04-03-2019, 06:03 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-03-2019, 06:10 AM by Bill the Piper.)
(04-02-2019, 11:43 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: "The generation born after the war was especially prone to selfish hedonism and naive mysticism."
LOL There you go Bill. That's where you and other boomer-knockers miss the boatAnd you say this was a reaction to a war that we never experienced?
Yes it wouldn't happen without WW2. The war made many people question the ideas of rationality and progress. Hippies merely put this into practice, but the theoretical ideas existed as early as 1950. See Ray Bradbury's stories. His philosophical underpinnings are similar to what radical students of 1968 believed. And he was born in 1920!
Ayn Rand claimed the hippies were most conformist among all boomers, since they did what the post-war intellectual establishment preached. I'd add: some of this stuff goes back to the radical, Jeffersonian wing of the American revolution. But without the post-war disillusion, counterculture would be a fringe movement at best.
The same attitudes were present after WW1, but because it was another phase of the cycle, they didn't gain so much currency.