Nicholas Higgins 11/07/2020
On Conformity
‘Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth’, John F Kennedy
‘A change in a person’s behaviour or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from an individual or group of people’. This is precisely what every ‘rugged individualist’ hates; changing yourself to meet others expectations is sheepish, bland and uninspiring.
But the fact is humans are herd animals. Conforming means you are accepted into a group, and this makes life easier. We all want to remain in the good graces of our social grouping. This makes sense in evolutionary terms too. The biggest reason we’ve evolved as we have is because we’ve formed co-dependent societies, which thrive on interaction with others, friends, family and partners. Such societies require conformity (to language, manners, which side of the road you drive on..) to operate. Just as a football team needs its players to conform to the will of the team, and not act as lone wolves.
Certainly this provides a stable and predictable world, but at what cost? Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 remind us that real conformity comes at the expense of individuality. Citizens in these dystopian worlds are not unique, free wheeling humans. They are the husks of human beings, empty shells devoid of feeling and free will. The motto of Huxley’s ‘World State’ is ‘Community, Identity, Stability’, but the cost is a humanity of indistinguishable automatons, who look and think the same, merely interchangeable parts in the giant machine the state.
Whilst 21st century man has yet to become full fledged robot, the warning signs may just be there. Our cultural aspirations are overwhelmingly homogenous: steady (office) job, semi-detached house, mortgage, wife and 2 kids. Our opinions are unanimous in their sanctimonious leftism; does anyone dare to voice against the received wisdom on race, gender or sexuality? Our clothes are the same, Nike or Adidas? Our cars are the same, BMW or Audi, and do you want it in black or grey? We follow the same fads, ever heard of TickTock? We have the same heroes, or should I say celebrities. We all even appear to have the same haircuts. Truly we have forgotten Epictetus’s call to ‘be the purple thread in the long white gown’.
Whilst the Western world professes ‘tolerance’, it demands conformity. True we do not live in a Nazi police state, but those who refuse to conform today are often met with criticism, bullying and disapproval. Those who wilfully reject it are ostracised as screwballs, misfits and dropouts. My brother in law, for example, has recently quit his job as a corporate lawyer to drive across the US. ‘Are you mad?’, the detractors cry. ‘Have you lost your marbles?! You mean you don’t want to be a wage slave on the 8:30 to Cannon Street? Tosh you fool!’
But by refusing to follow the well trodden path he’s acted on his dreams. He’s respected the fact that he’s his own unique person, with his own original, if unusual, ambitions. Many people want a 9-5 and to drive a BMW and that’s fine. But It is a terrible thing for someone to pursue these things simply so they can be accepted. To do so limits complex, free willed humanity into a shockingly narrow mould. If each person is uniquely different from every other, you lose something priceless and precious when you are forced to be like everyone else.
I suspect that many people would long to put a middle finger up to their 9-5 and follow their vision. Conformity however is the quiet voice that says, ‘why bother? Just imagine the rejection and criticism I would face? People would laugh at me if they knew my dreams’. In its most insidious form, conformity makes you a slave to society’s norms. You become a sort of sleepwalking cyborg, living a life but not as you want to. This is not least why, as Henry David Thoreau put it, ‘most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with their song still in them’.
What does the non-conformist look like? History shows us that they are the greatest thinkers, innovators and explorers the world has seen. Not a single one of them accepted the truth of the moment as the definite and irrevocable truth. Instead, they decided to challenge the status quo and find out how much of the existing truth really was true. Einstein had utter disregard of authority, and refused to conform. He once he wrote a friend and said, ‘A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth. Long live impudence!’ he liked to say. He ignored conventional wisdom more than he rebelled against it. It bored him.
Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Steve Jobs: they would have all been nobody’s had they chosen to conform. They all went beyond their comfort zones, stepped out of the boat, and exposed themselves to public ridicule and social opprobium. They knew that those who grow up in a herd, deer like, thinking with the herd, acting with the herd, rarely amount to anything. To be a mover and a shaker, to make it into the history books, sometimes you have to move against the grain.
We need people like this. They prevent society from stagnating and slowly eroding. They’ve allowed society to move forward and progress. Non-conformity may well be the very precondition for any sort of change. The great socio-economic transformations of our history, the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment, only happened because a few very clever men (and women) dared to think differently. We need people like this more than we think.
Whilst the world might dissipate into chaos if we were all non-conformists, mass conformity must always be treated with suspicion. Uniformity, monotony and homogeneity suck the variety, colour and diversity out of life. To live with some healthy non-conformity, however, is to live life through your eyes only. It respects that you are as unique as your fingerprints, and are not just another grain of dust or blade of grass. It refutes a spiritless life of ‘quiet desperation’ and unmet potential. It inspires us to act on our dreams, and if we’re lucky, to think as others have not before.