In my last post, I completely trashed the Baby Boomer generation essentially for having sold out to the big banks, big governments and big corporations when they decided to profiteer from the destruction of our dying world.
And, not surprisingly, I cought some flack, which I was more than prepared for, even though most honest people did concede that there was a ring of truth to the points I laid out.
So let me share with you all the things that the Baby Boomer generation did do right, and what are some lessons we might learn from their mistakes to help us do better than them. After all, we owe everything good we have in our lives to them, as they do to those who preceded them... Getting over my personal resentment, let me now express my immeasurable gratitude for the lives and sacrifices made by those who came before me.
First of All, There Was...
The Hippie Movement
This remarkable counter-cultural movement, that saw itself go against the militarist nationalism of the conventional cultural norms, was in of itself a spectacular first attempt at human emancipation.
Expressions during that time, championed like revolutionary slogans, made for an exceptional circumvention of the then-existing mechanisms of repression and control.
Therefore I think it's worth remembering through this short post what the young counter-cultural generation of the 1960s actually brought to our world.
Looking back at the 1960s, people often think of the hippies as being somehow left-wing leaning, when in point of fact, sixties radicals often looked at hippie culture as, at best a sideshow and distraction, and at worst, a sabotage thwarting radical progressive politics. Hippies, on the other hand, saw these leftist radicals as insane control freaks who were obsessed with taking control of America.
In fact, John Lennon famously spoke out against the leftist radicals, who were often at odds with the peace-loving hippies. He said that they were often heard chanting vain and meaningless slogans: "We need to give power back to the people!" As a leader of the hippie movement, he could see the hypocrisy in calling regular Americans to vote for them so that they could give the power back to the people, which the people had just given to them. To this, he had a fantastic rebuke:
"Anybody knows that the people have the power, all we have to do is awaken the power in the people. The people are unaware, they are not educated to realise that they have power. They put politicians in power, but the system is so geared that everybody believes the government will fix everything. When we are the government, the people are the government and we have the power." - John Lennon
Yes indeed, and so to this degree, the Baby Boomer's movement of Peace and Love was not a political movement, was not a socioeconomic movement. No.
And those who came before them knew it. They knew the world had become a very dark place. The Ghost of World War 2 had not yet finish casting its ominous shadow on the world that a New Great War which threatened the entire existence of mankind was already poised to set the world ablaze.
And from the very beginning, there were those who, upon realizing the sheer appeal and scope of the "hip" zeitgeist, wanted to co-opt and trivialize the whole hippie movement. It was distorted through parody, propaganda, self-hatred and even from its earliest beginnings, commercialism. Today, the movement has practically come to mean nothing more than getting stoned and doing nothing.
But at its root: the hippie movement was about the rejection of linear values of society, and a return to authentic experience. Hippies wanted to experience life to the furthest extent possible and expand their minds: through music, psychedelic drug use and sex. And usually all at the same time.
This idea of using psychoactive substance, previously unimagined sound and raw sexual energy to enact self-healing was a tremendously important first step in the right direction.
"The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn't the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility." - John Lennon
So let's just try to put this hippie movement of the Baby Boomer generation's youth into a little bit of context, and see what we may learn about it.
As a millennial, I look back at my parents who came of age at the tail end of the hippie movement, and see many parallels to my coming of age. There are some nuances and discrepancies, but over-all, I feel like many millennials actually emulate with remarked faithfulness the best behaviors of the hippies, and are currently searching their souls to figure out in what ways they may transcend the limitations of their movement that led to their failure of changing the fabric of the world.
What are the lessons for young people today to be learned from the hippie generation?
In essence, those who participated in the counterculture of the 1960s were part of a spiritual movement. In part they had searched and found alternatives to organized religions that only cared about rules and conformity, especially relating to sexual exploration and freedom. (One reason Eastern religions and traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism resonated.)
But the even more important was the uprising and rejection of America's secular religion of the 1950s, the materialist and consumerist bigger-than-life phony vision of society promulgated by the advertising industry, and the social Darwinism of Ayn Rand types...
Something that many in our generation are still striving to reject today. The narcissistic individualism of the selfie-generation that cannot function without a social media interface separating the other from ourselves. In much the same way, our generation faces the same challenges and dilemmas, and we are by no means in a better position to counteract these follies than our forebears were before us.
We need the Nike shoes, the Samsung phone, the whatever it may be.
The hippie idea just simply goes much further than the stereotypes and colloquialisms we often associate with them in retrospect. Though nobody can resist peeing their pants at the comedy of Cheech and Chong depicting half-baked stoners from the 60s going through life in a "fahrrr outtt meyannn" kind of way, there was some real evolution that took place in this era.
The hippies and young baby boomers were the fortunate recipients of a long list of incredibly talented thinkers, writers and artists that paved the way for their collective awakening.
Just looking at the Caucasian pioneers of this cultural renaissance: William Blake, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Hesse, Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, Aldous Huxley, utopian movements like the Rosicrucians and the Theosophists, and most directly, "Beat Culture".
Combine that with the evolution that was brought to global society by the influence of African thinkers, writers, and artists, musicians... Haile Selassie, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, MLK, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, Marvin Gay, Gil Scott-Heron, Roy Ayers...
Asian ones too... Gandhi, Krishnamurti, Bruce Lee..
I simply cannot list them all... So many great souls who came and taught the world in preparation for our post-modern predicament...
And being a man, I'm aware I'm naming the men that most inspired me, but honestly, we all know there were equally talented and awakened women... And this list may be anachronological, but really all of it either preceded, or superseded the cultural zeitgeist that changed the face of the world forever.
Because this was what was most amazing, at least to me, about the late 50s and 60s...
It was the first time in recorded history that young white kids and young black kids were allowed (let that sink in for a minute) to discover each other, to share in their experience, to intertwine, to give and receive to one another and embrace and love each other.
Hippies came up in an age where birth-control pills were introduced into society for the first time in history. A society that had just gone through the liberation and idealism of the civil rights movement, feminism, gay rights. They took control of the airwaves: FM radio, TV broadcasts... Mass production of LSD and marijuana, alongside a strong booming economy, and a huge quantity of baby-boom teenagers looking for a good time.
These elements allowed the hippies to have a mainstream impact that had simply never been possible. Everything seemed to come into alignment for a short while in those cult-years of the 1960s. And an image we will never be able to forget imprinted itself in the collective imagination of our species during this time...
The festival, a combination of hippie, pop and drug culture, became a symbol of the anti-war movement, and by extension, of the mantra of World Peace.
A dream that so many of us, especially young people, still cling to with so much passion and fervor... And though we may today have gone way too far in the opposite direction with the commodification of sex, in reality back then people truly explored each other through a revival of the human sexual experience. That fact that oral contraceptives, IUDs and diaphragms became popular, as well as the availability of abortions meant that people could really experiment without all the consequences of past generations...
People looking back today will point to the starting point of the steep rise of divorce. Or perhaps how feminism would later become co-opted. Or how gay rights would serve as a distraction to conceal the realpolitik agenda of the deep state... People may look at the break-down of Western society we are experiencing today and look at the hippie generation and go "that's where it begun! that was the problem".
But they would be wrong... The seeds of destruction of traditional society had been laid long before... This was just the beginning of seeing the changes that are to come as the world continues on its path of healing.
Conservatives and reactionaries today are certainly doing so... We see baby-boomers looking back at the follies of their youth, compromised as they are by the life choices they have made, and condemning our generation for the repition and emulation of the zeitgeist of that era... They think we are fools, just like they were. But they do not see that they simply stopped believing in themselves... Lost touch with their true selves... They have blocked out the ways in which they fell out of harmony with their true selves...
And as they continue to favor more hawkishness from the State. As so do the lefties, too. (One just has to look at the left's reaction to the Occupy movement.) Critics on both sides of the mainstream left-right paradigm condescending peaceful protestors for handing out free hugs, beating drums, smoking marijuana in public, and claiming to be a part of the 99% of humanity.
But the fact that not just 20 and 30 year olds, but people of all ages, of all walks of life, still have this ability to unite, come together peacefully occupy and consciously demonstrate, raising the planetary awareness, finds its roots in the activities of the 60s.
In fact, it must be said, that the New Age, of which there are literally tens of millions of believers around the planet, including yours truly... Is the most incredible and dynamic force for global transformation that we have right now.
This ethos, which became mainstream in the 60s, and has been taking deeper and deeper roots ever since... This belief that still has the leaders of the not-free world quaking in their boots, and trying to dispel through all sorts of crooked and malignant trickery the magic of our burgeoning human consciousness...
The mere reality that twenty, and thirty year-olds who experiment with DMT, who lucid dream, who study the meaning of ancient texts from cultures from the other side of the world, finding catharsis through mythology, meaning through psychoanalyzing dream content, freeing thoughts and transforming beings through poetry, planning for and anticipating liberation and emancipation by discussing conspiracy theories among affinity groups, and becoming realistic about the battles that lie ahead if a fighting chance is to be sought, to save our world, our species, our family, our home...
It's actually incredible how it would be inconceivable for us to be able to do that today... It would be inconceivable for me to be who I am today... For me to have such noble ideals and high hopes for our world, were it not for the youthful rebelliousness of the Baby Boomer teens.
For I spent just short of 10 years of my life smoking marijuana, listening to music, having sex (okay, a lot more with my hand in my earlier years) and experimenting with drugs, philosophy, poetry (admittedly in the form of rap, let's not be too "faarhh aoout meyannn"! I'm more of a G than I am hippie-dippie).
And now that I've smoked over 2 pounds of weed, eaten like a hundred grams of shrooms, had like 25 hours or more of sex... Now that I've caught myself up with the spirituality of my forefathers and am beginning to enter the peak of my adult form.
Well, I'm ready to go so much further than the baby-boomer hippies ever did.
And this is what I am most grateful for to the Baby Boomer generation...
Sure, they may have gotten tons of things wrong. Been suckered in by false promises and deceitful icons... They may have fallen for the likes of a Reagan (an actor) and his neoliberal enslavement agenda, just like our generation may fall for the likes of an Oprah (an actor) and fall for the carefully written public relations agenda that conceals the true intention of the eugenic genocide of free and independent human beings.
Without the path that they had paved for us, we'd probably already be living in a scary totalitarian system of control like here in China. Where freedom of speech is punishable by violence. Where even freedom of thought is considered a sin. Where people are so distrustful of their fellow man that they do not share their inner most thoughts with anybody around them, and where people truly feel incredibly depressed and have to wear a mask every day just to be able to survive.
My parents were baby-boomers that came of age at the tail end of the hippie movement, and they raised me to be counter-cultural... They raised me to be contrarian. Even when they feared for my life and my health, as any parent would, they did not crack down on me and rip from my mind the seeds of my own fruition.
They challenged themselves to award me more autonomy, more independence, to take the laissez-faire attitude, to have faith in the world through me and surrendering to the will of the Universe. Even when they were misguiding me, as they had been misguided before, they allowed me to express my opinions and express my thoughts and make my own mind up and take my own decisions, no matter how disastrous the consequences might have been.
Seriously, I don't think I was ever "punished" by my parents, ever, in any way that felt like a penance or serving jail time. And I fucked up pretty bad over a few of those teenage wasteland years. And they're not even that fucking hippie! My dad never even tried psychedelics nor did he ever smoke anything! Crazy! I think they intuitively just got turned off for life by the whole business of authority coming down on the youth and imposing an outdated and irrelevant way.
My parents never played the "Do as I say, not as I do" or "It's my way or the high way" routine that past generations had always employed with the threat of a good ass-whoopin' backing it up.
In many ways, they allowed me to grow up, and even though they still passed on an incredible amount of baggage, they gave me the tools to be able to sift through it, and to be able to figure out and decide what it is I want to carry with me for the rest of my life, and what it is I can get rid of.
So here are some lessons that I learned from this generation, that my parents personally helped me to understand:
Don't be a fool and follow what the majority is doing. Trust your own inner voice, go your own way and don't worry about what society thinks.
If a rule is unfair, or unjust, and you're willing to pay the consequences for disobeying it, and you feel you really ought to or you really need to, break it.
Hard work and play are substantially the same thing if you love what you're doing. Happiness lies in savoring every little moment, each and every day.
What are some the things they got right?
The Vietnam War political dissident Bill Zimmerman summarized some of the best successes and achievements of the hippie generation in his memoir, Troublemaker:
Not believing they could alter the juggernaut of American capitalism through politics, the hippies tried culture instead—starting with Leary’s slogan, “Turn on, tune in, drop out”... While the hippies who opposed the Vietnam war all accepted a subsistence lifestyle without expensive clothes, cars or other luxuries, they were about enjoyment, friendship, shared experiences, and whatever transcendence could be achieved through mind-altering drugs, music, and sex.
This is to stark contrast with today's youth, who are deeply embroiled and addicted to the culture that their parents or great-parents truly did make an attempt to resist. This is why we should not underestimate the social conscience and commitment of many of those who, during those precious years after the height of the hippie era, chose to develop communes and new age spiritual communities.
And this bring me to my next point.
The New Age Movement
Seriously. I don't know what spirituality would resemble without the era of the 1960s today, and really everything that has happened since...
The only solution to the world's problems I can conceive is to develop communes and New Age spiritual communities.
For us to break apart from the Dominator Culture that is guiding our world to destruction. To go against the culture, no matter how much flack and shit we will catch for it... Putting our money where our mouth is. Even if it means foregoing some of our most hedonistic impulses and challenging a society that tries to paint us as crazy crazy for trying to go against their "sanctioned ways".
Realizing that the world is sick. Profoundly sick. And it's up to us to heal ourselves, and to free ourselves from this Matrix that seeks nothing more than to control and abuse us until there is nothing left but a shadow of ourselves standing in our wake.
This is my only dream. To pool resources together with people who are operating on a similar vibrational level as me, utilize them in an effective way to develop some land, build our commune and equip it with all the necessary life and tech supporting infrastructure for a prosperous off-grid community to still remain connected to the wider world, and just focus on elevating vibrations. To have all the free-time and leisure to pursue our inner-most desires, ambitions, dreams... To help free slaves as we have freed ourselves, to learn and teach how to return to the Way, to create harmony in our little community, and then expand its frequency range and project it into our world in coordination with other similar intents... To live in a way that all the Greats of the previous generation would admire and encourage. To go further than the previous generation did, and to avoid falling for the same societal and material trappings that ended up winning them over.
For sure, most of these baby boomers didn't realize the ways that the system was adapting to their counter-culturalism and turning into the culture. Today, you can walk into any corporate establishment, say a clothes' retailer like H&M, Zara or Primark, which deals in neoliberal, off-shore business practices that hurt everyone, and find t-shirts with iconic counter-cultural characters such as Jimie Hendrix, or Bob Marley, or John Lennon, with psychedelic hippie motifs and patterns plastered all over them, for $19.99.
Hippie culture has become so normalized, that today, they have stripped us, our generation, of the essential freedom that these counter-cultural youths had reclaimed for themselves, while we are left with all of the nefarious aggregation of social consequences of their inaction in other domains.
Were as love was free back then, it has been commodified today. We're here trying to pay or purchase our way to freedom because the culture was co-opted and corrupted out of our hands... We realize that even though we still have all of the sexual permiscuitivity of their generation, we are no longer making love, but seeking cheap thrills through more social media platforms like Tinder and the like... Never have tensions been so exaggerated between the sexes. Things have progressed so far in the wrong direction that we are left pondering the meaning of "sexual market value", and wondering why we cannot appeal to our peers, when in reality, we are just lost and confused and cannot seem to find the light at the end of the tunnel we are walking through.
And yet, as sure as the idealism of the hippie generation changed the face of the world back then, so too does it live in in our generation.
We may have hipsters instead of hippies. We may be totally allured into the consumerist ethos of culture, and unable to relate to each other without the intermediating of corporations and marketing campaigns twisting and distorting our visions. We may still find ourselves being fed the same shit that the baby boomer teens were fed in their youth, if not in a slightly more palatable yet much more insidious and sophisticated way...
Yet for all the milestones that they hit and the way that they paved, we at least know that we came from something nascent, some as pure as a newborn... And as we continue to nurture and protect this spirit of peace and love within ourselves, we give hope to future generations.
The fight for the Soul of Mankind has only just begun... But if our generation is to inch us along towards the right direction, it's essential that we absolutely take all the best parts of our parents and grand parents, and use those lessons that they learned in their youth, to see what were the real mistakes, and the real pitfalls that caused them to steer towards such a waywardly and bastardized direction...
The responsibility for and future of mankind lies in our ability or inability to build on the solid foundations that were laid before us and to keep climbing towards a state of consciousness that sees peace, love, beauty and truth as the ultimate criteria of The Good Lyfe.