The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed

Geoff Hamilton is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of
British Columbia.

The Rebel Sell offers a critique of “counter-cultural rebellion,” a
blanket term meant to include various movements in the West over the
past 50 years or so that have sought to challenge the capitalist ethos.
Among the authors’ key targets are Adbusters magazine and globalism
critic Naomi Klein, as well as such popular films as American Beauty and
Fight Club.

Heath and Potter’s central argument is that the counterculture is
unaware of how deeply it is itself committed to the individualistic
spirit of capitalism and that its attempts to disrupt “the system”
are in fact a hindrance to social progress: “Not only does [the
counterculture] distract energy and effort away from the sort of
initiatives that lead to concrete improvements in people’s lives, but
it encourages wholesale contempt for such incremental changes.”

The book provides a concise summary of the evolution of the
countercultural movement over the past half-century, along with a
scathing indictment of its core ideas. The authors are very persuasive
in their denunciation of those who—very dangerously—equate all
deviance with dissent and therefore fail to distinguish between “acts
of rebellion that challenge senseless or outdated conventions and those
that violate legitimate social norms.” The vagueness of much leftist
ideology is capably exposed; however, the authors can, at times, seem
unfairly dismissive of the discontent that has spawned the
counter-cultural masses, and they have a tendency to lump all those they
disagree with together and then attack their most suspect members:
“From the Jonestown cult and the Manson family to the Nation of Islam
and the Society for Cutting Up Men, ’60s radicals seem to have been
peculiarly susceptible to the siren songs of lunatics and madmen.” The
few suggestions the authors do make for legitimate social reform—such
as changing the tax code to curb corporate advertising—are compelling
and demand consideration.