More profoundly, the postmaterialist thesis pays insufficient attention to the causes of insecurity that may (only temporarily in Inglehart's judgment) give rise to a
countertendency toward materialism.
Along the same line, David Camfield points to a "democratic
countertendency" in many unions that "arises out of experiences of workers' self-activity and self-organization." This ever-renewing "democratic impulse" is reason enough to focus on democracy inside unions even in the face of the bureaucratic social relations that constrain the rank-and-file.
Art becomes an image not directly by becoming an apparition but only through the
countertendency to it" (Aesthetic Theory 81).
Arguably, in this moral debate we can discern a
countertendency toward an affirmation of the jus in bello principle of noncombatant immunity, and a less permissive view about the right to war.
At the same time, in pondering recent answers to Frost's query to twentieth century poets--"what to make of a diminished thing"--I also find a
countertendency that I would call Neoromantic in the work of poets like Roethke, Lowell, Berryman, Olson, Duncan, Everson, Levertov, Rich, Berry, Snyder.
For Heidegger there is, of course, a fundamental choice built into this confrontation of Dasein with its being-toward the possible: Dasein either accepts authentically its existence in the openness of the possible as a task, or it flees inauthentically its ownmost sense as a task by immersing itself in its
countertendency to forget, to obscure what is at stake in its confrontation with itself.