Counterculture

You hear a lot of words that mean something similar during your lifetime, but the word counterculture is really straightforward. The first part of the word, counter, comes from (what else?) Latin, where it began as contra.

Culture is well understood to mean the dominant way of life all around us. Latin’s cultura sprung up from the word colere, which meant to inhabit.

So, counterculture has come to mean a secondary way of life that runs somewhat against the mainstream way most people live.

The phrase became popular soon after the publication of The Making of a Counter Culture in 1969, where historian Theodore Roszak not only coined the term, but gave us a working definition:

…the emerging cultural pattern which rejects as its fundamental premises the technological, technocratic, and consumerist values of the modern industrial society.

Roszak zoomed way out and saw that many of the protest movements during the 60s were actually linked closely together. Vietnam antiwar protests, radical feminism, civil rights direct action, the insistence on personal liberties in the face of a controlling state—these were all tied into the technocracy, a system that prized efficiency higher than anything else.

To have such great efficiency, you needed to have tremendous conformity. Roszak’s point was that efficiency isn’t the only thing to care about—particularly if what you’re creating isn’t something you really want.

Roszak gave this concept a name, but counterculture itself has been around for millennia. The idea that efficiency wasn’t the main thing was central to the Dada and Surrealist art movements of the 1920s. This was a direct response to the atrocities of World War I, where cold logic and blind industrial expansion seemed to lead to the greatest tragedy the world had ever seen (so far, anyway).

Dada wasn’t the first movement like this, of course. The 1800s had seen the rise of the Bohemian movement. The best way I know how to describe the Bohemians is as proto-hippies, or maybe even proto-punks. The main idea was to live outside of societal norms, rejecting mainstream society.

Instead of wealth and power as the ultimate goals—as they saw the mainstream—the Bohemians put individuality at the center. They were often poor artists, a lot like some of the more hippie-type punks I met over the years. They viewed climbing the corporate ladder with disdain, and the Bohemians were exactly the same with regard to mainstream Victorian society.

Now, I’m a huge fan of the Enlightenment— the historical period where science and reason became the main way to make decisions instead of superstition. Yet, Bohemianism was a rejection of this cold, calculating society in the same way that Dada was a rejection of the machine running with a mind of its own.

Here’s the core of counterculture. It’s not so much that we punks want to reject society because we don’t like other humans; it’s that we think society has a mind of its own, and that’s not reason enough to mindlessly follow that mind.

It’s very difficult to stand up against this. It might give some people thrills to resist, but for me it’s much more of a solemn duty. I feel as though people feel like there is no alternative, but counterculture provides exactly that. I’m not talking about a totally different set of laws or an overthrow of a state here, but I am talking about a rejection of norms just for being norms.

One of today’s main cultural battleground is over AI, but there’s way too much nuance being flushed down the conversational toilet. Like with everything else, I’m not against automation or making life easier, collectively—but I am against automating contemplation about the big picture.

Dada, Bohemian, hippie, punk—whatever you want to call it, I’m going to continue to be a part of the counterculture.