I've been asked a few times about how I can listen to punk music, and still be pursuing a career in the military or in some form of federal bureaucracy.
A lot of the music I listen to takes issue with "the system", and how society mutilates the individual into a grotesque reproduction of the system itself. These artists want to break out of the established boundaries and actually live as individuals. I think this is awesome. I've spent a lot of time studying how society uses conformity to keep itself alive. You can see how it works anywhere you look. Even those who try and break out and become "individuals" in the end are re-absorbed into the machine.
My favorite example of this re-absorption? Punk music.
Anything that fights the established norms is a threat to the "oneness" of society. There's two ways that society can remedy this: force the individual to conform, or actually reincorporate them by actually using rebellion against the rebel. Society turns whatever individuality is being expressed into the next "fad", thus bringing the fringe back in. It kind of makes me think of when you take silly putty and squish it on a newspaper, and it picks up the letters, but then you can smash it back together and all those letters fade into the mass and are gone. The ink's still in there, somewhere, but now it's part of the whole.
The same has happened to punk. A movement that got off on telling society to go fuck itself is now pretty mainstream. Plenty of people (myself included) lament the "pop punk" phenomenon. But that's how the system works. The same thing happened with rap. A subculture that went directly against societal norms was pulled into the system, reincorporating those who had stepped outside by redefining norms. The side effect? The qualities of the subculture that helped it survive outside society are distorted or lost.
Still, people spend years (and sometimes their entire lives) trying to fight this. They don't like the loss of control. Others go their entire lives completely oblivious of how profoundly their life is shaped by powers outside them.
I've found that the most practical course for me has been to mostly go along with the system. There really is no point in fighting it. That doesn't mean I have to be a perfect model of societal norms, however, and I think a lot of people miss this. I'm not an individual. I shop at major retailers and listen to music that's been selected by corporate goons for our listening pleasure. I own an iPod and a Blackberry because society told me that I need those items. And I do.
I don't, however, accept every single thing society tries to shove down my throat. I do try and exercise a certain level of awareness. Rebellion for the sake of rebellion is about as stupid as blind conformity. And I try to subscribe to neither.
I'll continue to listen to my punk rock as I complete my culturally approved pursuit of education. One day I'll listen to it in my shiny new car on my way to and from my awesome forty-hour-a-week desk job as a cog in the bureaucratic machinery that keeps our country (mostly) functioning. And the whole time I'll be painfully aware of it all.
And people wonder why political scientists are cynical.
