"And what is written well and what is written badly...need we ask Lysias or any other poet or orator who ever wrote or will write either a political … - Robert M. Pirsig

And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good — Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

They were living in some kind of movie projected by this intellectual, electromechanical machine that had been created for their happiness, saying: PARADISE PARADISE PARADISE but which had inadvertently shut them out from direct experience of life itself — and from each other.

"The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling."

The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it "freedom," but in the final analysis "freedom" is a purely negative goal. It just says something is bad. Hippies weren't really offering any alternatives other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.