Go ahead and mentally tick off any of the symptoms listed below that you may be experiencing.
1. You’ve worn a t-shirt, hat, jumper, bought a mug, flag, or any other accessory which sported an anti-corporate slogan or images like ‘McS***’, ‘Coca-Colonisation’, or Che Guevara (the unshaven Socialist Revolutionary). You hope you are projecting a message that will awaken others to reject capitalism, consumerism, conformism etc.
2. You admire musicians who don’t want to ‘sell out’. You would hate to see your favourite artist become ‘mainstream’.
3. While you see the problems the world faces as the result of a deeply ingrained consumerist culture, you believe that this culture must be changed before any real progress can be made. Also, you believe that any legal and economical reform is trivial if it doesn’t address the underlying ‘System’ that drives consumer culture, environmental degradation and worker exploitation.
4. You resent advertisements because they brainwash people to buy increasing amounts of stuff they really don’t need.
If you ticked yes to any of the above, you may be suffering from Counter-Cultural delusions. Don’t you worry though, just read this article, clear your head, and you’ll be back to creating real positive social action in no time!
The counter-culture ideology
The Counter-Culture (CC) sees our current way of life as being driven by an umbrella culture that embraces the artificial need to buy pointless stuff, and has us working like slaves to our jobs so that we can buy even more stuff. It is a critique of consumerism, ‘selling-out’, conforming, and the ‘System’ that is believed to keep the whole cycle going. Oh, also, the System enforces a group-thought mentality on people which keeps them miserable and out of touch with real life and real human expression.
The counter-culturalist aims to solve the big problems like environmental destruction and poverty by ‘de-programming’ fellow citizens. They believe that by destroying the mass-conformity on which the “Culture” depends, everyone will see the error of their ways, and work together to destroy the current institutions and replace them with a Utopia-like state (or non-state, as the anarchists would claim). A main method of bringing this about is by demonstrating to everyday citizens their wasteful consumer ways, and pretty much bringing out their inner bohemian.
Why it just doesn’t work
Ok, so that’s the Counter-Culture in a nut shell. While it’s got nice goals, it just takes the wrong way in achieving them. You see, it’s based on an incorrect view of consumer culture and economics. As a result, since its creation 40 years ago, the counter-culture has zip to solve the big problems; counter-culturalists have been banging their heads against a wall, all the while looking for ways to ‘jam the system’.
As I’ll explain, the CC has actually been counter-productive to fixing serious social and environmental problems. Ironically, it has
increased consumerism and made it bigger than ever before. And worst of all, it has convinced people to flat-out reject things like voting, lobbying for changes to laws, activism for people’s rights, corporate regulation, because they label those actions as merely superficial, ‘band-aid’ measures.
Myth #1: displaying ‘subversive’ messages is a profound challenge to society
Ok, I have dreads, but do I reckon I’m unsettling the ‘System’, defying mass conformity, opening people’s minds to new, free ways of expressing themselves? Not on your life. I don’t expect my hair style to bring about revolution in a stable, liberal democracy, even less for it to give rise to a radically different and improved political and economic structure. Crazily, that’s a core idea of the counter-culturalist’s rationale!
The basic mistake is that they see social norms as being a sign of a whole system of repression. They confirm this by noticing that people react negatively to strange, anti-social behaviour, and take it as a sign that everyone is being coerced into obedient group-think. Their solution is to then ‘subvert the norm’ however they can.
This line of thought is exactly what Hippies tried in the 60s, Punk rockers in the 80s, and Hip Hoppers today. They sought behaviours and images that would make a statement and shock people out of their hypnotic conformity. The problem is, after each ‘subversive’ fashion comes and goes we see that no revolution of social consciousness has occurred (quelle surprise)!
Myth #2: the consumer culture is a culture of conformity
The reality is that consumerism isn’t about conformity, but individuality. People want to be cool, stand out of the crowd, and so they will buy love beads, big black boots, spiky accessories, whatever it takes to show off their individuality. So, as the radical counter culturalists try to subvert fashion, they create new radical versions of individuality that people want to mimic, and thereby support a “keeping up with Joneses” scenario that increases consumption standards. By trying to reject society through this rebel, chic sort of image and behaviour, the counter-culture has
encouraged people to consume more and more.
The icing on the cake of delicious irony is that critiques of consumer society in the form of movies like
American Beauty, books like
No Logo, and music by the likes of Rage Against the Machine, have fuelled highly competitive, conspicuous consumption of ‘radical’ products. Same goes for the popularity of skateboarding, yoga, 4-wheel drives, ‘alternative’ music styles, VWs, Che Guevara t-shirts, dreadlocks, Mohawks etc.
Myth #3: the ‘System’ (full stop)
Watch V for Vendetta, and notice the scenes in which the English Prime Minister talks to his ministers via an oppressively dark and, well, terrifying video-conferencing room. Here you see these ‘Controllers’ systematically trying to control the populace by quashing individuality, as though it threatened the supremacy of their fascist ideology. This ‘control room’ picture of Western society pretty well represents the CC understanding, which views society as a fascist system of Technocracy.
The Technocracy idea encourages a deep distrust for democracy, a rejection of formal educational and the legal system, and the view that these institutions are apart of a System so repressive, so exploitative, that institutional solutions are cast-aside as superficial. One can see this scandalous counter-productivity amongst some environmentalists, anti-globalisation protesters, feminists and New Age religious beliefs.
“By rejecting any proposal that stops short of a total transformation of human consciousness and culture, countercultural activists too often wind up exacerbating precisely the problems they are hoping to solve.” (Heath J and Potter A, The Rebel Sell. Capstone Publishing Ltd UK (2005). P 98)
For example, rather than supporting legislation that aims to address instances of subjugation and discrimination of women in society, instead we witness fanatical calls to arms like “Smash the System”. The only effect of this CC campaigning is to ward off potential women’s rights supporters and detract from the credibility of the issues like gender inequality.
Contre la contre culture
For a not-brief-enough-time, I was a counter-cultural supporter. I swallowed the above myths (and the others I didn’t have space to mention) hook, line and sinker. I wallowed in frustration at the difficulty of changing the System, of instituting my Utopia in one revolutionary swoop. The worst part is that the counter-culture delusion still divides the people between those who are attempting real, effective, though often incremental solutions to social problems, and those who waste their time and effort on over-throwing a repressive ‘System’ that (fortunately) doesn’t really exist.
How do I know this?
Ball T, ‘Ethics For Old? Or, How (Not) to Think of Future Generations’,
Political Theory and the Environment, Humphrey M. Routledge (ed.)
Heath J & Potter A 2005, The Rebel Sell
, Capstone Publishing 
