LastSubCultist

The title from this is in relation to the title of one of my sci-fi short stories, The Last UnCult. 

Perhaps this can work as a preface or as a postcript. 

It works well as either which is an intriguing thing about it.

The Last Sub-Cultist

It is recognized in cultural history that very often a transition occurs between the first wave of original pioneers and the following generations. When a movement has been distilled and has become a retrospective, the process of nostalgic purification has replaced any original incentive. It is no longer the same open and expansive genre that it originally was. Reinvention is inevitable and with it, loss of authenticity. 

The wannabe's are not 'keeping it alive' it, they are the stagnation. Neither are those occupying cliched niches open and expansive, they become extremists so as to sate an ego need for recognition of expertise in a field they were never a part of other than to take it on as an assumed role for what is ultimately the purpose of absurdity. Their foundation is not the original sources, people, places, events but a mythology of those things. 

The originals can see this and in time as the fledglings age they will also accept this when comparing their own contrived elite status with that of as yet unborn who will eventually seize the mantel from them. We can see this continuity of refinement at the cost of the genuine in all socio-cultural movements. The trappings are not what the acolytes seek for the trappings are that which emerged after the founders had established the scene. 

Yet the acolytes seldom recognize it. Where they do, they forsake inherited dogma and strike out to live for their own generations emerging developments. It is not a personal attack on youth to teach others what insight a genre has given: it is a living part of that cultural heritage which idiomatic followers would be wise to assimilate if they are indeed as they claim a party to that scene.