WHAT IS A YIPPIE?

I like to think of myself as a yippie, perhaps the first of my kind, since I am increasingly drawn towards words associated, actually or potentially, with the Y-chromosome, which happens, as most adults will know, to be germane to males, as, androgynous exceptions to the rule notwithstanding, a genetic inheritance from one’s male ancestry. Thus a yippie is in some sense a self-conscious or Y-conscious male who strongly identifies with his male inheritance.

One thing, however, a yippie is not is a transmuted or transformed yuppie. He does not regard life from the perspective of wealth-generation, and therefore has not gone out of his way to become rich or to identify himself with money-making schemes, the likes of which clutter up the Internet with brazen promises of wealth. On the contrary, money for him is a kind of by-product of other things, not an end-in-itself, and certainly anything but the basis of a business career. He does not believe in financial greed, least of all in a time when such greed has led to recessionary problems the likes of which few if any of us are unaffected by. For him, money is a means to a higher end, one in the service of his religious and ideological beliefs, and in this respect he resembles the hippies of the late ‘60s who, as often as not, didn’t care about money at all.

But even if he would consider himself closer on that account to hippies than to yuppies, he would have nothing in common with their ethos of free love and dope-fuelled sexual promiscuity, nor would he be partial to Eastern spirituality and the kind of mindless identification with cosmic mysticism, of which the Clear Light of the Void would constitute a salient aspect so dear to the likes of Huxley and other renegade Anglicans. To him, all that matters in religious terms is transcendentalism, and he knows that transcendentalism is the opposite of fundamentalism and no friend of pantheism or humanism either. Transcendentalism is the free-psychic or church-hegemonic aspect of metaphysics, and metaphysics for him is unequivocally universal, which is to say, as far removed from anything cosmic (hyped as universe and/or universal) as it is possible to be – a universality of global civilization destined for a sensibly cyborgistic apotheosis or culmination in the not-so-distant future.

Therefore his view of life is intensely artificial, which would again suggest a marked contrast with hippie indulgence of nature and things natural, including sex. Even his hair would not be long, like theirs, but more usually as short as possible, as though significant of his artificial transcendence of natural phenomena and the possibility if not actuality of being a kind of ‘sonofabitch’.

But if the yippie as I define him is intensely, or synthetically, artificial, even in his drug preferences for or projections into a ‘millennial future’, he is yet, like the hippie, unconventional by majority standards, and thus closer in spirit to the hippie social nonconformism (though not in terms of communal promiscuity) than to the yuppie professional conformism, since for him what really counts in life is culture and, hence, his metaphysical ideology, which I have variously identified with Social Theocracy (political/state) and Social Transcendentalism (religious/church).

The yippie is in some sense a reborn and transmuted hippie, and thus a refutation, even if from a vocational standpoint, of the careerist professionalism of his yuppie predecessors. He doesn’t want to ‘do his own thing’ independently of the world (of straights and squares, bitches and ‘sonsofbitches’) but, on the contrary, to triumph over the world, and for this he requires a politico-religious ideology capable of assuming power and delivering religion from the clutches of the state.

Therefore the yippie has to be himself to others in order to influence them and make them aware of the alternatives to the worldly status quo. World-overcoming, to use a Nietzschean phrase, is high on his list of ideological priorities, and therefore he will engage with the world with a view to its Social Theocratic overcoming.

Finally, the yippie is, not unlike the yuppie of the ‘80s, a ‘yes man’, but a ‘yes man’ for whom the positivity of what could be called the ‘Yo-factor’ is incontrovertibly sacrosanct, since reflecting his own Y-chromosomal essence. For this reason he is a transvaluator rather than a devaluator, and will always side with the Y against the X, especially against the XX of Eve-like female seductive persuasion, which was the undoing of Adam and cause of the male ‘fall’ from grace and innocence into worldly bondage, the very same bondage (to female persuasion) in which the majority of non-yippie males still exist and will continue to exist until the end of the world through Social Theocratic overcoming, when they will be restored to godliness and, more importantly, to the heavenly innocence of the ultimate ‘Garden’ – the Social Theocratic/Transcendentalist Centre.

I am a yippie. I am for the ‘Yo-factor’. I am also enamoured of first names (surnames can also count) beginning with Y – at least for males. And I am inevitably for Israel or, rather, Ysrael in its struggle to survive and eventually thrive from the standpoint of an enhanced Y, a Y for which the myth of Eden is no longer relevant because the attainment to a new metaphysical paradise will put an end to worldly suffering and allow the transfigured to ascend into the heavenly bliss of metaphysical grace (coupled state-subordinately to wisdom on a lesser ratio basis) or into the pseudo-hellish torment of pseudo-metachemical pseudo-punishment (coupled state-subordinately to pseudo-goodness on a greater ratio basis), depending on gender.

For the opposite of a Y brought low by an XX is an XX kept down by a triumphant Y. This is ultimately what really distinguishes a yippie from a hippie.