The Individual and Culture

To what extent can the individual break out of cultural hegemony?  Obviously, it happens.  I suspect however, that it is ultimately a matter of choice: one does not choose to not belong to a culture, but rather chooses to belong to a different culture.  Human beings are social animals, after all.

It's kinda like language - one must choose a mode of communication (to be most broad about it), so we can either use the language we are taught growing up, or we can choose a different language to use, but ultimately, we still must use language.  Same thing with culture . . .

It's a bit more complicated than that, as we can choose bits and pieces of the cultures around us, as many people are with religion (or at least were, 5 years ago . . . curiously enough, I haven't heard much about it recently).  And, of course, fearless reader, I have issues.  My argument for culture mirrors my argument for religion: I feel like something meaningful is lost when you mix and match.  The whole of a culture or a religion is more than the sum of its parts, so mixing and matching ends up losing meaning.

Anyways, the point is that we as individuals are still bound by culture, even in the rejection of culture, which makes things complicated.  There was an old comic strip in the 90s that poked fun at kids who rejected main-stream culture as being too normal by adopting "grunge" and then all looking the same as each other.  But I always felt that the comic strip missed the essential point: the kids weren't being hypocritical, but rather potentially revolutionary (sorta - not surprisingly, fearless reader, I got issues here, too) by joining a culture of opposition.  Essentially, the problem wasn't their sameness, which the strip mocked, but rather their valuing of individuality in the first place - which is really the hegemonic ideology despite any evidence to the contrary.