On Becoming an Awake Contrarian

When juvenile counter culture goes wrong, and what you can do

My parents were the ‘68 generation.

At a time of petit bourgeois conservatism, they triggered and shocked their parents and teachers by growing long hair, sympathizing with communist ideas, and cultivating a lifestyle embracing nature, freedom, and carelessness.

In hindsight, it’s easy to blame them for today’s woke madness. After all, it was during that time, in Germany and France especially, where much of the ideological seeds had been sown that would later grow into critical race theory, post-colonial studies, technocratic environmental extremism, and the rest.

But for all of today’s nostalgia for the 1950s, let’s not forget that it was not all rainbows and unicorns after WWII. For example, we can make fun of the current wokeists for seeing Nazis lurking behind every bush. Thing is, though, in Germany back then, there literally were Nazis around: teachers, judges, regular neighbors, and oftentimes, parents.

If you had long hair at the time and wore some not-so-standard clothes, some random guy on the street might have greeted you with a lovely, “if Adolf was still around, they would have put you in a concentration camp, you dirty bum!”

Let’s also not forget that TV and advertising really took off at the time, laying the foundation for the rampant consumerism to come.

Along came Herbert Marcuse with his idea that people are manipulated into embracing “false needs,” and his writing resonated deeply with the contrarians at the time. He spoke to their deep longing: a longing for a more honest, more human, more alive culture and society.

Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs.
(Marcuse, One Dimensional Man)

I mean, you can quibble with his Marxist framework, but Marcuse’s analysis of a power elite brainwashing the public to create false needs, thereby enriching themselves and cementing their power, is hard to mock in an age where airlines make you pay more in return for a “CO2 absolution” and other absurdities, relentlessly hammering their message into our heads via the media and the big corporations’ PR armies. Yes, there is some backlash these days, but plenty of people have gotten plenty rich off the creation of new “false needs”—from bottled water to paper straws, from “sustainable” finance to green energy, all the while channelling any real energy for change into an abyss of clouded thinking and the satisfaction of superficial needs, including the need for moral outrage.

Now, while Marcuse made some poignant observations, at times getting close to describing the managerial elite that subverts all aspects of life and wages an open war against the soul of mankind, he screws it all up due to a poor understanding of human nature and his Marxian-materialist view of human progress. His desperate attempt to impose Marxist categories and the idea of a worldly form of “transcendence” on reality creates a dangerous mix that has led him down some very dark alleys—alleys that his later successors were all too happy to follow all the way through to the pathological utopian visions that dominate us today.

But some of Marcuse’s thought still resonates today, as it did back then.¹ There is a reason he had such an impact, and as always with history, we need to understand the people at the time and how they thought and felt if we are to make sense of where we are and where we came from—and what lessons we might extract from the experience of a previous generation.

Now, hindsight is easy. But let me just say it: I’m pretty certain that many of today’s contrarians, including many younger right-wingers, would have been 68ers had they been born earlier.

More to the point, if we acknowledge that Herbert Marcuse was onto something but screwed up because of his one-dimensional perspective (urgh) that he worked into a Grand Theory, which became the foundation for so much deluded word salad at war with reality, I wonder what kind of nonsense some of today’s contrarian thought might flower into a few decades down the line.

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When we are young, many of us go against the grain. Today’s youngsters are no different.

But how can you shock your parents, teachers, and culture at large into oblivion these days? Surely not by becoming a communist or railing against consumerism. No, you go right.

And if you are really looking for trouble, you go hard right. You declare that, well, the white race really is better than the rest, or that the Jews do run the world, after all, or that the Enlightenment was a big mistake and an absolutist king—or a nice little theocracy, perhaps?—might not be such a bad idea, all things considered.

This is thought crime of the first order, a bit like a young woman advocating for free sex back in the 50s, or a young man writing pamphlets about opening borders and abolishing the military in the early 60s.

Now, such frivolities are perhaps to be expected. And if a society becomes too rigid in its underlying mythology and sacred assumptions, we need people who are willing to slaughter sacred cows. Besides, who can blame today’s youth for defending themselves against the sheer idiocy of the woke mantras they are subjected to in school, at university, and at their workplace?

However, there is always a danger with juvenile reaction. There’s a reason why totalitarians are always trying to use the young and pit them against their families and society. We need to be on guard that we don’t slaughter sacred cows only to create new ones, which then turn into ideological dead ends—or worse.

How many have fallen!

How many have spiraled down into lunacy, obsession, and talking-points-radicalism!

How many have stared into the abyss too long and turned to stone!

We all know them. These are the obnoxious people littering the comment sections with their favorite sacred cows, spewing predictable bullet points once their emotional identification gets triggered by a phrase or a key word. Or even without a key word: they just can’t stop talking about their obsession and cannot wrap their heads around the idea that people are simply not interested. They are often just as programmed and reactive as those on the other side of the (mainstream) ideological spectrum.

In an age of AI, the last thing we need are wetware bot wars.

So, how do we escape this infuriating dialectic between left-wing and right-wing ideology, between theocracy and moral degradation, between utopian hippiedom and militarist tribalism, between mainstream absurdity and violent counter revolution?

It’s hard, but it’s possible.

There is a Better Way

The first defense is to cultivate some epistemic humility.

Don’t buy into the false dichotomy between “there is no truth” relativism and “my facts don’t care about feelings” nonsense. Just admit that 2+2=4, that the sky is blue, that biology is a thing, and also admit that we don’t know diddly squat about most things, and that we can tell the same story from many different perspectives that can be all valid. There.

Now, if you encounter some emotionally triggering subject, say, IQ and race, don’t shy away from it if you are interested in it (but don’t let anybody tell you that you must be interested), look at it as hard as you can, think about it as hard as you can. But at some point, you need to realize that if you missed just one little thing, this could change the entire story, and that there are likely many of those.

Some of those things you could have known but didn’t see. Others you simply cannot know. For example, there is so much we have no idea about when it comes to genetics, how DNA works, about intelligence, about the brain and its hemispheres, about how deep history affects us, about evolution, about our ancestors and ancient history, not to mention possible spiritual realms, paradigm-shifting scientific and philosophical breakthroughs to come, and so much more.

Just imagine yourself 10 years ago and the ideas you had back then, and compare them to what you think today. Now imagine how radically different you might think about stuff in another 10 years. This should bring home the idea that your thinking is severely limited, and you lack the knowledge, wisdom, and being to be sure about any complex scientific, historical, or spiritual “story” you have immersed yourself in at this particular time.

Clearly, under these circumstances, humility is the only rational option. At the same time, don’t discard your moral intuition and what your conscience tells you: this is necessary for creating movement, for following the right trajectory, even if later on you look back and question some of the calls you made. Moral development must necessarily go through stages, and perhaps from God’s perspective, in the final analysis, they are all wrong (but important) until one distant day when we are united with the Highest.

Besides epistemic humility, and perhaps more importantly, you must learn not to dwell too long on a particular angle.

When we are young (and often when we are not so young), we have a tendency to go all-in with some perspective or theory: we find something, which seems to explain so much, and then we look at everything from that perspective. But this can severely limit our understanding. Worse, we might get derailed eventually and fall into the ideological abyss.

Consider the wonderful painting, “Jacob’s Ladder,” by William Blake, a painting that I fell in love with years ago. It carries a deep meaning on multiple levels:

Notice how the path towards heaven has the form of a spiral. There are different scenes, different stages on the way up: at each stage, you might do something different, you may think about things differently.

Your perspective changes as you go up. And yet, because the staircase is a spiral, you also come back to a certain perspective eventually, but with new eyes: you look in the same direction, but from a higher vantage point.

I think this is the perfect image for how to deal with theories, historical explanations, philosophical outlooks, and so on.

1. You stumble upon an idea, perhaps even a contrarian and fringe take on things.

2. You study it hard, and you look at the world through that perspective, just as an exercise—knowing that nothing ever is the whole story, or the only story, or the only perspective. If you are lucky, a few light bulbs will go on.

3. At some point, you move on. You can’t stay at the same spot of the staircase for too long, lest you get sucked into the abyss.

4. By moving on, things start looking different, because you have a new perspective, a new direction.

5. Eventually, you will cycle back to the previous perspective or idea. But you will look at it with fresh eyes, based on new insights, and it might look radically different.

Practice epistemic humility and keep moving. You’ll avoid the abyss.

And perhaps, if enough of us can pull it off, we can avoid that today’s contrarian thoughts become the seed of tomorrow’s dystopia.

Perhaps we can finally break the diabolical dialectic that forever pins us down and, by learning how to hold a whole range of seemingly contradictory perspectives in mind, achieve a wider consciousness that can bring new and better approaches to this world.

We have no idea what we are capable of if we use our history properly and learn from the whole range of past human experience that we have access to via modern technology these days—including the experience of my parents’ generation and what it has led to.

Perhaps we find ourselves at a crossroads, with a unique opportunity to spiral out of the usual dialectic that keeps us running in circles—an opportunity that won’t come back for another ten thousand years.

Let’s get over ourselves and use it.

1. The tragedy with most “Big Theories” is that they are mixed bags: those with a good heart will hear what speaks to them, while filtering out the darker and more dangerous aspects. The latter are then picked up by later generations of theorizers and taken even further, building on existing “memes” that already wormed their way into the public consciousness via the more sensible interpretations of the original theory.

For more on that, you need to read Political Ponerology. Harrison Koehli has a whole Substack on the subject.