Not until the uprising of May 1968 in France was it possible to gauge the degree to which consumerism, the promise of a society of well-being and the attendant disillusionments had created favorable conditions for a genuine revolution of everyday life.
As a result of the blows struck against age-old traditions by the new economic dispensation, the young generation of the time undertook to sweep away all the values inherited from an archaic society that a modernizing bourgeoisie had adapted to its own requirements: patriarchy, hierarchy, church, army, work, sacrifice, dominance of the male, and the paterfamilias, contempt for women, children, and nature. Nothing at that moment escaped virulent criticism. Censorship was mocked. The supposed crime of blasphemy was no more, likewise the principle of lèse-majesté, the moral order in general, and respect for dignitaries ecclesiastical and secular alike.
Sad to say, whatever fails to take deep root in everyday experience and its liberatory impulses soon sinks and disappears in the morass of ordinary corruption. Of course, the purpose of the vogue for consumable freedoms was hardly the emancipation of men and women. Rather, it was governed by a slogan repeated day in and day out: “Consume! Consume whatever you want, but consume!”
Inasmuch as the exchange value of a product is more important, economically speaking, than its use value, its utility, and its quality, the logic of the market tended to reduce products and ideas formerly deemed either prestigious or worthless to the same level, thus making them interchangeable.
A true clean sweep has now eviscerated not just religious and ideological values once held to be immutable but also human ones—authenticity, solidarity, freedoms of body and consciousness—which over the generations had managed to resist the dominant oppression and lies.
Many now came to understand that dedicating their vital energies to the construction of a genuine life was preferable to squandering them on ideological and religious infighting in which blood and filth besmirched whatever risible and pathetic victories might be secured.
The notion of a life authentically lived began to make its way. It is still taking its first stumbling steps, but, no matter how obscurely, it embodies the awareness that its realization must imply the sovereignty of the living forces.