Posted by David Richardson on November 04, 2002 at 03:43:28:
In Reply to: What would Orwell think about: "the hippies", "the beatles", "the end of the cold war" and the "vietnam war"...URGENT PLEASE HELP posted by JVC USB on October 31, 2002 at 19:24:04:
Dear JVC USB,
I think that Orwell's essay on Gandhi on this web site would be a good place to start your thinking. My reading of Orwell inclines me to think that he would regard the hippies as, at best, deluding themselves, by not analysing the conditions on which their lives depended. I.e. they lived in a rich, comfortable society (at least relatively to most societies on Earth) where the risks of 'dropping out' and creating alternative cultures were much reduced. Their lifestyles nearly always depended on the existence of an organised industrial society and I feel that Orwell would have challenged them to either make a complete break with it, or 'go back into it' to challenge the structures underlying.
Orwell tried a bit of 'dropping out' himself, both as a tramp 'Down and Out in Paris and London', and as a pig farmer in Hertfordshire.
David Richardson (in Sweden)