While I think some of the social progress made during that time was beneficial(civil rights, women's rights, recognition of gays begins here too). Hippie culture and the ideals they espouse are inherently dangerous to the moral fabric of our society. I watched a documentary on hippies on the History channel one night, and my conclusion is that the whole movement is based on nothing more than access to, and the desire for illicit drugs and other peoples property. It's a very communist based system of ideals, which I find absolutely impractical and damaging to good order in society. People spoke of robbing food delivery trucks of their produce(theft), rampant use of illicit drugs and open sex(transmission of disease). These people obviously felt entitled to the fruits of other peoples labor, while providing no benefit to the society from which they robbed of those resources. The doc also mentioned an alliance of sorts amongst San Fransisco hippies and Hell's Angels to provide a sort of drug connection and protection for the hippies. I also view their naturalistic tendencies to be backwards and dangerous to the human race in the long term. While they might have some good ideas for living off the land in a sustainable manner, our species needs to move beyond that and focus on use of our resources to explore, and colonize space IMO. Hippie ideology would have us sitting here waiting for the next cosmic event to wipe us all out. I view them as a mostly mentally defunct portion of our society(mostly due to drugs, because some of them would be intelligent otherwise I think) that represents a regress of our human societies. Their ideals of peace, non-confrontation, and dissolution of states only put society at risk of being overrun by more powerful states who have no such respect for those ideals. I feel that overall hippies weaken society to the point that if we were to ever embrace their ideals, it would spell the end of western civilizations ideas of progress and scientific method.
