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.