How the Mass Mind Absorbs Potent Countercultures

Is the co-optation always degrading, politically compromised, and dishonourable?

Why do countercultures like the Hippie movement or alt-right populism develop in large societies?

Because the capacity for elite control over culture is typically limited, although this should be qualified by saying that social media, artificial intelligence, and other technological advances could perfect the police state.

Still, large societies necessarily run on lies, even if these are sometimes just lies by omission. The truth must be diluted to withstand public consumption since our personalities, tastes, and backgrounds differ, so only an average message could appeal to the majority. This is why political speech in free societies is often so vapid, and why kitsch appeals to the larger, lower class, while the minority of elites prefer “high,” “fine,” more conceptual art.

The dominant class’s counterculture

Countercultures, secret societies, underground movements, and the like form to vent minority grievances with those political compromises. To fit in with the dominant conventions, you must go along with various lies or myths. You must identify with certain fictions that prop up a collective self-image. That mass image is self-serving, as is everyone’s conscious conception of himself or herself. We’re all the stars of our life’s show, whereas objectively none of us matters much in the long run or often even in the short run.

For instance, in early modern Europe, the archaic Christian myth became intolerable, so it was replaced by a secular humanistic narrative about how we could solve our problems by undergoing technological and social progress.

When these fictions become stale or their political role overshadows their aesthetic appeal, maladaptive or dysfunctional individuals — prophets, philosophers, bohemian artists, melancholy drifters, spiritual seekers, victims of trauma or mentally illness — revolt by expressing their disdain for mainstream culture with a countercultural mythos.

More precisely, there are two kinds of counterculture, depending on whether they emerge from above or from below, as it were. The aristocrats or other dominant elites distinguish themselves with their high culture, as distinct from what Nietzsche called “slave morality” or the folklore that soothes the unwashed, often duped masses.

Both cultures are mythic brands that promote distinct lifestyles and personalities, but the culture of the lower and middle classes dominates at least in that it has the most adherents per society. Fitting into the dominant culture is usually a matter of automating your thoughts as well as your behaviour. The ideal member of that culture is a drone, a domesticated animal, as in a pet or a slave, which is to say a tool of the elites.

The elites’ counterculture, then, is usually an appalling testament to that powerful minority’s vanity and sociopathy, those being the vices needed to rationalize the elites’ political and economic domination. Having corrupted themselves in the process of acquiring their wealth and privileges, the “power elite,” as C. Wright Mills called the oligarchs, must brand their monstrous ethos with a suitable mythos, that is, with a fiction that casts the elites as the protagonists of their collective venture.

So, the ancient royals were more closely aligned with certain powerful deities, so that they seemed to rule by divine right, while modern bankers, industrialists, and celebrities deserve their power because of their supposed genius for business.

The underclass’s counterculture

There’s also a counterculture that emerges from the underclass, however. In both cases, the inspiration is the distaste for the hollowness of mass culture, which makes the countercultures counter to the latter. But the underclass lacks the sociopathy that comes with decadent empowerment. Instead, the powerless counterculturalists will be more revolutionary figures, inspired not by an urge to aggrandize their egos, but by some epiphany or artistic vision that sublimates their alienation and their resentment of their inferior social status.

In the Axial Age, for instance, prophets, philosophers, and ascetics challenged the status quo with a dualistic ontology, with a vision of a hidden realm that’s more real and perfect than the mundane one we commonly perceive. The ancient countercultures sided with the transcendent principle of the one true God, of the Forms, the Way, or Brahman, which compelled mass society to defend its adherence to profane norms by aligning them with this new moral vision.

Hindus excelled in that synthesis, as they posited a host of hierarchies and cycles to keep the peace. In India you could have your cake and eat it too. You could carry on with the mundane lifestyle, disdaining asceticism as so much madness, and you could still call yourself a Hindu in good standing because this religion placed these lifestyles on a spectrum of equally viable life options.

Thus, the existential choice in India wasn’t as stark as the one Jesus presented, as though you were either for the social outsiders and their vision or against them. Likewise, from the Cynical or Jain standpoint, it’s the mundane regulations of mass behaviour that are sinister and preposterous.

Intriguingly, modernists follow Hindu inclusiveness with their invention of the spectrum of political orientations, which lends conservatism credibility even though the conservative’s authoritarian personality is patently anti-humanistic and thus archaic in the modern context. Likewise, the Hindu synthesis of secularism and mystical asceticism may be an artificial, political compromise.

The degrading co-optation

In any case, elsewhere I’ve explained how there’s been a longstanding cold war between the compromised mass culture and the counterculture of social outsiders. But it’s worth pointing out here that the former often integrates the latter by a process of co-optation.

For instance, there are intermediaries and popularizers who bridge the two worlds, bringing undercurrents into the mainstream and normalizing what was once cool.

This is perhaps most familiar in the arts. Trent Reznor garnered mass attention for his version of industrial rock music. Woody Allen translated existential themes in Ingmar Bergman films for a less literary, American audience. Neil deGrasse Tyson and the other science popularizers simplify the complexities of theoretical physics for the masses. Ryan Holiday turns fatalistic Stoic ethics into neoliberal self-help platitudes for non-philosophers. And Rupi Kaur and the other Instagram “poets” reduce poetic creativity to consumer-friendly drivel for the infantilized crowd that’s hooked on social media.

The counterculture flourishes out of the spotlight when fame poses no distractions for its leaders. When an intermediary discovers the underground practice and is inspired to share its wealth with outsiders, the contents are usually degraded to appeal to that wider audience.

After all, every social practice looks foolish to outsiders. If you’re not going to pay your dues and initiate yourself into some subculture but are content to consume its contents in a disposable form like candy, you’ll hardly have reckoned properly with what made the subculture captivating in the first place. When an art world has gone mainstream, after enough popularizers and vultures have trivialized the once-sacred practice, genuine artists and devotees will have to return to their muses and develop what’s effectively another cult.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, cultures are just cults that are bastardized for political purposes, the inspired principles having been degraded to manage a larger, more diverse population (and usually to excuse the hypocrisy of the managers). This distinction maps onto the foregoing one between mass culture and the outsider’s counterculture. The latter are cults, as in underground societies for an initiated, zealous minority.

Some elite cults became legendary, such as the Illuminati or Freemasonry movements, or Jeffrey Epstein’s paedophilia ring. The underclass cults may be as small as a visionary artist’s labours in her garage that she shares with a only few admirers.

The point, though, is that these cults are meant to lend vitality and existential gravitas to life, whereas mass culture is a deadening, dehumanizing force that uses up the majority and casts them off as oblivious functionaries in some power elite’s scheme of self-aggrandizement.

An honourable assimilation?

Is there, then, some honourable way of integrating cults and cultures, private epiphanies and mass dereliction of existential duty? Or is the assimilation always politically tainted and premised on a degrading simplification of the thought leader’s insights?

There are, of course, some famous artists who don’t simply sell out or lose touch with their inspiration. They’re exceptions that prove the rule, though, since they typically delegate the job of managing their empire to non-artists, freeing these cult leaders to continue to explore their creativity without being tempted by the extraneous business or political exigencies.

Still, the obstacles here are familiar. The empowered artist can become self-indulgent: surrounded by sycophants, like a dictator, her very freedom is liable to infantilize her, as material necessity is no longer the mother of her invention. There’s an enormous difference between an entrepreneur’s ingenuity that fuels her work before she’s succeeded in her venture, as she’s still resorting to trial and error to map the territory of this niche, on the one hand, and the billionaire’s lame floundering as he indulges his appetites, no longer facing any visceral danger, on the other.

The trading of artistic integrity for fame, wealth, and power may or may not be worth it, but because these goods are in conflict, you can’t have both at the same time. To some extent, at least, you exchange one set of principles and lifestyles for another.

Idealists like Jesus, Kurt Cobain, and Emily Dickinson aren’t content to transform themselves in that drawn-out act of compromising. Obsessed with their daemon or their inner vision of how things should be, they prefer the mental flow state in which they forget the rest of the world as they practice their art. This is far from the realist’s management of the details of some business or social hierarchy.

The paradigmatic case of Jesus is instructive. Rather than suffering the embarrassment of having to sell out his principles once his cult went viral after the Roman Empire destroyed Jerusalem (and thus Christianity’s main rival, in Judaism), Jesus got himself executed.

But Christian myth imagines that Jesus then underwent a spiritual rather than a political transformation, in honour of the sacrifice he made for the purity of his late-Axial counterculture. Rather, Paul of Tarsus, together with Eusebius and the Church’s other ingratiators who drove the popularity of Christianity by selling its message carried out the political transformation Jesus would likely have had to endure had he lived to see his cult’s empowerment. Instead, Jesus’s corpse is supposed to have resurrected and been turned into a “spiritual body” that ascended to Heaven, this being the antithesis of the corrupt, mundane body that was Christendom.

As to whether an artist can cope with fame while retaining her connection to her muse, that’s a mystery of the ages.

Cults rejuvenate mass cultures, as the latter feed on the former’s energy and insights like vampires. Perhaps this is a vestige of the ancient rite of human sacrifice. The innocents are scapegoated, symbolically taking on the sins of the deadened, uninspired normies, and slain to feed the tribe. The big fish eat the little fish, and cultures devour the underclass’s cults, on the presumption that social outsiders will keep popping up with fresh insights to degrade and to assimilate.

It’s as though authentic philosophy, religion, and art were the lifeblood of our collective mind.