Notes on ‘Conform, Conform, Conform!’

The overall message? That conformity is embedded into us through society, but sooner or later we have to think for ourselves, even if it leads to pain.

It starts off with personal experiences of being within very conformist sub-groups and observing how people will go out of their way to conform in order to belong (I was a house-dad in a sea of desperate-to-conform women at nursery, whilst also living in a very conformist and traditional asian subculture i.e. an asian street)

The women at nursery mostly ignored or blanked me, because it was too dangerous / difficult to acknowledge that I was there. Not all of them, but most.

I then extrapolate this into general life lessons e.g. education has taught me that thinking for myself is ‘harmful for my health’ , and imagine what it would be like to go from conformist to being questioning “but as I do this hold my hand, it’s frightening for me,” and look back at all the ways in which society has inculcated conformity – bells at school, belonging to a team, rubbish pumped into the brain that destroys imagination, teams that as a by-product teach conformity with the implication that it’s a subtle form of conditioning that makes people more susceptible to taking orders (e.g. the army), the family instilling conformity (‘My youth meant that I easily became my culture’s slave’ – women in particular had roles and were destined for marriage in the street I lived in, ‘the Dead hands of the Dumb’ being all the unthinking middle-aged Mums and Dads planning their children’s futures and creating social minefields and pressures from which their naive kids couldn’t escape)

I then go through other ways in which conditioning continues :

Having a family means that there’s no energy left for thought, and social help depends on being a member of the group / family i.e. not rocking the boat
If you want to get on at work you have to conform with the mindless rules and social mores of your workplace – but if you do that you die inside ‘For unthinking is a way of being that quickly fills your head’
If you want to pray to God i.e. start developing internally the only way to do that is to go through religion, where the priests spell out what you can and can’t think

The only way to survive all these pressures is to tell yourself that your group is always right i.e. switch off your brain

BUT – there is a way to escape this hell of conformity and that’s to pray a little, and to reach out and dream, and bring that dream back into your heart to light the spark of questioning inside “And bring it back down here to Earth to shape an inner gleam.”