Countercultural Trip To Truth: A Study On The Counterculture Of The Late 1960s And Early 1970s In The United States From The Epistemological Perspective

The counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States is in no way merely a radical rebellion against and rejection of society, launched by a group of people known as "hippies"; it is a set of attempts and ideas drawn upon a "tradition of anti-tradition", targeted at subverting the "straight society". The counterculturalists touched upon root matters of American society; the received truth was the first and foremost one being questioned. Most probably, however, the counterculture suffered from the same epidemic as other easy terms do: incomplete, distorted popular image, and casual inflation of the term. Another problem with the counterculture, perceived basically as a collection of moral and emotional experiences, is its lack of examination with some measure of objectivity. This paper, drawing upon U.S. sociologist J Milton Yinger's fruitful studies on countercultures, thus purports to refresh the popular image of the counterculture from the countercultural epistemological perspective. The first chapter, having addressed the rise of the issue, delineates the dialectic perspective in countercultural studies proposed by Yinger, which underlies the basic approach of this paper. Feeling it necessary as well as helpful to provide a clear conception of counterculture discussed in this paper, the second chapter sets out to define, both analytically and empirically, the counterculture and the participants known as "hippies". The social background is also attended to, with an eye to differentiating the counterculture from other contemporaneous protest movements. The following two chapters observe in specific the countercultural perception and acquisition of truth, as a fundamental step in creating and establishing a set of new norms and values. In a popular distrust and questioning of rationality, science and technology were condemned as pernicious institutional agents that kept individuals from acquiring the authentic truth. The counterculturalists searched within for refreshed discovery of self, with the aid of hallucinogenics. These drug users believed in psychedelic chemistry's capability of revealing truth by washing away the received social programming. With the wide spread of drugs across the continent, the nation was populated by a citizenry without an overarching higher purpose. Youth's indiscriminate and blind involvement in drug scene, together with mass media's unfavorable coverage on the rare but violent behavior of drug takers, largely resulted in a nation wide criminalization and illegalization of drugs.Not all counterculturalists rejected the cursed science and technology outright; instead, some contrived the so-called "appropriate technology" and "soft path" as ways to attain a harmony among society, nature, and technology, so that human beings would finally be liberated from social institution and conditioning.Countercultures are continuing parts of social evolution. As two sets of polar forces, counterculture and culture get evolved through the negation from each other. The last chapter summarizes the argument and findings of the paper, and explains the expected significance as a case in countercultural studies.