Socrates: The World's First Hippie

About two thousand four hundred years ago, the most powerful and envied civilization was that of the Ancient Greeks.  Everything about them was miles ahead of what anyone else was doing at the time.  There were intellectuals pushing the boundaries of math, science and architecture, there were the best athletes in the world, the first olympics, an unstoppable army.  If you lived in Greece around that time, you were in good company.  They were the best dressed, in their sparkling white togas, which was a real trend at the time.  This was a civilization so brilliant that no one even cared that the men spent about half their time fucking young boys (one of my favorite jokes goes as follows: How did the Greeks separate the men from the boys?  A Crowbar.)  Nudity was a way of life.  A huge part of Hellenistic culture was the sculpting and display of the human body.  Pretty much every dude looked like the Situation, except with a vocabulary and better hair.  In the midst of all this, there was one man who stood at odds with the common culture at the time.  That man? Socrates, the father of Western Philosophy.
Picture this: You're walking through the streets of Ancient Greece and you see a bunch of guys strutting around in their barely-there togas and sweet leather (prada) sandals, showing off their bodies that they spend half the day working on.  All of a sudden, everybody stops.   This boorish, unkempt, dirty, smelly, barefoot loudmouth walks along with his man-boobs bursting forth from his stained toga talking about Ethics.

Mmmm... donuts.

Ethics.  Who gave a shit about ethics back then?  A man was judged on many things - his money, his family, his body, his boy toy, but no one seemed to give a shit about ethics.  In fact, the Greek idea of responsibility was completely black and white, as opposed to our idea of responsibility, especially in our legal system, which, in the words of one of our generational wise men "is made up almost entirely of grey areas."
Take, for example Oedipus.  The story goes that he was walking down a road when he ran into some old jerk-off who insulted his honor, and was generally acting like a jack-ass.  So he killed him.  Common practice at the time.  It was not until later that Oedipus found out that the man he killed was actually his ever-absent father, whom he never met.  The circumstances did not matter.  The Furies, or, the vessels of vengeance of the Greek Gods had him pegged for patricide.  It did not matter that he didn't know the guy from a hole in the wall, it would have been the same as if he killed his pops during a family dinner having lived with him for thirty years.  Intent didn't matter.
Socrates' changed all that.  He basically told Greek society what was what. He taught them to ask questions in life.  In fact, he brings forth some tenets which hold strongly to some of our own, like this quote, widely known to be one of his most important: "I know you won't believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others."  Sound familiar, Jews?
So, what we've got here is a society that has reached it's pinnacle. Now, think about this: What happens when a culture perfects everything, has the absolute best of everything, and for the first time in the history of the world, this perfection is accessible to all of it's citizens? Of course, pretty much everybody wants to participate in an enlightenment. I say "pretty much everybody" because, just as in any society, when once a type of uniformity is achieved, with it comes it's inevitable afterbirth: cultural dissidents, or, as we call them today: Hippies. Back then, they were Philosophers (bullshit artists).
The best way for us to perceive Socrates is to think of him as the John Lennon of his time. He was talented, smart, though some may say naïve as well, but most importantly, he had a way with words.  All of this is what the disillusioned youth of the aristocracy saw in Socrates: a charismatic, learned leader offering a lifestyle that clashes with that of their families and douchey meat-headed friends. In short, something different.
So these kids throw away their shoes, leave their palatial estates with their fish-and-lamb kebabs and their servants and their PS3s to drop acid and learn at the feet of their master (gotta keep the Lennon metaphor alive, you know?). They hang on to every word he says, even when he went through his heroin period and he was saying things like "The path to knowledge runs through that goat over there."
Imagine what it must have been like when these kids went back home for their bacchanalia vacation and started preaching the teachings of Socrates to their parents over Shabbat dinner. They fuckin' hated it.  To them, Socrates was a nut job. Just some broke degenerate who couldn't function in their culture, so he formed his own bullshit counter-culture.  And that's where it happened. That's where Socrates became the world's first hippie.  He was accused of corrupting the youth of Greece and his radical teachings enraged the big shots in the Brioni togas.  It was so bad that Nixon had a file on him the size of Kanye West's ego.
It was so bad that Aristophanes characterized him in his play Clouds as a crazy old clown who was teaching his students how to duck their money lenders. And that's one of the more flattering portrayals of him. Fuckin' A!
As we all know, Socrates, like Lennon, was killed by the government for being a heretic. But this was not before he passed his teachings on to his most important student, Plato.  Plato is most essential to Socrates legacy because he is the guy who put all of the legendary philosopher's (bullshit artist's) work to paper. Socrates, you see, was, like most hippies, dangerously insane, and did not trust the written word, so he never recorded what he philosophized (bullshat).  The more that I think about it, the more I feel like I could say that Plato probably took a bunch of Socrates' orations and put his name on them when no one was looking and took credit for them. Boom. Superstar overnight. Don't look at me like that. You'd do the same thing if you could.