The causes of alienation that were most commonly articulated at the time don’t fully explain what was going on during the 1960s 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?