Julian Rants About The Counterculture

“Why is it so hard to build a better world?” I ask Julian. He looks at me, pauses, then slightly nods several times. “Yeah, good question.” He says. “Let’s look at an example. The hippie movement in the sixties. They have a lot in common with us, in terms of what we care about. So that’s a good example.” He nods again, as if to organize his thoughts. “A lot of what they’re opposed to are ultimately problems stemming from the centralized system. War, inequality, social injustice, even ugly, mass-manufactured buildings. All problems with the system of centralization. ‘Being anti-system’ is what they used to call it, isn’t it. A counterculture. Anti-capitalism. And they’re right, of course. The way we organize things from the top down — the way the system organizes things — causes arrangements we would never deliberately choose for the local levels of organization. Homelessness, for example. No small community with pride and resources would simply abandon their unluckiest members to that kind of existence. Really poor communities, maybe, where almost nobody has enough. But not affluent communities, like the ones we live in. It’s almost unconceivable, isn’t it, walking past people who sleep under bridges in the winter, whose teeth are rotting, who are so mentally unstable or drugged up that we cross the street because we’re afraid. We walk past them, and we go home where we have enough extra shit that we need Marie Kondo to tell us to get rid of it. It’s crazy making, if you think about it.” I nod. I also find it crazy making. 

He continues. “But let’s assume a bunch of us get together to solve this problem for our community. We build nice shelters, the kind that respects your dignity. Then someone dies of a drug overdose and we get sued into oblivion. Makes no sense locally. Locally our community would just decide that the drug overdose isn’t our fault. But we’re part of a centralized legal system that we can’t escape. Or, we start giving out resources. Tents, warm clothes, food. Free housing, even. Now every homeless person from everywhere in the country moves to our city. So the city council probably tries to stop us before we even get started. This is at its core the same problem as gentrification. Wherever you build something good from the ground up it gets usurped by the consumer system. House prices rise. Cost of living rises. And thirty years later you have a community of rich doodooheads, using the infrastructure you built, while all the original creators have moved away. This is the hippie movement’s problem. Can’t simply build something different from the bottom up because the central system comes and eats it. Homogenises you. You can’t have an anti-capitalist bubble in a capitalist system. Doesn’t work.“ I nod again, feeling depressed. “So whatever you do, to build a better world, it needs to have an answer to the hippie movements’ problem,” Julian says. “You can’t be a bubble because it won’t last. Whatever you do bottom-up has to be designed to change the central system. For this we have to understand the central system’s intentions, not just oppose them. It doesn't work to be a counterculture.” My head buzzes as I try to think through all of this.