People got involved in 60s causes for all kinds of reasons.  Most people's motives were sincere, and idealism was everywhere.

Still, the late 60s were not exactly about embracing the Eisenhower-era values that most Americans  continued to cling to.   And to a certain extent, the idealism of the age was a direct product of rejecting what had gone before, because this was felt to necessitate rebuilding the world in a more positive way (and what could be more inspiring than that?)

With the pursuit of new ideals so heavily intertwined with rejection of more traditional ones, it was  inevitable that the various causes  flourishing in this era would have overtones of disparagement of the mainstream's values coloring their more straightforward and explicit goals.

For example, something as simple as deciding what to eat became fraught with social-group implications. A preference for organic foods was not only a way of eating healthier, but also a rejection of the output of giant agribusinesses and packaged-food purveyors.   In addition, there were overtones of shunning the mainstream that were not commonly discussed, and of which probably few people were consciously even aware.   But was it completely coincidental that among those who were promoting new attitudes toward food, nothing was vilified more than ballpark food—the hot dogs, French fries, beer, and so forth that guys have traditionally loved scarfing down at sporting events—places where relatively few Movement members had ever felt much at home in the first place?

Similarly, objections to the war in Vietnam quickly spilled over into disparagement of the military in general.  Military service was a profession to which few members of the Movement would have felt drawn in any era.   And was it entirely coincidental that the military was  a bastion of the kinds of traditional male values that the typical 60s protester was unlikely to exemplify?

Business enterprise became suspect as well—most typically at the level of giant multinational corporations, but sometimes even down to the level of mom-and-pop operations.  Again, how many Movement members had  nurtured aspirations in this realm? 

Technology likewise came to be widely disparaged in the late 60s, with one popular poster captioning a photograph of Neil Armstrong’s historic first steps on the moon with the words, “SO WHAT?”   This hostility was not entirely surprising, given that technology was an object of intense interest on the part of big business as well as the military.   It was also one of the crowning glories of rejected mainstream “Amerika” itself.   And is any of this especially remarkable, given that The Movement drew its members primarily from liberal arts majors, and was relatively unknown among the slide rule set? 

Even environmentalism, a cause with the potential to appeal to a wide variety of social groups (and one which had, in fact, been associated until the late 60s more with the traditionalists at The Reader’s Digest) managed to take on a cast of promoting in-group values at the expense of others.  A significant reason for this transformation was that by the late 60s, technology was so widely disparaged that relatively few people were inclined to look to it for solutions to problems of any kind, least of all ecological ones.  The result was that environmentalism’s primary message often didn't amount to much more than  shouting “Stop!” and “Don’t” at captains of industry.  How much love had been lost on them by Movement members in the first place?