Theodore Roszak: The Making of a Counter Culture

Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful OppositionEight essays from and on he sixties, some of them originally published in the Nation magazine.

1. Technocracy’s Children: This was really context setting for me. I used the world technocracy in the past but now I learned form its creator what it really meant. For the essence is the belief that technology can solve every problem and only it can do it , nothing else. Leave it to the experts. What a joke.

2. An invasion of Centaurs: an overview of the diversity within the umbrella term of counterculture. Particular emphasis on beat poets, Eastern religions and mysticism.

3. The Dialectics of Liberation: Herbert Marcuse and Norman Brown: A somewhat obscure treatise on the differences of these leftist thinkers approaches to Freudism and Marxism. They seemed important at the time, but from today’s larger context it was more like infighting within the same branch. They did have different approaches, but that is almost irrelevant today, when there are much larger differences.

4. Journey to the East… and Points Beyond: Allen Ginsberg and Alan Watts: criticism of Ginsberg’s poetry and praise for Watts, who had more of an academic background. Doesn’t asses importance on impact but on objective literary qualities if they exist.

5. The Counterfeit Infinity: The Use and Abuse of Psychedelic Experience: the title says it all. He disapproves wide-scale use and compares it giving guns to children, who are not mature enough to use it properly.

6. Exploring Utopia: The Visionary Sociology of Paul Goodman: Distilling Goodman’s vision from his novels and placing it into his life’s context

7. The Myth of Objective Consciousness: based on his own definition of technocracy Roszak attacks the concept. He manages to do it without invoking mystical or hallucinogenic experiences.

8. Eyes of Flesh, Eyes of Fire: On the importance of visions, rituals, poetry, magical experiences in an evergreying society.

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