07-31-2020, 08:09 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-31-2020, 08:22 PM by Eric the Green.)
(07-31-2020, 12:37 AM)Einzige Wrote: Did you guys even watch the documentary? It's not that long.
I've seen that thing before.
What I would concede to your point, Einzige, is that although the counter-culture and its various allies was a necessary and valuable step forward in human liberation and development, it was not sufficient. It was a generally-liberalizing influence. But many participants were moderate or conservative, using the movement's self-empowering and self-expressive trends to justify the self-reliance meme of Reaganomics, or at least helping business big-shots to reach their goals of "success" without any concern about what their businesses were doing.
In my Lifespring training (similar to est) in 1980, the trainer predicted Ronald Reagan would be elected president that year. He didn't say he favored him, and if I had had my horoscope scoring method available then, I might have predicted this too. Of course I was severely biased against him, and had the wrong chart, so I might have made the same mistake I made in 2016. The scores between Reagan and Carter were fairly close too; after all Carter had been elected in 1976 with a better score than Ford.
An activist value-set of concern for the oppressed and the poor and exploitation of the People by Capital does not always jive with human potential movements and self-expressive cultures. It's not a question of either/or though. Progressive people need to support both trends. I know that most San Francisco hippies were liberals, even if not always activists. Jefferson Airplane and Country Joe and the Fish made their left-wing political sympathies clear. I watched the first big anti-war demonstration on April 15, 1967 as it marched through San Francisco, with reporters observing as the numbers were swelled by all the hippies who joined in. Mutual influence worldwide between the two movements was constant and deep in 1968. Woodstock was also an anti-war protest.
Progress depends, I believe, on an idealistic view of human nature, not a materialist one. If we believe that we are capable of further developing, of having love and compassion and not just fear, we will more likely develop that way. It will work much better than believing in some revolutionaries who promise to overthrow the system by violence and then impose a dictatorship of the proletariat.