I know I'm a little late in offering my view of the hippie culture, but i will anyway. Lather, I think you used the expression 'ruleless relating,' to characterize an aspect of that culture that you believe was radical, and presumably real to some degree, and that appealed to you. I have a different take on it. I should say that I was, in a way, part of that culture; and in another way, not. In it but not of it might describe the situation. Though 'squares,' including my parents, just saw me as a hippie, i knew the difference. Two of my husband's brothers and his sister lived on communes for extended periods, as did many people we knew and hung out with. We visited a number of communes with the idea of possibly joining one, but chose not to.
Before I give my impressions of the hippie culture, which aren't awfully complimentary, I do have to say that penni was certainly right in saying that the nature of any particular grouping of people had everything to do with who comprised that group. Of course there were nice groupings of people and mean-spirited ones. Which was which was largely determined in the usual way-- by how the members had been raised by their parents.
But back to the 'ruleless relating' conception of that era.
The rules were obfuscated, but there were rules. Cool was a rule. Anti intellectualism was a rule. For example, if you accompanied a group of flowerchildren/hippies to the movies, and attempted to talk about the film later, this was a serious faux pas -- you were breaking a rule. (Calling them 'movies' instead of 'films' in artist communes was breaking a rule.) That you must express personal contempt for institutional authority figures, like individual cops, was a rule. (BTW, i must mention that it was not loving to hand flowers to cops. It was a hateful, snobbish, snide, provocative, ugly gesture. It was perfect passive aggression.) There were many mini-rules, too. It was a widely (though not uniformly) followed rule not to keep the children in clean clothes, even cleanish ones, or to stop them from, for example, smoking (even if they were 10.) Or if you went to a somewhat private swimming area with your hippie friends and chose to wear a bathing suit, or even just the bottom of it, you were breaking a rule. I am calling proscriptions 'rules' if not following them resulted in attempts at socially sanctioning the rebel. Not to drop acid made you uncool. To teach your young child not to continually interrupt adult conversations, or to teach your child any sort of manners at all, made you uncool. To show any interest in how things were paid for in any given group was uncool. (Well, the answer was often a little embarrassing. A hippie just hates to say, "I have a portfolio of municipal bonds.") Uncool was really, really bad. The ways you could expose your determined uncoolness to the determinedly cool are too many to list.
There really was no ruleless relating at all. There isn't such a thing now, there wasn't before that era, and there wasn't during that era!
The PR, though! Hey, that was great! Bullshit, but a very successful campaign. Many participants didn't know the difference between the media coverage of their lives and their lives, was the way it appeared to me.
There can surely never have been an era more penetrated by sheer posing, showing off, smugness and self congratulation. (That isn't repetitive, really. Every variation on narcissism was enshrined as its own virtue.)
I do know that there were groups and groups. And in groups, there were individuals and individuals. These comments, which are all just mho, are generalizations based on a pretty broad exposure, though.
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