Reply #77: Trendy only on the surface, not in real matters of choice/action

[Echo In Light]

This has been a marketing trend for many decades, and especially since the Counter Culture - the only recent mass uprising of U.S. citizens against govt/military/"conservative" ideals. The idea is to keep those kids believing that they're actually raging against that machine by adopting a harmless, profitable cultural affectation which in both theory and practice is frighteningly weak in terms of genuine anti-authoritarianism ... if for any other reason that it relegates dissent/protest, grounding it in conformity/uniformity. Herbert Marcuse was making this point in the early 60s with his book, One-Dimensional Man:

http://igw.tuwien.ac.at/christian/marcuse/odm.html

"Among neurotics, there are not a few who do not require any reminders of their social duties and obligations, but are born and destined rather to be bearers of new cultural ideals. They are neurotic as long as they bow down before authority and refuse the freedom to which they are destined. As long as we look at life only retrospectively, as is the case in the psychoanalytic writings of the Viennese school, we shall never do justice to these persons and never bring them for the longed-for deliverance. For in this way we train them only to be obedient children and thereby strengthen the very forces that made them ill—their conservative backwardness and submission to authority." ~ C.G.Jung