Psychedelics offered a view of existence that was often at odds with society's official assumptions about reality. By the end of the decade a small, but significant number of people had experienced that the reality which was perceived through the senses and thinking mind was not absolute, but merely relatively valid.
This radically shifted our experience of what life was all about. At the same time. many of us could see that each individual and society was immersed in a "worldview" - an image of the world - within which they were as if hypnotized.
Without positing a linear cause and effect, the 1960's can also be labelled the beginning of the post-modern era, offering audacious critiques of the belief systems of the modern world. The post-modern worldview suggests that we live in a symbolic world, a social reality that we unconsciously construct together, and yet experience as an "objective" real world.
Thus, we live in a universe of "multiple realties," because different groups and languages construct different "stories" - or ways of interpreting life - generating a variety in one's sense of personal identity, time and space.
Fresh ideas about sanity, consciousness and objective truth and were enthusiastically embraced by the "counter-culture" and slowly began to enter the public milieu. The concept of a "socially-created reality" filtered into modern culture. Theodore Rozak characterized the events of the time as a revolt against the established culture, which he described as built on "the myth of objective consciousness."
During this time the sub-discipline in sociology known as "symbolic interactionism" arose, focusing on the idea that, more than they realize, people use symbols to interact with each other. These include language, gestures, and artifacts -- as well as how people interpret those symbols in daily interactions.
Social constructionism holds that the meaning of acts, behaviors, and events is not an objective quality of those phenomena but is assigned to them through social interactions. In this view, meaning is socially defined and organized, and thus subject to change.
Simultaneously, the discipline known as "the sociology of knowledge" also arose, challenging a single absolutist worldview. In 1966 Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann authored the seminal book - The Social Construction of Reality. They stated that, the "'monopolistic tradition" [is]:
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