Turn on! Tune in! Crap out!

A constant theme in tho discussion about the relationship between society and its youth has been the sort of theory raised to pop seller status in Charles Reich's The Greening of America. It's out-line goes like this: there's a new revolution a-coming; it can't be resisted by violence or politics for it's a cultural rather than a political revolution: it possesses the "higher, transcendent reason" we need to control technology and seize the Utopia it promises. It is the Consciousness III revolution and its agents are modern youth whose culture, music, clothes, drugs, way of thinking and liberated lifestyles, whose 'campus demonstrations and beads and Woodstock festivals' make up a consistent philosphy which will inevitably include all America and which is the best thing we've known in all history. It is this theory which I will call Reichism, its implications and oversimplifications, that I want to concentrate upon here.

Reich starts from powerlessness, and says that only 'understanding' can lead to mature autonomy, an idea not exactly new. Such an understanding he calls 'consciousness'; it is a world-view that enables the individual to act in value-directed ways. People's world-views are amazingly self-consistent and are invariably affected by their age, social background (the sociologist's euphemism for class), and the life-role (job). Consciousness is more than the sum of the parts, "it is the whole man, his head, his way of life." As a mass phenomenon it is both formed by socio-economies and creates socio-economics, but there can be consciousness 'lag', when socio-economics progress faster than consciousness. There are three types of consciousness, dubbed I, II, and III according to the order in which they historically evolved. I is the good old American pioneering view and tends to be conservative in todays political spectrum. Sir James Wattie, born of the grocery shelves, is a local example; II evolved later, it is dedicated to progress and advancement, and Martyn Finlay is a reasonably close example. III is the consciousness of Modern Youth — it doesn't need any examples, it includes whoever Reichists agree with at the moment.