And as I spend more time around them, I have less and less respect for their worldview.
So far as I understand it, their worldview is composed of the following:
- omnitolerance
- pacifism
- pseudo-animistic spirituality with heavy themes of interconnectedness among living things, particularly to nature
- reverence of nature
Here's why I'm opposed at least in part with each of these principles.
Omnitolerance
Intellectual dishonesty and intellectual cowardice are going to be common themes in my criticism of the hippie mindset, and both apply in full measure to the predisposition of a hippie to be tolerant to a fault. But first, I want to be very clear about something: intolerance should be reserved for a very small, select group of outrageous issues; tolerance is otherwise a very positive and progressive influence, and I wholeheartedly believe that it is better to be tolerant to a fault than to be a bigoted asshole (e.g. racist, sexist, or a Prop-8 proponent). The fact that hippie communities tend to be warmly receptive of alternative lifestyle choices and their willingness to listen to alternative opinions with open minds is to their considerable credit, and any human society would benefit greatly by adopting this attitude. It is the lack of subsequent critical evaluation and the intentionally shallow depth to which these ideas are discussed that I find troubling.
It seems to me that there are two primary qualities which draw people into a community of hippies: poor critical thinking skills and intellectual cowardice.
I'll talk in greater depth about poor critical thinking skills as an apparent requirement to be a hippie when I talk about spirituality later on, but for now I'll focus on how that relates to the communities they create because of this shared mental deficiency. Generally speaking, to an unreasonable person, a large variety of poorly thought-out and mutually exclusive propositions are not only completely possible, but likely, and are further able to coexist harmoniously. If three hippies are talking about dreams and one posits that they are the memories of ancestors from which we can absorb ancient wisdom, one posits that it is communication with Mother Earth through which we are given guidance, and the other suggests that they are nightly extracorporeal excursions to a dream realm shared and sustained by human subconsciousness, they will invariably reach an immediate consensus on some schizophrenic, internally inconsistent conglomeration of these mutually exclusive ideas. They simply have no rational basis to distinguish the sensible from the insane; all is plausible so long as it isn't judgmental. (Interestingly enough, if you mention a (non-judgmental) idea that lacks some minimal amount of fantasy, you're more likely to receive a furrowed brow and a dismissive "okay...")
I suspect that the primary binding force in a community of hippies is validation. If you are an unreasonable person who has developed an unreasonable worldview, the only validation you'll receive for it will come from people whose critical thinking skills are also poor enough to fail to notice its glaring faults. Because these other people, like yourself, are also unburdened by coherent thought, they are likely to have some silly ideas of their own which you, as an unreasonable person, would probably find plausible or at the very least interesting. Because none of you are particularly adept at critically evaluating any of these worldviews, any discussion of them will never go into any meaningful depth, thereby sparing all of you from the disappointing truth. What's more, I've talked to some hippies who were initially eager to state their worldviews but became very defensive when I tried to talk about any particular part of them. I got the impression that they had embarrassing experiences talking about the details of their worldviews before, and that they were afraid to give it any more critical evaluation lest they lose the comfort it gives them. The ones who have been stung by rationality, it seems to me, make a habit of extending others the courtesy of withholding critical consideration that they wish they'd been shown, and this sets the norm for critical evaluation of ideas for the community.
The second part of this is an idea I've made a thread about in the past: a healthy dose of criticism is progressive. Put bluntly, first ideas almost invariably suck. Any programmer, scientist, writer, politician, or artist can tell you that works of significant importance are the result of constant refinement, and that initial "clever" ideas are unfortunately frequent casualties. With practical experience, most people learn to accept that their initial ideas, no matter how brilliant, could turn out to be incorrect or even shamefully stupid. Most people learn not to let it bother them when they turn out to be wrong. I suspect that hippies are either excessively sensitive to self-disappointment or have simply never had the experience of their first impressions turning out wrong enough for it not to affect them (possibly because they had never been brought into question before). Surrounding themselves with people who won't allow them to feel that (healthy, necessary) self-disappointment could very well be something like a defense mechanism.
The end result is that all ideas, no matter how cockamamie so long as there is sufficient mysticism about them, are considered plausible and thereby implicitly approved. With no process of discarding nonsensical or inconsistent ideas (as that would be intolerant), little or no progress is made in understanding reality or any part of human experience. Imagine if software developers were not allowed to fix bugs, if ancient medical practices are never to be abolished, or if laws could never be repealed; no functional system can work like this.
Pacifism
In the same way that hippies usually fail utterly to prepare themselves for academic success, a meaningful career (much less a job interview), or a competent defense of their schizo-spirituality, just about every hippie I've met has an almost tragic naivete about violence, or more accurately about those who rely on the use of violence to make a living. Even worse, the hippies who believe themselves to be experts in conflict resolution -- despite an utter lack of training or experience -- appear to be a majority. In my experience, hippie plans for the end of violence is the world to hear one of their number say, "c'mon you guys, an eye for an eye makes the world blind; let's just love and support one another," and the fact that crime still exists means simply that these criminals have not been told to "just c'mon, man, y'know?"
No, to the hippie mind, violent aggressors who act on behalf of The Man are the problem. They create victims (not "criminals"; The Man is the real criminal) who are subsequently punished for just trying to be who they want to be and express themselves. Hippies blame the same law enforcement groups who keep drug cartels out of their neighborhoods and soldiers who volunteered their lives to preserve the hippies' freedoms for the social inequality in the world that creates criminals. If everyone in the world could just sit in a drum circle and talk about what's hurting them and hurting their souls, they could reconnect to themselves and to each other and there would be no more violence forever.
The problem is, not everyone responds to words. Sensible people do, of course, but not everyone is sensible. A young urbanite who grew up in a broken home surrounded by drugs, guns, and poor role models, who joined the Crips in his second prison stay for felony assault, is not an individual who can be reasoned with. It's not an issue of society trying to pressure them to conform, or The Evil Machine stifling their attempts at free expression; a meth addict will do a more than adequate job of expressing his intention to gut you for your wallet. Even in a bizarre reality where world leaders are pot-smoking pacifists, rather than vengeance-obsessed sheiks who want to drop nuclear bombs on the Jews before their Messiah comes, economic forces and natural disasters will still leave third-world farmers with no home, no food, and no tools but an AK-47. And so long as you allow religious freedom, there will be zealots who believe they have a divine mandate to send you to their Hell, and whose passion will only be curbed by a 7.62 through the heart.
Police, prisons, armies, weapons, and bombs are all vitally necessary for the precious amounts of peace we do manage to find in the modern day. Influence over international politics and economics are all dictated more or less by who can be the bigger asshole, and any world power that can't compete in the international dick-waving contest will be dominated and subjugated by the ones who can. We have the culture we do, particularly with the free expression we enjoy, not because the rest of the world acknowledges that it's a good idea and lets us do our own thing, but because we're willing to fuck any nation who tries to take our freedoms from us with our preposterous nuclear capabilities.
A policy of dealing with violent people with words alone is so impractical as to be impossible.
And global disarmament will create far more problems than it solves (which is basically none).
Spirituality and Connectedness
No sensible person would believe things without reasons for them, but it takes a particularly egregious variety of stupid to believe in something you must know is merely the product of your creative mind, and/or to believe in something admittedly on the grounds that you wish fervently for it to be true. Even when it comes to organized religion, I think it is much more acceptable to believe in utter bullshit on the grounds that there is a preponderance of authority figures who appear to talk intelligently and convincingly about it... but the spirituality that hippies typically buy into simply has no such excuses. If I may quote a statement I once made to squibbles (who I believe has since learned better, to his credit): "You are making shit up, and then you are believing it to be true. You are making shit up... and then you are believing it to be true."
A very common theme in the hippie brand of spirituality is connectedness. At the very least, there is the belief that humans are "connected" to each other, but most hippies in my experience further have some sense of connectedness with animals, vegetation, some set of abstract nouns, and even supposed spiritual entities that embody those abstract nouns. About two weeks ago, I was in a conversation with someone who asserted that she regularly converses with the spirits of trees (and sees auras, and casts spells, but those are beside the point for the moment).
There are many problems with this notion of interconnectedness. There is no coherent definition of it. There is little agreement among those who believe in it as to its qualities or the experience of it. It is not falsifiable. There are no observable products, effects, influences, or consequences of it. It has no unambiguous proposed operation, explanation for how it sustains itself or is sustained, or how, specifically, it interacts with the material world (if not in a way that is measurable by scientific instruments). There is no relevant part of reality or human experience which it would serve to explain for which we do not already have adequate explanations that do not suffer from these damning failures; it is a redundant, useless imposition.
Pursue anyone who talks about this connectedness, and if he attempts to rationalize it, he will quickly backpedal into the perfectly mundane ideas of simple cause and effect, or basic properties of networks. If one member of a community learns a new skill and puts it to use within the community, competence with the skill will eventually propagate through the community -- this fact does not require a spiritual interconnectedness to explain it, but ideas of a similar nature are the only proposed (rational) examples of this interconnectedness that I've ever heard. And every conversation I've had in which I've asked someone to describe what properties "one-ness" has and how humans/life/nature/existence fits the bill have instantly fallen flat on their faces. A semester spent in an Economics classroom will easily trump a lifetime of hippie wisdom about the connectedness of things.
I'll talk more about human relationships with nature when I talk about reverence of nature.
In particular, if anyone ever claims to be able to communicate with animals or vegetation or spirits thereof or abstract nouns, for the love of humanity, pursue the idea to its fullest implications. Do not let him hear the end of it. What ideas can he communicate? How capable are they of abstract thinking? Are they wiser than humans? Do they have personalities? Do they communicate amongst themselves? Instantaneously? Across the globe? Do they form societies? Are any of them at odds with each other? Do they have systems for managing amongst themselves the resources they surely need to survive? Do they have plans for the future? Are they capable of analytical thinking as we humans are? Can they solve problems? Would they be willing to join efforts with the National Academy of Sciences? Do you know of a man called James Randi? How would you like to be a fucking millionaire?
These ideas don't have sensible explanations because there is no sense behind them to begin with. Hippies have simply not thought critically about these ideas, and I suspect that it's largely because it takes someone with depressingly poor critical thinking skills to buy into them in the first place.
The alternative, of course, is that they only act as though they believe these things. In a way, this is even more depressing.
I wish there was a term for the situation in which all parties in a dialogue are aware that they are making shit up, that they are -- in less forgiving terms -- aware that they are all brazenly lying to each other. I wish I could have some accurate, descriptive term to un-subtly drop in a fake cough when I hear a dualogue in which one person says something from which neither of them can derive any meaning but that both pretend to understand anyway. Whether each is only lying because he is not fully certain that the other is lying too, or whether they are both aware that they are consciously buying into a common delusion, it is blatant and contemptible intellectual cowardice.
As a very vivid example, I semi-recently witnessed someone say to an audience of several dozen that he had heard an excellent backronym for "love": Living One Vibrational Energy. The entire room ooh-ed, aah-ed, nodded their heads, and agreed that it was very wise, whereas I had to focus on preventing myself from rolling my eyes or looking at him like he was a colossal moron. I wanted desperately to challenge the entire room to make any sense whatsoever of that phrase, but as I was surrounded by them and dependent on them for free food after the occasion, I held back. (And if there is a sensible meaning, which is hard to believe, it is probably very contrived and I doubt that anything more than an insignificant minority were thinking of it.)
The foundation of this spirituality seems to be a powerful anti-science sentiment. Like any other worldview totally disjoint from reality, there is the sentiment among hippies that science is "just one view" which can be set to the side in favor of some other basis for understanding and interacting with reality. This is often because they have a poor grasp of logic (and therefore mathematics and science as well; I challenge you to find me a hippie with a technical major other than a B.A. in Environmental Studies). Mathematicians, scientists, and engineers simply have too solid a grasp on the requirements for speaking intelligibly about some existential claim to make an embarrassing mistake like buying into the standard fare of spiritual hippie garbage. Hippies, who are generally lacking in analytical thinking, simply don't know any better.
Worse yet, I often see some attempt to challenge the institution of science with ancient wisdom (this is largely an effort to be consistent with their subtly hedonistic view that humility should be held in the greatest esteem: because science is successful and its products ubiquitous, that means that it's arrogant and it rests upon the hippies to find some more elegant alternative to science). The arrogance to pull some idea purely from the creative mind, an idea that is never made manifest in any observable way, and to consider it on equal footing with science is present in a number of irrational worldviews but is particularly prevalent in hippie communities. It demonstrates a total failure to comprehend the overwhelming amounts of rational support behind scientific ideas and the stunningly beautiful consistency within its own discipline and even across others. More importantly, it shows that the hippie is not aware of how hopelessly futile his battle against reality is, or on a more fundamental level, what would qualify any particular idea to be a more likely one than another. From my perspective, this is a problem that can be solved by an overview of the track records of science versus ancient wisdom.
Reverence of Nature
This is something I've never understood to be possible with an informed view of nature, and in fact only possible with a Disney-sponsored perception of nature.
Mother Nature is a cold, merciless bitch, and she's out to fucking kill you. There are innumerable inefficiencies in the human body, and the environments of the Earth that humans have spread to (and even evolved in) aggravate the inconveniences they consequently create for us. Life is filthy and inelegant, needing to kill itself, infect itself, struggle pathetically in pain to survive just long enough to perpetuate itself and repeat the cycle. It is blood, pain, and terror. Every second of every day, there are organisms in the world experiencing the cruellest and darkest hell we could imagine: alone, cold, starving, sick, hunted, huddled in fear, whimpering and waiting to die. It's the stuff of nightmares, and it happens all the time for no good fucking reason. This is the life that any animal out of captivity knows, and the only life humans knew before we became the dominant species.
With the sabotaged body you have been given, it is only by its constant effort that you continue to survive. The need to regularly eat the right things at the right frequency, the need to sleep, the need to regulate your body temperature, the need for the right conditions to fight off diseases and infections, the need for proper conditions to heal wounds, and the countless emotional and psychological needs to be met are all bare minimum requirements to avoid misery and death. If you were to stop the effort, to put your fate into Mother Nature's hands, you would surely wither away in agony.
Thanks to scientific advances, these things are much easier for humans in the first world to do. If nature had its way, we would be dying in our mid-20's of a wide variety of horrible tragedies and diseases, and at less than one tenth of a percent of our current population. We have trivialized the most critically important needs of food and shelter long ago. We are safe from predators. We are (mostly) safe from disease-carrying insects. We sanitize the holy bejeesus out of our food and living environments. We have turned a staggering number of diseases and bacterial infections from death sentences to a few days of sluggishness. You enjoy a life largely free of these concerns because humans have worked hard to directly oppose the constant, overbearing efforts of Mother Nature to murder you. The beauty in nature that we first-worlders enjoy is only possible in strictly-controlled environments from which we've painstakingly extracted the horror that would otherwise be nature (e.g. national parks, backyard gardens), or else enjoyed for brief periods of time in which we've armed ourselves to the teeth with tools and knowledge (not to mention evacuation plans) to handle nature's unending assault against us.
Bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people, and horrific and unjust tragedies befall damned near everyone with depressing regularity; there is no justice or oversight for any of this. If there is any positive force you can count on, it's the human solidarity that results from nature as a mutual enemy.
This is nature.
I stand firmly and vociferously opposed to any regressive ideology which attempts to take us away from our scientific advances and bring us closer to such a cold and cruel existence. I expect any sensible person to do the same.
Hippies have a warped and alien view of nature that excludes just about all of this (i.e. that excludes reality). The romantic ideal in the hippie worldview is to live in socialist communities in which all inhabitants are well-intentioned, emotionally open, vegan, and peaceful, in which starvation is unknown and simple natural remedies are the cure for all disease and infection, where they fear no predators, all die peaceful, dignified deaths well past a hundred years of age, and all without any member among them possessing any knowledge of mathematics or medicine. The first thing to notice about this lifestyle is that it is static and stagnant. All intellectual development is mired hopelessly in the Making Shit Up and Telling Fantastical Stories Devoid Of Meaning methodologies. There are no improvements to be made. The second thing to notice is that it is utterly absurd; it is hopelessly separated from reality. It will never happen because it cannot ever happen.
Nature will never play this role. It will laugh at the expectations for it to keep shelter and food in plentiful, effortless supply, to keep predators at bay, for disease to be curable with remedies made of abundantly available resources, and for humans to live anywhere beyond three decades without preposterously well-sanitized food and living arrangements. No, nature will remain true to its fervent desire to fuck life in the skull, and it has no shortage of pointy cocks to choose from.
The reason I say that a positive view of nature seems Disney-sponsored is because the hippie utopia is suspiciously reminiscent of indigenous tribal life as romanticized by Disney. The "man-made machine versus nature" themes in which nature is some-crazy-how the benevolent force have only ever appeared in movies like Pocahontas, Brother Bear, and Peter Pan. The Disney corporation would of course see no profit in faithfully representing such a lifestyle: Pocahontas with brown teeth, covered with infected sores and fleas, hair matted with blood and dirt, dying a miserable death of dysentery at the age of 19. It seems to me that hippies want to work toward this kind of existence, unaware that it is not only impossible to achieve but would also be the gravest mistake the human species will have ever made, all because their expectations are rarely, if ever, in contact with reality.
My primary complaint is, haven't we outgrown this by now? Shouldn't we have? Even the most basic analytical look at humans, at life, at nature, at existence, will grant any sensible person a profound appreciation of the horrors science has spared the human species by directly opposing the forces of nature. How are there still people whose thinking is so primitive?
tl;dr: Hippies are dumb.
