I think we were right only in this. Peace requires inner transformation; no “system” can provide it. In just about everything else we were as wrong as can be.
It was interesting. Though some of the interests, styles, and lingo lasted, my opinion at the time was that the Hippies phenomenon was done by 1969 or 70 and even beginning to fade by the end of 67. It budded in 1965 and blossomed in 67, and faded fast.
I think it failed because most people want to do something, even if it's just make fancy candles to sell at Woodstock.
For my part, by the autumn of 67 I had come to believe that man's imperfections were serious and that he was not perfectible and certainly not by trying to be gentle, generous, and happy.
So I thought of the effort as a kind of naive flash in the pan. But it was too obviously impossible, as the waiting rooms of the STD clinics and the reliance on the generosity of people who actually had jobs made clear.
I think these things happen over and over again in history.
The hippies IMO weren’t consciously “guided” by anything other than the anti-establishment buzz and a reaching out, some sincerely others insincerely, for freedom, love, and peace.
In 1966-1967 I left the San Francisco Bay Area to be a freshman at University of Washington. Nothing unusual was going on in Seattle. When I left the Bay Area, things seemed pretty normal but music was changing a bit with the Jefferson Airplane and the Filmore in San Francisco, but generally things seemed the same as they had always been.
But when I got back in the summer of 1967, things had changed A LOT. All my friends were doing marijuana and the hippie thing was on its way.
I got to the point where I thought the hippies had some kind of secret or answer. But I found out in 1968 that what attracted me to the hippies was the freedom and love that I received from Jesus Christ.
Seems like there was a fork in the road for the hippies and the hippie movement. The “Jesus People” were the hippies whose sincere search for love and freedom brought them to Jesus Christ. Those who, as Bob Dylan said, just wanted to be on the side that’s winning, may have chanted “peace and freedom” but one way or the other their chants turned into cries for more and more government and less and less freedom.
I feel like the whole hippie thing was an emotional/spiritual filling of a vacuum left in society after the federal government unconstitutionally banned prayer and the Bible in public schools, although American society had been moving steadily away from faith in God for a long time and has continued in that direction until today.