The Hippy Movement

I regard the Hippy movement of 1967 as a sort of high point in American social and intellectual life.   It ended badly in many ways, but the intentions were good, and many great things resulted.    Here's a short description of the Hippy belief system:

Love.  Love your neighbor, love your enemies.  This is not about sex.  This is an old idea and is central to the dogma of many of the great religions.  The hippies really believed in it, unlike the so-called Christians.

Free Love.  This is about sex.  The pill, cures for most STDs, safe birth control removed most of the taboos associated with free love.  AIDs and the profit motive made it not work out so well as it had seemed at first, but the intentions were good.  (The "summer of love" ended when pimps and pushers moved in on Haight-Ashbury to exploit the thousands of teens who had come from all over the country)

Sharing.  Perhaps the most important thing the hippies did, it's an outgrowth of Love.  We're all in this together.  If I have something that you need, I should give it to you.  The Personal Computer and the World Wide Web are very direct outgrowths of this idea.  Jobs, Woz, Felsenstein, and many others were all Hippies at one time in their life or another.  Most of the early BBS systems were done by hippies. Ted Nelson invented Hypertext to share knowledge, and Tim Berners-Lee figured out how to put it on the Internet, so Jimmy Wales could do Wikipedia--the ultimate implementation of Ted Nelson's idea.  All were strongly inspired by the attitudes of the hippy movement.

Appearances are irrelevant.  except when they are, for example an artists work.  A persons value is their contribution to the community and how happy they are, not the way they look, how much money or stuff they have, how good they are at throwing a football, etc.  The hippies used "Beautiful" to mean something very different than the dictionary.

Drugs and Music are capable of great things.  I'm not so sure about the drugs part anymore, but the main hippy drugs, marijuana and LSD, are far less harmful than their detractors insist (and compared to Alcohol and Crystal Meth respectively, pretty harmless in absolute terms).  Music is the fastest, most direct, most universal form of communication yet invented by man.   The nomenclature is a little vague at times, there are clearly some people who just don't get some types of music.