Reddit reviews Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture

This is why all ideologically motivated movements turn into shit - non-stop purity tests dragging everyone to the extremes.

Good read on the subject:

https://www.amazon.com/Nation-Rebels-Counterculture-Consumer-Culture/dp/006074586X

My favorite book on the topic -- Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture

You should definitely check out Heath and Potter's Nation of Rebels: How Counterculture became Consumer Culture.

http://www.amazon.com/Nation-Rebels-Counterculture-Consumer-Culture/dp/006074586X

Try Nation of Rebels or The Conquest of Cool.

The book I mention near the end of the OP, "Nation of Rebels," contains a very critical analysis of what it calls "Deep Ecology," an umbrella term that refers to these sort of books. But other than Limits to Growth, I haven't heard of the others. I promise to check those books out if you check out Nation of Rebels and its chapter on the environment.

My favourite non-fiction book is:

The Rebel Sell: How the Counter Culture Became Consumer Culture

It's a book I'd wish I'd read when I was 17. I highly recommend it.

I think in the US it was known as Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture

One of my favourite books is "The Rebel Sell" by Heath and Potter (published as "Nation of Rebels" in the US). Anyone interested in the relationship between culture and counter-culture would find the book interesting, I think. One of the things the book goes into is that change does not usually occur because of a few people protesting against big bad corporations, but instead is usually an inside job--the result of legislations proposed and passed by people who are "part of the system".

I've been thinking a lot lately (because the Christmas message has been unavoidable) about generosity toward the homeless, and reflecting on the ineffectiveness of giving money to people on the street. It's impossible to know that the money will be spent well. In that regard, I see charities as kind of an "economy of scale", in that they allow a few people to make more educated decisions (in principle) than would be possible for your average person. Those people do this full-time, whereas at best I could spend a few hours a day trying to sort it out. So, provided the overhead isn't too large, it makes sense to delegate those decisions I'm really keen to help out.

In the same way, I wonder if the average person can reasonably be expected to do the research necessary to decide which choices are environmentally sound. For example, I've seen some good counter-arguments for certain recycling programs, namely that the energy required for recycling may be greater than what we save. I'm a fairly smart person, but just don't have the time to evaluate these arguments myself.

It's easy enough for someone to come along and say that I should make the time, or that it's my future that I'm gambling with when I choose not to. But the fact is that I might actually be able to do more for the environment by focusing on what I do well than on the things which I cannot do well. Grass roots action is good to an extent, but tends to be less efficient than more centralized policy.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I've given it quite a bit of thought, but I'm still not sure what we should do, or if the general public should be doing anything at all. On the other hand, if we delegate someone to make the decisions for us, then there is some expectation that we'll accept the decisions they make, and that's difficult, too.

"Momentum towards an authoritarian corporate oligarchic surveillance state?"

Honestly, perspective, everybody, please. Do you have any idea what this country went through in the Gilded Age? State legislatures were basically the boards of railroad and mining companies, for shit's sake. Nobody alive in this country born in this country remembers how bad corporate influence and ownership of government got. A tiny fraction of the country was enfranchised. Senators were appointed by those same corporate boards. Political machines, complete with armed regulars and auxiliaries to support them, unlike anything that currently exists--we're talking about mobs that make the relative cesspools of Chicago and Louisiana look like Switzerland--ran most of the major cities. College kids getting tear gassed? For christ's sake, dozens of the Pullman strikers got beaten to death with blunt objects. Can you remember when all those dozens of Occupy folks got their skulls crushed by charging Blackwater mercenaries armed with state-of-the-art military weaponry? Me neither. And if you want to talk about surveillance, J. Edgar Hoover had people under a wider and less regulated lens than the current programs that have people so riled up (albeit with the technological capacity to sift through far fewer of them). So much of this outrage seems to lack this perspective, seems to lack the perspective that the NSA programs largely aren't Obama's, they're what we had under Bush, plus Congressional oversight, plus the involvement of FISA courts. (And in some forms, this stuff went on before Bush--wide-net SIGINT is Cold War stuff). Are those oversights sufficient? Nah, probably not; I'd like to see some changes. But we're not creeping towards 1984. In a couple of ways, Obama creeped us a little back.

Look, if you think we're in some kind of bad spot, fine, but we've been here before. We've been in much, much worse shape than this. It didn't take a revolutionary change to get us out; it just took people voting for sane stuff. The last time I checked, men spend billions trying to convince people to give them those votes, because believe it or not, the votes still count. They're at little risk of not counting.

To another person who asked what my suggestion is? Another unpopular opinion: the current structure of our government works really, really well. We don't really give ourselves the credit we deserve very often, and we don't really see how valuable the stability of government we have is, because we've never lived without it, which is one hell of an exception in world history. (Note: it's also been a while since the rest of the world lived without us as the effective guarantor of international peace.) Our government has its serious issues. We need better campaign finance laws including robust public financing of elections, we need better ways to reduce the influence of lobbying (the second is embedded in the first), we need to figure out a way to draw congressional districts in a nonpartisan fashion, and we need to pay legislators--particularly at the state level, much much more. When you can make tons, tons more in the private sector, or lobbying in particular, than in legislative or related civil service, you'll have problems. That doesn't appease most of the current torch-and-pitchfork crowd who would like to see Congress lose their pay and their benefits and their shoes, since they don't understand that such a move only serves the rich. You don't need more democracy, you don't need to hold a constitutional convention; you definitely need to tighten a few of the loose screws on the Republic. All of this is boring and unsexy, and this sort of change happens in the way that it has almost always happened: on the backs of lots of anonymous volunteers who politically organize, make phone calls, send letters, engage in voter registration campaigns, etc.

You also need smarter people. The public in a representative system cannot deny responsibility for anything that its government does--it voted in that government's representative members, who appointed the rest. Think the 113th Congress sort of sucks? I do too. We have only ourselves to blame. Civics and history education isn't good enough. Plato understood that question of how we should find good and just men to rule is fundamentally a question of how you educate the youth. There aren't easy answers to that, but the fact that it's critical is a very easy answer.

I'm a liberal, and a progressive, and I have the suspicion of government which is the duty of a citizen of a republic. And the country that I live in, which has made horrible errors--great mistakes of commission and omission that I can detail for anyone at great length--is, for lots of reasons, including the efficacy and the fairness of its government, a damned, damned fine place.

> Massive consumerism at the expense of the planet AND ALL ITS INHABITANTS.

Lmao, you're a cartoon. It's been well established that modern consumerism was sparked by the ideals of the counterculture of the 60's. Fashion is rebellion. Read the book Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture.

> The concept of countercultural rebellion and its elusive twin—cool—have resulted in a status competition that has driven consumption to unprecedented heights. It's not conformism that leads us to spend, spend, spend on the unnecessary and the ephemeral, but its opposite: the quest to distinguish ourselves from the masses through our enlightened, hip, or just plain rebellious consumer preferences.

As always, you're trying to scapegoat another generation for your own faults. Typical.

> I have no apologies to make to you or anyone else.

Seems to be a common sentiment among Boomers.