Norman Mailer predicted a new kind of man in the 1950's who would enter the arena of ideological conflict:
"He was the hipster, who knew from the atom bomb and the Nazi concentration camps that societies and states were murderers, and that under the shadow of mass annihilation one should learn... to give up 'the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization,' to live in the moment, to follow the body and not the mind, 'to divorce oneself from society,' and 'to follow the rebellious imperative of the self,' to forget 'the single mate, the solid family, and the respectable love life,' to choose a life of 'Saturday night kicks,' especially orgasm and marijuana. For 1957, this was prophetic. It contained in a nutshell much of the self-liberation part of the cultural program of the sixties."
~Norman Mailer, "The White Negro," 1957. Quoted by Myron Magnet in The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass (New York: William Morrow, 1993), 35.
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