You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
(The following by Max Lerner, the eminent author and educator, seemed to the editors another appropriate commentary on the Beatnik-Hippie.)
The point about the hippies is that while everyone else has for decades been talking about changing the American value structure, the hippies are going ahead and doing something about it. At least for themselves (“Do your own thing”), but perhaps in a far-reaching way for some others, too.
In the last four or five years (that's about how long a “generation” is in these days of accelerated everything) we have seen three subcultures emerging among the young in America: the “new left,” the drug culture and the hippies. All three have played a role in forming the far-out America of today. All three will pass and will re-emerge in other forms and combinations in the 1970s. But of the three it is the hippies who reach deepest because they have, in their own bizarre way, brought into the open a values revolution that has been in the making for decades.
Mainly it is a revolution against the achieving society—against the tyranny of the job, the pursuit of the fast buck, the clinging to property, the ties of marriage and family, the hunger for power, the demands of status, the jungle of machines, the big impersonal corporate units, the institutionalized church, the legitimizing of killing in war, the tensions of group interaction and struggle, the constant drive to produce, produce and to succeed, succeed, succeed.
There are broadly three ways of accomplishing a values revolution. One is the activist way: to insist that you cannot transform values without capturing power, taking over the society, rebuilding its base, and then a new values superstructure will come. That is the way of the new left.
The second is the education way: try to reach the generations, younger and older, by writing and teaching and exhortation, to move from the false value gods to truer ones. This is the way of the major philosophers and prophets, from Socrates to Nietzs