Conformity

I speculate that conformity is a natural response to population pressure. Increasing population pressure makes competition for natural resources and the means to secure them more intense. Conformity is an alternative to hostility in securing the necessary means for survival. This could explain the ease with which people accept Fascism in difficult times.

My own life experience has been one of non-conformity in most areas of my life. Initially non-conformist by nature, not choice, due to learning disabilities and the effects of domestic dysfunction, I learned as a young child to tap my inner world for a sense of calm and safety. As a pre-schooler, I spent hours alone on the floor of an empty room with a pencil and paper. I drew my life in cartoons. Apparently, these early expressions of my inner life were so shocking to my parents that they routinely destroyed them, so they would not be seen by anyone else.

Punishment did not make me a conformist. It was the treatment of choice of the Roman Catholic nuns who succeeded my family as angry disciplinarians. My internal center remained in tact through countless attempts to pulverize my individuality into a conforming, grinning blandness. Attempts to make me into a "normal boy" failed every time. I persisted in being who I knew I was in my own consciousness.

Perhaps this is the practice that made accepting my own homosexual needs and desires quite simple for me at an early age. Conformity in the 1960s would have demanded my hating myself for loving men. I never did. Instead, I learned to hate the violence and psychological abuse that was employed to force me to become just like everyone else.

The new conformity has a cheerful face. Facebook has become one of its unintended vehicles. This is obvious as we see story after story of adolescents driven to suicide by Facebook bashers. It is obvious to me when I read my own Facebook home page. Antisocial and dysfunctional behaviors are sometimes applauded there without disagreement because they are perceived as "normal". I am left scratching my head, as I have been for over five decades, at the mindlessness of conformist behavior.

Being an individual with a social conscience is hard work. Most of us were not conditioned to live this way in America. We see the current populist abhorrence of individual human rights and social responsibility in politics on The Right. We are becoming a society of "Mind your own business and pretend to like everybody." I would like to live in a society whose motto is "Learn to be yourself and work to help your fellow citizens to do the same happily and peacefully."