The Hippie Counterculture

Hippie culture sought to alienate itself from society by rejecting American conventions, which ultimately produced apathy and indifference. Wesson elaborates on this, describing that “...hippie counterculture ... was largely alienated and strove primarily to develop a separate culture with its own mores, beliefs and lifestyles” (Wesson). The hippies isolated themselves from American society by breaking away from the conformity ideals of the 1950s. They lived in communes, preaching peace and love; the "hippie epicenter" was situated in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Because of the hippies close proximity with the Berkeley student political activists, the media began to associate the two with each other, despite their distinct

Proponents of LSD, like Harvard researcher Timothy Leary, musicians like The Grateful Dead and The Rolling Stones, and writer Ken Kesey actively promoted LSD and the benefits of its use; Leary and Kesey both took a religious approach of promoting it to maintain its legality in the US, while bands popularized its use at performances called ‘Acid Trips’. Timothy Leary, a huge supporter of LSD and former Harvard researcher, announced at the Summer of Love in 1967 in San Francisco that “... like every great religion of the past, we seek to find the divinity within and to express this revelation in a life of glorification and the worship of God. These ancient goals we define in the metaphor of the present — turn on, tune in, drop out” (American Experience - Summer of Love). In an attempt to maintain its status as a legal substance, Leary founded the League for Spiritual Discovery (LSD), declaring LSD as a religious substance. His phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out” refers to the concept of intersubjectivity, a heightened state of consciousness, which was the goal people were trying to achieve on their ‘acid trips’. Ken Kesey, while a university student, volunteered to try LSD. Kesey’s religious stance on LSD is demonstrated when Wolfe described the world as “simply and sheerly divided into 'the aware', [there were] those who had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of 'the unaware'” (Wolfe 127). In Wolfe’s The Electric Kool- Aid Acid Test, he documented Kesey’s religious spread of LSD and how its use led to intersubjectivity. LSD was quickly widespread across the U.S. due to Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ bus rides on ‘Further’. Kesey was also friends with musicians like The Grateful Dead and The Rolling Stones, who further promoted LSD through ‘acid trip’ performances. These ‘trips’, coupled with the music performance,