Skip to main content

Cowardice and Conformity


Rollo May, psychologist, thought of conformity as one of the greatest vices of man.  “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity,” he asserted repeatedly.  You are not fully alive, not even fully human, unless at some point of time you felt that the world around you is wrong and you wanted to scream at it, “This is me and the world be damned.”  Isn’t that what Socrates did?  Isn’t that what Jesus did?

People love conformity.  It makes life much easier.  It is easy to swim with the current, to move with the herd, to be a faceless shape in the crowd.  It is not just easy, it is beneficial too.  Trophies belong to those who abide by the rules of the game.  Pain, on the other hand, is the essential companion of the one who chooses to stand out.

No one becomes fully human painlessly, Rollo May quoted Dostoevsky.  Pain is what you undergo necessarily when you choose to be what you are rather than what the herd wants you to be. 

But why should anyone choose pain?  No, you are not choosing pain.  It chooses you, in fact, if you are on the road to inner freedom.  If you want to live your life as a subject rather than as an object.  If you want to be your own master and not a slave of the systems that stultify your very soul. 

You don’t seek freedom unless you are a rebel.  Civilisation begins with a rebellion.  Conformity is savagery.  Mass murders have been committed by those who followed leaders blindly.

The rebel, the non-conformist, is a truth-seeker.  And truth sets you free.  Though painfully.  The rebel seeks new frontiers of freedom.  “He is drawn to the unquiet minds and spirits, for he shares their everlasting inability to accept stultifying control.”  Personal integrity matters more than anything else for the rebel. 

The real tragedy of the rebel is not the pain he has to endure endlessly but that he will be made a god after his death.  He or his symbols will be used to create thorough conformists.


PS. The above post is inspired by a random reading of Rollo May.  May was not really advocating rebellion.  One has to go beyond rebellion and achieve creativity if one is to be really successful in life.  (Or remain a mediocre conformist who adds more and more to the pollution in the world.) I wrote this, however, seeing the tragic death of rebellion altogether.  Conformity has become a serious vice in our world, I think. Too much obsequiousness!


Indian Bloggers


Comments

  1. Agree with Jyotirmoy..a very powerful post :) I myself is a vehement supporter of non-conformist thoughts if it gives direction to a new and better beginnings......but on a second thought... besides deriving solace in numbers by conforming are we not empowering ourselves....unifying and synergising our capabilities... and that is why we raise our kids telling them to conform to society. Perhaps, it is genetically coded in us perhaps somewhere during evolutionary journey as a survival tool. May be I am off-tangent on this topic.. :D

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm sure you won't mind my answering you, Bushra, though you've addressed your question to Jyotirmoy. I know you as a blogger and I believe I don't intimidate you. :)

      Children have to be raised with some degree of conformity. Otherwise they will go berserk. Children are natural rebels. Rebellion is our blood by birth. It is education, society, religion and such forces that kill the rebellion. How much rebellion should be killed? That's my question. As adults why do we fail to question what is obviously wrong? The victims of religious riots today are supporting the same people who killed their family members.

      Creativity is the next step of rebellion. Why are we killing that creativity? Look at the earth today. We have killed it with our conformity. Conformity with traders and plastic manufacturers, for example.

      I know the story of a priest who tried to make an adult a conformist. The priest never succeeded. The rebel died miserably in the end as a total failure in life unable to fight the strong religious forces led by the priest. Finally the rebel was buried in a religious graveyard much against his wishes. When the cross, which the rebel detested in his whole life, was planted on his graveyard, the priest crossed himself solemnly and said, "Praise the Lord." He had achieved success. That is all what conformity can achieve.

      Delete
  2. Certainly...I like a good debate. And thankfully blogging world is not infested with trolls that we find in copious amounts on social media generally :D Very much appreciate your response :)

    The story of that rebellious youth is indeed tragic and the irony you pointed is agonizing. The person laid down his life for his beliefs only to be turned into what he rebelled against. Sad!

    ... am glad you agree the little imps, I mean the kids, need to be disciplined and I agree the control and conforming standards should not kill creativity.

    While adult world is conforming out of necessity and love for easy life is understandable. Then certainly conforming equates cowardice ..a reluctance to venture into new. But there is also a section of society which is breaking the norms...and hats off to those bravehearts.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...

Emergency - then and now

  When Indira Gandhi imposed a draconian Emergency on India 50 years ago on this day (25 June), I had just completed the first train journey of my life and started an entirely different kind of life. I had just joined a seminary as what they call an ‘aspirant’. One of the notice boards of the seminary always displayed the front page of an English newspaper – The Indian Express , if I recall correctly. I was only beginning to read English publications and so the headlines about Emergency didn’t really catch my attention. Since no one discussed politics in the seminary, it took me all of six months to understand the severity of the situation in the country. When I was travelling back home for Christmas vacation, the posters on the roadsides caught my attention. That’s how I began to take note of what was happening in the name of Emergency. A 15-year-old schoolboy doesn’t really understand the demise of democracy. It took me a few years and a lot of hindsight to realise the gravit...

Goodbye, Little Ones

They were born under my care, tiny throbs of life, eyes still shut to the world. They grew up under my constant care. I changed their bed and the sheets regularly making sure they were always warm and comfortable. When one of them didn’t open her eyes after a fortnight of her birth, I rang up my cousin who is a vet and got the appropriate prescription that gave her the light of day in just two days. I watched each one of them stumble through their first steps. Today they were adopted. I personally took them to their new home, a tiny house of a family that belongs to the class that India calls BPL [Below Poverty Line]. I didn’t know them at all until I stopped my car a little away from their small house, at the nearest spot my car could possibly reach. They lived in another village altogether, some 15 km from mine. Sometimes 15 km can make a world of difference. A man who looked as old as me had come to my house in the late afternoon. “I’d like to adopt your kittens,” he said. He...