As you may have noticed, I’ve been feverishly trying to reclaim some of the “lost history” of the counter-culture. In particular, a group called the Yippies. I was first drawn to the Yippies by way of the excellent BBC documentary, Century of the Self. Yippie leader Stew Albert explained in an interview in Part 3 that as a reaction to the violent repression the United States government lavished upon student protestors in the late 1960’s (at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Kent State, etc), the Left had no choice to but to change their focus and tactics:

People who had been politically active were persuaded that if they could change themselves and be healthy individuals and if a movement grew up just aimed at people changing themselves, then at some point all that positive change going on - well, you could say quantity would become quality and there would be a sort of a spontaneous transformation of society. But political activism was not required. It’s about making a new You. And if enough people changed the way they were, that the society would change.

Robert Pardun, a former student activist and member of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) elaborates a little:

The personal became political. Without changing the personal, you didn’t stand a chance of changing the political. Coming up against the state power of the United States was not an option. They out-gunned us.

They then go into describing the Esalen Institute and how it became a hotbed for pioneering techniques for people to change themselves, and thus change society. You can watch the experiments they conducted there and easily see connections how they were used on a broader scale societally. Check out how they “liberated” a group of nuns, and ask yourself if that wasn’t the conceptual groundwork for the Women’s Liberation movement and Feminism.

Maybe it’s just the way it is framed, but watching this documentary, you have to wonder if these groups (and us, their heirs in many ways) weren’t simply herded right back where the state and corporations wanted them. That is, getting people to intensely focus on perfecting their own inner world (or at least their personal one) rather than on the external social order. It seems to be the conclusion of this documentary that the trends for personal transformation pioneered by these groups were simply co-opted by marketers and used to create wholly new systems of advertising and salesmanship. Products became less utilitarian and more about enabling people to assert their identity and grow personally.

Narrator Adam Curtis later connects the dots:

In the process, the political idea that had begun the movement for personal transformation began to disappear. The original vision had been that through discovering and expressing the self a new culture would be born. One that would challenge the power of the state. […] But what was now emerging was the idea that people could be happy simply within themselves and that changing society was irrelevant.

They also feature an interview with a reformed and sort of toothless Jerry Rubin, who underwent EST training (part of the human potential movement, which was pioneered at Esalen - although I don’t know if EST itself was). Rubin, one of the original Yippies, originally lead the march on Chicago, and as you’ve seen in many of the quotes I’ve been using recently from his book “Do It!” was originally quite the revolutionary firebrand. He talks about burning down schools, dosing water supplies with LSD, fucking in the streets, all kinds of crazy stuff. But in this interview, he talks about how in days gone by he had a “martyr complex” and how he’s no longer so “overwhelmingly moved by injustice”. He hardly seems like the same person who was called before Congress to testify at the House Un-American Activities Committe multiple times, and came dressed as an American Revolutionary War soldier, a Viet Kong psychedelic hippy and Santa Claus.

But at the same time, reading his book, you can see the seeds of his own un-doing. You can spot the naivete held onto in so many areas which is so easily exploited - such as that a new ideology, Communism, would save them from the old, Capitalism. He seems to have given little or no thought (at least in this book, written in 1970) to the possibility that maybe ideology altogether was the problem. Or maybe I’m being too harsh on him, since hind-sight is of course 20/20. But there are also passages like this which speak for themselves (p. 169):

And we were motherfucking bad. We were dirty, smelly, grimy, foul, loud, dope-crazed, hell-bent and leather-jacketed. We were a public display of filth and shabinees, living in-the-flesh rejects of middle-class standards.

We pissed and shit and fucked in public; we crossed streets on red lights; and we opened Coke bottles with our teeth. We were constantly stoned or tripping on every drug known to man.

We were the outlaw forces of Amerika displaying ourselves flagrantly on a world stage.

Dig it! The future of humanity was in our hands!

Yippie!

The book is filled with passages like that, which on the one hand, are oddly inspiring. But on the other hand kind of make me want to smack my head and be like, “NO WONDER YOUR DAMN REVOLUTION FAILED!” Or, if Rubin’s not enough for you, consider also this quote from an interview with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver from the 1980’s:

We never dreamed that we would be able to overthrow the American government. We didn’t see that as our task. We saw that as the task of the survivors. Our job was to tear down the status quo and leave it to other people on how to rebuild because it was not possible to seize control of the government and install our people.

So in other words, it seems like the counter-culture willfully didn’t know what they were doing, didn’t make plans, didn’t prepare for what happens next. I really wish I had been through all of this first-hand, so I could really understand better the challenges these people were up against and the emotions and thoughts that ran through them at the time. Because in retrospect, it just seems so sad how all their good intentions got sucked up and perverted by the government and corporations. But maybe that’s just the way things go. I don’t want to be too harsh on them so much as I want to really feel what they felt and pick up where they left off spiritually and culturally.

But the waters are just so muddy nowadays. It’s so hard to get perspective on all this and sort all the issues out. The history is hidden and slanted. And just like back then, people today seem to lack an understanding of where we’re going (or even where we’ve been). And most people don’t even give a crap at all, which was elegantly stated in a recent piece on Wired by Tony Long:

Why aren’t we marching to demand an end to the illegal surveillance of American citizens by their own government, again under the pretext of waging war on terror? Why do we so blithely surrender our civil liberties — the very thing that supposedly separates us from other societies — to the illusion of security? All the high-tech snooping in the world won’t stop a determined terrorist from striking. If it could, Israel would be the safest country on earth.

Why aren’t irate Americans camping out in the lobby of every newspaper and TV station from coast to coast, demanding that the press reassert the right to perform its single most important function, that of government watchdog? The ghost of Richard Nixon, and a very corporeal Bill Clinton, must be cursing their rotten luck.

Why aren’t enraged college students occupying their campus administration buildings, demanding that the United States sign the Kyoto Protocol? Hell, it might already be too late, but is the luxury of driving your mom’s SUV really worth the coming dystopian world that you, more than I, will inherit?

Why aren’t we storming the battlements of every filthy oil company in America, demanding that their executives be tossed into fetid dungeons for cynically manipulating gas prices while raking in obscene profits?

Why aren’t we demanding that religion return to the pulpit, where it belongs, and keep out of the White House and the courts?

In short, where the hell is everybody?

And he, very correctly, concludes that people nowadays are firmly caught in the tricks and tactics which marketers learned from hippies and yippies and people who were trying to be spiritual and build better lives for themselves back in the old days. Our imaginations and hopes and dreams have been snared in the butterfly nets of consumer products:

I’ll tell you where they are. They’re at home, tuning in to root for the next “American idol.” They’re plugged into their iPods, utterly self-involved and disconnected from what lies just outside their doors. They’re spending 25 hours a week playing video games in virtual worlds instead of fighting to save the only world that really matters. They’re surfing porn. They’re text messaging and e-mailing and scheming to close that next big deal. They’re flogging their useless crap on eBay.

All that technology at their fingertips, and they’re completely blind. Two terms for George W. Bush? They’re deaf and dumb, too.

Bread and circuses. The government and the corporations are giving us bread and circuses to keep us sufficiently distracted so the powers that be can pursue their agendas.

And I think Long is very much correct. But I am searching for what’s next - looking to understand the past, so that I can understand myself, and the present and the future and all of us. Part of me wants to go down that exact same road as these guys took: just figure out myself and my own life. Just get that all in order, and then it won’t matter what kind of screwed up society I live in. Because I could be happy living in a jail cell. And that all sounds very New Agey and spiritual and Buddhist and everything, but it also sort of makes me sick inside, because it feels about the equivalent of saying “You win!” and throwing your hands up in the air and walking off the playing field. But maybe it’s not simply a problem that can be solved so much as it one that has to be LIVED, and you have to allow yourself - and others - the ability to make mistakes along the way, cause we’re all ultimately in the same boat, pointed towards the same goal. Or at least, that’s what I hope…