There is an article posted at Powerline from National Review in 1967 with the title, Who are the Hippies? Having been one amongst them, I know only too well who they are. They are the same people, now all grown up, who have opened up Europe to a barbarian horde that Europeans had been able to keep out for 1500 years. They are the idiot last generation of a Europe of Europeans. Next time you go to Europe, drop by St Sophia in Constantinople Istanbul to see the future of Notre Dame.
As to the article, I was personally more New Left than Hippy but I was both. If anyone has ever repudiated an earlier incarnation of themselves, that person is me. But I have also always thought that if there had to be such a time and place, I was glad to have been part of it, for no other reason than just because. The article – and you must keep in mind that this is from the famously right-wing National Review – compared these people to a second century small Christian sect known as the “Adamites”. This really is how they were portrayed, and this is not intended to show what a dangerous and unworldly crew of dimwits they were, but to criticise them for their misunderstanding of the proper ethos of love. If you don’t believe me, read the article from which these come.
1. A sense of primal innocence, without “knowledge of good and evil.”
2. Antinomianism, rejection, in principle, if not always in practice, of all restrictive law imposed from the “outside.”
3. Hostility to all authority, as in fringing upon their paradisal freedom.
4. Pacifism, since there can be no hurt in Paradise.
5. Sexual freedom, and no sense of shame, like Adam and Eve in Paradise.
6. Community of goods.
7. Free-floating fantasy-thinking: impatience with critical thinking as the product of man’s fall.
8. Emotional self-indulgence: resentment at demands for inner restraint and emotional self-discipline.
9. A comprehensive cult of love, as appropriate to the sinless life in Paradise.
For myself, I was there because I was genuinely unsure how I should lead my life. I was not prepared to embark on a career unless I felt those early steps were in the direction I truly wished to travel. If you were there then, the one thing that was open to all was a marriage, job and family, more or less as a carbon copy of the generation that came before. I now know that there is little else to life, but it looked too easy for those of us there at the time. The result has been that every possible obstacle has been placed in the way of each of these by a society that seems to have a death wish. What looked easy in 1967 now feels difficult beyond imagination.
Law of Markets 