The Out Crowd

Ah, yet another post written because I can't sleep. This time, I tried reading some articles at the Temple of the Screaming Electron. Specifically, I was looking at the texts on drugs.

(Buddy looks up at me. His eyes speak volumes. "Could you just go to sleep and turn off the lights?")

Of course, I looked at more texts then just those on drugs. Right before I turned to that section, I read an article on... well, a person's general schetzomania ("We're all being controlled by the corporations, man, and we're being led to our doom!"). Since TOTSE's purpose is to collect information, regardless of its content, there are many articles dedicated to counterculture.

Though there has been various incarnations of countercultures throughout multiple spheres of society. One of the first large countercultures to gain notoriety were the Beats of the 1950s and earlier.

Having not lived in that era, I could not say from experiance what motivated a person to become part of the beat movement. However, I can hypothesize that because of the rise of mass media and news broadcasts focusing on the economy and business sectors, individuals began to lose their individuality. They began to realize that they were just one of several billions of people who were in the same class as they were; they had no more power then billions of others. In that mindset, they could easily believe that they had no way to reach the same level of pull that large companies did. So the motto of the beat generation was "I have no power to change anything, and so my life is meaningless."

This motto changed throughout the years as the people who comprised this culture changed, and eventually a new counterculture came up as an evolution of the Beat movement. In walks the Hippies. Members of this culture had lives with purpose, although radically different from mainstream culture. Their motto, being a direct evolution of the Beat motto, was essentially "I do not have the power to change how the world is. However, I still have a life, and I am not going to waste it."

So unlike the 'terminally depressed' Beats before them, the Hippies based their life on creating experiances. Hippies formed their own communistic 'villages', where they would give their talents to everyone else (ironic, because of the massive red scare at the time). Concepts like Free Love opened up new worlds in terms of experiance, as did drug usage. Suddenly, drugs that have been used for thousands of years such as canibis and opium opened up new doorways into realms of thought and philosophy, which brought new forms of expression along with them.

Time passed, and as the Hippie movement started dwindling down, another counterculture began becoming more prevalent. Drug Junkies were essentially Hippies turned Beat, but with more drugs. Their motto: "There's nothing I can do to change things and no point in greater knowledge. But I have a pipe, so I'll smoke it." This viewpoint is gained from the combination of observations both philosophical and sociological. They are, "It doesn't matter if I have a superior philosophy because it is not the popular philosophy," which is also a political observation (most countries are democratic, so your oppinion only counts for an extremely small persentage), and, "I cannot change the viewpoints of others."

The interesting thing about the Drug Junkies is that it's still the prevalent counterculture in the US, after nearly four decades. Even though artificial countercultures were introduced in the 1980s (and more of them continue to be produced in this decade), the Junkies prevailed. It's suprising because of the sheer number of artifical countercultures there have been. What teenaged girl didn't want to dress up in the trashy style of Pat Benetar? There have been several 'fad' countercultures like that one which had become so popular that they seemed at the time to be greater then the culture it was 'against'. But of course, they never lasted long because they were artificial and the ideas behind them were not fully adopted by the people who moved on and made it uncool.

And now I have no idea where I was going with this. Good night.