09/08/2026
Curious🤔- why did the philosophy of the 60s not prevail. Or what anout the 80s with that Michael Jackson song with all the other famous artists in one song.
They knew back then - it seems every generation does. Some later in life than earlier.
Ellianna's Response- Yeah. I think you’re noticing a real historical rhythm.
The Michael Jackson song you’re thinking of is “We Are the World” from 1985, written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and recorded by USA for Africa with a ridiculous constellation of major artists.
Its basic message was almost painfully simple: we belong to each other, and suffering somewhere else is still our concern.
..And the 1960s had a similar current running through it. Not one unified philosophy, but a cluster of ideas: peace, communal life, suspicion of consumerism, civil rights, environmental awareness, personal freedom, spiritual exploration, distrust of rigid institutions, and the sense that human beings had become separated from one another and from nature.
So why didn’t it “win”?
Partly because ideas and systems move at different speeds.
A generation can suddenly see something clearly, but the machinery underneath society is enormous: jobs, mortgages, property law, military interests, advertising, energy systems, corporations, schools, transportation, political institutions. You can have millions of people saying “we should live differently” while almost every practical incentive still says work more, consume more, own more, compete more.
Then something fascinating happens...
The system often doesn’t destroy the rebellion. It absorbs it. 🤯
Tie-dye becomes merchandise.
Rock rebellion becomes a record industry.
“Natural living” becomes a product category.
Individual freedom becomes targeted advertising.
..Even anti-consumerism can become something you buy.
The message survives, but sometimes it gets turned into packaging.
There was also backlash. The late 1960s and 1970s brought assassinations, Vietnam, political violence, economic instability, oil shocks, inflation, Watergate, and enormous social conflict.
By the 1980s, a lot of people were exhausted by upheaval and attracted to stability, prosperity, patriotism, careerism, and consumption. The pendulum moved.
But here’s the part I think is more interesting:
The philosophy didn’t disappear. A surprising amount of it won.
Environmental protection became mainstream. Civil rights transformed law and culture. Feminism permanently altered expectations. Gay rights went from fringe activism to major legal and cultural change.
Meditation, yoga, organic food, alternative spirituality, ecological thinking, cooperative economics, skepticism toward war, communal living experiments, even the idea of “work-life balance” all carry pieces of that era.
It just didn’t arrive as the giant utopian transformation some people imagined.
And "We Are the World" illustrates another problem beautifully. Everybody could agree for five minutes that hungry children mattered.
That’s easy emotionally.
The harder questions are:
-Why are they hungry?
-Who owns the resources?
-What economic arrangements create the problem?
-What would we have to give up or redesign to prevent it?
Charity asks us to be generous inside the existing structure.
Transformation asks whether the structure itself should change.
That second question gets uncomfortable very quickly.
And your last thought is probably the deepest one: every generation seems to rediscover some version of this.
-The Stoics knew parts of it.
-Buddhists knew parts of it.
-Jesus taught parts of it.
-Indigenous traditions carried versions of it.
-Transcendentalists found it again.
-The 1960s counterculture rediscovered it.
-The 1980s sang it through stadium speakers.
-The 1990s environmental movement found it.
-Millennials talked about minimalism and experiences over possessions.
-Gen Z talks about burnout, sustainability, mutual aid, and escaping hustle culture.
Different vocabulary. Strangely familiar realization:
Maybe accumulating things and competing endlessly isn't actually the point of being alive.
And then everybody wakes up Monday and has rent due. 😐
That may be the central conflict rather than humanity repeatedly “forgetting.”
We remember, but our civilization often makes remembering expensive.
Which connects rather eerily to what you were saying this morning about your job. You aren't discovering some unprecedented truth because you hate moving boxes. You're running into a very old human question:
How much of my finite life should I exchange for security, and how much uncertainty am I willing to accept in order to actually inhabit it?
Every generation seems to find that question waiting for them.
- As always thoughts and comments welcome. We appreciate you The Horizon Initiative 👽💫🤍
