Some readers have asked me to elaborate on my perspective on youth culture now vs. the 1960s. To me, campus culture today seems idiotic. I think that the hippie culture of my youth also was idiotic, but it was not as aggressive. If you weren’t a hippie, the hippies didn’t try to shut you up or get you fired.
What was idiotic about hippie culture? Drugs and communes come to mind.
In my opinion, the “higher consciousness” that drugs supposedly fostered is Baloney Sandwich. I know that psychedelics are making a bit of a comeback, and I read Pollan’s book, and I still think it’s Baloney Sandwich.
As for communes, I see them as a reversion to small-scale society, with the governing principle “we care for one another.” In large-scale society, you have specialization governed by markets. You have social relationships grounded in families. Sooner or later, a commune is going to run into friction over the inefficiency of not having specialized economic roles, and also over relationships that are not grounded in traditional families.
I don’t know that the hippies were any less violent, Arnold. Many hippies were involved in the violent demonstrations and bombings of the late 1960’s and early 70’s. Aggressive clashes against counter-demonstrations were common.
“In my opinion, the “higher consciousness” that drugs supposedly fostered is Baloney Sandwich. I know that psychedelics are making a bit of a comeback, and I read Pollan’s book, and I still think it’s Baloney Sandwich.”
What is your opinion on commenting on something you have never experienced and thus would have no direct knowledge of?
I would like if you did try it and then comment after having put some skin in
Having been there, I am tempted to say that most “hippies” didn’t have the stomach for an “aggressive clash”. However, there were the “political people” who were interested in power and some times got off on such things–including the left splinter groups like Sparticist Youth League. But they were splinters.
It seems to me that “wokeness” is closer to the political people than to the hippies.
Shouldn’t leave out the most famous political people: the Weathermen.
Hippies don’t seem like the right comparison. Seems like a better comparison is to the activists — anti-war, black power, etc. So far, the activists today are not as violent as the ones in the 60s and 70s… but maybe we’ll get there…
Right, for instance, the people who were Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, or the folks hosted at the radical chic parties, or Commies or Students for a Democratic Society or the folks causing trouble at the ’68 convention, etc.
There were a few important youth subcultures floating around, some much more aggressive than others.
I’m a huge fan of your work and your blog. Of all of my blog subscriptions, yours has the highest “this will be interesting” percentage– it’s pretty close to 100%. (Also, I teach AP Stats)
I haven’t taken psychedelics, but I think you are wrong to label them “baloney.”
About five years ago, I started to meditate after reading some research indicating that meditating has health benefits. I was pretty skeptical, but I promised myself to stick with it for a while. I started with ~10 minutes a day, and I now meditate for two hours every day and it has absolutely transformed my life.
My understanding is that psychedelics work in somehow the same way– I guess I’m really defending meditation here, which I think you’ve been similarly skeptical of in the past.
Anyways, I just wanted to add one additional data point to nudge your “psychedelics/meditation is baloney” belief in the other direction a smidge.
Thanks for the blog– I absolutely love it
When someone becomes an advocate or evangelist for something, they tend to exaggerate both the benefits of the “human treatment effect”, and the likeihood of anyone experiencing those benefits, and minimize or omit the potential harms. At some fuzzy threshold of deviance from an accurately balanced report of the true state of affairs, that advocacy reaches the BS stage.
Indeed, the use of phrases like Null Hypothesis and Hansonian Medicine are to make the point that mainstream claims about Education and Health Care respectively are already well into BS territory.
The trouble of course is determining whether there is anything to a more modest expression of the case – maybe some people self-report that they benefit a little, some of the time – or whether the BS zone “starts at zero”, so to speak, say, any claim about anything above a placebo effect for things like magic healing quartz crystals.
My own judgment and experience regarding meditation and (legal) psychedelic experiences is that 95% (maybe even 99.9%) of the advocacy to which one is exposed is unfortunately far into the BS Zone, but that there remains some non-negligible gap between the start of that zone and zero. One could say the same for CrossFit, and if you’ve ever met a CrossFit evangelist, you know what I mean.
Of course this isn’t helped at all by the vague and mysticism-like language that people use when they struggle in futility to describe atypical experiences across a qualia-gap which is an instance of a deep philosophical problem: how would you explain to a blind person the difference between red and green to understand that difference the way a sighted person does?
What if the blind person were temporarily given color vision, looked at a realistic painting of a tree on a smooth wall, and then tried to explain his new (accurate) insight into reality to other blind people. It would sound ridiculous like BS nonsense, “Hey man, it was, like, the surface of stuff that feels all the same, turns out to be covered in a kind of special, uh, energy-stuff, that, uh, varies across that surface in different ways, and that makes it feel like the same energy-pattern of other real stuff. Like, it was far out man, the energy on the wall was just like the energy of a tree.”
NB: I’m not claiming this is really what’s going on in a psychedelic experience, or that this is why most people try to have them, which, let’s face it, is mostly recreational. I’m just illustrating that there are hypothetical scenarios in which one’s normal BS filters might lead one to underestimate the BS-zone threshold.
As regards psychedelic experiences and the various methods by which one can try to bring one about – legal or illegal – the bottom line is that for any person with decent levels of intelligence and self-control and unlikely to may a regular habit of extreme indulgence in anything, especially non-habit forming experiences, the whole process is both almost entirely innocuous with the expected cost totally negligible, to include the prospect of criminal penalties if one is gonig the route of prohibited substances, as law enforcement just isn’t interested.
When trying something out for yourself is so safe, cheap, low-commitment, and easy, and not obviously nutty like the healing crystals, then it’s probably best to reserve judgment on where the BS-zone begins until one has done so.
Yeah, I would also say that, especially for people who are less intelligent, psychedelics make people more vulnerable to emotional manipulation, which makes it easy to absorb someone else’s interpretation of what is going on in psychedelic experiences. The hippie culture has evolved it’s own collective, culturally constructed interpretation. So if you get introduced to psychedelics through the hippie culture (which many people do), it’s highly like you’re going to absorb some of that cultures ideas.
This is not really much different than how being born into a religion works – children are vulnerable to indoctrination in the same way, and people absorb ideas from those they associate with in general. If you live your whole life among Christians, chances are, you’re going to think a lot like a Christian.
Also, psychedelic experiences are often emotional which makes people feel like they’ve had a religious revelation. So then some people kind of go whole hog and adopt the whole hippie lifestyle.
I mostly agree with this and your other comment, which are compatible with what Huxley wrote in “The Doors of Perception” and in other works. In particular, he thought that the possible depth and potential benefit of the psychedelic experience were correlated with intelligence, to include the transformative influence of what he called the ‘gratuitous grace’ of being reacquainted with a powerful direct sensory experience bulldozing past unhealthy firewalls of cognitive insulation and symbolic abstraction to which intellectuals are prone.
Unfortunately this makes any attempt to investigate any potential therapeutic benefits inherently difficult, made worse by a large group of advocates who want to exploit the potential for such defensible benefits and uses as cover for legalizing fun partying.
What do you have against fun partying?
The Yippies had fun.
Creating disruptive theater was a good entertainment at the time, they were the Mad Magazine of the Hippie cult.
Having used psychedelics, IMO the main benefit is that it makes you much more aware of how much of your experience of the world is a subjective construct. Everything you see and hear is mediated by senses which do not relay absolute truth, rather they were shaped by evolution to convey things that were salient to your survival and reproduction. One consequence of that is that the reality you perceive can be very different from other people’s perceptions of reality. Another big consequence of that is that your mental state thoughts and proiorties are very heavily influenced by what is in your environment. If you are constantly surrounded by ugly things, that makes you feel more depressed. Similarly, people’s individual past experiences shape what information they find salient and thus how they perceive the world.
Psychedelics enhance all those effects to the extent that you become consciously aware of them. And once you become consciously aware of them on psychedelics, you remain conscious of them when not.
Re. communes: I know a married couple who with a group of hippies founded a commune in the 1960s. Eventually everyone but the couple left, and they ended up owning the land and house. I haven’t inquired as to the mechanics of this. Then both partners got public sector jobs and eventually retired with generous state pensions, social security, and investments. They freely travel the world, but still live on the farm. So from this example the commune seems more like a scam than anything else. “Come help me establish a farm where we’ll live together in communist harmony.” Right.
Cool story bro.
There wasn’t one unified ‘hippie’ culture. I knew of several sub-cultures in the college town I grew up in the late 60’s and early 70’s.
There were communes; I visited two at different times. The people I met in those communes were seriously trying to farm for purposes of being close to the earth and sharing and not being conscripted into a commercial, materialist world. The men did not all have long hair and they wore work clothing, not tie-dye or bell-bottoms. They were also massively naive about what it would take to make a living from farming, and interpersonal conflicts had caused many to leave the shared house and make a separate place to live in a barn or converted silo.
There were high-schoolers with long hair and bell-bottoms and necklaces, etc. (though the exact fashions changed; at one point I was wearing a WWII surplus tanker’s jacket as a fashion statement; necklaces for men were only ok in 1968). The ones I knew didn’t drop out or run away, but they looked the part. We called ourselves ‘freaks’, not ‘hippies’.
There were ‘street people’ who didn’t live at home and tended to be older.
There were older people (30s, 40s) who looked like hippies but with bald heads and gray hairs. I remember one guy who led ‘happenings’, like the one at the town dump where the crowd of participants slowly advanced while banging on objects.
There were idealists in their 20s who did things like run macrobiotic restaurants and organize ‘teach-ins’ and protest marches.
Of course, we all knew about the hippies and run-aways in San Fransisco from Life Magazine.