Regarding the Next Counterculture
The most radical counterculture didn’t attain power, and not only did it not sell out but it doesn’t even circulate in the market.
Even in California (its cradle), for example, certain classic books of anti-Psychiatry or deep Psychology are no longer catalogued. And they aren’t reprinted. Nor are they taught in many schools. As though they didn’t exist. They don’t belong to Neuroscience or Clinical Psychology. They don’t belong to “scientific” Psychology.
The counterculture lost that battle. Certain key theorists are considered charlatans today. Their texts are only found in second hand bookstores, staffed, by the way, by ex-hippies. And those businesses are closing due to the Internet and the fact that their owners are hanging up their sneakers.
The vast majority of these titles, of course, never went beyond the English language. Or their translations are already part of the Titanic.
Recently The New York Times published an article that revealed how the generation of university professors who were trained in the sixties, whose methods and curricular content reflect that decade, have reached the age of retirement and are being replaced by younger professors, who are notoriously less politicized. The academic left is moribund. Liberal North American universities are shifting to the right.
In the near future, French critical theory will soon be judged as belonging to anti-American occultism.
The fact is that Generation X, which replaced the counterculture, and the “Me Generation” – also nicknamed Millennials –, those born in the eighties and who today constitute the majority of university students in the world, as studies reveal, possess more reactionary ideological positions.
MTV was their Woodstock, and 1984 their 1968. Michael Jackson won the Cold War.
The liberal and theophanic achievements generated by the counterculture are being replaced by the postures of these generations that are more retrograde, more cynical, that is, more integrated, more conformist. Whose irreverence is South Park.
Even if it leaves the White House, Reaganism triumphed ideologically. Hardcore conservatism is eliminating the advances achieved by the counterculture. This is what our era is about. We are the retreat. We postponed the arrival of the 21st century. In the U.S. the phenomenon is irreversible. And not because the “system” has a conspiracy – as the Flinstone Left likes to think –, but simply because the post-counterculture generations couldn’t care less about the knowledge disseminated during that era, it means Bush to them. Or they won’t even hear about it in seminars. We are living the goodbye of the counterculture.
The fact is that if a few decades ago young people were a progressive social class, at the end of modernity the situation was inverted: youth is reactionary.
And the vision of the world that will rise to power – during the first third of this century – with today’s postmodern youth should be resisted by the next counterculture.
{ Heriberto Yépez, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 2 August 2008 }
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