The 60s revolved around free love, psychedelic rock, bell-bottoms, and extremely long hair. The style and culture was once viewed as unethical, revolutionary and anarchistic, but is now portrayed as a party theme or a style.
The views and perspectives of the 60s definitely shifted, but the importance of the counterculture and what it represented is in need of an in depth explanation. For some people, counterculture was less about style but more about philosophy. There have been claims that American society was corrupted by capitalism and stereotypes that later lead to opposing the prevailing social norm. In the process of working and following the social norm, people forgot to experience life more personally and recognize the fun life around them.
America was the centre of this issue as even wealthy people argued that the
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They also allow us to get a deeper understanding that maybe counterculture was not as revolutionary as we think. Many of the characteristics of the “revolution” was seen earlier in American history.
Transcendentalists in the 1840s retired from their tasks and went to farms to look for the veracity of nature and to remove themselves from lives revolving around materialism, corrupted principles, useless labor and mainstream communities. Henry David Thoreau was one of these transcendentalists, as he privately retired from his work and retreated to the woods where he kept records of his discoveries on finding himself in nature. His findings more or less reflect the cultural characteristics a century later.
By the 1850s, supporters of free love made the image of contemporary marriage and encouraged people to show their emotional and sexual feelings freely. Many reformers like Charles Fourier and Emanuel Swedenborg argued that “passional attraction” and “conjugal love” were topics to be examined in more depth rather than being