ABSTRACT
Not all of Haight-Ashbury's 7,500 hippies are Diggers, although no formal qualifications bar them; nor, in one sense, are the several dozen Diggers hippies. Hippies, originating mainly in the middle classes, have been nurtured at the boards of consumer abundance. Extreme as the antimaterialistic stance may seem, and despite its probable tempering should hippie communities develop as a stable feature on the American landscape, it nonetheless points a way to a solution of the problem of material glut; to wit, the simple demonstration of the ability to live on less, thereby calming the acquisitive frenzy that would have to be sustained and even accelerated, if the present scheme of capitalist production and distribution were to remain unchanged. There is much about the hippie subculture that already betokens this alteration of time-perspective and concomitant reconstitution of the experienced self. Some hippie visionaries compare the movement to Christianity sweeping the Roman Empire.
