Hippie

Clockwise from top:

Young people near the Woodstock music festival in August 1969; Button pins from the sexual revolution; Jefferson Airplane on the cover of Cash Box in 1967; An anti-war demonstrator offers a flower to a Military Police officer during the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam's 1967 March on the Pentagon.

Hippie (also spelled hippy in British English) is a youth subculture that began in the United States and became popular in the Western Bloc as part of the baby boomers generation. It is associated with the wider counterculture movement of the mid-1960s to early 1970s.

During the 1960s, the United States and the wider Western Bloc experienced unprecedented economic prosperity. Most hippies belong to the upper-middle class and lived in urbanized, educated and relatively developed countries, in contrast to the "Global South" which include Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia except Japan and Southeast Asia. This vast social net meant that hippies can afford social rebellion and conspicuous consumption with relatively few consequences to their careers by the time they reentered to the mainstream in 1980s. Though hippies participated in a multitude of different activities, one unifying thread is that they favored personal expression over structured political organizing of the era. In essence, hippies effectively turned left-wing politics into an aesthetic and lifestyle.

Influenced by the more mature New Left and civil rights movement, hippies adopted the vibe of the era and expressed it as a distinctive lifestyle: communal living, vegetarian diets, holistic medicine, long beards, psychedelic colors, etc. Some hippies use illegal drugs of the era, such as marijuana and LSD, to explore altered states of consciousness. They embraced the sexual revolution, participated in anti-Vietnam War protests, became involved in the New Age movements and generally engaged in idealistic utopian socialism. Driven by their detest on urbanization, some hippies participated in a back-to-the-land movement, where they experimented subsistence agriculture. Others took part in backpacking journeys that were almost akin to pilgrimages, both to meet other hippies and to observe developing countries along the hippie trail.

As the movement fade, many of the life-long followers of the hippie movement became prominent academics, left-wing politicians, musicians, spiritual leaders and entrepreneurs, which have a profound influence in the Western culture as they became the establishment themselves. In Western higher education, the hippie culture have established a culture of campus protest, student self-governance, and progressivism. The aesthetics of the hippie movement itself were rapidly institutionalized and commercialized during the 1980s as part of the yuppie culture.