Does Society 'dream' Youth Trend Archetypes? The hare hypothesis was first synthesized in the late 1980s. I developed it after reading a short line from a book by the philosopher Robert Anton Wilson. The line comes from 'Prometheus Rising', Wilson's guide to transactional analysis and the four life scripts. In this book, Wilson makes a brief, offhanded remark that a correlation exists between the archetype of the Gentle Angel from archaic symbolism and the symbol of the Flower Child from modern times. From this I figured that a pattern was occurring within contemporary youth culture which described not one, but instead a series of social archetypes based on our instinctive and emotional nature. 1 - Does Society 'dream' Youth Trend Archetypes?
Four archaic animals exist in relation to the four life scripts, which are:
Friendly Weakness - The Gentle Angel
Hostile Weakness - The Sullen Bull
Friendly Strength - The Noble Lion
Hostile Strength - The Imperial Eagle Robert Anton Wilson went no further than the Gentle Angel and the flower children. Why hadn't he mentioned mellow reggae culture and its similarity to Friendly Weakness in the early 1970s. What of other major youth trends, such as punk and rap culture?So I wrote several articles over the years on youth culture, mainly for the pagan small press in Britain. This culminated in a self-published book, The Sekhmet Hypothesis, in 1995. Originally, Sekhmet was the lioness headed goddess of ancient Egypt. As the hypothesis dealt with vibrant chaotic youth culture, it seemed fitting to personify the idea with an untamed goddess. The lioness archetype also tapped into the aura of the Noble Lion from archaic symbolism, which encapsulated the strength of rave culture.
Early versions of the study also brought in the outlandish idea that the 11 and 22 year solar cycles might be having some bearing on cultural youth trends. I later went on to dismantle this nonsense in 2000 (only to find it rear up again in Grant Morrison's book Supergods, 2011). Sekhmet is a solar goddess so I was keen to remove her from the study so as to avoid any more confusion. By the early noughties I'd replaced her with the hare, a simple enough symbol which I think encapsulates wild untamed youth culture. I could call the hypothesis something like, 'A Study of Youth Culture and its Possible Relationship to the Four Life Scripts', but I'm not trying to impress the academic world, so the hare hypothesis suits me fine.
I hope this new study will help us understand some of the social changes which are currently affecting emerging global culture. The core idea surrounding the hypothesis is to suggest that the four main atavistic moods which make up the development of the infant (namely Friendly Weakness, Hostile Weakness, Friendly Strength and Hostile Strength), now replicate themselves through pop culture, in a predictable and cyclical fashion. These self-referring social moods rely on the twilight zone of childhood and adulthood to manifest - the teenager recapitulates infancy through a series of colourful, social archetypes. Stranger still, the moods manifest in the same sequence as they do in personal infancy. The collective social infant appears to be growing into adaptive childhood.
This playful, self-referencing of infantile behaviour is a relatively new phenomena. Before the swinging Sixties, young people living in 'Western' culture were told to blindly obey leaders in church and government and to fit into a nationalistic, closeted outlook. In the mid to late Sixties, youth culture rejected on mass, old fashioned values and viewed themselves instead as belonging to a new global community. The sociologist Marshall McLuhan suggested they'd turned out this way by being raised from birth on global orientated television.
Back in the 1950s teenagers found liberation through Rock 'n' Roll but when Elvis joined the army it was a sign that youth culture was still under the thumb of parental government. Later the beats arrived, but for mainstream society they always remained partially hidden in the underground. Other cults came and went such as the neat mods and rough rockers but it wasn't until 1967 that the first global archetype of a strong atavistic nature emerged from the underground beat scene. The archetype was the Flower Child or Hippie. Dances like the Monkey Jive were a delightful visual guide to the mutation of raw rock 'n' roll into a new expressive mood based on gentle psychedelia. Unlike other youth cults of the past, hippie culture completely transformed Western society heralding in an era of joy, optimism and mind expansion.
Black culture played a seminal role to the mood having practically given birth to rock music in the 1940s. Mowtown also lent itself easily to the new loved up mood. Within solid black culture itself the mood manifested most visually with mellow reggae in the early 1970s. Rastafaria might be viewed as a religion or philosophy by most black people, but from the limited perspective of many whites, the term became a conveniant enough tag to describe anyone heavily into Bob Marley and the Wailers. (Incidentally, I'll be keeping most of the analysis here to my own white background. If there is a parallel going on with African Caribbean or Asian culture I'll leave it to others to fill in the details. I'd like to stick to my own experience of life here, rather than getting all intellectual and repeating stuff off Wikipedia.)
Eleven years on from the social emergence of the flower children came the next atavistic youth trend. Punk exploded into mainstream society in 1977. The mind-expansion of the late Sixties was replaced by a feeling of mind-contraction, separation and imploding hatred, all celebrated with plenty of fun and gusto. Mind giving delight was replaced with a feeling of mind spitting revulsion. Some people, such as John Peel, referred to this new current as a possible reaction against the hippies. Others suggested the punks were more like a strange polar complement to the gentle flower children. Punk bands, such as Crass, went as far as to merge the two trends together, retaining the communal hippie lifestyle while putting it to the soundtrack of punk rock.
Visually, the mood of the time was encapsulated by the 'epileptic fit': a 'dance' in which teenagers would throw themselves onto the floor and go into convulsive spasms in time to the music. Most people experiencing or witnessing this felt they were seeing something which went beyond a mere cult or craze. The grieving death posture (curling into oneself in a convulsive manner) had replaced the sexual, ecstatic, hippie posture (head back, arms outstretched). It had similarities to the same moods expressed on a personal level when faced with the emotional extremes of life. When we fall in love we radiate a great deal of happiness and optimism and we're keen to share it with the rest of the world. When we grieve for the loss of a loved one we tend to hunch over while sitting, or curl up tightly and sob into ourselves if lying down. The sense of time celebrated by each youth trend also complemented the same mood as expressed in the personal sphere: endless, laid-back, time expansion when we're in love; speeded-up, time compression when in grief or facing up to our own impending death.
As punk gathered pace, gentle, mellow reggae gave way to a complementary emergence of angry rap, which curiously also developed a separate version of the 'epileptic fit' along with tight, spiraling break-dancing. By the time the punk-rap current was in full swing, some people began to ask - could there be some reason behind this interplay of youths celebrating optimism, expansion and construction and then celebrating pessimism, contraction and destruction?
One philosopher, Peter Carroll, suggested that global, affluent culture was becoming receptive to the 11-22 year cycles on our local star. He suggested that the psychedelic movement of the mid to late Sixties had occurred in the build-up to solar maximum, which also peaked in the late Sixties. He said the complementing celebration of pessimism had occurred 11 years later in 1977. From this pattern Carroll suggested that as we approached solar maximum in late 1989, a new mood would express itself socially in 1988. These predictions were made in the early 1980s in his book, Psychonaut. Many an old hippie read Carroll's book and wondered in awe...
Later of course, Carroll's prediction came true. Rave culture emerged from the underground in 1988. The youth movement even found its own drug; ecstasy, the first designer drug of an empathetic nature. The Cheesy Quavers had arrived. Love and peace was back in again just as Carroll had predicted.
Taking Carroll's ideas further, it seemed that social mind-contraction and a healthy celebration of pessimism was on the solar cards for 1999. However, any potential angry complement to rave culture stayed well underground during this year and didn't surface as a youth archetype. As Grant Morrison put it, most youths wanted to spectate the film, The Matrix, with its imperialism and long coats, but only a few artists wanted to participate in the actual current. Some culture watchers therefore concluded that the atavistic trend was still to come.
Considering the 11-22 year solar cycles can cause radio, visual and possible meteorological disturbance, it's possible they may also have a bearing on social patterns of a global nature. But if we were to look for evidence to support this exotic view we'd have to find patterns which peak every 11 and 22 years and patterns which also change polarity along with each 11 year magnetic change.
Alas though, the intensifications of social chaos within youth culture simply don't have this periodic value. A study of the solar cycles at NASA's Spaceweather web site gives us the following correlation of youth culture to the cycles:
May 1967 - Hippie culture took off one year before solar maximum.
January 1977 - Punk culture took off two and a half years before solar maximum.
May 1988 - Rave culture took off one and a half years before solar maximum.
1999 - hostile strength culture surfaces (via The Matrix, Nu-Metal, flowering of Alexander MacQueen, etc), prior to maximum. But interestingly no actual youth trend archetype takes off. Gabber culture - boisterous raving for skinheads - has already come and gone by 1999.
Dates used are approximations of when the underground social trends hit the mainstream contemporary mind-set, via the street, tabloids and television. While the figures look vaguely promising at first, a problem occurs when we take a close look at the solar state of affairs in January 1977. This was in fact solar minimum and the sun later flipped suddenly up to solar maximum in the very short space of two and a half years. In fact there was no build-up to solar maximum when punk culture became sensationalised in the headlines. Likewise rave culture took off somewhere non-descript between minimum and maximum - yes it was 'close' to the oncoming date of solar maximum, but in reality there wasn't a great deal of solar activity happening at the time. Couple this with the fact that no major youth trend coincided with the last solar maximum and the hypothesis of 'Solar Youth Culture' looks pretty hopeless.In the meantime, it seems reasonable to assume that youth culture is now replicating atavistic behaviour via pop culture because of a lack of social-parental control, as evidenced by the decline of religious institutions along with the breakdown of nationalism. As urban youth culture goes increasingly out of control, it becomes more tribal, vibrant and chaotic; less hierarchal and more holistic. As the primitive re-emerges, it seems to throw up a map of mood archetypes as already dictated by the personal, inner infant. With the outlandish solar hypothesis now hopefully dead and buried, I'd like to return to a study of the four life scripts, which is the foundation to the hare hypothesis.
