The Counterculture Everyone Forgot

October 31, 2023

by Charles Hugh Smith Of Two Minds

Rather than mocking the Counterculture, we would benefit from re-acquiring its values that favored frugality and the ownership of skills, work, enterprise and land.

Mention the Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, and the memory stored in popular culture is of drug-dazed, half-naked hippies dancing to rock music. There was a slice of that, to be sure, but there was much more that’s largely been forgotten:

The Counterculture was primarily a response to the meaningless debt-dependent consumerism that had already taken hold of our society and economy. The core values of the Counterculture Everyone Forgot were:

1. Learning how to make and repair things oneself

2. Frugality

3. Rejection of debt