Can conformity exist within deviation?

I wrote this essay as part of my sociology midterm a couple days ago, and while writing it I realized that this journey is what afforded me the ability to appreciate the uniqueness surrounding Aeon Flux and Trevor Goodchild as fictional characters. I also came to the realization that the deep unease I felt while watching the live-action movie came from the violation of this appreciation, even though I was mostly unaware of it at the time.

“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era— the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. What-ever it meant…---
---…but being absolutely certain that which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt about that at all…
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…
And that, I think, was the handle— that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…
So now, less then five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark— the place where that wave finally broke and rolled back. “ -Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson.

Can conformity exist within deviation?
Hippies.

During my high school years I had gotten into the “hippy” era by the means of a famous journalist named Hunter S. Thompson. It was the one quote above that catalyzed a whole spectrum of counterculture fantasies where the weird were cherished and the wise were heard. I had the popular images of flower people in peculiar clothing relishing the sanctity of life stamped across a time, and across an entire generation. Then I actually started reading about hippies.
I first read The Darma Bums, by Jack Kerouac, and got a look at the “spirituality” that had surrounded the 60’s. They swallowed up the legends of foreign cultures, of Tibetan monks and long dead languages, without actually trying to learn about the people themselves. They used worldly religions as a figurehead for their alternative way of life, but failed to adhere to some of the simplest principles of those religions. Even with my limited knowledge of the philosophies that hippies tried to perpetuate, I could tell that they used their fascination for the unknown as a disguise and a justification for being reckless and disassociated from the world. They were a perversion of the beatnik generation who might have actually of tried to accomplish something. They were clowns for the sake of some great unnamed cause. They were religious fanatics without a religion to bind them, only an opposition, a distain for someone else, and then, of course, they had the war.
After The Dharma Bums I read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests, by Tom Wolfe, off of a recommendation. The Dharma Bums had been popular among the hippies, but it wasn’t about hippies. It wasn’t about their culture. The Electric Kool-Aid acid Tests is about Kesey, an author and one of the leaders in the 60’s movement. Kesey’s bus trip around America is part of the hippie legend, and one that excites a roar of images describing a journey into the deeper levels of the mind, and the higher planes of existence. After reading it though, the trip becomes much simpler. What was a group of open-minded kids journeying across America to discover the boundless world beyond the choking grasp that conservatives had on the youth of America, soon became a tightly knit group of highly intolerant drug users, perpetually insistent on conformity towards their unrealistically idolized leader’s whims, all gathered together to aimlessly drive anywhere the front of their bus ended up pointing. I was crushed.
A year after I gave up on The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Tests I tried to read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, deemed an American classic, and it officially extinguished the final flame of admiration I possessed for the 1960’s counterculture. Not only that, but like most who have their iconic visions shattered by the actual inquiry of those beloved icons, I began to question the substance of long held ideals I’d never come face to face with. Somehow, I’d believed that those countercultures, who had broken the norms of which I’ve felt so strongly all of my life, had become free from the constriction of social expectations and had burst into a realm where a persons identity could be realized without the reproval of ones own culture. Instead, they merely created a different and often times more strictly repressive set of rules to substitute for the old ones. It then hit me like a light. I knew why they called it “counterculture.” It’s a large group of people who are dissatisfied with the boundaries one culture puts on them, so they create a new culture, with boundaries of their own image, and represent their new culture as the antithesis of the original. The mentality, social structure, and basic rule system remain the same between the cultures, they merely decide to envelop themselves in a different environment and decorate themselves with a different face. The question then went from whether a deviant could also be a conformist, to whether deviation could exist without conformity. Is there really any such thing as freedom? Can someone distinguish a genuine identity separate from the construct created by their culture? Is there a pure self? As each pillar of thought and system of belief crumbled, they were replaced by a new question, as well as an expanding uncertainty that gave the world a grey tint and a repetitive simplicity which developed in me a genuine distaste for the world. Anomie, accompanied by a general anxiety, soon set in and cost me the worst trip to hell I’ve yet experienced.
After a long while I was able to partially reconcile myself with the 1960’s counterculture, and the rest of the cultures it had become a figurehead for as well. I realized it was unfair for me to supersede the individual and judge that person for the social structure they found themselves stuck in. I also realized that each group usually has a large variety of people regardless of the social norms involved. But even in recognizing these facts I cannot maintain the visions of distant cultures on top of the same pedestal I’d once kept them on. Instead I’ve had to utilize curiosity to reintegrate myself into the world. I’ve developed the initiative to pursue interests involving my school studies, as well as music and art, and although through the knowing filter of skepticism, I’ve been able to retain glimmering ideals in the form of the intellectual heroes of mine that have withstood the test of time. As anomie ebbs to the side, society regains enough complexity to emanate once again a sense of mystery from its dark unexplored corners, but still, you cannot un-know what you have learned, and I don’t believe that the bitter resignment associated with a collapsing world ever quite goes away.