When the culture was based on rebelling against the very culture that we are seeking to explain. Attempting to understand the culture of the Vietnam era will only lead you in a circle of contradictions and ever changing ideals. In part, due to the fact that there was no dominate overlaying culture at that time, but rather fragments and social factions which often held ideals that challenged other groups. How can we describe a culture that contradicts itself? We must simplify it. The culture of the 1960's is too much of an endeavor to decipher by looking at it in entirety so we must break into down and then break it down again, until we are left with nothing but the elemental bases from which the culture was formed. But what are these cultural elementals? How will we know that we have found one, and not just another cultural compound that needs to be broken down once more? We will know we have reached the foundation, the basic building blocks of the 1960's culture, when we come to something that is no longer filled with riddled with internal conflict that is no longer plagued by illogical contradictions.
[...] Now we are left with one last question, which one man to represent the basic element which embodied the most culturally turbulent decade of our recent history. Our natural inclination is to choose someone who stands out in the history books. But for that very same reason we should not pick them. How a person is remembered is far from the control of that person. A traitor can be remembered as hero, a terrorist can be remembered as a patriot. [...]
[...] (See figure Abbie even describes his vision of revolution as one that satisfies people's needs, key to organizing an alternative society is to organize people around what they can do, and more importantly, what they want to What three things of do we think of when we hear the 60's? Sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Well, sex, drugs and rock & roll, I know it may seem funny, but they are all basic physiological needs. Well at least the first two are. [...]
[...] Abbie didn't go to college to understand the laws of physics or business principles; he went with one goal in mind understanding himself. At Brandeis University, he majored in psychology and philosophy. The two biggest influences on his college life were Herbert Marcus, a philosophy professor and Abraham Maslow a psychologist. Abbie not only studied these two's works but took their works to heart. The core ideology for the Youth International Party, that Hoffman would later found, was forged from the ideas of these two men. [...]
[...] He spent the rest of his high school education at Worcester Academy one of if not the most elite private school in Massachusetts. Just to get an idea of how elite this school is, here is a list of notable alumni: Royal C. Taft, Governor of Rhode Island, Edward Davis Jones, co-founder of Dow Jones, John Hope, founder of Atlanta University, Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, founder of National Geographic magazine, Charles E. Merrill, co-founder of Merrill Lynch, William Toomey, gold-medal winning decathlete in the 1968 Summer Olympics, and Rep. [...]
[...] By creating an environment where people's basic needs could be satisfied it was possible to focus their collective will on a single goal. Abbie fits into this war as a leader. The combination of Hoffman's personal history and the philosophies he adopts made him the ideal leader. His life was just like everyone else's, and had lead him to the same questions everyone else was asking, but his education gave him the answers to those questions and the tremendous power that comes knowledge that is in demand. [...]
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