(02-18-2019, 11:13 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I question the notion that the counter-culture was composed of people who neglected their families. For one thing, most hippies were under 30 years old, and probably didn't have children or married partners. Some of them formed communes in which children were looked after by everyone there. They engaged in free love because they could. Later, many settled down. The birth control pill made freer sex out of wedlock more possible. This pill was not the result of the self-actualization movement.
...if they did not have children, or at least put off child-bearing and child-raising until they were through with the counter-culture. The party is over, at least for women, once they have children. If a man has any character, then the party is over for him.
Quote:Self-actualization does not mean neglect of families. As I already mentioned, a lot of therapists during the Awakening helped to cure the results of oppression within families, and thus healed family relationships. Virginia Satir and John Bradshaw are examples. A self-actualized person has awakened and developed themselves into a full human being, and that certainly involves being able to care about and for others.
If self-actualization means consummate achievement, then... maybe a creative person can create a solid economic basis for the economic reality for his family, and often one far more satisfying than that that an assembly-line worker can get. (I have seen studies of the reality on an assembly line, and self-actualization is impossible. The work is numbing boredom with no room for expressions of individuality.
Quote:Gen Xers gained a lot because they were neglected. They became excellent survivalists and independent, self-reliant people. The Awakening era saw a rise in divorces and single-parent families, which was the main reason for this neglect. There were latchkey kids, which was also the result of more women working. Single-parent families was not necessarily a good thing, for many children. I remember Bradshaw said it wasn't. But it was a general trend of the time, and it was not a direct result of the counter-culture or the self-actualization concept. But the general trend of the Awakening was for more freedom in lifestyle, including freedom from marriages that were not happy or supportive for women's aspirations (e.g. The Feminine Mystique), and divorce laws were weakened. So the trend of those times did create more neglect of children. But people who just wanted more freedom were not necessarily self-actualizing people.
Because Generation X, if middle-class, was still living in the post-WWII economic milieu, a working mother was giving her kids privacy. Did the kids use the privacy for their own efforts to reach for the stars, did they simply get too big a dose of TV programming made for adult interest, or did they simply abuse the unsupervised time? Chores are fine: mowing grass,doing dishes, and washing clothes was my way to make a contribution. I cannot say the same of the tougher urban areas, where kids had practically no privacy.
Getting stoned was obviously not self-actualization.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.