Spiritual self-help recurred in cycles by stripping countercultural ideals to narcissistic consumer products.

Evidence

The happy marriage of woo-woo and capitalism echoed the seventies’ New Age movement, which emerged from the sixties’ collective countercultural ideals. But as Tom Wolfe famously wrote, this communal spirituality quickly devolved into the “Me” generation, marked by self-help cults like EST, Synanon, and Scientology. These groups emphasized individual transformation, beginning with “the most delicious look inward” and a heavy dose of narcissism. In the 2010s, this same spirit resurfaced in practices like manifesting, nootropic pills, and astrology—modern self-help tools tailored for the pursuit of personal success. As Kurt Andersen noted, The Secret stripped traditional American ideals—“individualism and supernaturalism and belief in belief”—of their religious and moral trappings, reducing them to the pure materialist lust. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 609

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s goal of tracing Marx’s mechanism — the death of the sellout path where counterculture content is stripped into capitalism-compatible form.
• QUESTION: The reader must trace Marx’s four-period structure; this recapitulates his earlier argument about subcultures being absorption-resistant — does he see these cycles as evidence of flattening?