It would hardly be novel to describe the youth movement of the 1960s as tribalistic.   Hair, the emblematic celebration of the spirit of the age, proudly proclaimed itself “the American tribal love-rock musical.”  And in his book Do It!, radical leader Jerry Rubin prominently featured a photograph of himself in war paint.  In various ways, tribalism was emblazoned all over The Movement.

It was also a time of widespread dissatisfaction by young people with the kind of world they had been born into—despite the fact their lives were far easier and filled with more material abundance than their parents could ever have dreamed of when they were the same age.

The causes of alienation that were most commonly articulated at the time don’t fully explain what was going on during this watershed era of protest and dissent.  For example, ending the war in Vietnam was probably the most significant of The Movement’s articulated political goals, but this obviously didn’t require making sand candles or tie-dyed T shirts, or dancing nude in the rain at Woodstock—any more than re-arming the German Rhineland in the 1930s or cancelling its crushing World War I reparations payments required creating a new mythology of the Aryan race.

So what did make young people in the 1960s so down on their world, despite all their material comforts? There’s a kind of person who might say, “Hey, they were teenagers—and what do teens usually agonize over?  Maybe they didn’t feel popular enough.  Maybe they just felt left out.”

Granted, the student protests and other social turmoil of the late 1960s were often initiated by the sorts of “brainy” and “artsy” young people who had typically found themselves marginalized by Eisenhower-era America.  But we should bear in mind that the teenagers who went on to become activists were not especially interested in sock hops or pep rallies or street-racing hot rods.  It’s also worth noting that the movement they started was quickly joined by others in their age cohort from all sorts of other backgrounds—including some of the most popular ones in their classes.  Could so many of them all have felt left out?

On the other hand, if they didn’t, then what did make kids with such cushy lives and such bright prospects so down on their world? 

Well, comfort is one thing, and personal significance is something else.

It’s more than plausible that the ever-increasing gigantism of scale of the modern world could have left a generation feeling unacceptably small and inconsequential—without ever realizing why they felt this way, or how profoundly different their position in the world was from that of people during the vast majority of the time that humans have been on this planet.  When changes occur slowly enough, even the most bizarre ultimate conditions can appear normal and customary.  They're just “the way things are.”

Given all this, it would be no more reasonable to expect baby boomers to have articulated the underlying reasons why they felt like nobodies, or even to fully realize they felt this way, than it would have been to expect the same of German or Italian or Japanese citizens in the run-up to World War II.

But as the rise of European fascism had already demonstrated, the tribal imperative itself can drive forms of behavior in the modern era that might otherwise resist explanation.

With the Woodstock movement as with National Socialism, it can be revealing to shift our gaze away from the things people were saying at the time, and might rationally have expected their social movement to accomplish, and spend a bit more time dealing with how participating in this form of neo-tribalism made them feel.  In an inquiry of this type, matters of style and imagery sometimes speak more eloquently than anything that was ever overtly expressed, or consciously thought.