In our anti-intellectual culture anyone who wants to talk about substantive things is too often seen as someone who is bragging or being arrogant. And it invariably comes from people who are threatened. It Is such a shame we have this anti-intellectual culture and cannot just exchange ideas as a process of learning. But I have been watching this anti-intellectual behavior my entire life. The greatest thing about college was that that was the one place where you can sort of escape it because people could enter into substantive discussions and it was recognized as a process of learning and nothing more.
All I was doing was recounting an experience that shaped my life. But if you talk to any 60s hippie I think you will find out that what they learned during the 60s, and the changes they made in their life, stayed with them their entire life, because it was the most sophisticated philosophy ever developed on earth in masse. As I've posted many times, it was a milestone in cultural development because it was the first mass existentialist movement in the history of mankind and meant a metamorphosis for the human species from simply blindly conforming to whatever culture, upbringing and society one lived in, to striking out on one's own to pursue self-actualization and manifest their own destiny free from primitive cultural, or religious, or social obligations.
I saw hundreds of people make that transition/journey. Today, even though most people are not aware of it, we have essentially transformed to an existential society. It is evident everywhere from the bank teller with a tattoo on her arm, pink hair and a ring through her nose, to the rise of the females as self-actualized people for the first time in the history of the world. That is how profound the 60s was. An era as important as the Industrial Revolution.
As we hippies aged over the years and took regular jobs, most of us sort of had to go incognito i.e. wear suits and conform to things we didn't agree with. It was extremely hard for me to conform to working for the state of Alaska. At first I didn't see how I going to be able to do it. But all the while I was there, there were other hippies, and we helped each other out. In fact it was a bunch of hippies that used the Democratic Party in Alaska to take control of the legislature and mold the state of Alaska at the time into the most sophisticated state in the union e.g. our permanent fund, and creating humanitarian programs based on modern science to greatly help the people of the state for example the first women's rights commission..
But for each of we 60s hippies, I'm sure if you ask the question how did they arrive at their philosophy ,each will have a very interesting story. Because each person had to make a very radical and emotional break with the past. In the 60s it was sort of like we had mass epiphanies and realizations. In the beginning there were only a few of us in the entire Bay Area as mentioned. At San Jose State we hippies had exactly one table allocated for "our kind". We were ostracized by pretty much everybody. And so our tribe was very important to us because we got emotional support from each other to stand up against the primitive conformity pushing against us in trying to get us to conform and that we were trying to change e.g. the right of every person to manifest their own destiny. And the realization that things like racism, sexism, and homophobia were primitive ideas birthed in antiquity that needed to be fought against. Contrary to what many believe our protesting the Vietnam war was just one more element in a string of fights we made during that period. It was not what the 60s was about.
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