THE HIPPIES AS CONTRAMERITOCRACY
Pitts, Jesse R.
Hippies seem to fascinate the mass media somewhat less than they did a year or two ago. Butthey have not disappeared. Older Hippies, who refused to convert to straight society, have moved from...
...He is much more likely to fail because of an incapacity to efficiently mobilize for the completion of tasks...
...In the Hippie movement this is not to remain an abstract dedication to others but must become a warm openness toward all human beings that precludes competitiveness at any level...
...In writing there are a series of seers such as Kerouac (less liked now that he has become too establishment-oriented) , Allen Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Herman Hesse, Corso, Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Selby, Tolkien, Kahlil Gibran...
...Sponging on welfare and petty thievery in record shops, bookstores, university libraries, and supermarkets are accepted because, supposedly, there is a state of war between the square (or "straight") world and the Hippies, a war that is the sole responsibility of the former...
...Other "exclusives" of the Hippie movement are the heavy public exposure through the popularity of the Rock band and of young bards like the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Donovan, Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix...
...The educative impact of the Hippie community has two aspects: first, just by being a member, the Hippie experiences a relief from the self-deprecation that often has characterized these individuals before they joined the movement...
...Over the last few years there has been a considerable increase in college enrollment in the Western world and especially in the U.S., drawn mainly from the lower-middle or working class...
...Their music and songs are a self-righteous exaltation of love and animal spirits against the dull requirements of social structure...
...Hence it may turn out to be necessary to the continued existence of the meritocracy...
...Security and nurturance are offered without the member having to pay the price of conformity...
...It has become the effective center of the contrameritocracy, because its values and behavior patterns permit a thorough and enthusiastic alienation, and because its critique, whatever its "scientific" value, offers a disturbing challenge to society...
...Above all, Hippies see themselves as creators in their own right, even if the only object of their creation is their own mood when under the influence of drugs...
...As the opposite of spontaneity, work is a constraint upon one's fulfillment because it subverts the individual in his uniqueness...
...Style is more important than the consequences of action...
...Blowing people's minds is the way to proselytize the world...
...Sponsors on the fringe of the movement can often help him obtain a job in the mass communication industries, from managing record shops to writing advertising copy...
...Yet the cult of culture requires less effort than might be thought...
...Luckily, the most valued activity is the creative expression of inner moods through various art forms, or simply and more frequently, through the spontaneity of the "scene...
...While Rock bands and bards sing the joy of having one's "mojo" working, the attitude of the Hippies toward sex succeeds in removing some, if not much, of the confusion and anxiety attending sexuality among adolescents...
...To influence someone is to restrict his freedom...
...in short an aesthetic and sentimental attitude toward life...
...The Hippie might try his hand at some craft which puts him into intimate relation with wood, stone, plants—but not with IBM cards and paper clips...
...The upper class also supports the more high-brow forms of art...
...The result is the same: a step toward effective equality between men and women...
...The worst form of work is, of course, that which is most common in the modern world, work in the bureaucratic context, which is said to heighten impersonality and subordination and to remove people from nature...
...Of the Christian religions, Eastern Orthodox Catholicism is the most collectively oriented and Puritanism the most individualistic...
...5 The tolerance and lack of aggressiveness of the Hippies serve as tranquilizers for many personalities suspicious or anxiety-ridden in their interpersonal relations...
...In many ways Hippies have a relation to high-brow culture similar to that of upper-class people...
...The first is its justification of an exploitative relation to the outside world...
...We have instead a primacy of expressive activities, which is reflected in the Hippies' devotion to culture, especially to culture of an avant-garde type...
...Thus, the world can never threaten the Hippie effectively...
...Hippie girls seem usually to prefer "making love," yet they can also indulge in the more detached type of sexual intercourse without feeling shame...
...The tense relationship between the outside world and the Hippie community is maintained by "blowing people's minds," the use of drugs, and work avoidance...
...It is at least conceivable that the Hippie movement represents a groping toward a necessary adjustment of our social structure to the growing rationalization and "disenchantment" of life on the one hand and, on the other, to the decline in the quality of community experience that one can secure outside one's immediate family...
...Self-expression should know only one limit dictated by the love of others: the other's need for his own self-expression...
...Since all individuals are equally valuable and worthy of love, the desires of each merit realization...
...Hence the delinquencies the Hippie community allows and/ or fosters are unlikely to make a return to middle-class society difficult...
...It is largely in this sense that the Hippie THE HIPPIES AS CONTRAMERITOCRACY 315 movement—.with a mystique that places its basic dogmas outside the realm of rational discourse—can be termed a religious movement...
...They had been described by informants as hard-core Hippies, whose period of activity in the movement ranged from one to four years...
...Another specification in line with the American ethos is the Hippies' high valuation of independence...
...Hippieism continues the Puritan tradition by putting the "burden of proof" upon the collectivity for the social forms that constrain the individual...
...Here is an opportunity for American youth to experience a peer group with which he is likely to have had little or no contact: a peer group where solidarity is untrammeled by any achievement criteria like sports, sexual prowess, fad leadership, etc...
...Even "pot heads" (people who smoke marijuana so as to 'be "high" through most of the day) and "speed freaks" (amphetamine addicts) will find a subtle pressure to limit their drug intake to group occasions...
...A function of this cult of culture is to upgrade the self-imputed status of the Hippie...
...Sex must be free, i.e., a woman must fully want it rather than merely bear it, consent to it, be seduced, or forced into it...
...In fact, love is seen by the Hippies as the normal expression of man unless he is hampered and perverted by social structure: the meritocratic rat race destroys love...
...This encourages a feeling of mutual dependence, the fraternity of the trenches...
...Youth is transformed into a motivational category: the elect have it forever...
...Impotence and nymphomania can be seen as expressions of sexual freedom...
...It is difficult to determine, however, whether this was a slogan THE HIPPIES AS CONTRAMERITOCRACY 309 posed to be an act of love...
...In the past few years, however, the Jet Set has become more and more a transmission belt into some sections of the middle class for fashions, mannerisms, and ideology orginating mainly in the Hippie movement...
...they usually mean poetry...
...This does not mean that the teachers, the manager-owners of the macrobiotic restaurant, the published novelist, the American who had become an interior decorator in Germany, the nightclub manager in New York, have become entirely "straight...
...This behavior, always permissible against squares, is supposed to force people to face the futility of their present course of action and make them accept the new wisdom incarnated in the act that "blew their mind...
...The taboo against aggression insures that whatever provocation takes place will be verbal, indirect, and not likely to start the night sticks swinging...
...Like all churches, the Hippie movement has a small core of devotees and theologians, its phonies, and its saints, and a large mass of vacation, weekend, and Sunday members who return on Monday to the uncharitable competitive world of the job or graduate school...
...It attempts to increase the capacity of people to relate more quickly at a level where they can give each other a support that is commensurate to the strains placed upon them by the meritocracy...
...Others say the Yippies are an invention of the mass media...
...If the students come from nonreligious, unitarian, "liberal," or radical homes, the response is likely to take the form of a New Left or Hippie commitment...
...Yet a good number will not be able to maintain themselves in college and will have to settle for occupations involving a return to the status of their parents...
...The uniqueness of the individual resides in the unpredictable diversity of his struggles with the world and the flesh...
...Just as Christianity, a religion proclaiming the supremacy of the meek and the downtrodden, became the religion of some of the best officers and civil servants of the Empire, so Hippieism, instead of drawing only on the failures and semifailures of the system, may become a creed of its more effective servants...
...an attitude toward work that at once runs it down yet tries to make of it as much as possible a personal experience...
...By its nature, the upper class cannot endorse the achievement criteria of the middle class...
...Hippies also reject the commitment to exchange that is implicit in work...
...And since lowermiddleand even middle-middle-class families do not have the means to cushion the downward mobility of their children, achievement anxiety is likely to be common among students from these two groups...
...Hippies reject the alienation of work because it always requires some and often much selfdenial...
...The "mother-fucker" wing of SDS seems to consist of hipster-type Hippies attracted by the pornography of violence...
...Some say that Hippies have become Yippies: they have renounced nonviolence and political indifference in favor of active provocation and resistance...
...To describe the Hippie movement as "religions" is also warranted by the fact that members of the movement are willing to give its basic values primacy in guiding their personal development, regardless of loss or disapproval...
...The capacity to blow people's minds has been the only approved way to express aggression, 2 because in its essence it is sup2 The past tense seems indicated here because there seems to have been a shift away from nonviolence, e.g., the recent Chicago (August 1968) slogan "Kill the Pigs" (thepolice...
...The Hippie woman seems to secure sexual satisfaction without shame, and to be free without loneliness...
...There is more likely to be a marginal adjustment, and a potential relapse...
...In 1967 a e One of the major problems of the Hippie movement, as of all religious sects, is that success means wider membership, division of labor, hierarchy, all of which make much more difficult the undifferentiated and immediately felt fraternity of the "tribe...
...The New Left copes with the threat of failure by asserting that opportunity for achievement does not really exist, since it is monopolized by a nation's power elite...
...but this struggle is hampered, of course, by inner temptations representing the weight of the flesh...
...There is no place to hide...
...q 316 JESSE R. PITTS...
...The Hippie movement claims that the opportunities offered by the meritocracy must not be pursued if man is to save his soul...
...They are not as likely to find in their parents the models they need to balance their aspirations and their effective potential...
...Having abandoned the concept of original sin, the Hippies deny the relevance of any universal standard of morality...
...The Hippie must never be "taken in" by society, but he must at all times keep his distance from the role relationships he may be compelled to enter...
...Releasing the primacy of expressive activities need not result in the kind of achievement valued by squares: the drug cult is proof that one can gain pleasure without having to pay the price of work and selfdenial and that the road to happiness is not through competition...
...What is crucial here is the assumption of a full-time job, i.e., coming to terms with the dominant society in ways other than sponging or part-time low-skill employment...
...The latter part of the Hippie movement has been attracted by Eastern philosophies, mainly Hindu or Taoist, for they structure a system of thought in which intuition, vision, telepathy, and modulated emotion are preferred ways to the truth...
...What the Hippies have brought to bohemia is a mass base for the development of the underground press, a new militancy, an increase in self-righteousness, a relief from the ghetto feeling...
...The Hippies at once upgrade the classical "female" values of love, nurturance, expressiveness, while also offering girls more opportunities for rejecting the traditional female role...
...Astrology, numerology, the whole folklore of good and bad "vibrations" are further instances of nonrational and nonempirical phenomena to which Hippies give credence...
...These philosophies hold out the promise that man may rinse the soul of ego in the narrower and greedy sense of the term...
...The valuation of sincerity is definitely in line with the Puritan ethos, not just in the "I cannot tell a lie" sense but, more important, as part of the search for inner consistency— since every action must reflect the election of the soul...
...But whether fundamentalist or liberal, the Puritan ethos is suspicious of pleasure and holds that the direction of the good lies away from gratification of the flesh...
...For many boys the end of the "seduction imperative" must indeed be a relief, but the main beneficiaries of the Hippie sexual patterns are the women...
...It is the secret weed around which rituals of solidarity andmutual love are organized, for Hippies believe that taking drugs together can lead people to mystical kinds of experiences that may link them forever, even if they should never again see each other...
...the levels are certainly well below those entertained by "square" fantasies...
...Out of 25 women, one was dead, nine had married within the group, and another was living with a French sculptor...
...The latter come to visit more than to stay...
...One should not be "hung up" on anything or anybody, one should "keep his cool...
...The most telling appeal of the Hippie movement is that it can relieve the pain of failure in the occupational world...
...The heightening of meritocratic pressures leads to an increased need for a center that can reduce the tensions induced by frustrations while nevertheless keeping the individual from quitting...
...And Hippie girls will not prostitute themselves (turn themselves into an object), even though this is often an easy source of 4 In bohemian bars and coffee shops, this may even have some prestige because it transforms the waitress into a priestess of the Rhythm and Blues cult...
...disruptive potentials of both the economic entrepreneur and the moral entrepreneur a la Thoreau...
...Retelling of occasions where "blowing someone's mind" was done successfully against squares is one of the ways prestige is built...
...The Hippie belief system does not, like the radical political movements, have to suffer the consequences of the failures of ideology in Soviet Russia, China, or Cuba...
...While there are many deviant behavior patterns Hippies will tolerate, they definitely do not encourage "hard drug" addiction...
...they also offer their members eternal youth...
...The Hippie movement is a religious sect through which the members reach what they feel to be the highest levels of value achievement, and thus they attempt to bring salvation to the corrupt society that rejects them...
...Although in bureaucratic, capitalistic, warmongering Babylon they seem to be chained, they are superior to their captors and no prison can hold their souls...
...It must shift the grounds of status from occupational achievement to family-rooted superiorities: ancientness of dynasty, graceful living, and a commitment to noblesse oblige...
...The im5 This is often the latent function or at least the unexpected consequence of the "orgy...
...Although Hippies have no Kantian principles of sexual morality, they consider rather "uncool" seduction, satyriasis, pedophilia, rape...
...Although the group is economically parasitic upon the society, it discourages among its members gross stealing and swindling...
...Another meaning of "cool" is awareness...
...The resolution of these contradictions, and the cohabitation of both the hipster and the mystic in the same communities, will be easier if spontaneous and sincere action stays away from places where facilities are scarce and where the pleasure of one may lessen the opportunities of the other...
...An act, to be good, must be a personal effort rather than represent compliance with church and state...
...Through denial of the self-directed impulse the individual demonstrates his state of grace, and the universal principles of morality (the Kantian categorical imperative) provide the rationale of self-restraint...
...6 For eventually he comes to realize that there are freaks and scoundrels as well as saints among the chosen, and that the difference from the square world is perhaps not so great as he first thought...
...Keeping your cool" promotes a degree of self-control in personalities where this capacity has often been lacking...
...The pressures of the meritocracy find a weaker ego structure, a greater fear of judgment, a greater anxiety as to what the future may contain...
...310 JESSE R. PITTS the contrary, to do what one wants, regardless of whether others like the product...
...But the content of premarital sex—for this is the type of sex they are really concerned about—has been transformed...
...Most lower-middleand middle-middle-class youths have satisfactory family relations and have made sexrole identifications which permit integration into occupational, marital, and community roles, and have ambitions that are within reach of their intellect and will power...
...College and graduate education require a capacity to work without direct supervision and to bear professional authority without fawning or rebellion, and perhaps most of all an ego strong enough to withstand the judgment of competent specialists...
...While the classical Puritan ethos sees in work the idea of service, for the Hippies the impersonality of the market to which work is oriented either directly or implicity condemns work as a force separating individuals from one another...
...The police, unfortunately, do not always seem aware of the difference...
...In the optic of universal love, whether one has a special attachment to someone else is not crucial...
...To be cool" is to dominate through intelligence and analysis any potentially distasteful involvement in the world...
...Two ideological tenets reinforce this ethnocentrism...
...Indeed, all the evidence points to a relatively low rate of sexual activity, considering the lack of moral censure and the ready opportunities...
...The Judeo-Christian churches used to provide this center for strivers and failures of all classes...
...list was made of 67 Hippies who used to come to the Ibiza-Formentera islands every summer or lived there all year around but had not shown up that summer...
...Contrary to public fantasies, the result of Hippie social pressure (not altogether intended) is not some loose promiscuity but rather stable relationships, which are entered into on the basis of psychological compatibility without any fog of sexual deprivation and obsession...
...And just as Puritanism began the movement toward a single sex standard (men abstaining as well as women), so the Hippies continue it (women enjoying sex as freely as men...
...In the Puritan ethos there is one strain implying that actions of the elect have an inherent goodness...
...a liking for the novel, the disconcerting, the far-out...
...She can express "masculine trends" without fear of male rejection...
...He is more likely to specialize in nondelictual delinquency which thrills the doer, shocks the onlooker if he's around, but rarely triggers the apparatus of justice...
...More than a restraint upon self-expresTHE HIPPIES AS CONTRAMERITOCRACY 307 sion, it is a warning that one should be able to disconnect any relationship that turns out to be upsetting...
...Squares have their minds blown when Hippies offer the spectacle of their decorative spontaneity, in their clothing, hair styles, profanity, public love-making or undressing, gifts of flowers to policemen, sleeping in the streets, in the frenzy and bawdiness of their music, integrated love-making, and selfrighteous begging...
...This is because the Hippie movement has become the effective center of the contrameritocracy in the United States and probably also in England, though in Japan, Germany, Italy, and France, New Left patterns have been more 305 important...
...one should not allow anyone to possess another human being...
...One should never be so "hung up" on anything, or on any single relationship, that one is led to lose one's temper or feel inordinate grief...
...A whole world of freedom and new pleasures seems within easy reach...
...Once enrolled in college, these students benefit from a status that is already higher than that of their parents...
...The value of the individual and the value of love find their first combined specifications in the cult of sincerity, the cult of independence, and the imperative of "keeping your cool...
...The refusal of career commitments becomes a conformity to the antiwork ideology...
...The high ethnocentrism in the Hippie community leads to two consequences...
...Poetry is preferred to novels because it is less 308 JESSE R. PITTS rational in construction, more spontaneous, and apparently does not take as long to write...
...a growing realization that one is not so young anymore and that the millennium is not for tomorrow—all these can then lead the Hippie to "sell out" and rejoin the meritocracy...
...But sensual pleasure is seen not so much in its hedonistic light (there is some of this, no doubt) but as a sign of what the individual needs, and a guarantee against domination by others...
...The crucial appeal of the Hippies for older bohemia is that they offer the chance of renewed youth, a still open future...
...All poetry either farout in style or sexual in content will be appreciated or given the benefit of the doubt...
...Blowing people's minds" is the obverse of "keeping your cool": its purpose is to shock, disconcert, and thus help disintegrate the "unhealthy" psychological structures of outsiders...
...Having set out to be an amazon she discovers she has become another Jewish mother...
...Of the 42 men, one was dead, and only six could be said to be still pursuing the Hippie life...
...Love is to be shared with all mankind, by contrast with the narrow capacities of the adults who are usually limited to family, friends, ethnic, and national similars...
...All but one of the husbands held relatively steady middle-class jobs...
...It also implies a refusal to judge anyone or to give a person a label like thief, convict, addict, because the code of love requires that the individual always be given another chance—and without expecting anything in return...
...The result was an increased rate of economic change and of productivity...
...But regardless of the vagaries of fashion that permit successive cohorts of youth to differentiate themselves from one another, the Hippie phenomenon seems here to stay, not merely as a variety of the perennial bohemian fringe well described some years ago by Ned Polsky in this magazine,' but as a social movement of some significance...
...In its struggle against the middle class it is often led to disparage the values of hard work, thrift, and personal restraint in favor of an ethic of prowess flowing from inherent traits of personality ("breeding") . The "Jet Set" is the militant expression of the antiachievement aspect of the upper-class ethos...
...Hippies distinguish between "fucking" which is sheer sensual enjoyment,7 without any commitment, and "making love," where there is some commitment even if it does not result in a lasting relationship...
...Many Hippies, when asked what they do, will answer "I write...
...Sex has been demythified or desacralized...
...Furthermore, the slogan seems often part of the pornography of violence rather than an effective commitment...
...Nevertheless, meritocratic pressures keep bearing down harder on the Youth Society and may make it vulnerable to the Hippie appeal if alternative structures do not appear...
...They were a shortcut, a way of discovering where "it was at," but the true sage should be able to gain peace and wisdom without them...
...Is not this antagonism to the "ties of the flesh" very similar to the attitude of the Puritan divines in the 17th century...
...Their anger against the world that has passed them by, or friends who went on to better things, dissipates progressively as they learn the meaninglessness of what the squares call success...
...And indeed, it is among the latter that we should find the bulk of the militants of the contrameritocracy...
...In painting their tastes go from the most advanced abstractionists to op and pop art...
...Hippicism (or another movement less burdened by the contradictions between its ethics and the structural cost of living) may do for professional life and the increasing range of professionalized occupations what increased capital wealth, scientific technology, and the prestige of entrepreneurship did for bankruptcy: diminish its sting, make it a normal cost of business innovation to be assumed not just by the entrepreneur and his family, but also by the total society...
...The Hippie collective offers the neophyte the possibility of increasing his rate of interaction with others—and at his own speed...
...Depersonalization and twilight states can be explained by the use of drugs...
...Defending the Hippies is like the Hippies defending the Negroes, a way of validating one's group without seeming to...
...Thus drug takeia are privy to a wisdom that is beyond the grasp of any square, however learned he may be.8 Drugs play a major role in cementing the solidarity of the Hippie community...
...Friendly patrons can be used without any commitment on the Hippie's part, since fundamentally they are still the enemy and, after all, they are repaid by the pleasure derived from giving...
...This does not preclude developing attachments to particular individuals, but those attachments must involve complete reciprocity and never act as binding obligations upon the other...
...to explode and fragment when they reach a certain size...
...But the Hippies are on firmer ground for they deny the relevance of age, just as they deny the relevance of sex and status categories...
...They know the writers and the artists, or know someone who claims to know them...
...Evidence on the postgraduate lives of Hippies is not easy to assemble...
...Nor will the return to the community necessarily mean a simple conformity...
...To paint, carve, write, or play music is not to work but, on 3 It is conceivable that drugs may not be necessary anymore, say some of the older Hippies...
...Examples of the Noble Savage are the Negro, the itinerant worker, and, more recently, the American Indian...
...Nor is there suspicion of pleasure as a guide to action, and of sensual pleasure in particular...
...The "saints" of the movement often do have a self-confident and benign quality that facilitates their rapport with an "uptight" neophyte...
...Since those who choose the Hippie mode of adjustment as a dominant behavior pattern will represent no more than 1 percent of the student body, it is necessary to inquire why so small a movement has had such an impact upon the youth society and why it has become the dominant mode of bohemia...
...THE HIPPIES AS CONTRAMERITOCRACY 311 portance of the group as a shelter, a source of nurturance, and a solvent of guilt facilitates a strong transference for a personality that has gained new self-esteem...
...Failure becomes a mark of purity— paranoia the assumed reality of police harassment, passivity kindness...
...Only rarely will a student who has been able to enter college or graduate school fail because of lack of I.Q...
...Some of the impact upon youth can be explained by factors common to other movements: the chance to be taken seriously, to live dangerously (it takes "heart" to live the Hippie way), and the denial of competitive achievement...
...The cohesion and continuity of the group will be furthered if it develops a high ethnocentrism and reduces its relationships to the outside world as much as possible tomartyrdom and proselytism...
...Beatniks of the type described by Polsky in 1961 went to great extremes to avoid work, but Hippies will occasionally work at some semiskilled jobs...
...An air-tight system of beliefs thereby transforms the losers, the dispossessed, the subordinates, and the judged into a blessed group...
...Thus Hippieism may decrease the cost of social change and create a sort of permanent revolution of manners and mores, more effective than political revolution...
...But those students who come from families with a strong desire for upward mobility—and whose status is threatened by discrepancies in income, occupation, style of life, and ethnic origin—are likely to experience a more difficult problem of identity...
...There are taste leaders who give the proper cues as to what should be admired...
...It is uncool to steal from persons, though alright to steal from supermarkets that overcharge the poor...
...Even if average in the occupational world, the bohemian is always culturally superior to the readers of the Time-Life art section...
...With all their potential appeal the Hippies have influenced so far only a small fraction of the Youth Society...
...for this appreciation seems to require special gifts not available to conventional middle-class patrons...
...Girls will do waitressing,4 Kelly girling, thesis typing, modeling, or clerking...
...a preference for marijuana and LSD as tranquilizers or as a recreation, and for interactive adventure rather than getting things done...
...Except for the possession of drugs, the Hippie will seldom engage in obvious violations of the law...
...Hippies will relate to people whose age varies from 14 to 80, and bohemia will relate to the older Hippies (20 to 25...
...While "nobody can tell you what to do" in any particular situation, the direction is nevertheless clear and common to all men: they must build the City of God on earth...
...Outside the family and friendship, direct expression of the value of love is limited to a willingness to cooperate on the neighborhood or job level, or to a general respect for the rules of the game even if cheating would bring immediate returns...
...To that extent even "fucking" is spiritualized, an act of the total self...
...Hippie styles have radiated upward to older bohemia as it receives the mature failures and the temporary failures...
...Through mass media channels and the numerous shops that have sprung up in suburbia and around campuses, the Hippie movement has been providing a series of statements and attitudes, a style the young striver—at least in the professional, mass media, and intellectual trades (i.e., frequently high-ambition and high-uncertainty trades) —can use as an insurance policy against failure...
...a tendency to transform the friendship network into a sort of Jewish family...
...Most students who drop out manage to reduce their level of aspiration without excessive bitterness...
...Dealing in marijuana and LSD is usually the worst felony committed, and the result is a very low arrest and conviction rate...
...Men may do house painting and decorating, janitoring, cab driving, bartending, and mail delivery...
...they describe the relations between adults—with their mental reservations, their limited commitments, their unwillingness to raise issues irrelevant to an immediate problem—as "playing games...
...Even a student from a 312 JESSE R. PITTS middle-middle-class home who has entered a prestige Ivy League university will be exposed to this possibility...
...My hypothesis is that there is developing in the United States (and probably in other industrialized countries of the West) a contrameritocracy, which offers the failures 1 "The Village Beat Scene: Summer 1960," by Ned Polsky, DISSENT, Summer 1961...
...Avoidance of work is equally crucial to the integration of the Hippie community...
...So far, all the evidence points to the fact that the meritocracy, far from making life easier for the highly educated, increases the burdens upon those who have to assume high-uncertainty decisions...
...The "love-in" becomes a sort of Hippie revival meeting...
...The first are really the last and the last the first, because they will not sell their birthright for the 314 JESSE R. PITTS pottage of success...
...A lasting heterosexual commitment...
...And then, like the child who discovers his parents are not perfect, the Hippie discovers the discrepancy between the values of the group and the limits of its organization...
...Essentially, they were able to proclaim the salvation of those who had the proper motivation regardless of their success or lack of it in this vale of tears and thereby to reduce human failure to insignificance in the eyes of God...
...No role differentiation for them: merely human beings, face-to-face, intent on love rather than on manipulating each other for selfish ends...
...Since it is easier for girls to find jobs in the square world—employers being easier on the females of pariah groups —many a Hippie girl winds up as the breadwinner of the couple...
...It does not even have to achieve any concrete political goal, because on its own terms organizational success or failure means nothing...
...Through drug experiences, for example, it has created a new respect among its members for the nonrational and nonempirical aspects of human experience that challenge the value of occupational achievement and emphasize how much man deludes himself in thinking he can control his "social" destiny...
...we do not normally use more than 10 percent of our brain power, and that drugs, especially of the LSD variety, permit the expansion of one's consciousness by going beyond the structures of thought derived from role-playing and "status games...
...One must always do what one wants to do...
...Thus, while the Hippies attempt a "primarization of life" as their response to the increasing pressures of the meritocracy, they shift the grounds of achievement from areas where it is scarce and competitive to areas of the inner self where everybody can win...
...For new members the use of drugs becomes a rite of passage, a way of teaching proper techniques of appreciation...
...It is likely that Hippies, ostentatiously doing their thing even in Traverse City, Michigan, are an intrinsic part of the postindustrial world...
...The Hippie community, which assembles those who dedicate themselves to the value of love, takes on a special sanctity, for it demonstrates the possibility of creating groups where men can be together without conformity, discrimination, or jealousy...
...The stress on high culture and the occasional interchange with the Jet Set permit condescension toward the middle-class meritocracy...
...a permissive attitude toward sex of which their somewhat overweight wives do not seem to take notice or advantage...
...And here the Hippies part from the Puritan ethos with its emphasis on active mastery of the environment...
...One of the weaknesses of the American New Left is its youth orientation: every year brings its devotees closer to the fatal age of thirty...
...Any group whose ideas deviate significantly from the surrounding community has the problem of maintaining solidarity among members whose reason for belonging lies precisely in their social maladjustment...
...Although older bohemians tend to be sarcastic about Hippies (as the latter tend to be toward teenie-boppers, i.e., Hippies of high school age), they still feel obliged to defend them against the squares...
...A legitimated self learns dissent without fearing exclusion...
...In Puritanism potential conflicts between high valuation of the individual and high valuation of universal love are limited by the doctrine of original sin, which states that in and of himself the individual cannot reach perfection: he needs the aid of grace which permits him access to aperfection whose model is outside the individual...
...Caught between what the sociologist must see as the conflicts inherent in a doctrine that stresses values impossible to maximize simultaneously (the cult of personal experience or independence and the cult of community, the cult of spontaneity and the high valuation on keeping cool), there is a tendency among Hippies toward a split in values: some choose an individualistic and hedonistic pattern, which Norman Mailer described as the "hipster" life, and others a mystic pattern that strives to deny ego needs or fuses them into the needs of the group...
...The underworld, by contrast, has an achievement orientation...
...There is a set vocabulary to assimilate and use at proper moments...
...Though it has roots in the Puritan ethos, the Hippie conception of uniqueness is different...
...It will also be easier if one avoids complex forms of cooperative action where the pay-off is long in coming and where those who possess the highest technical skills must make sure they have the cooperation of the less skillful...
...Not only is he superior to all members of society who do not share his interest, but he is also superior to those who do not give to this interest the same dedication...
...There is a tendency for communities...
...or dropouts of the achievement society a haven that neutralizes the pains of failure...
...Drugs prove that the inner state (pleasure, revelation) is the important goal, rather than trying to modify the outside world...
...It offers a way to supreme success, i.e., sincere, spontaneous, loving self-expression, doing what you want to do, if only you give up the games of bureaucratic existence...
...A frequent belief among Hippies is that pushed mainly by the SDS, Maoists, and Trotskyites, and to what extent it was taken up by the new Yippies, the old-style Hippies, and the "straight" McCarthy youth...
...It is my contention that the Hippie movement is made up of youths who are overcommitted to the basic middle-class values but are unwilling to realize those values in the occupational world...
...It serves as a response in the incessant search of mankind for forms of order that require less violence, less pain, and less contempt...
...The Hippies want all relationships to be total or at least potentially total...
...a pattern of speech that allows for the maximum amount of self-revelation and the maximum amount of support for others (we are all sinners and love children together) ; a preference for direct confrontation rather than manipulation...
...Hence, uniqueness will be found in the cultivation of sincerity and spontaneity...
...And since the Hippie identifies with the Noble Savage, he can worship his own group without having to bear the burden of the sin of pride...
...What replaces love between man and woman is not hatred or indifference, but simply universal love...
...In order to be valid, a relationship must be totally spontaneous and sincere (there is a tendency to see these two kinds of behavior as synonymous...
...In the Western world, at least, men are supposed to love their families and be receptive to outsiders, but they are also supposed to be able to enter into limited relations that are dominated by objectively measured exchanges...
...a style of life that dismisses as many of the conspicuous aspects of status as is possible...
...the subsequent realization that if one wants a good job, it is necessary to complete one's education and/or accept certain bureaucratic disciplines...
...a willingness to change career lines once one feels that there is little to be learned or created...
...The themes of love and total acceptance of the whole personality give legitimacy to the prolongation of a teen-age kind of gang that is immune to the centrifugal forces of heterosexual commitments and differential school and occupational achievements...
...The Hippie commitment expresses itself through a nonactivist support for pacifism, the underdog, the rebellious youth...
...The Hippie cult of spontaneity and independence strikes a responsive chord among adolescents THE HIPPIES AS CONTRAMERITOCRACY 313 struggling to establish their identity amid the pressures of school and family...
...but it is not an attempt to influence through dialectic, for the choice of the true way must remain one's own...
...The use of the adjective "religious" is justified by the constant reference in the Hippie movement to nonrational, nonempirical forces, its concern with the ultimate ends and meanings of life, and its rel= ative immunity to organizational failure...
...The Hippie movement, I would suggest, represents a further emphasis on this individualism...
...Service combines inner direction and integration into the community, without undergoing the...
...Given the crucial nature of the university degrees as passports to middle-middle- and upper-middle-class positions, and the broad equality of opportunity that exists in the university, the adolescent faces the possibility of a failure that could seem the failure of his whole personality...
...Some of these "reconverted" 35 have joined "swinging bohemia" and others "proper bohemia...
...Hippies give absolute allegiance to two values: universal love and the unique value of the individual...
...The high valuation of love is in line with all the major religions...
...7 The evidence collected so far does not seem to point to special success in attaining high levels of sexual enjoyment...
...The imperative of "keeping your cool" is strangely in line with the Puritan norm of self-control, although it is certainly not the English version of self-control with its inhibition of aggression and sexual expression...
...At least until 1967 it was considered quite uncool to provoke the wrath of the police...
...One is "catastrophism," the belief that the world is soon to be obliterated because squares in their ignorance, folly, and meanness are bound to unleash atomic war, thereby making nonsense of middle-class planning and postponement of gratification...
...Embracing this value with a vengeance, Hippies turn it against the adult world...
...Thus in the social reconversion of the Hippie his group experience will have been useful, and its cultivation of high-brow culture will have helped him maintain a familiarity with the academic atmosphere that is handy when he reenlists in college...
...It also serves as a sign of mutual recognition among Hippies and a way to maintain the hostility of the square community...
...If anything, romantic love is under some suspicion, for it tends to withdraw people from the magic circle of universal love...
...Hence the Hippie movement is a preferred mode of deviance for girls, and their ratio in the Hippie community (two or three boys for every girl) is much higher than in other patterns of deviance such as alcoholism, hard-drug addiction, suicide, professional crime, or juvenile delinquency...
...Older Hippies, who refused to convert to straight society, have moved from Haight Ashbury to Big Sur or other places more removed from the tourist trade...
...At the upper-class level we had "cafe society," at the bottom disorganized working-class elements and hoboes...
...Merely by 'belonging to the group, the Hippie gets a feeling of being one of the chosen few...
...Some of the Hippie themes, as Bennett Berger has pointed out, are as old as bohemia...
...These Hippies were mostly American and British...
...The better the university, the more talented and understanding the teaching staff and the psychological services, the more difficult it is to find excuses for one's failures...
...Since their attachment to middle-class values makes them unwilling to enter the world of juvenile delinquency, there remain for them the patterns of heroic value commitment and expressive behavior, through whichthey align their stand with that of the upper class—but without the latter's devotion to graceful living and essential conservatism...
...Tolerance is justified because the failings of the chosen are minor in comparison with the importance of being among the chosen...
...And "blowing people'sminds" has the advantage of shying clear of police reprisal: it may shock, it may be an act of exquisite cruelty, but it is unlikely to be a legal misdemeanor...
...There is even some muted social pressure against homosexuality as a dominant sexual adjustment...
...Of the 15 girls not known to be married, only six were involved in the type of employment that might permit the continuation of Hippie life: three were photographers' models, two were nightclub dancers, and one was a translator in Ibiza...
...Within the group all resources are shared and a good deal of time is spent in the sheer enjoyment of each other's company...
...funds and need not assume the sordid trappings of "hustling...
...anything else is subordination 306 JESSE R. PITTS and loss of independence, ergo loss of individuality...
...There are known cases of beautiful girls having lived many months in Hippie communities and remaining virgins...
...and then, in its liberal version this becomes the belief that all men are intrinsically good and that with effort, learning, and self-control anyone can succeed in "realizing himself...
...The Hippie movement serves to mitigate the impact of deviance from the total society...
...Homosexual trends can be talked out and even occasionally acted out in festive group occasions without shame and panic...
...A man and a woman should be financially and emotionally independent from any other man or woman...
...For the Puritan ethos the value of the individual in his uniqueness lies in his imitation of Christ, his struggle to act continuously in such a way as to be consistent with the search for the City of Light...
...A person must do his own thing: only thus can he realize the good within him...
...Bohemia is, of course, an institution that antedates the Hippie movement by more than a century...
...Until now this antiachievement society was located either at the very top or bottom...
...Hippie life seems to resolve some of the strains that women experience in a period of changing sex roles: at once encouraged to be active and self-reliant in studies, job hunting, and choice of lover(s)—yet expected to be passive, attractive, and loyal to men even at the cost of some personal satisfaction...
...When one has some marijuana one shares it with others, and when they have some they reciprocate...
...Communes have sprung up in rural or urban settings, and Hippies are less noticeable now that some of their fashions have become part of youth culture...
...For the Hippie all men are good if only they give way to their nature, as against the pressures of the social structure...
...And by declaring age irrelevant, they not only declare irrelevant the disabilities the square world attaches to age...
...The second belief is "miserabilism" or "pastoralism," which states that the more outside the system an individual is, the less likely is his native goodness to be corrupted...
...But the Hippie commitment to love goes beyond all this: it implies a permanent willingness to share all of one's possessions with anyone who might require them...
Vol. 21 • April 1974 • No. 2
