Charles Manson Counterculture

We “wanted to do a crime that would shock the world, that the world would have to stand up and take notice,” said Family member Susan Atkins (Bugliosi 123). The year was 1969, young men and women frolicked in colorful and loose clothing, making the most of their time as anti-conformists whilst burning incense of psychedelics and expressing themselves as induvial, together. As a struggling musician, young diagnosed psychopath named Charles Manson immersed himself in the drug culture of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in California by indulging in LSD, heroin, and speed daily. From early childhood, Manson had a penchant for crime and manipulation, then he reached California in the 1960s, and found a scene that perfectly catered to his psychopathic

Manson took this counterculture era of American individualism in the 1960s and by using psychedelic drugs, sexual liberation, and non-traditional experimentation to his advantage, he obtained control to cultivate his psychopathy and influence California’s radical youth into executing psychotic behaviors and heinous crimes.

The counterculture of the 60s provided Manson an environment that masked his true motives and made his crimes possible. The convergence of so many ideologies and practices produced a unified counterculture. The whole idea and goal of the counterculture movement was to directly challenge the 1960s conformism, racism, sexism, and materialism. There was a new age of interpretation of society and the American Dream. This era of movement, like many social and cultural revolutions of modern history, was orchestrated largely by college students and young adults. The counterculture coincided with th8e rise of the New Left, which was a politically focused incentive for change. The New Left often shared social concerns with the counterculture, though activists of the New Left refused to be distracted from their progressive and action-oriented agenda by counterculture mainstays like drug use

Ideally, the world would be more humane like the romantics of the 18th century envisioned. Transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau foreshadowed the philosophy of future hippies; living “organically” on Walden Pond provided him a place where “I can have a better opportunity to play life,” and not “when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (Moretta 37). The emergence of the counterculture encompassed these dreams and ethics of the literature and poets of the period into their new wave. Charles Poore, reporter of New York Times in the 1960s details how dystopian novels such as Huxley’ Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 proved wildly popular, in their own fashion. Huxley depicts the ideal hippie oasis society with an inclusion a drug culture that opens a wedge of ultimate consciousness” (Cottrell 238). Beat poet Allen Ginsburg, an icon of poetry advocated for the world to become more “naked” in order to “see the world in a visionary way” (Hamilton 22). Instead of protesting against issues