The Age of Discord

How can we call this anything else? At least in terms of the narrative of our mass culture.

If you have never really looked at 60s American counter culture I suggest that you should go and take a look into it. Up until about a year ago it was history. Since the middle of 2016 it's starting to consume reality.

It's super hard to unpick this one, it's hardly an intuitive leap. The counter culture (which I am going to use here to refer specifically to the 60s American counter culture movement) is a many-layered and complex belief system that changed the world. The movement's ideals were not realised, but some of its goals and objectives either were at the time, or were seeded so that it almost seems inevitable that they should come to pass.

The counterculture lived everywhere in art, music, literature, politics and even carved its way into science and technology. What I think people didn't get then, what is only starting to emerge now, is that things we have, as a Western culture, regarded as movements or philosophies that grew up out of counterculture were, in fact, a generational shockwave that is now starting to realise around us.

Confusion

One of the key things that contributed to our failure to perceive this cultural velocity is the fact that some key features of the counter culture were, in fact, parts of the underlying philosophy which became redundant. They are like cladding on the outside of a space module attempting re-entry. They can burn off, so the payload can be kept safe.

Among these features are obvious things like frequent, intense drug experimentation and the philosophy of free love. When you talk about hippies these are two of the key points, and often in that order. It's hard not to be cynical about it these days, after all we've spent about three to four generations being cynical about hippies at this stage.

On the one hand the ideals of the movement talked about peaceful living, building a life out of love and so on and so forth. The unfortunate side-effects from the attempts to live out those ideals were passive-aggression, paranoia, psychosis, ignored misogyny and a general celebration of the solipsistic.

Maybe these guys should have read less Marx and Ghandi and taken on board the words of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder:

"No plan survives contact with the enemy."

Here's a thing, you would imagine it would be quite easy to see a flaw in any philosophy who's central tenet is love but whose foundation is anti-establishment.

Once you've harnessed that horse and cart together and loaded up the cart with drugs and questionable personal choices it's easy to see how it ended up in a ditch.

The mistake comes in thinking that just because something's most obvious features foundered on realities rocky shores that the whole ship went down with it. This is most certainly not the case. Almost all the most recognisable features of our zeitgeist have their roots in the counterculture. Post post modernism, political correctness (mad or otherwise), self-referential entertainment, social media memes. The world has spent nearly half a century now cranking up the absurdity.

It's not a surprise that finally the world of politics has gone the same way in English-speaking Western culture. The weirdest thing about the current right-wing is that it's an MTV commercial pastiche of the things it used to be. No less dangerous than it ever was but the political end may as well be a bunch of rubber puppets spitting one-liners, constantly embarrassing and disgracing itself, the extreme end is like a KKK comic book version of itself. Extremism is taking its extreme cues from 90s skate-punk marketing campaigns.

In the pub fight of Western Culture we're at the point where someone's going to have to shove that broken bottle in someone's general direction or cooler heads need to swoop in to drag the participants outside into the cold night air.

And all the while Discordians have a chuckle. Not in some bittersweet "have to laugh or you'd cry" way. Crying is not on the agenda. It's all funny, no less potentially destructive and catastrophic for it. But it is funny.

So laugh on that basis everyone. Welcome to the Age of Discord where your murderer will probably be some kind of parodic imitation of the real thing.