Fabrizio Petri: Gandhi, Popper and Internet: a renewed relation between Individuality and Altruism

It is my belief, as I argue in my recent essay Karma Aperto (Open Karma), that the rise of the internet’s global world started in the 60s represents a new phase of renovation for the link between individualism and altruism, and that the exchange of ideas with the East has played a prominent, although concealed, role in the proper vein of what is today clearly appearing to be a truly global – and not any more only Western – phenomenon (Petri, 2012). In his groundbreaking work The Rise on the Network Society, Manuel Castells (1996), the father of the studies on the Informational Society, suggested not only that the technological process that emerged in the 70s was linked to the special freedom culture, individualistic entrepreneurship and personal innovative spirit present in California – also due to the countercultural movement - a decade before, he also underlined that internet dynamics were, half-consciously, propagating worldwide such values. In a more recent essay, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner studies the role played by the counterculture, and especially by Steward Brand, in the rise of the Informational Society (Turner, 2006). While we will come back to this noteworthy essay, in my view here lays a crucial implication: American countercultural protagonists – such as poet Allen Ginsberg, leader of the Beat Generation, and writer Ken Kesey, the link between the Beat and the Hippies – performed about the same unconscious role that British philosopher Isaiah Berlin advocates in his illuminating essay The Roots of Romanticism for romantic poets in the rise of nowadays pluralistic societies (Berlin, 2001).

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After India, Ginsberg returned to the USA as a different man. By now he was deeply involved with the message of non-violence found in the old Indian principle of ahimsa that the genius of Ghandi had turned from a millenary instrument of personal salvation into the most important political tool of India’s independence struggle. But Ginsberg was not simply speaking of a noble idea – to trigger a change in your enemy’s soul through your suffering -; he was incarnating it. His behaviour was part of an attitude that would have taken an archetypical form in those years. Non-violence was lived not as a mere imitation, but as the only way a true deep feeling can be expressed; with an amount of personal integrity relevant for the reality where it is to flourish. That reality was the California of the 60s where non-violence became an attitude of inner-outer transformation: Transform yourself and you’ll non-violently transform others and, eventually, the world.

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See also:

Hippie Roots & The Perennial Subculture by Gordon Kennedy & Kody Ryan