S2. Chapter 4: What If the Hippies Won?

Lloyd Dobler asks what the world might look like if peace, poetry, and protest had actually beaten profit. Chapter 4 of the Tao Te Ching meets Gen X nostalgia and political satire. What if the hippies actually won?

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Lloyd Dobler peers into chapter 4 of the Tao Te Ching “the well that’s never used up” and finds his own reflection—half boombox philosopher, half aging protest kid. From Sound of Music antifascists to Reagan-era sellouts, Lloyd wonders how close we came to building a gentler world before greed re-branded itself as virtue.

It’s a meditation on bottomlessness, burnout, and what it means to keep drawing from the infinite well when the empire won’t stop drinking.

Based on Chapter 4 of the Tao Te Ching:
The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.

Hidden, but always present.
I don’t know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.