Move forward a bunch of years, and you will come to the medieval times where we had slayings of peasants and other unpleasant events. Move forward a couple, and you had the hanging of the witches because of their different ideologies. And then you come to our society, a society where we look back at history and grimace over the barbaric inhabitants of that world. There is no difference. Our perceptions are the same.
People seem to think it's cool nowadays to dress all in black and be depressed all the time.
This seems to have been the next step from the coffee house junkies. Instead of drinking coffee, they now wait for their prozac prescription to go through. Instead of reciting bad poetry, they recite worse poetry. Instead of sitting in coffee houses, they sit in dark corners and look spooky. And sadly, this has worked to an extent.