Pro Commerce

Hippy Successes and Failures

One of the hippy successes was the Whole Earth Catalog. It was a masterpiece of a new form of encyclopedia and was the first version of the future Google.

I’ve written about many of the hippy successes and of the great social changes that hippies invented.  They include the modern universal bicycle, hang gliders and their offshoots, comfortable beds and countless artifacts that are too numerous to mention here.

The greatest impacts were in the extraordinary expansion of the American urban diet and cooking methods, the vast expansion of unusual religious orders and related thinking as well as the love of flowers and craft skills.  While not discussed openly, a wide range of psycho-active drugs gained widespread acceptance. Non-religious simple living and right livelihood gained ground as did homeschooling.

But what were the failures?  

The greatest hippy failure was their inability to promote the optimism that engulfed the hippy world view.  The hippies were joyous; the modern American world is grim and depressing.

The hippies loved hitchhiking. It couldn’t succeed because there is a small criminal underclass that can never be ignored. 

The biggest failure was in finding new social organizations.  Americans just can not live comfortably together in groups.  Communes, group houses and every form of communal living failed.  Many pairing and mating structures failed as well, whether it was open marriage or any of the various forms of polyamory.   

Hippies never indulged in politics even though the press confused them with the anti-war Left.  The worst hippy legacy is the modern street people who have destroyed San Francisco and a few other cities. Hippies made living on the street and in publicly visible areas a tolerable behavior that the future social outsiders, hobos, made a serious public nightmare.

The hippies founded environmentalism but focused heavily on the population explosion which later changed into human caused global warming eschatology.  The hippy fear of nuclear power made the situation worse.

All in all, it is too early to make historic judgments about the hippy era.  And I was too much of a central figure to also be involved in the historic evaluation.

Simple Livers

Harold Geneen, Coco Chanel, Peter Sellers, Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, and Cole Porter lived in hotels for many years of their lives.  Harold Geneen, the CEO of International Telephone and Telegraph in the 1960s and 70s lived in many hotels and kept a complete set of clothes in each one.

I wrote a book called Simple Living Investments in 1979.  It still sells. The theme was Simple Living for non-religious or spiritual reasons. My strongest arguments for simple living were that owned objects clutter the mind and life is freer with many more ways to live if one has a simple daily practice.  

At one point I had less than 100 objects in my van and lived as a house sitter.  That is much harder to do with a spouse and children.  It makes a conventional lifestyle more difficult. But I made the point that having or accumulating money was not in conflict as long as it wasn’t used to buy objects like houses and cars that divert attention to maintenance and worrying.

I’m a pilot and a sailor.  But I never owned a plane or a sailboat. For fifty years I was an active pilot with a single-engine plane that I used as a member of a flying club and sailed as a partner in a 30-foot sloop where I paid the moorage fee and paid for repairs resulting from racing.

I was always impressed with creative people who lived in hotels for the simplicity of daily living that that made possible. 

Many prominent mathematicians seem to live with virtually no possessions, just living on friends' couches and thinking about math. There is Elon Musk who seems to own no houses but lives with friends and on the airplanes where he spends much of his time.

The subject comes up because of my friend Alex who is handsome and very bright but lives in a modest apartment with very little furniture.  Alex has plenty of money.  Many women rapidly stop dating him after they see his modest apartment.

Why Employment Law Worked

My biggest and most famous lawsuit was about employment discrimination against women and minorities; it was an immediate societal success.  I have since figured out why it succeeded. 

The case was brought in 1971 by Bob Gnaida of the law firm Public Advocates against the Bank of California.  We won and the decision demanded an aggressive program with supporting money to promote women and minorities into management at all levels, promptly.  I brought the suit after leaving the Bank of California as a Vice President. I took with me all the incriminating internal evidence.

The major banks in America signed consent decrees to the settlement and banking quickly became the most integrated industry in America.

I tried to establish similar anti-discrimination lawsuits in housing and private clubs.

In housing I carried out many ventures with my wife in trying to rent apartments in upper income neighborhoods where we were followed by black couples (friends) who tried to rent the same apartments on the same day.  They never could rent the same apartments that we could. We had overwhelming evidence of discrimination against blacks but were never able to put together a lawsuit.  No law firm and no government agency would take the many cases offered.

Unlike the banking case where I had overwhelming computer printout payroll evidence, as was true throughout banking, in the case of housing, there were countless acceptable semi-legal reasons given by landlords for their preference for white renters.

In the case of private clubs Congress amended the anti-discrimination laws to exclude private clubs with less than 200 members and included only club lunches because the rest of the private club world didn’t directly seem to involve business issues.