The Flowering of the Hippie Movement

Abstract

The following article focuses on three aspects of the hippie phenomenon: Who are the hippies? What are the defining characteristics of their movement? And what impact have they had on the larger society? Four hippie types are discussed: the visionaries, the freaks and heads, the midnight hippies, and the plastic hippies. The visionaries are utopians who pose an alternative to existing society. They repudiate conventional values on the grounds that they induce status anxi ety and a fetish for material acquisition. The community that they developed in Haight-Asbury can be viewed as a kind of experiment in social organization. Freaks and heads are the more drug-oriented hippies. They surround the use of drugs with an elaborate mythology suggesting a variety of benefits to be derived from "going out of one's mind." Midnight hip pies are older people, mostly in their thirties, who, having be come integrated into straight society, cannot adopt the hippie style of life, but, who are, nevertheless, sympathetic to it. They articulate and rationalize the hippie perspective to the straight world. Plastic hippies are young people who wear the paraphernalia of hippies (baubles, bangles, and beads) as a kind of costume. They have entered into it as a fad, and have only the most superficial understanding of the ideology. The vision aries sought over a two-year period in Haight-Asbury to imple ment their view of the good society. External pressure and certain internal contradictions in their social system led to a breakdown of the experiment. By the summer of 1968, many had left the city to set up rural communes, with the hope of being able to survive in a less hostile environment. It is argued here that it is slick and superficial to dismiss the phenomenon as simply the latest version of youth's rebellion against author ity. Unlike previous celebrated generations of young rebels— the "lost generation," for example, and the beatniks—the hip pies posed a fairly well thought-out alternative to conventional society. They assumed, implicitly, that the example which they set in their own communities would induce change in the rest of society.