04-03-2019, 07:59 AM
(04-03-2019, 06:03 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:(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!
The progress of recent times had introduced the greatest potential for swift, irreversible, and unavoidable destruction. After the Second World War everyone feared the atom bomb, but before that was apocalyptic destruction of cities such as Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo with 'conventional' bombing with incendiary weapons. Add to this, the GI generation preferred a sort of anesthetic culture of comfort with few intellectual challenges except on the job (for which they were paid). Even GI cuisine was insipid by current standards.
It's hardly surprising that the kids saw such as empty, and wanted something more organic and sensory.
Quote: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.
Boomers had different ways of conforming, depending upon which direction they went. Aside from being confrontational and contrarian, I could make the case for the Religious Right being the most conformist of American Boomers. The Religious Right has been anti-intellectual in the extreme, even denouncing science when it contradicts a literal interpretation of the Bible. "6000 years ago, all in one week, there had to be a worldwide Flood, and believe it or burn in Hell).
Quote:The same attitudes were present after WW1, but because it was another phase of the cycle, they didn't gain so much currency.
Undeniably so with pacifist movements.
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.