Angels & Genies
The Beatles Conspiracy/1st & 2nd Matrix Tango, Part Five
(Art by Michelle Horsley)
The Final Nail
As a last pass at Ian MacDonald’s sterling intro to Revolution in the Head: McDonald makes a similar, if more succinct, case to that of Witcover’s 1968 (quoted last time), now peering through the pop cultural glass, and pointing out how the 1960s led inexorably to the 1980s and to a reassertion of authoritarianism, only now with an even more scientistic, narcissistic ruthlessness:
Thus, by a devilish paradox, those who thought they were at the cutting edge of social development in the Sixties—the hippies, the New Left—soon found themselves adrift in the wake of the real social avant-garde of the period: ordinary people. The individualism of the Me Decade, as Tom Wolfe dubbed the Seventies, was a creation of the Sixties’ mass mainstream, not of the peripheral groups which challenged it. Former hippies and radicals who abandoned the utopian “we” for rueful self-interest in the Seventies, far from leading public taste, were merely tagging along behind it. . . . [Thatcher] and her radicalized, post-consensus Conservative voters are the true heirs of the Sixties. They changed the world, not the hippies (and certainly not the New Left). What mass society unconsciously began in the Sixties, Thatcher and Reagan raised to the level of ideology in the Eighties: the complete materialistic individualization—and total fragmentation—of Western society. (p. 31, 32).
In summation, McDonald describes the “destabilizing social and psychological evolution” since the 60s as stemming
chiefly from the success of affluence and technology in realizing the desires of ordinary people. The countercultural elements usually blamed for this were in fact resisting an endemic process of disintegration, with its roots in scientific materialism. Far from adding to this fragmentation, they aimed to replace it with a new social order based on either love-and-peace or a vague anarchist European version of revolutionary Maoism. . . . Ironically, the harshest critics of the Sixties are its most direct beneficiaries: the political voices of materialistic individualism (p. 36, emphasis added).1