re: Did It All Start with the Hippies?

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Why can’t people just be normal? It just seems so abnormal these days.

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That's what goes back to the Enlightenment really. That's when this focus on "science," and the creeping in of "acceptance," began.

And I use those terms loosely, but by and large, shame became less and less a tool over time to encourage people to live a particular way. The Enlightenment didn't make science more concrete, it made it more fuzzy. We decided that it could be the answer to everything no matter what situation. People became numbers and digits, essentially - and politically this is behind most of your most evil movements - abortion, euthanasia, eugenics, etc. - it's all about people as data that feed into models (and is quite possibly climate change and a plethora of other movements). Abortion - let's turn happiness into an equation and make sure we balance it, and allow people to balance it for themselves. Euthanasia - same story. Happiness is calculable and if someone's calculation is off, well that's ok. Because science. Eugenics - let's turn evolution into an equation we can perfect. Because science.

Hippies were kind of the result of many years of weakening shame, social pressure, strong social cohesion and opinions, within larger cultures, and an expansion of science to solve every single problem ever - thus the spread into Academia and the study of everything. And it's going to solve all the world's problems - because math tells us there's a "limit" to the world's population and resource use. Because science.