happening.
As well a state of mind was influenced by that wave:
I always say: Don’t worry be hippie!
The Hippie movement represents in my point of view:
Trying to live with as little as possible. Sharing. Long hair. Naked.
Nature. Music. Dancing. Drugs.
Make love not war.
and so on.
All those things are related to the hippie movement.
A big part of the permanent change was subtle. A shift in attitude towards life overall from LIFE IS REAL! LIFE IS SEROUS! THERE ARE DUTIES! RESPONSIBILITIES! PROPRIETIES! THINGS HAVE CONSEQUENCES! to a more easygoing It’s cool, man! Live is good! Be like a brother to other people, and just let everyone do their own thing , it’s all right!"
It’s like a shift from a scarcity mentality (slightly paranoid, overly controlled, concerned about doing anything wrong) to a non-scarcity mentality (nothing to worry about, be at peace), one that was overdue and was going to show up sooner or later in this postagrarian civilization.
It was a loud emphatic “We have met the enemy and they is us” with regards to most of what people generally feared. Uptightness, rigidity, the very condition of being worried about doing things wrong, were themselves identified as the real problem.
And to a significant extent this sea-change in attitude has permeated and persisted long after there have been “hippies” to speak of on our streets.
The hippie movement was a reaction to wars and environmental damage that we are doing to the planet. There were hippies who started businesses like , book stores,clothing stores pipe shops etc. So to assume it was an anti business movement is wrong. Just anti planet damaging rapacious businesses .It was an eye opening time when people discovered the damage that our government and corporations could do to the planet. Much of that awareness still exists and has been translated into political platforms and movements. They were instrumental in ending the Viet Nam war.
But the power to the people concept has persisted. People feel empowered to stand up to governmental and corporate malfeasance.
But the serious side of hippiedom was all about a ‘scarcity mentality’. Many have commented on the association of hippiedom with Environmentalism. What else is Environmentalism, but a “scarcity mentality” writ large? The fear that we as a species is screwing up the whole planet is certainly a source of worry about scarcity - that we have only limited resources and we are squandering them in a manner not sustainable.
Hippies contributed to all the 1960s and early 1970s causes: women’s rights; black sufferage; civil rights; the end of the War in Vietnam; sexual liberation; gay pride (even the word “gay”); lowering the voting age to 18; assistance to conscientious objectors; music (from Dylan to Hendrix); modern American style liberalism; efforts to decriminalize drugs (especially marijuana); a general awareness that it is better make peace (or love) than war; the eventual resignation of Adolf Nixon; deep personal sacrifices, like the four students murdered by our own military at Ohio State University; the notion that you stand up for what you believe, even when you face down your own government; the end of the 1950s Father Knows Best mindset; and much much more.
I think we are running into a problem of how one defines ‘hippy’. As hippy was originally a perjorative created to describe the youthful counter-culture. So really hippy has come to describe anyone remotely associated with the counter-culture. So as the youth became the adults the counter-culture became sort of mainstream, and the effect of that is ubiquitous and across the board.
The problem is that “hippie” seems to mean all things to all people. It is impossible to pin down exactly what causes Hippiedom stood for, since individual hippies stood for basically every popular cause of the late 60s and early 70s. Thing is, most of these causes did not originate with hippies; thus the charge that hippiedom is nothing more significant than a certain faddish style or set of associations in clothing, music and youth culture popular at the time, and that all of these things - Black civil rights, woman’s and gay lib, etc. - would have happened with or without that particular style; that the significant issue is not “hippiedom” but the baby boom that fueled it.
Rather than seeking tangible, material gains like the more accomplished movements, the hippies’ contribution was expanding the edges outward to open up more cognitive and cultural space for the social changes that were going down anyway. It may not look like anything to you since you’re only looking for tangible and material, maybe institutional, results. But open space has value too, in the whole process.
Thirty spokes surround the hub:
In their nothingness consists the carriage’s effectiveness.
One hollows the clay and shapes it into pots:
In its nothingness consists the pot’s effectiveness.
One cuts out windows and doors to make the chamber:
In their nothingness consists the chamber’s effectiveness.
Therefore: what exists serves for possession.
What does not exist serves for effectiveness.
No cause is original. The measure of a movement is not its originality of cause, but its effectiveness.
If I had to distill hippiedom down to its most essential quality, I would say that it was mostly about challenging authority and the cultural status quo. They were breaking out of some pretty confining cultural constraints, so in that initial burts of freedom, there was a lot of crazy experimentation with art, dress and philosphy, but at it’s core, it was about the experimentation, not the results. Some of it worked. We got a lot better music, obviously, and movies were freed from the Hays Code straight jacket. There were also some pretty clear advances is feminism, racial equality (in practice, not just law) and at least the beginnings of a GLBT movement.
The main success was in stopping a war, but also in making it ok to criticize the government and the President. One of the lasting legacies of the hippie movement, believe it or not, is right wing talk radio. If it wasn’t for Abbie Hoffman, there would be no Glenn Beck, but Hoffman could come up with more entertaining stunts than teabagging. Nobody tries to levitate the Pentagon anymore. No creativity. It’s the lack of drugs, I guess.
That might have been the etymological origin of the term, but by the late 60’s, it meant a lot more than that. It didn’t denote a single “cause,” to be sure (except maybe opposition to the Vietnam War), but it was a term for an entire collective counterculture.