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One of the problems with TFA's allusions to hippies for me is that it feels as if it is arguing that the hippies were the first of their kind. In reality, grou

One of the problems with TFA's allusions to hippies for me is that it feels as if it is arguing that the hippies were the first of their kind. In reality, groups with the general back-to-the-land drop-out mentality are a persistent feature of western culture, occuring every 40-80 years for several hundred years. They rarely change the entire face of the culture they emerge in, but they typically shift it a bit, at least for a while. And as Peter Coyote once observed, while the hippies lost just about every political battle they purported to care about (war, racism, sexism, industrial agriculture, cars, pollution etc.), they won most of the cultural battles.

toyg 3y ago
> they won most of the cultural battles. That's because the upper echelons correctly understood that culture is largely window-dressing, as long as the fundamental economic ballasts remain the same. They will let us dye our hair blue, what matters is that we keep working in their factories/shops/call-centres/banks/etc, making money for them; and if we bootstrap something else, it will inevitably be absorbed back into the system once a little greed creeps in. What they cared about was killing collectivism, which was the real threat to the economic order, and they largely achieved that.