An artist should be a truth seeker, whether or not that fits into established social confines. Both are necessary.

Check out Herbert Marcuse and the idea of the Great Refusal.
The role of the artist is to question the validity of established reality (this is the part the hipsters don’t get; they’ve been sold this lifestyle, they pay the established reality to provide them with it), great art is such because it refuses to adhere to norms, refuses to accept the assumptions of the moment. It’s possible to understand the artists’ depression as the natural outgrowth of accepting the role of the outsider necessary to contribute to a Great Refusal of norms and dogma–that can be an isolating experience and isolation (whether physical, intellectual or emotional) is depression’s advance guard.

Or not. It may also be that artists are simply the people best equipped to express the feelings of isolation, hopelessness and loss that far more people than we realize suffer from. It may be that most people are not afforded the chance to reflect on their own experience, to read the philosophy and study the ideas that would reveal the meaning of their anxiety to them; most people are never equipped with the tools that they need to recognize in order to recognize their own unhappiness, their own frustration. Instead they are taught that their feelings of longing and dissatisfaction are a signal that something is wrong with them, so they hide it from the world, afraid of being rejected based on what they believe to be a personal defect. As a result, too many people who might otherwise be coalescing around the type of refusal-to-be-ruled and demand-to-be-free (or perhaps refusal-to-be-isolated and demand-to-be-connected) that you have called the Calico Rebellion are taking drugs sanctioned by the state, and prescribed by pushers in lab coats that are designed and advertised to make potential revolutionaries, potential brothers and sisters in the fight for justice and the prioritization of humanity over material feel more like shopping and less like rebelling against the very same system that has frustrated them to the point of seeking medical help in the first place.

Thanks for writing.

And the Luke Skywalker comparison is no doubt legit.

good we have nukes on standby just in case. : )

and those toms shoes are nuts. want to know who they remind me of?
http://l.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/wrlds/strwrs/pr/img/orig/Episode_4_Luke_Skywalker_1.jpg