Space Hippies in the 23rd Century?

Granted that TOS was a reflection of the times, like any other '60s era television show, but looking back...do you think that as humans become more technologically more advanced, the more likely that some counter-culture will spring up? Granted that Dr. Severin was using his companions for his own ends, but do you think that actual "space hippies" would be a thing? I mean, we romanticized past eras all the time to create "sub-groups". Maybe there might be an anti-Federation counter-culture who doesn't appreciate the Federation's interpretation of "paradise"?

 

We do get some examples of people turning their backs on technology and choosing a more agrarian lifestyle. I do agree with you though. A society that is basically free from want which has the ability to travel at near light speed would be pretty varied, imo. Humans seem a little too homogenized in Trek some time.


As much as I hated the space hippies episode on TOS, I think it would have worked brilliantly on TNG with Picard as a foil. Not to mention Worf and Data's reactions.

 

There's always subgroups. You may not read them in the nearest available history book, and their size varies from era to era. But they are there, and more people are in them than you would think. More often than not, the same notes repeat, even if one era is Jazz and the next is Jefferson Airplane. Not to get to explicit, but "free love" was a subculture thing in the late 19th century, with the same mind as the larger subculture of the 1960s and 1970s. So certainly, there could be some kind of counterculture.

Also, on the TOS hippies, I still hold to the view that it was a much bigger movement than Severin. I think of Severin as one of the factions of many, and many without factions, in "The One" movement. And he's basically the Charles Manson of that movement; an old creep exploiting young people for his own insanity.

It stands to reason that the Space Hippies of the 23rd century would have the same criticism as the Boomers of the 1960s. 23rd century humanity is more or less the 1960s, black glasses, suit and tie view of life. Better living through chemistry. Suburbia and 9 to 5. And the criticism was that it was uptight, reactionary, conformist, repressive and artificial and suffocating; often hypocritical, often wrong, and an unhealthy way of life (which if you watch "Mad Men", in a lot of ways they aren't wrong). The same view of the Federation is possible, and its even more artificial. You're literally living on recycled air and food artificially assembled based on a taste matrix in a computer, for goodness sake. You're living on a metal television show set, without many windows. Enough of that, and you'll start to grow out your hair and listen to Jefferson Starship.

 

Mad Men is a work of fiction. And it is not an accurate depiction of the period. Being boorish and insulting to women and minorities was not the accepted norm in the real America of the 1960s. This was especially true in mixed company, to say nothi. Mad Men, in that regard, is a soft propaganda piece meant to portray Whitey in a bad light. Note that the longer the series ran, the more severely it humiliated the white male bosses, including Don Draper. And that was the point.

Regarding hypocrisy, in my view the space hippies are not above suspicion. They "get back to nature" by space travel. And of course most real hippies don't part with technology, either. They just jeer at those who produce it for them. Everybody with an extreme ideology has behaviors that don't line up with it.

 

Mad Men is (was) rather refreshing after a period of history marked by films and television shows which were saccharine nostalgia for the 1950s/1960s from people who were teens or children in those years. That period being the 1990s, with Forest Gump as a prime example. Leave it to Beaver was not a documentary. That period, in terms of actual social history, was far more like Mad Men than it was like other portrayals up to that point. It was the disconnect between the idealized portrayal, which their ad agency takes part in propagating, and the reality of what people were actually like beneath an outside portrayal, and a striving for that ideal they were supposed to be while not being it. And how in not being that, and in pretending to be that, the stresses and indeed pains it causes, and the problems it lets go on because to address them means the world is not what it is pretended to be. And treating women and minorities as secondary was what was accepted. It wasn't even anything militant, at least not all of the time. It was an instinctual assumption. "Of course women should stay at home", "Of course women should find a man, and quit their jobs to be a house wife.", "Of course, they [whoever they are] are children and aren't ready for equality". I'm a bit cross-eyed at the notion that the 1960s, an era noted for racial and gender inequality which was often aggressively enforced should someone even hint they might go outside of what a consensus would allow for them, was not boorish and insulting to women and minorities. You might use "ma'am". Splendid. Your father would also send you off to live with an aunt for nine months if you got pregnant out of wedlock to save the family from embarrassment, and expect to hand you off to a young man to stay at home and raise children. At work, you would be casually reviewed as a sex object and greeted with leering and comments. You wouldn't be accepted as a doctor or scientist, or anything more than a secretary. And for the few women that did break through, it was a fight against sexism all the way. And that is not even mentioning what minorities went through. And that's not even touching race. Even outside the Jim Crow South, the general view, if not barking racism, was a casual, dismissive racism. "Stay in your part of town", casual jokes and beliefs and expecting people to stay in a certain place. And on barking racism, Martin Luther King said the most segregated, racially hostile city he went to was Chicago. But while Mad Men also portrays the blatant racism and sexism, it also portrays the bigotries and ignorances (including racism and sexism) that were subtle and ingrained and ubiquitous. And the fact that that requires this long of a paragraph to even somewhat scratch the surface of, to try to explain it, because you are stating that it was not like that, boggles my mind.

This is a sidetrack off the topic, perhaps, but c'mon. And heck, because of that sidetrack, I didn't even get onto the parts of the problems the hippies also faced and frequently embodied in regards to the disconnect between the ideal and how they were often actually acting, and the prospect that what they were criticizing was often fair but their solutions to them were often incorrect, if only because they failed to live up to what they set out to be. And the hypocrisies mentioned by people in the counterculture when interviewed later, such as the fact that male hippies were still expressing sexist assumptions and expecting their flower children wife to obey and hang back and feed them. I don't even have the energy right now.

 

Short answer: yes.

 

There will always be contrarians

 

TV shows made in the '50s and '60s were an idealized portrait that put America in a purer light than reality. Newton Minow, at the time, referred to "formula comedies about totally unbelievable families." But I'd still say Mad Men went too far in the other direction, in the sense of Manhattan liberals in mixed company being casual and matter-of-fact, so open, about their moral/social faults. And I watched it pretty faithfully because it was so well done and brilliant.

 

Not "space hippies" but other Trek episodes did depict people who were seeking a simpler life not encumbered by technology. The TOS episode, This Side Of Paradise, shows a small group of people who start a farming colony using only traditional farming implements. There is a recurring anti-tech theme present in TOS. It's often expounded by McCoy but also by Cogley's preference for books over a computer in Court Martial. The Next Gen episode, Up The Long Ladder, shows another group also fleeing technology.

I can see the appeal of wanting to what we would refer to today as "disconnect" and seek a simple existence.

 

The tendency in presenting the past is to either idealize it (which is currently in vogue with the 80s ala Stranger Things) or to demonize it as a backwards time (presumably so we can feel better for living in such enlightening times...like having a president who talks about grabbing women by the *****).

The truth is somewhere in the middle, but the middle doesn't pop. It's more interesting to push things one way or the other for effect. Shows about the past become more like presenting an alternate civilization ala TOS: the value-systems presented always come across as monolithic. People seem to be more drone-like in drinking that era's kool-aid in order to drive home the show's agenda.

I happen to think there are a lot of negative aspects of today's society that we're currently blind to, BTW (and not necessarily the sort of negatives that are trotted out on the news as negatives). People who have totally bought into whatever constitutes current culture always sees the way things are as the golden age. It's the arrogance of the now.

 

In every society there will always be those that are not happy with the rules and regulations for whatever reason!
JB

 

It is easier to live a simple lifestyle in an advanced society than in a simple society. In a simple society one has to do everything for himself and he often has to do it right now whether he wants to or not, or else die. In an advanced society it is possible for a person to do only one thing as part of a job and and use his pay to obtain everything else he wants or needs.

I use high technology, produced for me by thousands and millions of other people, in my lifestyle, but I suspect that my lifestyle using high technology in a complex society is much simpler than those of countless millions and billions of our hunter-gatherer ancestors living in simple societies.

 

No there won't.

 

Tsk, tsk, how contrary.

 

Again, not hippies, but the awful DS9 episode "Let He Who is WIthout Sin..." basically showed a modern group of 24th Century contrarians. Since the 24th Century Federation was much more akin to the hippies' idea of paradise, it makes sense that the new contrarians would be much more socially conservative and uptight.

 

The problem with the space hippies is not that they wanted a free lunch but they were a bunch of would-be-murderers.

 

Kirk should have just dropped them all off at Altamont VII and called it a day.

 

...Since when did we see Trek communities or lifestyles that were not counterculture? It seems every single colony out there was founded out of hatred of how Earth did things, both in TOS and in TNG.

It would be pretty hard work to out-Hippie all those Hippies. I could well see ultraconservative Neo-Hippies emerge, insisting on certain styles of music and clothing and making your hair and mandating substance abuse and acts of sabotage against the establishment, or else. On the other hand, Sevrin might indeed be tapping into mainstream counterculture here, the most romanticized, commercialized and formalized approach, the one requiring the least thinking.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Perhaps I was being a contrarian in my spare time.