Counterculture Blooms

Counterculture blooms wherever and whenever a few members of a society choose lifestyles, artistic expressions, and ways of thinking and being that wholeheartedly embrace the ancient axiom that the only true constant is change itself. The mark of counterculture is not a particular social form or structure, but rather the evanescence of forms and structures, the dazzling rapidity and flexibility with which they appear, mutate, and morph into one another and disappear. Counterculture is the moving crest of a wave, a zone of uncertainty where culture goes quantum. To borrow the language of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ilya Prigogine, counterculture is the cultural equivalent of the ‘third thermodynamic state,’ the ‘nonlinear region’ where equilibrium and symmetry have given way to a complexity so intense as to appear to the eye as chaos.