From "The Gates of Eden" to "Day of the Locust"
DANIEL A. FOSS &RALPH W. LARKIN

Humboldt Journal Volume 3 Number 1 Fall/Winter 1975

THE 1960s were marked by the rise of a dissident youth culture, characterized by the following three mutually reinforcing developments:

1. Increasing conflict with the dominant society. It began as a liberal reform movement in the early '60s, dedicated to the implementation of civil rights to Southern blacks.

However, as it evolved, the level of conflict increased until 1968-69, when visions of revolution were held forth as the only alternative to existing society.

2. Growing reinterpretation of social reality in the course of which dominant institutions and elites were first questioned and then repudiated as the possessors of legitimate authority. By 1968, the principles of property ownership and hierarchy were rejected as neither necessary nor desirable.

3. Revaluation of the self and its capacities. Young people began to participate in "mass therapy" by which they could rid themselves of ego-crippling character deformations which are part and parcel of their socialization into a stable condition of social subordination.

As circumstances changed, a new collective evaluation of "where it's at" would be made and a new cultural phase would be generated.

In this paper we trace these changes and transformations of the '60s youth movement and the post-movement organizations which it spawned in the 1970s.

The origins of the movement began in the late 1950s years were marked by vague cultural protest amon middle class youth influenced on the one hand by t Generation and on the other by the popularity of rock among teenagers. Seen in retrospect, this movement s an inchoate ideology expressing intense genera resentment and demands for sexual freedom. The first overt political phase of the movement was the Old New Left (1960-65). This phase lasted from the beginning of the support for black integrationists in the South to the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. Largely concerned with "community organizing" and university reform, this phase gave prominence to self-sacrifice and gentle humanitarianism ("serve the people"). Its most notable ideologist was Tom Hayden ("participatory democracy"). In the Hippie Phase (1965-1967), the depth of the cultural revolt was drastically expanded and its intensity increased. Developing a shared culture around drugs, sex, music, and individualistic mysticism, they constituted themselves as walking critiques of bureaucratic rationality. The next phase we call the New New Left (1967-69). Responding to the failure to transform society through the diffusion of drugs and the outbreak of mass black

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violence at a time of increasing escalation in Vietnam, the youth culture turned in the direction of dreams of social revolution. Psychedelic posters were replaced by Che and Mao posters. Acid rock gave way to hard rock. Day-glo was superceded by jeans and crash helmets, be-ins by confrontations.

The overt-political impulse largely exhausted itself by 1969 and gave way to the Woodstock Aquarian Phase (1969-70) beginning with the Woodstock festival of August, 1969. This was another cultural-intensification phase. The freak-radical personal ideal of "together" (consolidation of the self in a posture of revolt) gave way to the new ideal of "mellow" (calm luxuriating in simple natural joys). Hard rock music was replaced by country rock. The characteristic institution was the commune. Thousands of communes, both rural and urban, were founded. The Whole Earth Catalogue was the bible of the commune minded; health foods and vegetarianism came into great vogue.

The post-movement period began after the Cambodian invasion and lasted through 1973. Organizations which appealed to dissident youth during this period were authoritarian and helped members accommodate to the status quo rather than appeal for revolutionary changes through conflict with the dominant social structure.

The Freak Vision as the Basis for Interpreting Reality As it developed during the 1960s, the ideology of the white middle class youth movement had a vague formulation and coherence. It never achieved the intellectual systematization of a doctrine because of its strongly subjectivist nature ("if it feels bad, it's repressive") which defined reality in the terms of personal experience that stood in opposition to bureaucratic rationality as the arbiter of truth. What is more, each would-be formulator - writer, musician, or mythical figure - emphasized different facets of the shared subjectivist ideology. We might describe this vague formulation as a "vision" and briefly outline some of its principal features.

First, the end of material scarcity had rendered outmoded a socio-economic system in which sheer economic accumulation had been retained as an end in itself. The very abundance made it feelable if not thinkable that the allocation of goods and the organization of labor could be based on other than the market mechanism. Material abundance made it seem ridiculous for people to be, in Ray Mungo's words, "charged so many dollars a day for the right to go on living." Abbie Hoffman, as the leader of the New York City Diggers, proclaimed: "There is enough to go around! Take what you need! Everything is free!" The foremost articulators of the shared subjectivist ideology urged youth to intensify their awareness of the repressive influence of scarcity assumptions and the intrusion of the market mechanism into the minute areas of everyday life.

The second significant component of this vision was expressed when the Beatles sang to youth of the advanced capitalist West, "all you need is love....Love is all you need." Their message should be interpreted as literally as possible: the real material needs of people are relatively simple and have already been satisfied. Therefore the only thing that people need is that which they do not yet have - love. "Love," in the vision of the 1960s, is a short-hand for elaborate and complex efforts to develop new forms, styles, and intensities of being which could only come to fruition in a social order yet to be constructed.

In the hippie phase of the youth culture, "love" was far and away the most powerful catchword. The sixties thus witnessed a vast and profuse explosion of communes, collectives, encounter groups, affinity groups, "families," "tribes," group marriages, and whatnot, as people in considerable numbers explored the multifarious possibilities of "getting by" and "getting high" with a "little help from my friends."

A third feature of the white middle class youth culture vision of the 1960s was the quest for higher states of consciousness, mystical and spiritual experiences, getting high, getting off, or whatever it was called. Such states were induced through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, peyote, and psylocybin; the practice of yoga and meditation (especially in the later cultural phases); and the participation in highly charged communal activities (e.g., group sex or communal dancing).

A fourth major element of the "vision" of the white middle class youth culture of the 1960s was, of course, sexual liberation. Sexual freedom was upheld not only because of the possibilities of sheer pleasure, but also because it was felt that the loss of sexual inhibitions necessarily carried with it an oppositional stance toward conventional culture and the established social order. The most famous slogan to emerge from the hippie period was "make love, not war."

A fifth feature of this vision was the rejection of hierarchical structure and organizational routine. In the early stages the emerging social groupings seemed to have no manifest purpose beyond "being" (this was the time of the "be-in") - itself interpreted as an oppositional stance toward organized society. The principle of the avoidance of purposeful individual and collective activity became integrally related to the shared myth of "being" at this stage, because many individuals were at this time preoccupied with disentangling their "authentic" motivations from "inauthentic" ones - experiences imposed on them by a social order which made no apparent sense.

The suspicion of "goals" and organized collective action extended into the realm of overt politics and any large-scale organized activity within the movement. Vociferous charges of manipulative plots were made against many movement organizations. Abbie Hoffman realized the freak youth would never accept the discipline of "serious" revolutionaries. He therefore broke with the traditional Marxist theory of revolution as the outcome of a class struggle in which the insurgent class is progressively molded in a planned fashion in both organization and consciousness until it is ready for disciplined armed struggle to destroy the existing state apparatus. Instead, he held forth a concept of revolution as a spontaneous anarchic explosion of individuals and emerging collectivities pursuing unrepressed and joyous development in an increasingly uncompromising fashion and opposing repression of all spheres of everyday life ranging from school rules to parental authority, from the exchange of money for goods and services to pay toilets. He gave this idea shorthand expression in the title of his book, Revolution for the Hell of It (Hoffman, 1968), which he authored under the pseudonym "Free."

Redefinition of the Self

The rise of the subjectivism led young people to redefine themselves in subjectivist terms, centering on here-and-now

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experience (the answer to the question "Where do you live? " is "Wherever I am.") or universalist pantheism ("I am God.

You are God. Everything is God."). By redefining themselves in terms of the present or the cosmic, dissident youth could throw off the ego-crippling negative evaluations of the dominant culture. Terms such as "neurotic," "failure," and "deviant" were oppressive labels that denoted deficiencies of performance of expectations imposed by an obsolete social order. They were mechanisms by which people were coerced into compliance with organizational requirements.

Liberation, in addition to its overtly political connotations, meant allowing full expression of personal impulse. Psychic disorder was redefined as the repression of impulse. Psychic liberation was conceived as the ability of people to free themselves of their social armor and personal inhibitions that prevented them from having fun. "Hangups" in youth culture argot were those aspects of the self that prevented free-flowing activity. They could be accepted or confronted. Oftentimes, hangups would lead to "freak-outs" or "bummers." Acid-trips would often force a confrontation with inhibitions, fears, or repressed desires. Such confrontations became the battlegrounds in the struggle to reconstruct the self.

By the late 1960s, "freakified" youth were exploring what were, to them, previously unknown aspects of self-hood.

Indulgence in drug experiences, sex, communal activities, be-ins, sit-ins, demonstrations, riots, busts, trips with no destination in particular not only gave subculture members a set of common experiences, but also uncovered vast new capacities of self-hood for exploration. New depths of love, hate, anger, sorrow, and elation were generated by participating in such activities. In the musical Hair, 1968 is asked by 1948 what makes him so damn superior. He responds:

I got life, mother,
I got laughs, sister,
I got freedom, brother,
I got good times, man.

I got crazy ways, daughter,
I got million dollar charm,
I got headaches, toothaches,
An' bad times too, like you.

The point made by 1968 is that the difference is not in the categories of experience, but in the depth of the experience.

Freak youth existed as a critique of bourgeois rationality that limited both the breadth and depth of experience by encapsulating it within the formalized structures of society so that it could be monitored and kept within the bounds of conventional control. Once those bounds were broken, previously unexplored aspects of self emerged which were both frightening and seductive. Because of the pure pleasure that sensual indulgence generated, many people could not resist the temptation.

Indicative Minorities and Vanguard Nuclei

The white middle class youth movement of the 1960s can be clearly demarcated into a series of cultural phases of ever-diminishing duration which, in retrospect, are clearly identified with one or more "indicative minorities" which at the time gave mythic expression to the inchoate feelings of a far wider youth population. Participants in the indicative minorities were normally distinguishable by being engaged full time - either as dropouts or as nominally-matriculated students - in activities which were currently most fashionable with the dissident youth culture and which gave to each successive cultural phase its distinctive cast. For example, during the Old New Left (1960-65) the main indicative minority consisted of civil rights workers, freedom riders, and succeeding waves of young people who went South in support of integration, community organizers, and other political reformers of various preoccupations. During the Hippie Phase (1965-67) the principal indicative minority was that of the drug-culture dropouts. The freak-radicals were the most important indicative minority of the New New Left period (1967-69). In the culturally fragmented situation of the period 1969-70, which marked the beginning of the end of the movement, there were several indicative minorities, none of which achieved clear predominance; these included commune residents, embittered radicals and prototerrorists, natural-foods enthusiasts, and radical environmentalists.

Participants in the "indicative minorities" had moral ascendancy within the dissident subculture as a whole and they themselves scorned part-time movement participants as "liberals," "plastic hippies," or "plastic radicals." But within the indicative minorities there were generated leadership elites which we call "vanguard nuclei." These nuclei exercised leadership not through organizational machinery but by exemplifying the current ideals and preoccupations of the dissident subculture to an extreme, dramatic, mythical, or heroic extent. By serving as moral examples (or, if you will pardon the expression, "role models") to their contemporaries, they were hailed as leaders or heroes at the local, national, or - in some cases - even international levels.

Nuclei were almost always either primary groups or networks of a few primary groups. Some of them were identified as the entourages of particular mythical figures but more commonly they were popularly known under collective names.

Prominent nuclei during the 1960-65 period included the leaders of SDS, SNCC (before the expulsion of the whites), and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Typical nuclei of the 1965-67 period included acid-rock groups such as the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane, anarcho-hip community self-help groups such as the Diggers, the entourages of such personalities as Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, and the staffs of underground newspapers. During the 1967-69 period significant nuclei included the SDS National Office collective and anarcho-freak-radicals such as the Yippies and the Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers. The 1969-70 period was replete with an assortment of vanguard nuclei reflecting the loss of cohesion of the dissident subculture: the feminists were developing pioneer women's collectives; the communalists were inspired by a number of famous communes in the rural areas of Oregon, New Mexico, Colorado, and Vermont, as well as by the Hog Farm troupe (one of whose members, Stewart Brand, was the father of The Whole Earth Catalogue).

Embittered radicals developed collectives, some of which, including those of Weatherman (later Weather Underground), were evolving into terrorism.

Decline of the Movement

The 1969-70 period marks the watershed of the white middle class youth movement. It was during this period that

Volume 3 Number 1 Fall/Winter 1975 21

the processes which define the existence of a social movement-intensification of social conflict, reinterpretation of social reality, and redefinition of the self-ceased to be mutually reinforcing. Two developments stood out: first, the movement participants no longer attempted to bring greater coherence to the still fragmentary freak vision. Second, and relatedly, a dissociation occurred between the objectives of personal liberation and social transformation-which hitherto had been increasingly experienced as indissolubly linked.

The end of the decade saw the movement develop a number of divergent thrusts. This divergence, had the movement not exhausted itself, might have foreshadowed a broadening and deepening of revolt, rather than its end. But as it happened, each thrust by itself represented a path to accommodation or to the encapsulation of dissidence.

Communal living served to impart to the participants the subjective experience of living in a libertarian-communist social order such as might prevail following a revolution.

Commune residents sought to determine their "natural" balance of material, spiritual, intellectual, sexual, and work needs in opposition to the definition of needs which prevailed in the "plastic" society they had repudiated. Conceivably, this experience might have imbued them with a clearer vision of the ultimate objectives of the movement as well as a sense of the irreconcilability of the provisional alternative society with the social order at large as then constituted. This did not happen. For the most part, they came to believe that salvation lay in the small group and that the masses in the cities and campuses were best left to stew in their own corruption.

Commune residents were uninterested in conflict beyond handling the "hassles" with hostile locals. Both the rural and urban communes disintegrated after a brief period. Greed, jealousy, and ego-tripping were inevitably brought in from the wider society by the commune members despite their earnest intentions to suppress such behavior traits.

The thrust toward ecology-environmentalism might have added a new dimension to the movement and a new set of issues around which militant struggle could develop. There was, in fact, no shortage of radicals declaring that preservation of the environment was incompatible with capitalism and "the system." But the actual result was confusion and accommodation. Very quickly every major politician and corporate head declared against pollution. For their part, most eco-freaks failed to expend the sort of passion on environmental issues that was being deployed over the Vietnam War and student power. Many, in fact, welcomed the opportunity to shift away from issues in which young people were isolated against the authorities, feeling themselves driven to dangerous forms of protest, to issues around which they could ally with the respectable middle class and employ more genteel means of struggle. Environmentalism, therefore, far from intensifying the sense of irreconcilable differences between freaks and straights, rather led to attenuation of that estrangement. In the ideological sphere, eco-freaks developed a great vogue for the elitist, technocratic, and non-conflictual theories of Buckminster Fuller. In other spheres of culture the eco-freaks were preoccupied with measures for individual salvation. Eco-freakism coincided with the growing popularity of vegetarianism ("Love your little animal friends. Don't eat them."), organic foods, macrobiotic diets, Vitamin E, hatha yoga exercises, Tai-Chi, backpacking, and meditation. There was a growing acceptance of the notion that the attainment of happiness did not require conflict with anyone-only the purity of one's precious bodily fluids and an unspoiled view of the Sierras.

In still another thrust of the movement in this period, the embittered radicals carried subjectivist ideology to its logical conclusion. This could have been done only against the backdrop of the decomposition of the dissident subculture, since freak culture, always a mass of contradictions because of its dependence for its dissemination on commercialization and mass-media publicity, never carried anything to its logical conclusion so long as it possessed vitality. But now the embittered radicals, experiencing themselves as isolated kamikaze for the struggles of Black Panthers, Vietnamese, or the Cubans, huddled together and sealed themselves off in tightly-knit collectives. Weatherman heightened mutual love and demolished "bourgeois" individual egos in marathon group therapy ("criticism-self criticism") sessions. Solidarity was further heightened with group LSD trips and enforced promiscuity ("Smash monogamy!"). Weatherpeople purified their souls and expunged middle class inhibitions against the use of violence by staging mass hate tantrums ("Wargasms").

Thus cleansed within, Weatherman and kindred groups defined themselves as a moral elite and proceeded to offend nearly everyone lacking their resolution and noble depth of feeling.

Their craving for the experience of struggle led them beyond the point of contact with a movement of white middle class youth impelled to conflict because of the experience of repression as white middle class youth. Such a thing, to Weatherman and the life, was sinful, the outcome of "white skin privilege." Conflict and confrontation had, for movement participants, always been in large measure therapeutic; but the embittered radicals now turned conflict into therapy pure and simple without any relation to the articulation of the shared experiences of the mass of youth. Thus, their contribution to social transformation was nil.

There was more campus disorder during the 1969-70 academic year than the previous one (Sale, 1974: Chapter 25).

But with the breakup of SDS in June, 1969, the protests had lost their national focus. They tended to be isolated, often unreported, and of the single-issue variety. Confronted by movement "heavies" with their newly learned Marxist doctrine, the arrogant Weatherman, and the welter of established Marxist sectarians, many disaffected young people recoiled from their coherent reinterpretation of social reality.

They did not establish new nuclei capable of articulating or mythically dramatizing their experiences. The one remaining source of political coherence was the Nixon Administration, with its prosecution of the Chicago Seven and the invasion of Cambodia by U.S. armed forces. Under these circumstances many young people became susceptible to leadership by liberals whom they had previously scorned. On November 15, for instance, the liberals summoned half a million people-the vast majority of them young- to the largest peace demonstration in history in Washington, D.C. Even when the Kent State shootings touched off a spontaneous nationwide student general strike, the students responded to another call by the liberals for a Washington rally (May 9), but the anger melted away in the warm sunshine and people frolicked naked in the fountains.

Feminism appeared as a major force at the very time (1969-70) that the freak insurgency was losing momentum. At the beginning of the 1970s male participants in the expiring

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movement, faced with growing apathy and floundering for a political and cultural stance, found themselves confronted by confident and energetic women who had something to believe in. Male activists were further forced to deal with sex role problems they would have rather avoided. Some of these men chose to become "fellow-travelers" of feminism. Others accelerated their withdrawal from social conflict.

The rise of feminism might have provided a stimulating, intensifying, and deepening effect upon the insurgencies of youth culture. The actual results were different. On the one hand the conflictual motives for the maintenance of the boundary between freak and straight were abating; on the other hand feminism itself rapidly overleapt that boundary and percolated widely among middle class women of differing "life-styles" and ages. The bond of gender became more significant that those of generation or "counterculture".

Under the impact of feminism it became possible for suburban housewives to flee their husbands to join women's collectives in the central cities, but it became equally possible for ex-freak and semi-freak women to mount a campaign for careers open to talent within existing bureaucracies. Given the attenuation of other social conflicts, "women's lib" became extremely fashionable as the freaks had once been- and for publishers and TV networks extremely profitable.

As the characteristic mass-gathering in the Hippie phase had been the "be-in" and that of the 1967-69 period the "confrontation," in 1969-70 the appropriate equivalent was the music festival. The most famous one, the Woodstock festival (August 25-29, 1969), became legendary in rock songs and oral tradition. Abbie Hoffman tried to create a freak nationalism around the legend in his book, Woodstock Nation (Hoffman, 1970). Superficially, a music festival resembled a be-in to the extent of its atmosphere of collective frolic and the prevalence of drugs. But in a be-in the hippies had not been simply "being," they were a novelty as a social category and were incidentally outraging the conventional public with their massed outlandishness. But in 1969 freaks were no longer a novelty and the relative growth in their respectability was revealed when Life magazine published a special issue on Woodstock. The mood at a festival was totally non-conflictual and this was abetted by the circumstance that at a very large gathering the freaks were dependent upon the promoters and their hired guards to maintain order and essential services.

Crosby, Stills, and Nash (singing Joni Mitchell's song) neatly tied the Woodstock legend to the non-hostile eco-freak mentality: "We've got to get ourselves back to the Garden." Although in the unfolding of the white middle class youth movement of the last decade personal liberation came to be seen as inseparable from social transformation, this was not equally true of all movement participants at all times. During cultural intensification phases (Preparatory phase, 1955-60; Beat Generation, Chubby Checker - Elvis Presley; Hippie phase, 1965-67) personal liberation seemed paramount, while during overt political phases (1960-65; 1967-69) political and social change appeared to be the most pressing necessity.

There were people who consistently favored one at the expense of the other through each successive phase. But 1969-70 was a cultural intensification phase; and it was also the last phase. From this time forward more and more movement participants abandoned hope of making any dent in the established power but retained faith in the possibility of personal liberation in one form or another. Against them were ranged a growing band of "serious" radicals, Marxist sectarians, and neo-Stalinists who, dancing on the corpse of the movement, insisted that the lesson be learned that the revolution must first occur before people are permitted to do as they please- if then.

The hippies had initiated a broadening and deepening of the dimensions of dissidence to include everyday life. They sensitized themselves to experience repression in every aspect of the conventional culture; drugs, sex, and hair became political issues in the sense that they involved conflicts over the exercise of power over individual behavior in everyday life.

But the 1969-70 phase, by contrast, failed (the feminists aside) to explore new arenas of cultural conflict or to intensify the sense of irreconcilability of freak culture with that of the straights. Although great satisfaction could be derived, as at music festivals, from the sheer number of people now involved in freak culture, the aggressiveness was draining away. Freaks were by now inclined to do as they pleased as if the straights did not exist, relying for security on their numbers; the music festival was again highly symbolic in this regard. There was an ebbing of the passion for "doing your thing" as an act of war against a depraved enemy.

The collective self-satisfaction of the freaks in 1969-70 led logically into hedonism without oppositional content. It also dovetailed into the temptation to psychologize-to focus upon one's "hangups" in isolation from the context of cultural repression and social suppression. To cater especially to the affluent hip and the hipified rich seeking salvation on the personal and small-group levels, new therapies spread rapidly: Esalen, Primal Scream, and CoCounseling in California; Sullivanian and Reichian therapy in New York. The tendency to psychologize recoiled upon feminism, draining it of the revolutionary vision of its pioneers. As commonly practiced, "consciousness-raising" became more and more exclusively a species of therapy, concentrating heavily upon "relationships" and upon the removal of intrapsychic blocks to success in conventional careers.

By 1970-71 the two greatest cultural idols officially declared the movement at an end. John Lennon announced that "the dream is over," while Bob Dylan sang of his "day of the locust" as he, ideologist to a generation of rebels, was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree at Princeton.

Each found the only alternative to despair in privatization and domesticity. Lennon: "I just believe in me/ Yoko and me/ And that's reality." Dylan: "Build me a cabin in Utah/ Marry me a wife and catch rainbow trout/ Have a bunch of kids who call me pa/ That must be what it's all about." To retain anything like a coherent version of the freak vision in the absence of an unfolding social movement became progressively more painful for most former movement participants. Most resorted to a number of adaptations to attain painless quiescence. A minority resorted to terrorism or, more commonly, to routine perpetuation of movement activities. There was always another meeting, another rally, another "mobilization," even if one had sworn off ever attending another one, knowing in advance that it would be a waste of time. But another group gravitated toward the indicative minorities of the early 1970s, the post-movement groups. Each of these organizations provided a faith and a discipline which enabled the believers to liquidate or fragment in themselves the vision of the 1960s and to legitimate this process in the language of the 1960s: either discovery of the Volume 3 Number 1 Fall/Winter 1975 23 True Self and Transcendence or social revolution-but not both. Moreover, some of these groups capitalized on the 1960s cult of pure Experience and channelled it to foster acceptance of heirarchy and asceticism; while others sought to shape experience in accordance with the prescriptions of the sacred texts of Marxism, Hinduism, or Christianity. John Lennon was already aware of the gods of the 1970s and thought he understood their appeal: "God is a concept/ By which we measure/ Our pain." His long list of die ties in which he said he did not believe included "Jesus," "Buddha," "Mantra," "Gita," and "Yoga." He left out Marx, and was about to worship at that shrine himself after a spell in Primal Scream.

But many in his huge audience were unable to follow his advice: "And so dear friends/ You just have to carry on/ The dream is over." Post-Movement Groups Post-movement groups can be classified according to their historical and cultural relationship to the white middle class youth movement of the 1960s. Some evolved organically out of the decomposing youth culture at the end of the 1960s or later. In this category we would include the Divine Light Mission of Guru Maharaj Ji, authoritarian communes like the Lyman Family, the Manson Family, and the Metellica Aquarian Foundation of Amherst, Massachusetts, and the Marxist sects that arose from the ashes of SDS (e.g., the October League and the Revolutionary Union). Other groups were formed at least in part in order to repudiate some or all the characteristic cultural manifestations of the '60s either during the movement period or afterward. Such groups include the Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation (a fundamentalist Christian sect), the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (the Hare Krishnas), the Progressive Labor Party, and the National Caucus of Labor Committees. Still other groups antedated the existence of the movement, sometimes by decades. They did not appeal to freak youth during the movement period, but received an influx of former movement participants and younger people after the demise of the movement. Exemplary of these groups are L. Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology and the Communist and Socialist Workers Parties.

Post-movement groups, regardless of whether their manifest goal was to transform the social order through the development of a revolutionary vanguard, as in the case of the Marxist sectarians, or through propagation of the faith, as in the case of the religious sects, developed an authoritarian structure, formally articulated with sharp boundary definition.

Most of these groups developed a cult of personality around a single leader who served as an embodiment of the vision of the membership, and to whom they demonstrated extravagant servility. In the cases of the religious groups, the leader became deified and worshipped. Prabupad (A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, the spiritual master of the Hare Krishnas), Guru Maharaj Ji of the Divine Light Mission, and Moses David of the Children of God are all examples of such deities. Even in cases where post-movement groups were established on non-religious grounds, such deification occurred. Mel Lyman, the founder of "The Lyman Family," a Boston area freak commune, had proclaimed himself God by 1967. Victor Barranco, the originator of the More Houses in Oakland, California, became the spiritual father of the "marks" (his term) he exploited in a profit-making scheme to rebuild old houses. What makes him so incredible is that he induced young ex-freaks to rebuild houses without compensation and, after they finished, charged them $200 a month to live in them. He also ran the Institute of Human Abilities, which amounted to having his devotees pay up to $65 for an hour in his presence. In the cases of the Marxist sectarians, Lyn Marcus of the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) is credited with the ability to foretell the precise development of world capitalism for the next five years, eventuating in a world-wide depression which will culminate in the mass strike process-in the midst of which the Labor Committee, knowing exactly what to do, will seize power.

Each of these groups is pyramidal in structure with lines of authority highly articulated from the top down. The NCLC, directed by ex-efficiency expert Marcus, operates a tight-knit bureaucracy which measures its progress by the hour! The Divine Light Mission is rampant with titleism and has developed a centralized bureaucratic structure which spends most of its effort printing, filling out, filing, and data processing forms that monitor organizational activity. The Guru himself holds the titles of Supreme Director and Supreme Chief Executive of the Mission. Smaller groups and authoritarian communes manifest patriarchal rather than bureaucratic structures. In these cases, as in the Lyman Family or the Alamo Foundation, the authority comes directly from the leader.

Each group has appropriated a fragment of the freak vision, often using it as the basis of legitimation of the authoritarian structure. The servility of the members is used as evidence of spirituality, ego-transcendence, or even manifestations of peace and love. When members allow themselves to be subject to heirarchical authority, such personal subjugation is prima facie evidence of commitment to the propagation of love and peace or the historical necessity of the revolution.

Post-movement groups developed non-conflictual stances toward society-at-large. Like their predecessors, they all believed in the inevitability of radical change; however, unlike dissident youth, they believed that social transformation could not be achieved by immediate action upon and conflict with objective social reality, but must be brought about by the attainment of spiritual perfection by the members and the diffusion of spiritual perfection to broad sectors of the population. Where conflict did occur, it was not with the larger society, but between post-movement groups competing with each other for similar constituencies or over minute differences in doctrine. For example, in mid-1973, the NCLC began "Operation Mop-up," a campaign to destroy the Communist Party by beating up its members. At a Divine Light Mission Festival 30 Hare Krishnas were arrested protesting Guru Maharaj Ji's claim to Perfect Mastership.

All post-movement groups break sharply with the notion, widely disseminated in the late 1960s among white middle class youth, that removal of limitations on immediate gratification and rediscovery of the body is inextricably combined with the process of the transformation of the entire social order. Instead, they stand for a reversion to an earlier cultural syndrome: they advocate self-discipline, self-sacrifice, hard work, systematic and orderly living, and renunciation of the pleasures of the flesh.

These groups minutely regulated the everyday lives of their membership. Short hair, conventional dress for men and 24 HUMBOLDT JOURNAL OF SOCIAL RELATIONS modest dress for women have been the norms in several groups. Most prohibited the use of substances defined by the conventional culture as "drugs," and many have banned alcohol as well. All or nearly all of these groups have discouraged uninhibited sexuality and many have encouraged sexual abstinence. Among the Jesus Freaks and the Eastern sects, renunciation of sexuality tended to be a sign of spiritual perfection and of the fact that one was relying on the source of ultimate satisfaction which lies within: The Holy Spirit; Krishna, The Reservoir of Pleasure; Theta (in Scientology); or the universal Energy source (Divine Light Mission). Among the Marxist sects, sexual restraint seemed to be taken as a sign that one is "serious." A member of the NCLC once boasted, "I've got no time for girls. I'm too busy doing class organizing." Some groups, such as the Children of God and the Hare Krishnas, have not discouraged marriage, but insist that marital sex be intended exclusively for purposes of procreation.

All post-movement groups maintain a fierce exclusivity based on the claims of their doctrines and leaders to embody a monopoly of the truth. However, the similarity of their functions is revealed by the fact that many people have passed through several of these groups in turn. The fragmentation of the youth culture is most dramatically demonstrated in such claims of exclusivity. During the '60s, as the vision developed, it was able to incorporate greater varieties of orientations and, because of its subjectivist-existentialist core, became more or less universally accepted since it raised personal experience as the ultimate criterion of validity. Though post-movement groups gave lip service to the criterion of personal experience, those experiences that were the exclusive domain of the groups became the basis of the arbitration of Truth. For example, devotees of Guru Maharaj Ji cannot complete a sentence without including the word "experience." However, to them "experience" means experience in the Knowledge, which mere mortals who have not been initiated into the secret meditative techniques of the Divine Light Mission cannot possibly comprehend unless they too become devotees.

Since the sole purpose of the organization is the propagation of the one and only Truth, the organization becomes the embodiment of the Truth, and membership in the organization is the only means by which one can have access to the Truth.

In line with freaks characterizing conventional society as meaningless, post-movement groups offer themselves as remedies for the meaninglessness endured by average middle class citizens and drug-soaked hedonistic hippies alike (and those which do not make overt promises also seem to attract members who join at least in part out of a craving for a more "meaningful existence"). Whereas freaks found meaning in maintaining a position of defiance and opposition to the "plastic world," post-movement groups find meaning in escape from the complexities and incongruities of the material world (or the world of the mind) into a more transcendent simplified view of the cosmos independent of material reality. Jesus Freaks recruit among longhairs by denouncing the pointlessness of conflict or the hedonistic life and by claiming that the true Christian can stay permanently high on Jesus and obtain greater joy than what can be derived from drugs or sex ("Try Jesus-God's eternal trip!"). They promise the end of all earthly mental anguish, which is said to be derived from being caught up in the toils of a society dominated by Satan. The Eastern cults promise the same thing, using different words: the material world is Illusion, and a life committed solely to activity in the material world is bound to be meaningless and incapable of sustaining true happiness. The mind, preoccupied with coping with the material world, becomes a trap in which the individual becomes entangled. The individual is urged to by-pass or squelch the mind and to "look within" to find the only reliable source of pleasure, such as Krishna Consciousness or Satchitanand ("truth - consciousness - bliss"). "Give me your troubles," says Guru Maharaj Ji, "and I will give you peace." Marxist sectarians promise a meaningful life by indicating that the individual can choose to swim either with the inexorable tides of history or against them.

The decline of the movement occurred at a much more rapid pace than the intensification. By 1971, almost all forms of youth dissidence had disappeared or had been encapsulated and various forms of accommodation were appearing on the scene. Post-movement groups were on the rise and dominated the youth culture scene, reaching their apex during the summer of 1973. By 1974, the Divine Light Mission had faded from public view after the disastrous Millennium '73 festival in Houston, and conversions declined to 5,797 in 1974 compared to 30,000 in 1973. The NCLC faltered, thanks in part to the mental breakdown of its leader, and Jesus Freaks are becoming Baptists. Since then, they have also declined as youth have returned to an uneasy state of "normality," with the rise of "grim vocationalism" and reversion to 1950s privatism. With the demise of the post-movement groups, even fragments of the vision have all but disappeared. Whereas during the previous decade, a time of seemingly boundless prosperity, accumulative personal goals receded in significance, the mid-1970s economic slump brings with it a resuscitation of "getting ahead"-though seemingly without the conviction among youth in the absolute validity of doing so.

REFERENCES Hoffman, Abbie 1968 REVOLUTION FOR THE HELL OF IT. New York: Dial.

1969 WOODSTOCK NATION. New York: Vintage.

Sale, Kirkpatric 1973 SDS. New York: Vintage.

(continued from p.55) Winstedt, E. O.

1932 "Some Records of the Gypsies in Germany, 1407-1792." JOURNAL OF THE GYPSY LORE SOCIETY 3, 11 (Nos. 3-4):123-141.

Yoors, Jan 1967 THE GYPSIES. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Yoors, Jan and Andre Lopez 1974 THE GYPSIES OF SPAIN. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company.

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