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Politics : View from the Center and Left
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To: JohnM who wrote (191988)6/18/2012 9:56:29 PM
From: koan  Read Replies (1) of 543757
 
With all due respect John, you are really missing the point of existentialism. I guarantee you it had nothing, nothing at all to do with the YMCA or YWCA, etc and in fact it was the antithesis. Hippies did not join the YMCA or YWCA. In fact had nothing to do with them. They were seen as primitive artifacts.

The best way to explain existentialism and the 60's was very well portrayed in the MTV cartoon Daria.

The 60's was about awareness of shallow living. Awareness of shallow thinking. Awareness about being shallow.

The social consciousness came from an awareness of illogical stupidity like racism or sexism, or like women being free to be as promiscuous as men. Another was the existential idea that one's validity resulted from how one lived their life. As opposed to being saved.

This is why Buddhism was/is the most compatible traditional spiritual belief system.

<<But existentialism, at least the parts that fascinated us, had no social ethics. The philosophical ethics that led to the student movements, at least this is my impression, came through the YMCAs and YWCAS, and through campus religious groups (one can read some of this in Motive Magazine, published by the Methodists ( here's a bit on one of its editors). That was bits and pieces of the old social gossip movement and can be linked almost directly to liberation theology which becomes more prominent in the latter part of the 60s.

There is a large literature on the movements which I've never read with precisely these questions in mind. But it would be interesting to do so.

koan could well be right in so far as existentialism had more to do with the movement members willingness to take absurd risks (Casey argues that in one of the pieces above), but the sense of "rightness" she and others talk about I suspect came more from these other sources.
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