Is Counterculture Still Counter?

I don’t think there is a mainstream culture anymore, or perhaps I should say the mainstream isn’t really a culture anymore. When we say something is mainstream, I think we’re often just talking about a bunch of miscellaneous purchase selections that happen to be made by large numbers of people: what are the most popular brands and what types of entertainment are people choosing? And that’s pretty much our shared “culture.”

And deconstructionism to the contrary, I think you can drive yourself nuts trying to attach too much significance (or trying to find too much resonance) from what people purchase as consumers. At its core, I think that our version of consumerism is just the pretty vacant response of lots of people passing the time without a clue, in a society where nothing much coheres.

Another way of looking at it is that the “mainstream” is now a faux counterculture. It’s got your Starbucks café society: all the various hip brands as reflected by their advertising, all the cool gadgets with their well-advertised youthful hipster appeal for connecting and having fun. It all kind of strives for “counterculture lite.” People are encouraged to “think outside the box,” which is a sort of utterly neutered version of the idea of transgressing taboos that was vital to authentic “countercultures”

Human beings who share a place and time, and most of all a language, together are going to influence each other and have commonalities and shared underlying assumptions. So there’s not some kind of non-permeable boundary around counterculture –— or the notion of counterculture – and mainstream, although in the context of my Countercultures Through The Ages book (written with Dan Joy and intro by Timothy Leary), I would refer you to certain discussions in there. For instance, the Qalanders in the Sufi tradition — – they were forest-dwelling, hairy, sexually-free, hallucinogen imbibing wild men and women in thirteenth-century Middle Eastern Muslim culture. Since I wasn’t there, I have no way of knowing, but it’s lovely to imagine them as way “dropped out” — – radically different from the mainstream culture or cultures around them at that time. Genuinely apart. I’d say the same thing about some of the Taoist hermits and “blockheads” in ancient China, as discussed in that book.

In some ways, I like to see some of these as examples of drop-outs from the Darwinian evolutionary struggle. It seems that there are reward systems that are built into our brain chemistry — – they reward success (it feels like cocaine) and social approval, or at least acceptance. I like to think that certain dropped-out groups in human history have discovered a different reward system that is also somehow built into the human system –— one that might be related to a mind-opened engagement with experience itself. Or it might simply be related to the absence of stress from refusing to participate in whatever rat race was particular to that culture.

The second in a series of outtakes from interviews with me. This one was conducted by Tristan Gulliford for Reality Sandwich in 2005