What, then, was the historical significance of the hippie counterculture that flourished so briefly during the late Sixties and early Seventies? As this book shows, the answer contains quite a bit of ambiguity. Hippies had once believed that their vibrant new culture would be so appealing that the mainstream would disappear, but the reality had proved to be otherwise. While the search for authenticity, including spontaneity and spiritual seeking, had been personally important, the lack of both a robust philosophy and an institutional framework had limited long-term success for the hippie movement. Nor had the embrace of individualism produced much social change, because social structures largely remained untouched. By contrast, the hippie search for community had been very important. Rural communes enabled freaks to grow personally and to thrive inside a society that they found suffocating.

As the counterculture faded during the 1970s, certain hippie ideas and practices permeated mainstream culture. There was a blending. Many hippies, however, felt that their values were co-opted and perverted. However, mainstream conservatives believed that the larger society had sold out to the oversexed, drug-using crazies. It is important, therefore, to specify precise ways in which the counterculture helped reshape the mainstream. Three specific hippie legacies can be identified. First, Americans followed the counterculture in expressing a rising individualism. Second, the hippie search for authenticity could be seen in society's changing sexual practices, gender roles, marijuana use, and increased tolerance for diversity, as well as the coarsening and redefinition of popular culture. The counterculture's aversion to authority also spread throughout the society. Third, the hippie desire for community helped launch hippie entrepreneurs, the environmental movement, and the personal computer.

The writer Tom Wolfe referred to the Seventies as the “me decade.” Wolfe, who had helped launch the counterculture with his coverage of Ken Kesey 's lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) experiments in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), found the next decade sobering.