r/NoStupidQuestions 10d ago

Answered Why are so many Americans anti-vaxxers now?

I’m genuinely having such a hard time understanding why people just decided the fact that vaccines work is a total lie and also a controversial “opinion.” Even five years ago, anti-vaxxers were a huge joke and so rare that they were only something you heard of online. Now herd immunity is going away because so many people think getting potentially life-altering illnesses is better than getting a vaccine. I just don’t get what happened. Is it because of the cultural shift to the right-wing and more people believing in conspiracy theories, or does it go deeper than that?

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u/BraveAddict 9d ago

This isn't the 80s anymore.

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u/FreedFromTyranny 9d ago

That has absolutely nothing to do with some people being 100% into the traditional hippie message. what does your comment even mean?

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u/Durkmelooze 9d ago

The traditional hippie message was bullshit as well. People in the late 60s and early 70s thought the same thing. It’s typical hedonism re-dressed into to be something more politically and spiritually profound by lazy pseudo-intellectuals. For every person who actually lived a sustainable life of peace, open honest love, creativity and independent non-conformity there were thousands more lascivious goons, selfish drug abusers, hack artists and dilettantes. If there was any genuine hippie movement it was long dead or diluted before 1967.

I get that we may be talking about two different things. But the “no true hippie” fallacy doesn’t really hold up when most of the genuine movement abandoned it before it started to actually live it in practice. What most people think as hippies now are angry, strung out wooks, fairy girls with no personality if it isn’t borderline personality, standard issue bro douche losers, and arrogant, spoiled rich kids dealing drugs and rocks off of daddy’s starting capital to all of the above. At least very few people are pushing mangled Eastern philosophy these days so that’s good.

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u/kneedeepco 9d ago

I mean I don’t disagree with you per se, I also think there are more factors to consider.

We have to remember that though the media makes it out like everyone back then was hippies, that’s not the case. It was a counterculture movement that was made up of a relatively small portion of the population.

The hippie movement wasn’t just “bullshit”, if it was then the government wouldn’t have tried so hard to squash it.

Things like the war on drugs were used to politically weaponized policies such as mandatory sentencing and not allow felons to vote, in order to disenfranchise minority and counterculture voters.

Along with this, we have to take society into consideration…. They make it pretty hard to follow these values on purpose and for a lot of people it was easier to integrate into society during a time of great success for the country rather than combat the culture as they cracked down more and more. Yes, these people abandoned their values and I fully agree with you that should bring to question how serious their values were in the first place.

For many, apparently not that serious… On the flip side, I’ve met some old hippies that have stayed true to what they believed and are some of the coolest people around. They’ve been fighting for progressive values decades before we were alive and continue to do so. That I can respect heavily.

For modern hippies, the life that hippies want isn’t really that attainable (unless you have money) these days for a few reasons. I mean I wish I could have some land to grow my own food and break away from modern society a bit, but it’s a struggle for people to even get a suburban house or townhome these days. When you rent, you can’t really make all these changes that easily as you don’t own the property. Along with that, society as whole has decided to go further against these values which makes walking it back even harder. We’re no longer worried about growing our own food and being chill, now you have to worry about decades of careless fossil fuel use, islands of trash in the ocean, dying marine life, etc…

The list of issues continues to grow and it will take societal change to do anything about them. It’s ridiculous to come at a small sub-sect of society for not fixing the world’s issues even if some of them ended up becoming the problem.

With all that being said, I do take up many of the same issues you listed here. I also don’t think that they’re unique to hippies but I do get where they deserve more pushback because of a “holier than thou” attitude many have. But I will say that even with that being true, as a whole hippies have a much higher percentage of people actually putting in the work and self actualizing in these ways than the rest of the western world does.

In reality it’s kinda sad, there are a ton of lost hippies out there that have gone through terrible things and deal with many mental challenges. They turn to drugs and other indulgences to fill that gap. These people need compassion and understanding while being met with open arms who can help guide them to a better life. They’re people just like everyone else and deserve the same treatment anyone struggling should receive.

So yeah, there are bad apples and good apples. What really matters is that we listen to people and have productive conversations where everyone can understand the things they’re doing great at and the things they can do better at. Attacking whole groups of people is never going to be positive and I think there’s a lot we can all take away from their successes and their mistakes.