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Not that anyone would want to.
I have a thorough understanding of the confusions and illusions that arise from the minds of those who are confused and their restless synapses. I see it nearly every day in my dear and loyal friend Don. He can no longer get certain things together; his thoughts get lost along the way. About what, exactly? That’s hard to say, because Don often struggles to find his words.
Does that make him mad? In that ugly, degrading sense of the word?
No.
He is exceptional — and “ordinary” people often wear that puzzled look when they meet him.Don is not mad. He is simply a man whose brain, after a stroke and an aneurysm, was stripped of some of its abilities. He is, therefore, a man harmed by nature.
Period.
The truly mad ones — in the negative sense — are the conscious ones. Those who parade their madness in politics and power.
We have plenty of shining examples these days, performing on the world stage like actors in a farce. How high the level of insanity truly is, no one can measure. And that’s already quite mad. But I don’t want to write about those people today. They already live rent-free in my head most of the time. No — I want to break a lance for the extraordinary ones. The creative, the visionary, the loud and colourful souls who changed the world in their own strange ways.
Yes, the hippies, for example. They turned the old, bourgeois world upside down in the late sixties. It wasn’t just a creative revolution of music — it was a revolution of thinking. With the hippies, the commune experienced a resurgence in community living, marking its return to life. I spent some time in one myself and found it wonderfully refreshing, though sometimes a little nerve-racking. However, I learned a great deal — about consideration, empathy, and what it takes to make a shared life work.It was no longer “I want,” but “We want.”
Sex!
That so-called scandalous, natural, joyful act between people — or with oneself — was still tightly regulated until the hippie era.Homosexuality was barely spoken of, monogamy was mandatory, and freedom in love or sexuality was condemned as filth and shame.
Freedom of love. Make love, not war.
Ah, yes, and then there was this word “sustainability,” which didn’t even exist in the public vocabulary back in the Seventies. Respect for nature and the planet was likewise part of the hippie philosophy. Back to simple living — away from the stress of luxury and lifestyle. It was incredibly liberating.
And today, it is again. Because overstimulation through endless consumption becomes tedious — and exhausting. And there was something else — not Spirit in the bottle, but Spirit with a capital S.
The search for spiritual happiness.
Whether in Indian culture, the religious performance business, or sect-like communities, we were searching for that elusive thing called bliss. Still are. But the search itself was joyful. No spiritual movement was safe from me. But after two weeks at most, I’d always had enough — too many rules, too many moral straightjackets. Yes, society called us mad — the “normal” ones did. But that wasn’t hurtful. It was a compliment.
When the respectable citizen twisted his face and muttered a few insults, we smiled. Because the lifestyle itself was mad. Some of that easygoing philosophy stayed with me. Other parts I’ve dug back out of the old, flower-painted VW bus in my mind.
What I remember most fondly is the absence of racism and sexism. We made no distinction between skin colour, body shape, political views, or social class. My entrance into that flower-power paradise happened in Amsterdam in the seventies. I spent ten days in the Vondelpark, surrounded by sweet-smelling smoke and thousands of people from all over the world. We had nothing to do — except talk, make music, smoke, and take the world apart into its philosophical pieces. We wanted to create everything new. And better.
That was mad. We were mad. I am mad.