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.
