Freud had an outsized impact because he transformed the traditional idea of unconscious (sometimes sexual) motivations into *a vividly illustrated, agile, mistrustful, naughty, unfalsifiable theory of everything.* Perfect for educated elites.
The Beatles had massive impact 1964-1970 because they their artistry and diverse personalities — a band is a microcosm of entrepreneurship, creativity, cooperation, and conflict — evolved with the emergence the sexual revolution and the counter-culture. Technology shock (the pill) and demographic shock (the coming of age of the baby boom) set the stage. A crucial moment was the semi-documentary film *A Hard Day's Night,* which opened their open-ended lives to the world.
It's more than just that. He also created the institution of the secular confessional and a new official priesthood. His professional heirs formed into a priesthood that practically and legally merged with the medical profession in many important states. Presto, an old institution reprised in a new costume with fresh liturgy.
You are touching on the difficulties of causality in complex adaptive systems. No one agent is the environment that shapes other agents, but the environment is defined by all the agents together. So if agents have varying influence on others, and you pull out one high influence agent, the future environment path will change, yet that agent was a product of its environment as well. So the answer is yes, the world changes by removing one, but no, not necessarily in a key way, but yes, maybe?
Regarding the Beatles, one can imagine what might have happened if their environment rejected them, that is to say what happens if for some reason the Hinduism thing was a bridge too far and people stopped buying albums. Would Harrison have back off of it? Would the rest of the band stopped and covered it up to keep selling? How much were they leading society as opposed to doing what society would allow for? Hard to say.
Maybe a few, but the ‘Dead are kind of a good test. They were (are?) known for having seriously hard core devoted fans, but how many really were there? How much of a long term cultural impact is there (not zero!) ? How much was it the ‘Dead themselves vs lots of people ready to latch onto that sort of thing?
I don’t know the answers, don’t get me wrong, it just seems that while Jerry Garcia was really big, it was really big by music standards which is pretty small over all it seems.
I highly, highly recommend "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs" episode on the Dead's Dark Star. It is an intimidating 4.5 hours long (like a Dead song!) but persuasively argues the case for their influence on everything including modern podcasting (and substack) in terms of their business model (give a lot away for free, charge for some content) and in terms of their musical impact. In general, 500 Songs is a masterpiece of social history of the US and UK from the 1930s to (so far) Altamont. My main fear is that either the host or I will die before he gets to #500 (which will be a song from 2000).
John Lennon wore a suede jacket on the cover of Rubber Soul. Half a century later, I still have a suede jacket in my closet, in case I suddenly need to be cool...
October 2022 was the sixtieth anniversary of a song that ignited the extraordinary – and at times hysterical – global pop phenomenon that subsequently came to be known as the British Invasion. I first heard the song, aged twelve, on Radio Luxembourg as it came crackling out of the raffia speaker panel on our walnut-veneered radiogram. Love Me Do - The Beatles’ first UK hit - is, in itself, nothing special. But it was that spark. By early 1964 the British Invasion of the USA was underway. She Loves You was topping the charts simultaneously right across the Western world. The following year I Can’t Get No Satisfaction was doing the same. Tuning in on Thursday night to the BBC hit parade show Top of the Pops had become, for every British teenager, a once-week tv Scale A parade.
The hitherto all-dominant American pop industry greeted this British Invasion with shock and disbelief. The Brits?... rockin’ and rollin’?...Whaat! Head-scratching, almost wounded dismay was an initial reaction; one captured some years later in Don McClean’s American Pie. But from the mid 60s on, the pop industry on both sides of the Atlantic came to be mutually energising; exploding exponentially into the cultural tsunami that was (is?) Rock/Pop Music. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/imagine-theres-no-muzak
From what might be a different angle, the "legacy" section in the Freud wikipedia entry states:
"Freud's legacy, though a highly contested area of controversy, has been assessed as 'one of the strongest influences on twentieth-century thought, its impact comparable only to that of Darwinism and Marxism,' with its range of influence permeating 'all the fields of culture ... so far as by to change our way of life and concept of man.'"
Interestingly, the names Freud, Darwin, and Marx also appear in the wikipedia entry for "independent scholar":
"In previous centuries, some independent scholars achieved renown, such as Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon during the 18th century and Charles Darwin and Karl Marx in the 19th century, and Sigmund Freud, Sir Steven Runciman, Robert Davidsohn and Nancy Sandars in the 20th century. "
Perhaps it is unsurprising then to read that "The Beatles’ educational background is a fascinating story of self-taught musicianship, passion, and perseverance. None of the band members pursued formal music education or completed their secondary education. Instead, they learned through trial and error, experimentation, and dedication."
One might conclude then that at least one small aspect of Freud and The Beatles influence is their demonstration that a university is not necessary for the very highest levels of achievement.
I like to think that the role of the most influential philosophers is to capture and crystallize a sentiment that is in the air at the time but not yet fully articulated. In putting the ideas to concrete words and concepts the philosopher has some leverage to influence the direction. I think this is a similar idea to what you are suggesting in your post.
Well, I don't like being old any more than the rest of us. But I'm grateful to have grown up at a time when the music was terrific and us kids (those of us who didn't take a detour to Southeast Asia) seemed to have a lot - a lot - more fun.
The music "business" was just so much different then. I saw the Who for the first time at a local high school gym (optimal acoustics.) Our NJ college town had a "Hippie House" where all the musicians would party and sometimes crash after concerts at the local college. I met many of the most prominent musicians who were by and large terrific people. Even Zappa was tolerable. The Jefferson Airplane gave the Hippie House a promotional biplane that stood in the front yard until the police paid a local delinquent to set it on fire, at which point the police (many of whom were friends) raided the place and had the hippies evicted. Those were the days, my friend.
More seriously, I think that what separated musicians and their fans back then from kids today was a knowledge of and reverence for the music of those who came before, whether John Coltrane or Muddy Waters or Jimmy Rogers or Woody Guthrie or Bill Monroe or Franz Liszt (inimitably played by Roger Daltry) or Hector Berlioz (Townshend's hero.) I'm not sure most kids today even know what good music is.
I have long believed, but with less intensity as I have aged but still, that, for example, had there never been a Sigmund Freud, there would have been another person with a different name with the exact same theories- even up to and including the ability to promote those theories like Freud. So, there were never a Beatles to set the standards some other band would have done so during the period. Of course, without Freud almost none of the people alive today would exist but would, instead, be another population of very similar people indistinguishable as a collective.
This is inline with my beliefs. Remove Steve Jobs from the world and another person would have created a company similar to Apple. The world would still have computers and phones that resemble the Mac and iPhone. Obviously not exactly the same, but still similar. We can argue all day about how similar Other Macs and Other iPhones would have been had Steve Jobs never existed, but I'm not that interested.
This is one of the argument in Kevin Kelly's book, What Technology Wants.
Of course there's no way to prove the degree in similarity between the actual iPhone and the Other iPhone but we can use general ideas about comparative advantage to guess at what the Other iPhone would be like. Comparative advantage says that the form factor of computers that can fit into your pocket will take on the shape of the iPhone. Rectangular and thin so as not to bulge from your pocket. Within that form factor how much stuff can we fit into it that replaces other stuff that people want? They want a wallet, a camera, a navigation device, a weather radio, a music player, etc.
The key idea is that a large majority of people want certain things. Steve Jobs and crew were the first to bring such a device together. Had he not existed, the Other iPhone would exist and it would be pretty similar.
I think the eastern religion boom has been explained pretty well but I forget who did it - basically a supply and demand argument, where liberalizing immigration laws allowed more eastern gurus in to the US, UK, etc. and a pent up demand that had not been satisfied was able to be met. There was, I thought, a paper with the title of "Rush Hour of the Gods" but all I can find is a book looking at a parallel boom in outside religions in Japan, so I may be misremembering that. I'm sure the Beatles played a role, but if not them, someone else would likely have done so in pop culture.
There’s nothing avant-garde in it. All this is made joke in novels a half-century prior, such as those featuring my namesake by my treasured E.F. Benson.
John Higgs wrote an enjoyable book in 2023 entitled "Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche." Turns out that the first James Bond movie and the Beatles first hit record were released on the same day. Higgs tracks the impact that both the Beatles and the Bond movies had on British culture. It's a quick and fun read.
There are mass movement tides and waves, and Great Men of history.
The key individuals, like Freud & The Beatles, both amplify and guide the wave that is coming, and which will be successfully led to a big change, or not.
Psychological thinking about thinking was coming, Freud guided that wave into the unconscious & sexual with a very strong bond to scientism, despite it being unreproducible and unfalsifiable.
The Beatles rode the Rock ‘n Roll wave, adding all kinds of fun, especially sex & drugs & anti-establishment. The Beach Boys & The Rolling Stones would have led rock to many similar pop places, but unlikely to get nearly as good as it got.
I’m singing Beatles songs in karaoke in Slovakia, and most in the audience/ bar can and do sing along.
Rock ‘n Roll is more important than psychology, to most folk, most of the time.
The in-laws’ family record collection had been culled over the years, but finally there seemed to be no longer any need to keep even that remnant - we were too young to have grown up wedded to vinyl*, and too old to buy a record player just for hip, style reasons. So this time all the records really went away, to the last record shop in town, whose hours were so infrequent you had to make an appointment.
But we kept one, the White Album, because it was numbered, and because - imagine running to the record store to get the new Beatles album, yet unheard. We kind of wanted to memorialize that, even though it wasn’t the way we got to experience the Beatles.
*My first record was a 45, the Partridge Family, “Albuquerque”. I no longer hear a hit in it lol. But I loved it, perhaps loved the word Albuquerque, so much that I buried it in the backyard circa 1973.
I would ask one more question. Is your view adversely biased by having lived through it or am I unable to understand because I was too young during that time period?
Personally, I see them as part of a greater whole which maybe changed those who came later but the Beatles seem like an important but rather small part of that.
This particular piece is curious for me, as it's the first of your posts where I found myself not caring. I usually devour your posts and follow all the links and ponder them for days. When I find myself wondering about small cultural stuff...I like going to the other side of the world where several billion folks don't know who the Beatles were/are and are only now opening up to the idea of "doing psychology". IOW, China.
I sometimes think we're way too enmeshed in our own ideas about this stuff.
But then explains why around the world other nations are copying a lot of what happens in the US. What impact has hip hop and rap music head on American society and the rest of the world?
I didn't comment on "impact". I said I don't care.
I live in Wuhan. I see it all around me. Who won the popular culture competition?...we did. Period. It's most places and if one reads between the lines it's everywhere. Everyone else can ascribe impact.
The Beatles crystalized what had begun amorphously with Elvis, Buddy Holly and other early rock-and-roll innovators of the late '50s. Beatlemania gave a name to what was now a full-blown cultural revolution, one releasing the untapped springs of early post-WWII society. It opened hearts, enlightened, and, infectiously, set flowing through the world the tides of modern civilization. But as is common with all grand movements, it evolved, and inevitably would be hijacked, tranquilized, transmogrified, leading to ends opposite to initial awakening and advancement. There is no revolution that can change the nature of man.
Would William Reich & his ideas have existed without Freud?
Would Jung?
Unrelated, there are numerous ideological & intellectual movements without a single overarching figure. Without Freud, others might have come up with similar (if equally false) ideas which would have infested Western culture.
Freud is often just a shorthand for an anthropology (in the Catholic sense) of man similar to how Einstein is a shorthand for all early twentieth century scientific achievements.
Freud had an outsized impact because he transformed the traditional idea of unconscious (sometimes sexual) motivations into *a vividly illustrated, agile, mistrustful, naughty, unfalsifiable theory of everything.* Perfect for educated elites.
The Beatles had massive impact 1964-1970 because they their artistry and diverse personalities — a band is a microcosm of entrepreneurship, creativity, cooperation, and conflict — evolved with the emergence the sexual revolution and the counter-culture. Technology shock (the pill) and demographic shock (the coming of age of the baby boom) set the stage. A crucial moment was the semi-documentary film *A Hard Day's Night,* which opened their open-ended lives to the world.
It's more than just that. He also created the institution of the secular confessional and a new official priesthood. His professional heirs formed into a priesthood that practically and legally merged with the medical profession in many important states. Presto, an old institution reprised in a new costume with fresh liturgy.
You are touching on the difficulties of causality in complex adaptive systems. No one agent is the environment that shapes other agents, but the environment is defined by all the agents together. So if agents have varying influence on others, and you pull out one high influence agent, the future environment path will change, yet that agent was a product of its environment as well. So the answer is yes, the world changes by removing one, but no, not necessarily in a key way, but yes, maybe?
Regarding the Beatles, one can imagine what might have happened if their environment rejected them, that is to say what happens if for some reason the Hinduism thing was a bridge too far and people stopped buying albums. Would Harrison have back off of it? Would the rest of the band stopped and covered it up to keep selling? How much were they leading society as opposed to doing what society would allow for? Hard to say.
I think that George Harrison or Jim Morrison or Jerry Garcia could have led us lemming-like off a cliff and we would have happily followed.
Maybe a few, but the ‘Dead are kind of a good test. They were (are?) known for having seriously hard core devoted fans, but how many really were there? How much of a long term cultural impact is there (not zero!) ? How much was it the ‘Dead themselves vs lots of people ready to latch onto that sort of thing?
I don’t know the answers, don’t get me wrong, it just seems that while Jerry Garcia was really big, it was really big by music standards which is pretty small over all it seems.
I highly, highly recommend "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs" episode on the Dead's Dark Star. It is an intimidating 4.5 hours long (like a Dead song!) but persuasively argues the case for their influence on everything including modern podcasting (and substack) in terms of their business model (give a lot away for free, charge for some content) and in terms of their musical impact. In general, 500 Songs is a masterpiece of social history of the US and UK from the 1930s to (so far) Altamont. My main fear is that either the host or I will die before he gets to #500 (which will be a song from 2000).
Thanks for the recommendation!
John Lennon wore a suede jacket on the cover of Rubber Soul. Half a century later, I still have a suede jacket in my closet, in case I suddenly need to be cool...
If we are comparing to Freud, the question would be whether you son or grandson had the jacket for the same reason.
October 2022 was the sixtieth anniversary of a song that ignited the extraordinary – and at times hysterical – global pop phenomenon that subsequently came to be known as the British Invasion. I first heard the song, aged twelve, on Radio Luxembourg as it came crackling out of the raffia speaker panel on our walnut-veneered radiogram. Love Me Do - The Beatles’ first UK hit - is, in itself, nothing special. But it was that spark. By early 1964 the British Invasion of the USA was underway. She Loves You was topping the charts simultaneously right across the Western world. The following year I Can’t Get No Satisfaction was doing the same. Tuning in on Thursday night to the BBC hit parade show Top of the Pops had become, for every British teenager, a once-week tv Scale A parade.
The hitherto all-dominant American pop industry greeted this British Invasion with shock and disbelief. The Brits?... rockin’ and rollin’?...Whaat! Head-scratching, almost wounded dismay was an initial reaction; one captured some years later in Don McClean’s American Pie. But from the mid 60s on, the pop industry on both sides of the Atlantic came to be mutually energising; exploding exponentially into the cultural tsunami that was (is?) Rock/Pop Music. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/imagine-theres-no-muzak
From what might be a different angle, the "legacy" section in the Freud wikipedia entry states:
"Freud's legacy, though a highly contested area of controversy, has been assessed as 'one of the strongest influences on twentieth-century thought, its impact comparable only to that of Darwinism and Marxism,' with its range of influence permeating 'all the fields of culture ... so far as by to change our way of life and concept of man.'"
Interestingly, the names Freud, Darwin, and Marx also appear in the wikipedia entry for "independent scholar":
"In previous centuries, some independent scholars achieved renown, such as Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon during the 18th century and Charles Darwin and Karl Marx in the 19th century, and Sigmund Freud, Sir Steven Runciman, Robert Davidsohn and Nancy Sandars in the 20th century. "
Perhaps it is unsurprising then to read that "The Beatles’ educational background is a fascinating story of self-taught musicianship, passion, and perseverance. None of the band members pursued formal music education or completed their secondary education. Instead, they learned through trial and error, experimentation, and dedication."
One might conclude then that at least one small aspect of Freud and The Beatles influence is their demonstration that a university is not necessary for the very highest levels of achievement.
I like to think that the role of the most influential philosophers is to capture and crystallize a sentiment that is in the air at the time but not yet fully articulated. In putting the ideas to concrete words and concepts the philosopher has some leverage to influence the direction. I think this is a similar idea to what you are suggesting in your post.
This is so true. There is a tide of history, a wave coming, but key individuals guide the power of the incoming wave.
Well, I don't like being old any more than the rest of us. But I'm grateful to have grown up at a time when the music was terrific and us kids (those of us who didn't take a detour to Southeast Asia) seemed to have a lot - a lot - more fun.
The music "business" was just so much different then. I saw the Who for the first time at a local high school gym (optimal acoustics.) Our NJ college town had a "Hippie House" where all the musicians would party and sometimes crash after concerts at the local college. I met many of the most prominent musicians who were by and large terrific people. Even Zappa was tolerable. The Jefferson Airplane gave the Hippie House a promotional biplane that stood in the front yard until the police paid a local delinquent to set it on fire, at which point the police (many of whom were friends) raided the place and had the hippies evicted. Those were the days, my friend.
More seriously, I think that what separated musicians and their fans back then from kids today was a knowledge of and reverence for the music of those who came before, whether John Coltrane or Muddy Waters or Jimmy Rogers or Woody Guthrie or Bill Monroe or Franz Liszt (inimitably played by Roger Daltry) or Hector Berlioz (Townshend's hero.) I'm not sure most kids today even know what good music is.
I have long believed, but with less intensity as I have aged but still, that, for example, had there never been a Sigmund Freud, there would have been another person with a different name with the exact same theories- even up to and including the ability to promote those theories like Freud. So, there were never a Beatles to set the standards some other band would have done so during the period. Of course, without Freud almost none of the people alive today would exist but would, instead, be another population of very similar people indistinguishable as a collective.
This is inline with my beliefs. Remove Steve Jobs from the world and another person would have created a company similar to Apple. The world would still have computers and phones that resemble the Mac and iPhone. Obviously not exactly the same, but still similar. We can argue all day about how similar Other Macs and Other iPhones would have been had Steve Jobs never existed, but I'm not that interested.
This is one of the argument in Kevin Kelly's book, What Technology Wants.
https://www.amazon.com/What-Technology-Wants-Kevin-Kelly/dp/0143120174
Of course there's no way to prove the degree in similarity between the actual iPhone and the Other iPhone but we can use general ideas about comparative advantage to guess at what the Other iPhone would be like. Comparative advantage says that the form factor of computers that can fit into your pocket will take on the shape of the iPhone. Rectangular and thin so as not to bulge from your pocket. Within that form factor how much stuff can we fit into it that replaces other stuff that people want? They want a wallet, a camera, a navigation device, a weather radio, a music player, etc.
The key idea is that a large majority of people want certain things. Steve Jobs and crew were the first to bring such a device together. Had he not existed, the Other iPhone would exist and it would be pretty similar.
Same is probably true for the Beatles and Freud.
I think the eastern religion boom has been explained pretty well but I forget who did it - basically a supply and demand argument, where liberalizing immigration laws allowed more eastern gurus in to the US, UK, etc. and a pent up demand that had not been satisfied was able to be met. There was, I thought, a paper with the title of "Rush Hour of the Gods" but all I can find is a book looking at a parallel boom in outside religions in Japan, so I may be misremembering that. I'm sure the Beatles played a role, but if not them, someone else would likely have done so in pop culture.
There’s nothing avant-garde in it. All this is made joke in novels a half-century prior, such as those featuring my namesake by my treasured E.F. Benson.
John Higgs wrote an enjoyable book in 2023 entitled "Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche." Turns out that the first James Bond movie and the Beatles first hit record were released on the same day. Higgs tracks the impact that both the Beatles and the Bond movies had on British culture. It's a quick and fun read.
There are mass movement tides and waves, and Great Men of history.
The key individuals, like Freud & The Beatles, both amplify and guide the wave that is coming, and which will be successfully led to a big change, or not.
Psychological thinking about thinking was coming, Freud guided that wave into the unconscious & sexual with a very strong bond to scientism, despite it being unreproducible and unfalsifiable.
The Beatles rode the Rock ‘n Roll wave, adding all kinds of fun, especially sex & drugs & anti-establishment. The Beach Boys & The Rolling Stones would have led rock to many similar pop places, but unlikely to get nearly as good as it got.
I’m singing Beatles songs in karaoke in Slovakia, and most in the audience/ bar can and do sing along.
Rock ‘n Roll is more important than psychology, to most folk, most of the time.
The in-laws’ family record collection had been culled over the years, but finally there seemed to be no longer any need to keep even that remnant - we were too young to have grown up wedded to vinyl*, and too old to buy a record player just for hip, style reasons. So this time all the records really went away, to the last record shop in town, whose hours were so infrequent you had to make an appointment.
But we kept one, the White Album, because it was numbered, and because - imagine running to the record store to get the new Beatles album, yet unheard. We kind of wanted to memorialize that, even though it wasn’t the way we got to experience the Beatles.
*My first record was a 45, the Partridge Family, “Albuquerque”. I no longer hear a hit in it lol. But I loved it, perhaps loved the word Albuquerque, so much that I buried it in the backyard circa 1973.
I would ask one more question. Is your view adversely biased by having lived through it or am I unable to understand because I was too young during that time period?
Personally, I see them as part of a greater whole which maybe changed those who came later but the Beatles seem like an important but rather small part of that.
This particular piece is curious for me, as it's the first of your posts where I found myself not caring. I usually devour your posts and follow all the links and ponder them for days. When I find myself wondering about small cultural stuff...I like going to the other side of the world where several billion folks don't know who the Beatles were/are and are only now opening up to the idea of "doing psychology". IOW, China.
I sometimes think we're way too enmeshed in our own ideas about this stuff.
But then explains why around the world other nations are copying a lot of what happens in the US. What impact has hip hop and rap music head on American society and the rest of the world?
I didn't comment on "impact". I said I don't care.
I live in Wuhan. I see it all around me. Who won the popular culture competition?...we did. Period. It's most places and if one reads between the lines it's everywhere. Everyone else can ascribe impact.
The Beatles crystalized what had begun amorphously with Elvis, Buddy Holly and other early rock-and-roll innovators of the late '50s. Beatlemania gave a name to what was now a full-blown cultural revolution, one releasing the untapped springs of early post-WWII society. It opened hearts, enlightened, and, infectiously, set flowing through the world the tides of modern civilization. But as is common with all grand movements, it evolved, and inevitably would be hijacked, tranquilized, transmogrified, leading to ends opposite to initial awakening and advancement. There is no revolution that can change the nature of man.
Would William Reich & his ideas have existed without Freud?
Would Jung?
Unrelated, there are numerous ideological & intellectual movements without a single overarching figure. Without Freud, others might have come up with similar (if equally false) ideas which would have infested Western culture.
Freud is often just a shorthand for an anthropology (in the Catholic sense) of man similar to how Einstein is a shorthand for all early twentieth century scientific achievements.