"Tripping Out" and the Adult Dilemma

In such a world, combined with generic product standardization and far above subsistence living, it is not surprising that man responds eagerly to the fascinating shock of the unexpected. The enormous attractions of marijuana  contact sports, television violence, and literary "sex and sadism" are understandable. They provide man with escape not escape from reality but escape back to reality. He wants to escape from the artificiality that the machine has imposed on his life and return to  more primitive involvement of his senses with nature in the raw. The only reason teenagers and college students are greater consumers of marjuana than adults is simply that adults have greater obligations to the machine. They cannot "drop out" because they are too deeply in.They are prisoners of the world they made.

This accounts for the intensity of the adult furor over the seemingly aberrant life styles of their children. It represents less adults' concern about the health and happiness of their children than the fact that they are envious of their children's freedom. The young people who take trips and smoke pot need it least because they are already so much less thoroughly bound to society's rigid routines. The people who need most to escape, who are most firmly imprisoned by the world from which the trip is an escape and who have the greatest need to drop out, are the adults. They are understandably unhappy about the liberated behavior of their children.

The adult's reward for a life of hard work and scheduled dedication to his job is the anomalous necessity to work even harder and with more dedication. The juvenile beneficiaries of his inescapable attachment to the machine are most intent on escaping the machine. No wonder the adult world is so outspoken about the younger generation. It shows no gratitude for parental sacrifices indeed it pooh poohs them and seeks artificial escapes from what is already a condition of great relative freedom. The invocation of moral platitudes and self righteous calls for order and discipline have been the predictable outpourings of envious adults and social arbiters ever since Isaiah.

The adult too searches for and needs excitement the felicitous injection into his life of benignly unexcpected events. That is why excitement will increasingly, in spite and perhaps because of computers and management science, become a powerful ingredient in business success. The man, the company, the product that denies this most in practice will suffer most in the market.