All you need is love (yeah, right on): The burnt-out optimism of the hippies

The hippie movement was a sort of mass hallucination powered by radical optimism; an optimism that, half a century on, it is not only difficult but a little embarrassing to believe anyone ever possessed, writes MM Owen

The hippies might have wanted in some abstract way to be selfless but they also wanted to be noticed, otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered with the tie-die (Getty)

Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton – an irascible, hard-drinking actor whose career is slipping through his fingers. It is the summer of 1969; on the other side of America, pensive under a red headband, Jimi Hendrix is giving Woodstock a fractured rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner”. But Rick Dalton isn’t the Woodstock sort. He hates the “flower children” wandering barefoot around Los Angeles, and his scorn is amusing. At the screening I attended, each time Dalton cursed the “fuckin’ hippies”, a chuckle rippled through the seats.

Tarantino’s movie plays on a cultural truth: it is acceptable to disdain hippies. Why? In one of the first literary passages I really loved, the protagonist of Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas looks back on the Sixties: “There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning… And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil.”

Right-wing contempt for this hippie vision is easy to understand; to a conservative, forces of old are not evil but the very bedrock of a liveable society, and an Age of Aquarius defined by love and harmony sounds like a mix of going soft and going insane. But what about those whose souls are a little stirred by the idea of Thompson’s inevitable victory?