Culture is mostly invisible to those living it, it’s like water is to fish. I spend a lot of time talking…

Culture is mostly invisible to those living it, it’s like water is to fish. I spend a lot of time talking about the countercultural revolution of our era, with friends. Because it’s our culture. And it’s largely invisible to us, I suspect. /1 https://t.co/JRYLjf4P6k

We would all immediately look at life in China or Russia, and see it as the playing out of their earlier revolutions, over time. And yet we see our own lives in the West as just normal life. Like some scientifically ordained way to live. /2

But our lives today, in 2025, are exactly like those of the Russians or Chinese. The playing out of our own revolution. The countercultural revolution. We think that all ended in the 1960s. And that since then ‘the economy’, and ‘neoliberalism’ have taken over. /3

It’s nonsense. The pseudo-science bollocks of economic politics is just a set of names we give to the playing out of the countercultural revolution. Our beloved ‘free market’ economies are the direct product of that revolution. They were a social invention. /4

How do we not see it? Fish don’t know water exists, until beached. You don’t tend to see your own culture, *as* a culture. It just seems to be the way things are. The anti-establishment counterculture was about a ‘free market’ of individuals, free of establishment shackles. /5

All the ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ gibberish we attribute as the cause of our modern lives is piffle. They’re just teams playing out the same revolution. The small State ‘Right’ today would be welcome in the anti-establishment protests of the 1960s. Bizarre bedfellows? /6

Only if you think politics is a thing, and not just social and cultural actual things. The culture shifted, towards an adolescent framing, developed in schools over decades. The ‘establishment’, still Trump’s enemy today, was just a name for adult life and culture. /7

Which teens rebelled against. And because they were a massive demographic blip post-war, the ‘boomers’, as they grew they gradually replaced that adult culture, with the counter (teen) culture. Some of the heroes of the counterculture, rock stars, are now billionaires. /8

Living in aristocratic country estates vacated by previous aristocracies. This is how all revolutions go. What is the adolescent obsession, in modern compulsory schooling times? Identity. Forging one, amongst strangers. /9

So of course, we should see what we are seeing, a literal explosion of identity-based social movement. ‘Identity politics’. Look around you, every critical problem facing us as a society, what’s our overwhelming response? /10

To use it as a platform to reinforce and multiply new forms of identity. We’re in a pandemic where some public health professionals gained fame and status by preaching public health bollocks. It got them likes and followers. Status. Identity. /11

Significant numbers of bushfires and mass shootings are about the perpetrator (arsonists and gunmen) wanting to gain notoriety, to create an opening for their identity in society. We ‘Stand with’ rather than fix things. Still the counterculture, performative outrage. /12

Our view of democracy is as ‘the people’ running countries, and our view in turn of what the people is always is some mass assembled in protest, like they’re at a rock concert. We think we have to ‘mobilise’ a crowd, to bring about change. More counterculture. /13

Once you accept that just like the Russians or Chinese, we’re still beholden to the revolution that shaped our society, everything will look different to you. The West is a giant high school, riven by status games/team sports between rival teams. /14

Like groups in a school playground. Because that’s what adult life literally now is, in countercultural times. /end