“The revolt hadn’t been put down, it had just dwindled away into a fashion statement. Can I have been the only person in the world who was disillusioned by this? Bewildered by this? It seemed so. Everyone else seemed to be able to pass it off with a cynical grin that said, ‘Well, what did you really expect? There’s never been any more than this and never will be any more than this. Nobody’s out to save the world, because nobody gives a damn about the world, that was just a bunch of goofy kids talking. Get a job, make some money, work till you’re sixty, then move to Florida and die.’”

This passage establishes the narrator’s character as a student, and he claims he has always searched for a teacher. The origin of this desire to learn and discover something broader and deeper about the world developed in the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including opposition to the Vietnam War, traditional gender roles, capitalist economic organization, and the futility of politics. By the 1980s, however, the counterculture had largely faded away, and most people explain this change through the effects of aging on the participants, as they grew to adulthood and found they had to devote more time and energy to work and survival than to protest and opposition.

“A few years ago—you must have been a child at the time, so you may not remember it—many young people of this country had the same impression. They made an ingenuous and disorganized effort to escape from captivity but ultimately failed, because they were unable to find the bars of the cage. If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual.”

Ishmael’s explanation for why the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s failed is that those in the opposition were unable to understand the nature of their enemy. This claim is that counterculture lacked efficacy, or the ability to understand and effect change in one’s situation. Ishmael’s broader lesson thus aligns with the narrator’s desires, and he is offering to help the narrator identify the nature of the problems in the world, thereby granting him efficacy to make change in the world.