They over-reacted to an excessively strict and repressive society, and created an enormity of problems in the long run. They were fuck-ups who ruined our civilization and made us weak to all forms of destruction we now suffer, the repressive generations above and the overly permissive and coddling generation that wanted to provide an idyllic childhood for their children also fucked up, they made their childhoods too free and the social structure's of adulthood too stuffy. Generations and their ideals clashed for a lack of foresight, planning ahead and willingness to have dialog and compromise, these thing's were exacerbated by social parasites and predators who egged on the social and generational conflict. Only two socio-political forms can be stable, benevolent tyranny, and a mildly dissonant, mildly hypocritical society which has liberty and rigged social mores to give structure and form where needed recognizing the weaknesses of total order and total anarchy and so chooses to operate with an affinity to ordered chaos. People will say Rome was stable for so long but the city was under the later in it's first age and then the former after Cesar, everywhere else they had periodic uprisings and purges or even outright genocides; though border skirmishes often dominated political and social life. distracting from other social problems; after all, the hippie's themselves were a component of the government's eagerness to fight in vietnam.