I wish to bring back to mind my past foulness and the carnal corruptions of my soul. This is not because I love them, but that I may love you, my God. [..] In the bitterness of my remembrance, I tread again my most evil ways, so that you may grow sweet to me, O sweetness that never fails, O sweetness happy and enduring, which gathers me together again from that disordered state in which I lay in shattered pieces, wherein, turned away from you, the one, I spent myself upon the many. For in my youth, I burned to get my fill of hellish things. I dared to run wild in different darksome ways of love. My comeliness wasted away. I stank in your eyes, but I was pleasing to myself and I desired to be pleasing to the eyes of men. -- The Depths of Vice from The Sixteenth Year of The Confessions of St. Augustine

I've always been something of a closet Augustinian, believing sin the default human condition. If he would've just left out all that God stuff I'd be more willing to come out of the closet. Nevertheless, his notion that being good is an act of will against wordly temptation seems right to me. In a capitalist democracy, giving in has always been an easier route to material success than acts of resistance.  Obama wouldn't be America's first ("serious") post-racial candidate if the majority thought he'd tackle racial injustice in any substantive manner. One doesn't rise through the business ranks by being an agent of moral change, making the business work better for the employees. The only change that's allowed is that of efficiency, streamlining the workers' output in accordance to the demands of the employer. You don't achieve power by disposing of the cultural rules, but by learning them, incorporating them and making them work for you while you actually work for them.  As Foucault pointed out -- and the Frankfurt School before him -- power is everywhere and nowhere in particular.
 

Since power is theoretically dispersed to the masses in a democratic system where the have-nots will always outnumber the haves, it becomes necessary for mass desire to be manufactured such that the status quo is believed by the people to be their will, and not something being forced upon them from the outside. This keeps things from changing, or not changing, too fast, so that the small ratio of dominant to the dominated can remain fairly static over time. That's why 1984 has never been a wholly convincing metaphor for the modern Western democracy. People would vote out Big Brother if he were seen to symbolically conflict with their democratic and other structuring beliefs ("don't need no outsider telling me what to do"). However, his ideas of control might work if the people can be convinced that those ideas are their own. In fact, Orwellian totalitarianism began when democracy ended, but a more pressing concern for modern democracy is its own despotic fault-line. 

The fault-line in the heart of democrats was pointed out by Tocqueville in the 19th century: "they want to be led, and they wish to remain free."  He referred to this danger as soft despotism, where people willingly (vote to) release their liberty, their control, to the state in exchange for some stopgap measure promised by the political representatives. The promise might be for some pork bill, or for some legislation limiting the rights of others who aren't felt to be acting in accordance with common sense or decency.  As Thomas Franks has argued, the politician doesn't even need to deliver the goods, so long as he's perceived to be working in the voters' interests, i.e., delivering the symbolic goods ("next year, we'll get prayer back in the schools"). Meanwhile, the politician can continue to serve the interests of the corporate status quo, which has zero interest in making things better for those doing the voting. Thus, the voters feel in control by voting for someone else to symbolically take care of things while the politician feels empowered by being the symbolic powerbroker in the capitalist order. The temptations of the silver-tongued devil have been replaced by the pervasive control of the culture industry.  And some of the most fitting allegories for this dispersed systemic power are in the teen oeuvre of John Hughes.

Beginning, appropriately enough, in 1984 with Sixteen Candles and ending in 1987 with Some Kind of Wonderful, Hughes explored the dynamics in which people are brought into the symbolic order. Four of these films he wrote, produced and directed (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller's Day Off), and the other two he wrote and produced with Howard Deutch directing (Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful). Although largely dismissed for its establishment politics (Tout va bien these films ain't), his teen cycle is more profitably seen as depictions of the way an individual's desire interacts with and is ultimately shaped by social control. Central to this cycle is the master-slave dialectic, which he predominately addresses according to class distinctions (e.g., the envious attitude Molly Ringwald's character expresses towards her high school's wealthy ruling elite in Pretty in Pink), but also breaks it down along relative positions of prestige, or character types -- the popular versus unpopular (such as the adoration Emilio Estevez's working class jock receives in The Breakfast Club). The political criticism isn't without merit, as there's always a trace of the satanic in these films, the celebration of selling one's soul to fit in. The most evil example is undoubtedly Ally Sheedy's finding happiness in The Breakfast Club once she's made over into the jock's ideal. She complains about being ignored, but is only noticed once she ignores who she is. Consider here the paradox of Obama's candidacy: he became the first black candidate by becoming post-racial, downplaying that which makes his candidacy historically significant, his race in the cultural context of America's racism (he only alluded to Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention). 

However, Hughes doesn't just leave popularity or the haute bourgeoisie as unquestioned truths. Instead, he regularly demonstrates how the popular class has to go through the same process of commodification (selling oneself as an object for others) as the outré class does in order or to stand a chance of entering the former's social circle. Estevez's jock tearfully explains how he lives his life to satisfy the expectations of his dad and the school while having little time (until his detention) for deciding what he might want (which, as it turns out, is to do nothing in particular). Similarly, Lea Thompson's popular girl from the wrong side of the tracks in Some Kind of Wonderful has to constantly struggle with suppressing her moral conscience lest she be cast out of the popular clique. Hughes' twist on Horatio Alger's dream is that success comes more from learning to walk in another's shoes than pulling oneself up by one's own boot straps. That these films are nostalgically remembered for their happy resolutions despite their pervasive miserabilism has a lot to do with the conventions of the teenage romantic comedy genre in which they work (or are made to work).