I’ve believed for a while now that the most successful, or perhaps the most widely-spread sub-cultures are the ones that provide egos to people that wouldn’t otherwise have an ego. Indeed, if you took, say, a scene kid from 2007 (when “scene” was cool; it stopped being cool a long time ago) and put him amongst a group of chavs, his ego would shrink instantly. But amongst his useless peers, he’s the equivalent of a young Jeremy Clarkson.
Being a metalhead is an absolutely beautiful example of this. Kids who like heavy music as young adolescents get mocked by the majority, particularly chavs, and if they stayed within this environment and never got out of it, it would destroy them. But thankfully, metal’s enormous sub-culture lets you be the most arrogant, pedantic, self-aggrandizing wanker that you can possibly be, and you get celebrated for it, patted on the back by fellow metalheads and you lie safe in the knowledge that you fit in there. I should know, I was that arrogant, pedantic, self-aggrandizing metalhead wanker who felt alienated in the outside world when I was in my teenage years.
And this can apply to the majority of sub-cultures that the world has to offer. A sub-culture only becomes popular with people because it gives them a sense of worth; in the broad scheme of things, people who follow these more “alternative” sub-cultures are the ones who get bullied for who they are and they gain an inferiority complex within “normal“ society, but the sub-culture they follow gives them back that sense of worth and allows them to be arrogant, bullying, essentially all the things that they were getting picked on for not being.
Now I don‘t know about you, but I hate this alpha-beta-omega bullshit and always have done. The reason I became alienated from metal was because of how self-involved and narrow-minded the sub-culture was, and I’ve noticed how many things work in the same way. Very few sub-cultures actually offer an alternative way of life, and THAT is what I’ve been seeking; a real escape from society. The vast majority of sub-cultures operate in exactly the same hierarchical way that society does, just with people wearing different clothes and having different haircuts. They don’t offer anything new other than a recycled sense of acceptance.
All you are doing is living the same horrible lifestyle that you would be living if you’d became a chav, just under a different guise. Just more alpha-male, self-aggrandizing bullshit. Nothing liberating. You can be who you are, but only to an extent. You can listen to the music you want to listen to without feeling under judgment, you can wear the clothes you want to wear without feeling like a freak, and that’s really great, honestly I‘ve been there. But you can’t be the instinctive human being that you are; you can’t just live your life and “do what thou wilt” and all that. Your sub-culture still has the same codes and practises as anything else, and it’s far from liberating.
Become a hippy
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