Speaking as someone who’s lived and moved in hippy-adjacent spaces for most of my life: the hard truth that you should not trust most new age people as far as you can throw them
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Same opinion - and that rule seems to be valid internationally because I've found out that fact of life growing up in a very hippy-ish & supposedly left-winged rural area in Germany.
It’s funny because none of this is surprising. They’re softer versions of people who reject society and live on their own land. Both groups have a simple commonality: they don’t trust anyone or anything except what they already believe
ya this tracks, I know a few hippie-new age types that have pivoted hard-right since covid happened. once the anti-vaxx stuff set in, the rabid transphobia, and the "they're eating the pets!!" nonsense quickly followed.
Oh, my point is that the hippies were always conspiracy loving, gun nut racists who supported the worst politics and candidates.
Most were just libertarians who loved weed, cultural appropriation, and wanted to destroy the nation state, modern society and medicine, and social supports.
So that we could all live in farming communes ruled by paranoid white dudes with guns. Except, in the hippie version, the white guards have dreadlocks.
Like, that’s not an exaggeration. Had enough college bullshit sessions and keggers with hippies to realize the vibes were rancid.
As I understand it, the nutshell version is that there are a lot of folks who got pushed into hippie-ism in the 1960s and 70s by the draft & Vietnam, but were never really meaningfully liberal or on board with the stated political goals of hippies outside of 'end the draft, maybe legalize pot'
It basically proves the axiom: Punks are genuinely nice people who look and act like unfriendly assholes on the surface, new age hippies are genuinely unfriendly assholes who look and act like nice people on the surface.
I'm describing modern Punks. As a GenXer, I'm well aware of the rightward slant of GenX punks.
After all, in the old Penelope Spheeris film Suburbia, the whole point of the film is that the punks are just as intolerant, racist and homophobic as the conservative suburbanite homeowners they hate.
Can't find the exact quote right now, but I recall someone saying of the leftism of the hippies that it was based not on material analysis, but on a feeling. And the problem with that is if you're susceptible to one feeling, you're susceptible to another
I had a neopagan follower lose her shit on me on Twitter because I tweeted that it weirded me out that neopagans were appropriating Pennsylvania Dutch barn signs for folk magic, because the PA Dutch stole her true German paganism. At which point I decided it was getting too esoteric Nazi adjacent.
I’m not in the business of telling people what they are and are not, and I’m very open to people claiming witchcraft and other magical practices, but call yourself a “Druid” and my eyebrows really do go up
Neopaganism is its own (very interesting!) thing with a pretty interesting intellectual history, but quite what it has to do with pre-Christian paganism is, to say the least, contestable
Have already had to block a Druid who snivelingly insinuated that this observation is because I hang out around white nationalists. This thread is going to be so normal
One last thing I’ll say about this, and then I have to get to work: people tend to treat the New Age types as…well…new, an eruption of reënchantment in a secular age. The reality, of course, is that *disenchantment* has always been the non-normative phenomenon, and its grip lighter that admitted
Like within the history of humanity the new age movement is new but it’s 50+ years old now! Its basis is very old. We’d have to be real loose with the term secular for even that assumption to be true. New age to QAnon pipeline.
Because they are incurable narcissists. They are trying to bliss out on their own private peace. This is the ugly normie underbelly of hippie culture: Thin-skinned selfish wealthy white people.
I have always had values that align with conservation friendly hippies in the popular consciousness... but having spent a lot of my late teens and early 20s with actually hippies... most of them do not have the values pop culture attributes to them!
At one point in the mid-90's my stepson said to me, "I just realized that Punks are nice people pretending to be mean, and hippies are mean people pretending to be nice."
Many people into alternative healing modalities are quite reactionary against Western medicine. And unfortunately, Western medicine has given them plenty of reasons to feel that way.
The other problem is, white people need to stop doing Ayahuasca ceremonies.
I certainly don’t think it helped! People’s concerns about Democrats capturing and neutralizing genuine eruptions of revolutionary feeling are valid, but a lot of these groups were (I think unintentionally) just as bad
Was talking to an old guy at a DSA event and he had a wild tale about friends who were college activists with him in the 60s and then spent most of the seventies in a Maoist co-op house that just became more and more obviously a cult run for the benefit of one guy.
One reason, by the way, I don’t have much patience for the linking of cultic thinking with non-normative religion: it’s pretty clear that cults happen when an organization — and it can be any kind — turns cancerous
I've been trying to do battle with my mom's anti-science beliefs for my entire life. I'm happy to report that she has avoided becoming right-wing, but I've had to argue with her about vaccines, fluoride, and whether "climate change is really just caused by changes in the sun's intensity"
If you think your feelings and your ego takes precedence over evidence and logic, you're a reactionary, and it doesn't take much for you to go from being one kind of a reactionary to being another.
My ex wife is one of these. She was a huge Clinton supporter and worked on his campaign, but then turned against Barack Obama, used racist slurs. It made no sense to me, but a lot of things she did made no sense. I didn't care anymore because I'd decided that marriage was over right about then.
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Most were just libertarians who loved weed, cultural appropriation, and wanted to destroy the nation state, modern society and medicine, and social supports.
Like, that’s not an exaggeration. Had enough college bullshit sessions and keggers with hippies to realize the vibes were rancid.
After all, in the old Penelope Spheeris film Suburbia, the whole point of the film is that the punks are just as intolerant, racist and homophobic as the conservative suburbanite homeowners they hate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z802lX8SnzQ
I'm just like "That tracks" 🫠
The other problem is, white people need to stop doing Ayahuasca ceremonies.
Seriously. Once is fine. Maybe.
I also think the reason activism suffered in the 90s was an over-abundance of this crowd in the movements.
literally kidnap you, traffic you across the country, and force you to work for free in one of their bougie restaurants.
Do Not get on that bus.
The “Free Mumia” scene devolved quickly from a social justice prison reform movement into a parasocial cult revolving around a charismatic author.
Even if their politics supposedly align with yours.