Hippies and the Mystic Way: Dropping Out, Unitive Experiences, and Communal Utopianism

This article hopes to uncover the relationship among psychedelics, mystic interpretations, and hippie projects of communal utopianism. Specifically, it traces the evolution of dropping out as an ahistorical, mystical orientation dialectically emerging within the framework of liberal-capitalist modernity. This orientation results from a fissure within the constructs of modernity itself, unsettling the progressive pulse of modern practices, revealing spaces to simultaneously challenge institutional hierarchy or materialist consumerism while experimenting with alternative moments of unitive togetherness. To construct an investigation into hippie mysticism and communal utopianism, this article (1) engages the dystopic problem of modernity through the lens of 1960s social, political, and cultural theorists, specifically Herbert Marcuse, who influenced the intellectual landscape of countercultural responses and situates the utopic implications of dropping out; and (2) uncovers the mystical vision of a key hippie philosopher, Stephen Gaskin, whose communal utopianism continues to challenge the homogeneity of modern culture, offering a vision of absolute love, responsibility, and community. I argue that dropping out offered a distinct antimodern impulse derived from mystical prophecies and experiences of absolute togetherness that, potentially, presents a lens through which to critically engage the challenges of “modern” society, rescuing the intuitive sense “of all of us being one.”