Are the Hippies Back?

There is a resurgence of young people interested in healing, yoga, health diets and awareness raising in general. For many this looks like a re-run of the 1960s’ hippie movement. Is this a revival, or did the original movement never actually die out? Is the new movement anti-establishment, a marketing ploy, and what is the ‘Brave Man Movement?’

Len Firewood, a retired IT consultant, and a member of the 1960s counter-culture joins the program to answer these questions and many others.

Len sees the current ‘neo-hippie’ movement as being a resurgence of an old movement which never finished. He traces the appearance of the first hippy movement back to post-war prosperity. “Before then, teenagers weren’t really a thing, …we had the mods and the rockers, and then we had something completely new, which originated in California. …What was different about this was that the mods, rockers and teddy boys were very materialistic, were all about having money in your pocket, spending it and impressing the birds, …what was different about the hippies was the rebellion against the [Vietnam] war.” At the same time, Len said, there was an explosion of experimental use of psychedelic drugs and these two elements came together to produce a movement which filled a vacuum at the time.

Len says that present conditions are certainly different from the 1960s, but they still do offer fertile ground for a resurgence of hippies, because the “hippies never really died out, they just faded into the background, …they variegated into other movements such as the New Age Movement and so on, …what I do find as a kind of facsimile of the purer form of hippiedom is in the Burning Man Movement, that also started in California and has gone global. Politically speaking, Len says that the new hippie movements tend to be in the progressive sector, but leaning towards the democratic parties, although many are “disillusioned with politics.”

There is a large section of commodification and commercialisation in the new movements, with ‘30-minute meditation packages’ which can be downloaded to your smartphone for example. But, Len says, there is a core section of people who “seem to be making a genuine spiritual exploration.”

A lot of the people involved in the new movements, Len says, are the children of hippies. “They have more money and they want to do it in a more luxurious way. I don’t think it is going to become the second revolution like the first one was.”

In general, the new movements seem to be to do with positive energy; a good thing. But, as Len says: “In the end of the day, you’ve still got to go out and chop wood.”

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