Hi everyone,
This week, I want to start by sharing a passage from Part One of Beautiful Possibility (significantly edited for length). I’ll explain why afterwards.
excerpt:
It would be hard to overstate the impact of the “earthquake” that hit the world in 1964. The cultural revolution of the Sixties, sparked by the explosion of Beatlemania, changed our world instantly, radically, and though it might not seem like it at the moment, permanently.
It was a matter of speed as much as scale. For only the second time in human history, the foundational mythology of Western civilization was almost completely rewritten. And unlike the other time — the ascent of institutional Christianity, which had taken hundreds of years to reshape the riverbed of the culture — the revolution of the Sixties would do it in less than a decade.
When we talk about the influence of the Sixties, we tend to focus on the cultural and political revolutions of those years — which are, of course, important reasons why the Sixties hold a unique and iconic place in our history. But these more tangible advances are not why the Sixties was a mythological earthquake.
Mythological, riverbed-changing earthquakes only happen when our way of viewing the world and our definition of what defines a successful life are fundamentally changed.
The Sixties did that, and this is by far its most important legacy.
You may have noticed in the prior episode that both the pagan mythology and the faux-Christian mythology that replaced it began with “life is hard.” Prior to the Sixties, “life is hard” was an assumption that had never before been questioned on any large scale. It was taken as an axiom — life was hard, and made somewhat deliberately so by the powers-that-be. Suffering was inevitable. The only issue was how to cope with it.
The original pagan foundational myth said, “life is hard, appease the gods and maybe it’ll get a little easier.” The faux-Christian mythology that replaced it — and remember, that particular mythology had very little to do with the actual teachings of Jesus — promised, “life is hard, but if you follow the rules, you’ll be rewarded after you die.” And the Protestant work ethic adjusted that to, “life is hard, but if you follow the rules, you’ll be rewarded in your old age, and after you die.”
But in 1964, after two World Wars and their brutal aftermath, not to mention the assassination of a charismatic young American president who’d promised a new era of opportunity only to be murdered in cold blood before he could deliver, the younger generation had had enough of the suffering. And as for “rewards later,” the long shadow of the atomic bomb made it all too possible there might not even be a later.
The rejection of “suffer now, rewards later” wasn’t in and of itself new. Since the First World War, the younger generation’s growing anger at continual suffering with delayed and often nonexistent rewards had led to scattered outbreaks of rebellion — most notably in America where these sorts of things tend to happen.
But none of these minor rebellions fundamentally changed the pattern of most people’s lives, or their expectations of what a good life should be — meaning that none of those little rebellions got anywhere close to challenging “suffer now, rewards later” as the foundational mythology of Western culture.
So what was different this time? Why did the Sixties — sparked by The Beatles — become a culture-changing earthquake, when all the prior attempts for the past two thousand years had failed? And why do we still hold on to the Sixties so tightly today?
Well, to begin with, in the Sixties, for the first time on any meaningful scale, it wasn’t a battle between the kids who wanted to dance and shag the night away and the stern moralising forces for social reform who wanted those same kids to get serious and help make the world better. Instead, it was the kids who were dancing and shagging who wanted to make the world better. And more than that, those dancing, shagging kids were proposing the stunningly subversive idea that the singing and dancing and shagging is what will make the world better — not just for a night of escapism, but in real, substantial, long-term ways.
The Love Revolution of the Sixties made the radical suggestion that life doesn’t actually have to suck, and that instead of blindly following the rules and delaying happiness until retirement and a pension (or even worse, an afterlife), it might make sense to live more fully in the present.
This was such a new idea for most people that there aren’t good words for how new it was. And if it doesn’t sound all that new, well— that’s because of the Sixties.
Before the Sixties, it had never been suggested by anyone other than a few fringy outliers that music and dancing and sex — and more specifically, the ecstatic joy these experiences give us — might themselves actually be the way to create a better and more meaningful life here on earth.
That’s not even the most revolutionary part of it, though.
Even more radical was the introduction — into all that music and dancing and sex and social consciousness — of love. For the first time ever, love became the central organising idea for a global cultural revolution — and by “love,” I don’t mean vague, abstract spiritual love, but human love for our fellow humans, including erotic love.
Love, erotic or otherwise, had never before been the defining element of a revolution, or even a major social movement. Sex, yes — there was plenty of that in the Roaring ‘20s and in the rock-and-roll ‘50s. But never love — and especially never erotic love.
In the Sixties, for the first time ever, the same young people who were dancing and shagging and making music were the ones leading the call for substantive social change in the name of love. “Revolution,” proclaimed a student journalist in 1968, “is the ecstasy of history,”1 and in the Sixties, that was literal. It all came together in a heady, frothy, sexy, joyful, free love “make love, not war” earthquake that healed a generations-old death trauma and, along the way, just happened to completely change everything about what we — and I just might mean the whole world now, not just Western culture — expected and demanded out of life.
Because of the Love Revolution and for almost all of us, regardless of our spiritual beliefs, it’s no longer enough to follow someone else’s rules, get married, have kids, slave away for a lifetime at a job we hate, retire with a pension, and hope our suffering earned us a place in some vague promise of Heaven — or even Florida. That approach still works for some people, but most of us no longer feel that’s a description of a life well lived.
Instead, starting with the Sixties, our measure of a successful life began to prioritise happiness and meaning — not in some vaguely defined future or afterlife, but right here in the present. It was the beginning of what almost every single one of us now takes for granted, because it’s all most of us have ever known— the freedom to define our lives by our own, individual standard of happiness and meaning, what we sometimes shorthand as, “you do you.”
Here’s cultural historian Shawn Levy—
After the [Sixties], anything you wanted to do, pretty much, you could — or at least try — in music, fashion, hair, sex, food, living arrangements, you name it. And people would give it a minute’s thought, at least, and not just write it off as a waste of time. Forever after, you would have the license to dress, express and entertain yourself, give yourself over to sensation, investigate a wider world or things beyond it. Doors had opened — hundreds of them — and the hinges were removed from the jambs.2
Before the Sixties, it simply wasn’t acceptable to live differently from everyone else. Only freaks and outliers insisted on a meaningful life defined by their own values instead of by the “suffer now, rewards later” culture.
But The Love Revolution permanently changed our definition of a well-lived life — not just for people who lived through the Sixties or those who identify with the culture of that era, but for every single one of us. And this freedom to define our own lives is far and away our most important inheritance from the Sixties.
This right to define our own lives according to our own individuality is a freedom that virtually every single one of us takes for granted today. Every single one of us holds an expectation and a longing for a life defined by our own authenticity — and that expectation holds regardless of our age or background or political beliefs, and whether or not we extend that right to others.
Even if we don’t consciously realise it, even if it all happened long before we were born, every single one of us has had our lives profoundly shaped by the cultural revolution of the Sixties. We are all fundamentally different people leading fundamentally different lives because of what happened in those brief, shimmering years — because everyone alive today in Western civilization (and in most of the world) has inherited from the Love Revolution an unshakeable expectation that we have the right to live a life of individual meaning and purpose whether the mainstream culture likes it or not.
Obviously, not all of us have embraced this inheritance, but even when we fail to extend that right to others, we recognize that a fundamental injustice occurs when we ourselves are denied the right to live according to our own values.
When it comes to how we live our actual lives, day-to-day, this right to define our own individual happiness and purpose is arguably the single most radical and transformational idea humans have ever come up with, and it’s a way of thinking that did not exist in any widespread form before the Sixties.3
All of this is why the Love Revolution was the second riverbed-changing earthquake in recorded history. And as we went on to talk about in Part One, all of this is also why the world-changing power of the Love Revolution terrifies (and continues to terrify) the “suffer now/rewards later” powers-that-be in a way that nothing else ever has. Because in two thousand years of human history, the Love Revolution is the only thing that’s ever taken away their power.
And that’s why I’m sharing this with you today — because whatever awfulness has happened and is yet to come, here’s what I hold on to, and maybe it will help you to hold on as well—
On a human scale, this dumpster fire of a nightmare is undeniably catastrophic. But on a mythological scale, it’s not especially consequential. Nothing that’s happening is a mythological earthquake or even a mythological tremor. Nothing that’s happening is reshaping the mythological “riverbed” of our culture.
At most, the dumpster-fire-in-progress is a mythological tantrum — the tired, deposed story of “might makes right” and its demented offspring, “suffer now/rewards later,” kicking back in a death spasm against the transformative power of the Love Revolution.
As a kid, when I suffered a setback, my father would reassure me by telling me that whatever went wrong, “they can’t take away your birthday.” I’ve carried that odd little consolation with me throughout my life — because what my father was pointing out is that who we are at our core is untouchable, inviolable. Sacred. And who we are at our most sacred and inviolable core has been forever shaped by the Love Revolution and our belief in the value of a life of authenticity and purpose.
This is the awesome (in the most literal sense) power of mythology as the hidden “riverbed” of our lives. It’s built for times like these, because it endures and inspires and offers strength in a way that nothing on a smaller scale can. Mythology — most significantly the mythology of the Love Revolution and The Beatles — shapes our deepest and most profound experience of who we are and why we’re here. And it does that shaping regardless of whatever storm is raging on the surface of the river.
As a mythologist, what I’m telling you is this — no matter how awful things get, they can’t take away our birthday. They can’t take away our birthright to the life of love and purpose gifted to us by the Sixties and The Beatles.
We’ll need to stand up — and keep standing up — in defense of our ability to live out that birthright. That part of things is, without question, in serious jeopardy. But the birthright itself is untouchable, inviolable. Sacred.
Peace, love, and strawberry fields,
Faith 🍓
Quote by Angelo Quattrocchi, reporting on the student uprisings in Paris in May of 1968, quoted in Hippie Hippie Shake, Richard Neville, Bloomsbury, 1995.
Shawn Levy, Ready Steady Go: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London, Doubleday, 2002.
Primarily quoted from episode 2 (“Love Lies Bleeding”)