Politics & Power Quote by Richard O'Brien

There is a puckish distrust of adulthood baked into Richard O'Brien's line, the kind that sounds offhand until you notice how pointed the target is. "Aligned" is the giveaway: he's not talking about growing up so much as joining a club, signing on to a tribe that expects a certain posture. The mature group, in his framing, isn't wiser; it's captured. It "go[es] off" into respectability and ends up as "politicians and stuff" - a deliberately deflating phrase that treats power as just another tedious hobby people pick up when the costumes come off.

As an actor and creator associated with cult sensibility and theatrical transgression, O'Brien is defending a creative identity built on misalignment. The subtext is that maturity, as society sells it, often means trading spontaneity for status and trading imagination for management. His joke lands because it leverages a familiar cultural arc: youthful weirdos are celebrated until they're expected to become "serious", at which point the reward is proximity to institutions many people privately dislike. The word "politicians" functions as shorthand for compromise, brand management, and the slow erosion of outsider honesty.

Contextually, it's also a sly comment on how subcultures get absorbed. The people who once refused the mainstream become its administrators. O'Brien is staking out the opposite impulse: stay porous, stay unserious, stay unclaimed. It's not anti-responsibility so much as anti-capture - a refusal to let "maturity" be defined as submission to the dullest forms of authority.