Thanks, Samuel. Interesting interview. My take is that the 60s movements failed not because collective and individual freedom are inherently opposed, but because they never successfully integrated their inner work with their outer political project.
The psychedelic experimentation, the encounter groups, the importation of Eastern spiritual traditions, the emergence of humanistic psychology, the challenge to every orthodox mode of thought inherited from the previous generation — all of this was a culture that took consciousness and self-transformation seriously. Certainly, more seriously than any political movement before or since. There was a degree of flourishing that had incredible life-force energy.
To say they skipped the inner work would be inaccurate. The more accurate critique is that they SILOED it.
The consciousness exploration and the political organizing ran on parallel tracks that never fully converged. And when they did meet — as in some of the commune experiments — the results were frequently chaotic, precisely because inner liberation was treated as SUFFICIENT rather than as FOUNDATIONAL. Much of the inner work of that era was oriented toward dissolution (of the ego, of existing structures, of consensus reality) rather than toward integration. I still come across this today; if enough individuals free their minds, become more conscious, the world will change as a consequence. They will “manifest” it. But transcendence and “blowing the mind open” is not the same as doing shadow work/healing. The 60s were far better at breaking things down than at building the regulated, integrated psychological foundations that durable institutions require. They mistook expansion of consciousness for the deeper developmental work of genuine psychological maturation.
I like that Orsina's framing is more subtle than a simple story of failure. The 1960s generation didn't just encounter external obstacles too great to overcome. They ran into a contradiction that was INTERNAL to their project. They wanted to liberate the individual THROUGH collective political action, but collective action inherently demands the subordination of individual will to group purpose. But you cannot simultaneously free a person and discipline them into a political movement. The movements didn't collapse because the state was too powerful or the opposition too strong, necessarily — they collapsed because the goal itself was structurally self-defeating when pursued by political means.
In hindsight, we talk about them “selling out.” But I think, for them, what followed wasn't experienced as capitulation. The utopian energy didn't dissipate, so much as it MIGRATED. Into law, into human rights frameworks, into economic technocracy, and most significantly, into the personal and moral sphere. The so-called revolution continued, but through channels that didn't require reconciling collective discipline with individual freedom. Change yourself. Change your consciousness. Change the culture from within. This felt like a more sophisticated path to the same destination, not a retreat from it.
But this reframing also proved insufficient in its own way. As I've written, people came to feel powerless, choosing to focus on the local and personal rather than the global, no longer believing they had any significant agency. The individualistic turn resolved the contradiction Orsina identifies, but at the cost of the structural transformation that only genuine collective action can achieve. You end up with a population doing sincere personal work inside systems that remain fundamentally unreformed — which is its own kind of trap.
The standard framing, then, presents us with a binary... sacrifice the self for the collective, or retreat into individualism. But this is a false dichotomy. What we actually need is what I'd call a double helix model — personal empowerment and structural change as two strands that must rise together, each creating the conditions for the other's ascent. New levels of consciousness supported by new levels of social improvement, which then support new levels of consciousness in an ever-virtuous cycle.
The deeper problem is that traumatized people build traumatized institutions. When we try to organize collective life without integrating our inner work, we import all our unresolved exigencies into the shared project. i.e the psychological shadow dynamics, the power-seeking, the unconscious conditioning. This is why movements collapse on the contradiction Orsina identifies. They attempt to build a liberated world with unliberated psychologies.
The resolution isn't less politics, and it isn't more. It's simultaneous work at multiple scales. What can I control? My own cultivation, my choices, my presence. What can I influence? Relationships, mentoring, modeling. What requires collective action? Institutional design, systemic change. Then we act at all three levels concurrently, not sequentially.
The conscious individual doesn't choose between self and collective. He understands that deep personal integration is ITSELF a political act. And that any genuine counterrevolution worth having starts on the inside before it ever reaches the public square.
"The resolution isn't less politics, and it isn't more. It's simultaneous work at multiple scales. What can I control? My own cultivation, my choices, my presence. What can I influence? Relationships, mentoring, modeling. What requires collective action? Institutional design, systemic change. Then we act at all three levels concurrently, not sequentially."
Thanks so much for this conversation. Sam, I am going to Rome for the first part of my honeymoon in 5 weeks. Do you have any restaurants or places you'd recommend I visit?
It's hard to know where to begin, as this was such a rich tapestry. I guess, my first thought is on the conservative notion of order and what this means. So, in the UK, we look at the hereditary peers moving out of the Lords for good, oddly enough, this erosion of the hereditary principle has not been extended to anti-democratic modes of representation (the Bishops are still there for instance). I think the Conservative Party today, at least in the UK, as a child of Thatcher, struggles to maintain a vision of order beyond market growth and disruption. Although there are segments of the conservatives who do adhere to a stronger notion of tradition and community, they are largely sidelined from the heights of the political party.
I would also perhaps slightly contest your reading of Hobbes, Sam, if I may. In my mind, Hobbes is not asking people to give up individuality; he is asking them to obey the law. Of course, the law could end up robbing us of our individuality, but in works such as his Dialogues and his lesser-read Behemoth, he also demands that the sovereign act with restraint when making the law. He only wants to impose the law that is necessary to maintain a secure political order, in my mind, which implicitly promotes individuality within the realm of political stability.
The end of tragedy is a wonderful way to describe the way Fukuyama thinks and I've never heard that particular phrase before, so I may steal it for my future writing haha. But, I was also wondering about national states, do you think politics is really still anchored in them? I don't want to proclaim the death of the nation-state, but I think we live more in the time where I'd be reading Putnam's fears than Anderson's description about what is happening to politics and civic connection? Just as Anderson highlighted the emergence of print capitalism bound us to a state, is its decline and eventual demise the undoing of it as a political entity as well?
Btw, you both nailed the UK's political sphere right now!
Found the idea of the EU coming together in a weak season of nation states really interesting. Totally frames up Brexit and Brits in general. AND absolutely terrifying to think how this governing body will falter as it rises to continued invasions from the East, migratory and otherwise from what I hear.
Thanks, Samuel. Interesting interview. My take is that the 60s movements failed not because collective and individual freedom are inherently opposed, but because they never successfully integrated their inner work with their outer political project.
The psychedelic experimentation, the encounter groups, the importation of Eastern spiritual traditions, the emergence of humanistic psychology, the challenge to every orthodox mode of thought inherited from the previous generation — all of this was a culture that took consciousness and self-transformation seriously. Certainly, more seriously than any political movement before or since. There was a degree of flourishing that had incredible life-force energy.
To say they skipped the inner work would be inaccurate. The more accurate critique is that they SILOED it.
The consciousness exploration and the political organizing ran on parallel tracks that never fully converged. And when they did meet — as in some of the commune experiments — the results were frequently chaotic, precisely because inner liberation was treated as SUFFICIENT rather than as FOUNDATIONAL. Much of the inner work of that era was oriented toward dissolution (of the ego, of existing structures, of consensus reality) rather than toward integration. I still come across this today; if enough individuals free their minds, become more conscious, the world will change as a consequence. They will “manifest” it. But transcendence and “blowing the mind open” is not the same as doing shadow work/healing. The 60s were far better at breaking things down than at building the regulated, integrated psychological foundations that durable institutions require. They mistook expansion of consciousness for the deeper developmental work of genuine psychological maturation.
I like that Orsina's framing is more subtle than a simple story of failure. The 1960s generation didn't just encounter external obstacles too great to overcome. They ran into a contradiction that was INTERNAL to their project. They wanted to liberate the individual THROUGH collective political action, but collective action inherently demands the subordination of individual will to group purpose. But you cannot simultaneously free a person and discipline them into a political movement. The movements didn't collapse because the state was too powerful or the opposition too strong, necessarily — they collapsed because the goal itself was structurally self-defeating when pursued by political means.
In hindsight, we talk about them “selling out.” But I think, for them, what followed wasn't experienced as capitulation. The utopian energy didn't dissipate, so much as it MIGRATED. Into law, into human rights frameworks, into economic technocracy, and most significantly, into the personal and moral sphere. The so-called revolution continued, but through channels that didn't require reconciling collective discipline with individual freedom. Change yourself. Change your consciousness. Change the culture from within. This felt like a more sophisticated path to the same destination, not a retreat from it.
But this reframing also proved insufficient in its own way. As I've written, people came to feel powerless, choosing to focus on the local and personal rather than the global, no longer believing they had any significant agency. The individualistic turn resolved the contradiction Orsina identifies, but at the cost of the structural transformation that only genuine collective action can achieve. You end up with a population doing sincere personal work inside systems that remain fundamentally unreformed — which is its own kind of trap.
The standard framing, then, presents us with a binary... sacrifice the self for the collective, or retreat into individualism. But this is a false dichotomy. What we actually need is what I'd call a double helix model — personal empowerment and structural change as two strands that must rise together, each creating the conditions for the other's ascent. New levels of consciousness supported by new levels of social improvement, which then support new levels of consciousness in an ever-virtuous cycle.
The deeper problem is that traumatized people build traumatized institutions. When we try to organize collective life without integrating our inner work, we import all our unresolved exigencies into the shared project. i.e the psychological shadow dynamics, the power-seeking, the unconscious conditioning. This is why movements collapse on the contradiction Orsina identifies. They attempt to build a liberated world with unliberated psychologies.
The resolution isn't less politics, and it isn't more. It's simultaneous work at multiple scales. What can I control? My own cultivation, my choices, my presence. What can I influence? Relationships, mentoring, modeling. What requires collective action? Institutional design, systemic change. Then we act at all three levels concurrently, not sequentially.
The conscious individual doesn't choose between self and collective. He understands that deep personal integration is ITSELF a political act. And that any genuine counterrevolution worth having starts on the inside before it ever reaches the public square.
My Dream American:
"The resolution isn't less politics, and it isn't more. It's simultaneous work at multiple scales. What can I control? My own cultivation, my choices, my presence. What can I influence? Relationships, mentoring, modeling. What requires collective action? Institutional design, systemic change. Then we act at all three levels concurrently, not sequentially."
Thanks so much for this conversation. Sam, I am going to Rome for the first part of my honeymoon in 5 weeks. Do you have any restaurants or places you'd recommend I visit?
It's hard to know where to begin, as this was such a rich tapestry. I guess, my first thought is on the conservative notion of order and what this means. So, in the UK, we look at the hereditary peers moving out of the Lords for good, oddly enough, this erosion of the hereditary principle has not been extended to anti-democratic modes of representation (the Bishops are still there for instance). I think the Conservative Party today, at least in the UK, as a child of Thatcher, struggles to maintain a vision of order beyond market growth and disruption. Although there are segments of the conservatives who do adhere to a stronger notion of tradition and community, they are largely sidelined from the heights of the political party.
I would also perhaps slightly contest your reading of Hobbes, Sam, if I may. In my mind, Hobbes is not asking people to give up individuality; he is asking them to obey the law. Of course, the law could end up robbing us of our individuality, but in works such as his Dialogues and his lesser-read Behemoth, he also demands that the sovereign act with restraint when making the law. He only wants to impose the law that is necessary to maintain a secure political order, in my mind, which implicitly promotes individuality within the realm of political stability.
The end of tragedy is a wonderful way to describe the way Fukuyama thinks and I've never heard that particular phrase before, so I may steal it for my future writing haha. But, I was also wondering about national states, do you think politics is really still anchored in them? I don't want to proclaim the death of the nation-state, but I think we live more in the time where I'd be reading Putnam's fears than Anderson's description about what is happening to politics and civic connection? Just as Anderson highlighted the emergence of print capitalism bound us to a state, is its decline and eventual demise the undoing of it as a political entity as well?
Btw, you both nailed the UK's political sphere right now!
This was a fantastic conversation and I really hope his book comes out in English. That, or I guess I'm going to have to try to learn Italian.
Found the idea of the EU coming together in a weak season of nation states really interesting. Totally frames up Brexit and Brits in general. AND absolutely terrifying to think how this governing body will falter as it rises to continued invasions from the East, migratory and otherwise from what I hear.
Love his analysis. Thx Samuel