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 any
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