Violence Is the End Result of Idealism

Was the Manson Family an aberration of counterculture, or its logical end-point? I subscribe to the latter, because yesterday’s idealist is tomorrow’s murderous authoritarian.

Case in point: “Dezi Freeman”, the murderous loon who finally met his predictable end in a police shoot-out.

When I met Dezi Freeman in my early 20s, decades before he murdered two police officers near the remote town of Porepunkah, we were preoccupied with idealism and full of longing for a simpler and kinder world.

As Good Oil readers will be well aware, anyone that makes a self-proclaimed virtue of prating about ‘kindness’ is just one goose-step away from bragging about creating and brutalising an entire underclass.

Yesterday, I compared Freeman to Bernie Sanders. Both were work-shy hippy freeloaders – Sanders is surely the only person in history to be booted out of a hippy commune for being too lazy – and both became government-funded freeloaders, mooching off the taxpayer practically their entire lives. Sanders found a ‘respectable’ way of being a crook, by becoming a politician. Freeman didn’t even have the basic rat-cunning for that.

Rainbow Gatherings are temporary, completely off-grid events where anywhere from a hundred to a thousand people come together to build a village from scratch and live collectively for between a week and a month. They still happen to this day.

This is a typically collectivist mindset. I’m sure Lenin was a lovely bloke when he was just lazing around Zurich cafes all day, spouting off ‘idealistic’ bullshit.

The man I met there, Des Filby, was generous, joyous, capable, and like many of us, searching for meaning and something larger than ourselves to belong to. He had a magnetism […]

Idealism isn’t naive – it’s born of a deeply human longing for things to make sense, to be fairer, better. But for those who already feel out of step with the world, that impulse can intensify into something more rigid, and sometimes more extreme.

It’s the path of all murderous fanatics and wannabe dictators. At the same time as the Manson Family, and on the other side of the country, another group of hippies were proving that the end-point of the ‘counterculture’ was always going to be rigid dogmatism and violence.

When rock band the MC5 played the Fillmore East in 1968, they ran afoul of the ‘Motherfuckers’. As music exec Danny Fields recalled, “The Motherfuckers were a radical East Village group who had been demanding that Bill Graham turn the Fillmore East over to them one night a week because it was in the ‘community’… these were really disgusting people.” And when they didn’t get free tickets – these people, like Freeman, make a virtue of ‘dropping out’, but not so far that they won’t demand everyone else give them ‘free’ stuff – they turned violent. The MC5 were surrounded, nearly stabbed and their car attacked by a mob of howling, demented ‘Motherfuckers’.

The Age’s ex-hippy valoriser almost gets it.

The same impulse that draws people towards more utopian ways of living can, when met with disillusionment and marginalisation, become something dangerous. What begins as an objection to injustice and a society that feels incoherent, can over time become a rejection of the world altogether.

In other words, when these mental toddlers don’t get their way – their ‘kinder’ world always just happens to be a world where they get given the fruits of someone else’s hard work for ‘free’ – they throw tantrums.

The next time I saw Des, at a music festival some years later, I sensed a bitterness had set in. He was looking for work, trying to be a photographer, and struggling.

In other words, choosing a ‘career’ that he no doubt calculated required the minimum amount of actual work – and discovering that it actually required talent that he didn’t have. So, he bludged off the taxpayer and threw the inevitable tantrum. Only, with guns, instead of just stamping his feet and holding his breath.

Dezi murdered two innocent people. There is no ambiguity in that fact. But he was not forever destined to reach that point. The pipeline from idealism to something more dangerous often begins with disillusionment – feeling outside the world as it is.

Indeed – and it is inevitable. Because real ‘idealists’ – the ones who truly mean it, instead of LARPing and play-acting for a few years between the arts degree and the mortgage – are invariably fanatics. The real world can never match up to their utopian fantasies (which invariably boil down to: they get everything they want without doing a lick of work to earn it) but they won’t abandon their utopian fantasies. So, they lash out at the real world. Everything is always everyone else’s fault.

Freeman wasn’t really a work-shy loser, the world just failed to recognise his genius. So, he lashed out in an epic tantrum.

When he ran into the bush, he left behind more than the grief of the families of the officers he shot. His children are without a father, his wife without a husband.

And so are the families of the police he killed. All because of the choices he made to not get off his arse and work for a living like the rest of us, and blamed the world for not handing itself to him on a silver platter.

Like all so-called ‘idealists’.