The «Beats» rejected the material values and preached «free love» while experimenting with drugs. In the ’60’s came the Vietnam war which provided the fulcrum upon which the «counter culture» could leverage their rejection of bourgeois (Christian) morals claiming that their opposition to the war gave them the moral high ground in ALL things.
When I graduated high school in 1965 drugs were virtually unknown, parents were still honored and the overwhelming majority of girls valued and guarded their virginity. By 1966 all of this was changing at a near frantic pace. Drugs, LSD and Marijuana in particular, had flooded the area where I lived. Parents, derided as hypocrites and war-lovers, were ignored and openly despised. The birth control pill had been around for a few years but it was almost as if it was newly discovered as all the young ladies quickly availed themselves of this and virgins virtually disappeared overnight.
1967 was the «summer of love». I lived a block-and-a-half from the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco. The neighborhood was filled with shops selling odd clothing and drug paraphernalia and the sidewalks were very busy with hippies and various freaks (that is how they referred to themselves) in such numbers that there were tour buses filled with gawking out-of-town tourists running up Haight Street hourly. There were free concerts in Golden Gate Park almost every weekend and the big names from the Beats would attend and give speeches about how evil the establishment was and advising all the young people to ignore their parents, pastors and teachers and «turn on, tune in and drop out».
In the midst of all this there was a sudden and wide-spread rise in interest in eastern religion which quickly morphed into little cults studying crystals and chakras and chanting (to actually practice eastern religion was too difficult and demanding). LSD, mescaline and peyote could provide a «religious» experience though the few who did have this found its effects short lasting and usually buried it under a series of repeated attempts to repeat the experience with the drug that only provided greater and more colorful delusions.
The war provided the enemy with the ammunition he needed to discount and discredit all values and morals. «Your parents are war mongers and war lovers who think it’s good to kill children» he preached while flattering the ignorant young by telling them they were morally superior and so much superior that they could throw off ALL the rules and create their own as they went along. This kind of thing was especially prevalent in colleges and universities and the people who were undergraduates then earned their degrees and took their places as leaders in politics and business and finance and education. Things simply progressed from there and the rest, as they say, is history.