In “The Rage On Placid Lake,” a teenager tells his old hippie parents that they are selfish. The wife says, “Are not.” The husband says, “Are.”
I have some insight into this issue.
The hippies did not start out as being selfish. They started out fighting for all sorts of altruistic causes, such as civil rights, women’s rights and environmentalism. Then, as most people who had been hippies stopped being hippies, the people who remained hippies were left in their own world. And people who live in their own world are thought of as being selfish.
Basically, these people lost their connectivity. They were no longer involved in other people’s concerns as they had been. They lost their cause, and they lost the people. All they had left remaining is themselves. So they were portrayed as selfish.
Now to hear it from another side, we have Ayn Rand saying that selfishness is good. The problem with Ayn Rand’s philosophy is that it sees financial self-interest as the whole of rational interest. That is wrong. Science and education are rational interests as well, and without them business prosperity would be impossible. Ayn Rand is good for yuppies but terrible for teachers and scientists. And without teachers and scientists, prosperity would not exist. I’ve been a yuppie myself, and I did not find other yuppies to be more rational or responsible than scientists and teachers I’ve known. My grandmother was a teacher, and she was at least as ethical and responsible as any businessman or engineer.
As for old hippies, there are plenty on the Magnetic Island in Australia where I used to live. I get along with these people. They think that I am a genius, and I enjoy reading my poetry there. These people had to find a way to survive, and a number of them have done an excellent job of it. So I respect them.
As the hippies were left in their own world, where they could be portrayed as being selfish, the gen-Xers kept perpetrating the slander that they were narcissists. In fact I found these people to be more compassionate than the average person. There are some in New Age who believe very wrong things, such as that everything that happens to people is a reflection of what’s in their consciousness or that fear is at the root of all that’s wrong with the world or that positive thinking is the solution for everything. However these are the same people who at another time forswore their financial and status interest to fight for the rights of people from whom they had nothing to gain in return. And it is completely wrong that these people be seen as being more selfish than the average person.
I want these people to have a legacy. What they were seeking to accomplish at one point is right. And I also want to refute the misconceptions about these people. They are not more selfish than the average person; for a long time they were significantly less selfish than the average person. What happened was that they lost their cause and left in their own world. And that gives credibility to those who want to see them as having been selfish.