This system, he explained, favors people so attuned to groupthink that they behave as though part of a school of fish, in which no member requires any time at all to react to the lead of another, but behaves as though part of a collective organism governed by a collective mind. Interestingly, he pointed-out that Communism appeals to people who are excluded from selection by the elite; that it's the politics of resentment of being considered second-tier. Additionally, he brought up that people who strive to be selected by this system are not altruistic, with a lack of empathy toward others, even toward their own peers; to the sociopathic extent that these people cannot even predict the actions of their adversaries in response to their own.
What he was describing caused me to reflect upon my time in the New York rock scene, circa 30 years ago. I knew all sorts of musicians there, then, but – barring my own admitted glaring personal deficits – there was a reason why I found myself at odds with the alternarock crowd, of which I was ostensibly part. It took me a while to catch on, but one day it just clicked in my head: a lot of those people were from wealthy families. Not only did they not have to eat shit at low-paying day jobs, they knew how to talk to rich people. As a matter of socialization, rich people know how to talk to rich people, but there's also that it takes one to know one. There may be some sort of verbal secret handshakes, whereby one's pedigree is indicated, or one's admission to some prestigious school signals peerage. There is also a manner of a wealthy person's bearing and comportment, which defies the pose of disenfranchised rocker, an air of entitlement or ease of movement through life – a lack of working-class insecurity. (It may be as simple as tilting one's head back as one laughs while holding one's wine glass by the stem; I dunno.) Wealth begets wealth, but also rewards it.
Following what Mr. iPhone was puttin' down, I recognized how this system of elite homogenization through compliance worked in the culture industry. During my tenure in the New York rock scene, I wondered how those rich kids could look so "alternative" and yet be so conservative. They were supposedly this peripheral contingent, but their aspirations and affinities were decidedly mainstream. How soon or readily they seemed to transform from thrift-store self-stylists to pets of fashion designers. Mainly, however, was how they maintained and reinforced musical conventions amongst themselves, signaling to one another their hipness to a shared aesthetic that was ultimately so innocuously – suburban, despite the urban edginess that supposedly "informed" their art. Among a roomful of them, I'd see them all checking cues from one another, while trying to seem coolly detached, especially from others looking to them for cues. All their posing, on stage and off – it makes one want to see them sleeping or taking a dump, just to catch them unguarded and unselfconscious.
Further along with the premise of Mr. iPhone, there was in this milieu a second-tier population, the ancillary support crew of sycophants. These were the music journalists and photographers, the people who worked at record labels, and the hangers-on who'd say things like, "Guess who I'm friends with:" the hive-minded, from whom comes the "buzz" about this band or that artist. The "buzz" is generated by these cognoscenti, and then the general public wants to vibrate with it, too. Resultantly, people get excited about this band or that artist without understanding how nor why – it's what's driving the school of consumerist hipster fish. It's just known; it's just felt. I've witnessed for some musicians of my peerage popular enthusiasm that I can't understand; only to be explained by the result of "buzz" transmitted to the lower hive-minded. People like it because "people like it." Liking it aligns them with those highest up in the food-chain, who tell them what it is that they like, and who had been carefully vetted by the System, so as to expunge any undesirable deviation or innovation that might indicate or cause questioning of parameters of acceptability and standards of desirability, the order by which the consumer-culture of our society runs most efficiently and lucratively.
I often envision some of the rich-kid rockers with whom I'd been acquainted now living in exclusive neighborhoods, tending the flowerbeds around signs reading, "In this house, we believe . . ." or with an ever-evolving "I stand with . . ." message, prominently displayed so that their neighbors will know how "radical" their political views are. Never mind that the only poor people they know are those who come to mow the terraces every couple of weeks.