Culture and counter-culture

Abstract

A curious paradox must be faced at the very outset: nothing is perhaps more culturally inclined than the various counter-culture movements. In other words, writing and working against the prevailing culture amount to an essentially cultural enterprise. Culture seems to be inescapable. A supposedly dying declining or simply inadequate or wrong culture is usually criticized and fought against by a culture that is in a hurry to take its place. To use the famous formulation of Vilfredo Pareto, one could say that the whole human history is nothing but the ongoing struggle of a “repressed “elite against a power elite through a variety of means which can, however, be summarized and symbolized, as it were, by two animals, the lion and the fox, that is to say force and shrewdness.