The result invites analysis in terms of Gregory Bateson's theory of the double bind. Put a child into a family setting where the realities that can be discussed flatly contradict the realities the child experiences, Bateson pointed out, and mental illness is a pretty common result. Put an entire society into the same sort of conflict between ideology and experience, and new belief systems that promise a radical resolution of the conflict spring up. The more drastic the disconnection between culturally acceptable beliefs and personal experiences becomes, the wilder and more apocalyptic the resulting belief systems tend to be.

There's an entire literature on revitalization movements, which is what sociologists call the mass movements that sometimes gather around these new belief systems in times of drastic social stress. Some dimensions of the UFO movement came close to that category, though it never quite managed to become a mass movement on the scale of the Ghost Dance of the Native American plains tribes, say, or other classic examples of the type. The social pressures that gave rise to the extraterrestrial faith found other expressions before that faith could find a large following; the widespread but mild belief that there could well be aliens out there somewhere, and there might be something to all those reports of flying saucers, replaced the total conviction that sent Dorothy Martin in pursuit of her destiny.

Just now, though, the double bind that drove the radical movements of the Fifties and Sixties – the gaping disparity between the Utopian visions of progress that flooded popular culture and the manipulative and inhumane technocracy so many people saw taking shape around them – has given way to a different one. Where the stresses of an earlier time grew from contradictions to the claim that progress is good, those of the present and foreseeable future are building around the claim that progress is inevitable. A society founded on the unquestioned belief that economic expansion and technological development will continue forever may have a very, very hard time dealing with a future in which economic contraction and the abandonment of technologies too complex to be sustainable will likely be dominant trends. It's not too far of a reach, it seems to me, to suggest that massive revitalization movements will follow.