The seeds of the sixties are largely located in the swirl of cultural currents that precipitated shifting social attitudes and sweeping social change. Values, lifestyles and institutions all received special scrutiny and challengeat different times and from different quarters.

         Thus the so-called Generation Gap was one of the root causes. The hippies gave the movement a distinctly anti-establishment character, rejecting certain values they labeled materialistic, business interests they characterized as rapacious and politics they lampooned while protesting and attacking its leaders and practitioners as bellicose and lacking moral authority. In this regard the signal issues of the day--the Vietnam War and civil rights--gave credence to certain aspects of the Hippie indictment of society's institutions. And perhaps those flash-points broadened the appeal of the Hippie movement while also giving it a moral dimension if not exactly depth.

         Hippies were non-conformist in their intention and anarchist in their practice, a heady mix of  idealism and rebellion. Clothing, hair and personal hygiene were all outward expressions of an internal and seemingly abrupt about-face on the current establishment. Timothy Leary’s famous advice toturn-on, tune-in and drop-out was but a psychedelic variant of a lifestyle exploration that, for many, combined an inward search with a outward release of pretense.

      Though emphatically non-materialistic, the idealized lifestyle was unabashedly hedonistic:“if it feels good, do it!” was one of the more common mantras of the sixties and the hippies that embodied so much of its spirit.