Ideas, not just styles
Most accounts of 1967 focus on music, dress and demonstrations. This article looks at the ideas underneath them. It is a good deal harder to date a change in thinking than a concert, so the claim in the title needs a qualification: the ideas discussed here mostly developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and 1967 was the year when many of them reached a mass audience.
Expanding consciousness
A central belief of the period was that ordinary awareness is limited and that it could be widened, whether through drugs, meditation, music or communal life. The sources were varied. Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954) described his experience with mescaline. The Beats had explored Buddhism and jazz. Interest in Hindu and Buddhist teachers grew through the 1960s, and the Beatles’ public interest in Indian music and meditation in 1967 brought these ideas to millions of listeners.
The psychedelic experimentation of the era was often discussed in near-religious terms. Participants described it as a route to insight, empathy or a sense of unity. Researchers and clinicians of the time held mixed views, and a lot of early enthusiasm was later tempered by evidence of harm, and by the criminalisation of the drugs. It is accurate to say that the idea of consciousness as something to be explored, not just accepted, became widespread. It is not accurate to say that science had validated the claims made on its behalf.
Distrust of institutions
A second shift was scepticism toward large institutions, including government, corporations, universities and churches. The reasons overlapped with political developments, particularly the Vietnam War and the gap between official statements and visible events. Student radicals described universities as part of a “military-industrial complex,” a phrase President Eisenhower had used in his 1961 farewell address, in a different spirit.
This distrust was not limited to the left. Different groups distrusted different institutions, and the common feature was a lower willingness to defer. Survey data on trust in government moved downward through the period.
McLuhan and the media
Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian professor of English, became one of the most discussed thinkers of the mid-1960s. His book Understanding Media (1964) argued that the form of a medium shapes society more than any particular content, summed up in the line “the medium is the message.” He used the term “global village” for a world connected by electronic media. In 1967, The Medium Is the Massage, a short, heavily designed book produced with the designer Quentin Fiore, put his ideas in a visual form that suited the moment.
McLuhan’s ideas gave young people a way to think about television and what it meant to grow up with it, and they gave advertisers and artists material to use. He was not a countercultural figure himself; he was a conservative Catholic scholar who often described rather than approved the changes he identified. Critics also found his claims hard to test or prove, and the debate about his work continues.
The new psychology
Psychology was changing as well. Timothy Leary, a former Harvard lecturer who had been dismissed from the university in 1963 after controversy over his psychedelic research, became a public advocate of LSD. His slogan “turn on, tune in, drop out,” which he promoted in January 1967, was widely quoted and widely misunderstood; Leary said it was meant as an invitation to inward and social change, not simple withdrawal.
Abraham Maslow represented a different side. His 1943 paper on the hierarchy of needs, later developed in works such as Toward a Psychology of Being (1962), put forward the idea of “self-actualisation” and helped establish humanistic psychology as a challenge to behaviourism and Freudian approaches. The Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, founded in 1962, became a centre for such ideas. Carl Rogers’s client-centred therapy belongs in the same broad movement.
In Britain, the psychiatrist R. D. Laing published The Politics of Experience in 1967. It questioned conventional definitions of mental illness and became widely read among young people, though many psychiatrists disputed his views. Leary, Maslow and Laing differed greatly in method and purpose, and it would be a mistake to treat them as a single school; what they shared was the assumption that personal experience mattered and could be investigated.
What lasted
Some of these ideas settled into ordinary life without much fanfare. Interest in meditation, therapy and self-development became part of the mainstream; media studies became an academic field; and a questioning attitude toward institutions persisted. Others faded, and some predictions, like the belief that drugs would transform society, did not come true. A careful summary is that 1967 did not invent these ways of thinking, but it was the year when they became hard for the public to ignore.