The Ideology of Hippies.

980 Words4 Pages
Hippie Ideology Many associations and images pop up in one’s head when he hear the word “Hippie”: Strangely clothed young people with long hair and unshaved beards, with flowers attached to their tie-dyed shirts, always smiling and having glassy eyes due to smoking marijuana. They drive around in colorfully painted VWs and listening to singers like Bob Dylan or Joan Baez, singing about war and peace and a world where all people can live together. Although, this image of the 60’s movements might appear true, it is a stereotype. What we really have is an increase in a peace movement that rejected the involvement in Vietnam. The Americans that represented the “hippie” movement, also known as the flower power movement have a difficult set of ideals, beliefs and conviction than mainstream America. The ideologies that we can correspond with the hippies are self-identification, free love, and living through chemistry. In the movement of the 60’s we see self-identification and how in any way it relates to the “hippie” movement. The meaning of self-identification is the attribution of certain characteristics or qualities to oneself. The “hippies” looked for escape to find ones self and what they believe in. Clothing and fashion was a big part of the Hippie’s self-identification. When one thinks about how a “Hippie” looks, everyone has the same image in his mind: Men with long hair and often beards, both not cut accurately but grown “wild”, women with even longer hair and colorful beads in it (Kunkel, 10). Many would argue that “hippies” enjoyed non-conforming to main stream beliefs and that they had no need to find them-selves. Self-identification was not the only ideology the “hippie” movement adopted but there was also free-love. Secondly, we will look at the hip and talkative free-love belief and how it was so frowned upon in any culture back in the 60’s
Open Document