The Inspirations behind the Hippie Movement
A Comparative Philosophical Analysis of Ideology
The cynics proclaimed themselves as citizens of the world and were strong supporters of free speech. Their most famous leader was Diogenes (400-325 B.C.E.) who was often referred to as the “dog” and who famously lived in a tub. In fact, the word “cynic” itself meant dog, since most of the adherents of this group decided to shun all social conventions and to live in a natural, animalistic state. It involved even urinating and defecating in public and living with as few worldly possessions as possible.
Their philosophical stance was an act of rebellion against the accepted, often hypocritical, corrupted and materialistic forms of living. They claimed that human laws of etiquette are illusory and that humans may be rational and social, yet they still pertain to the animal group and ought not to aspire towards a supposedly higher nature. Plato used to refer to Diogenes as a “Socrates gone mad”.
The Romantic Revolt against Scientific Determinism
The Romantics were another group that may have been an inspiration for the later Hippie movement in the 1960s. The Romantics felt out of touch with a world that was growing more and more technological and logical and losing touch with both feelings and nature. They claimed that humankind cannot be reduced to simple scientific formulas and that the focus of the Age of Enlightenment on reason and rational thought is erroneous and ignoring a major part of the human make-up, the capacity for feelings.
Romantic sentiments and all forms of passion, no matter how destructive or irrational, were exalted; to express one’s deepest emotions and one’s individuality were the primal concerns of the movement. As such, the romantics contributed greatly to the formation of national identity and a growing sense of individualism.
The Hippies as a Social and Political Countermovement
The Hippies began to reject accepted norms and regulations imposed on them by the government and conservative society as a whole. Similar to the cynics, they decided to undergo social customs by not cutting their hair and wearing their own distinctive clothing and often rags to protest against the clean-cut hypocritical tendencies of their age. They resembled the Romantic Movement in that they preferred to base their actions on spontaneous outbursts of feeling rather than on rational thought. The fact that they used drugs was nothing new since the Romantics had already experimented with hallucinogenic drugs, mostly absinthe and opium.
The ideological beliefs of returning to nature and living in harmony with it had been mostly fueled by field studies of the anthropologist Margaret Mead, especially her work entitled “Coming of Age in Samoa”, in which she demonstrated that there were other alternative lifestyles. The Samoans apparently lived in perfect harmony with nature and each other and felt sexually liberated not being imposed by the stigmas and prohibitions of stifling communities that the modern world experienced at the time.
