The great god Conformitas

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This is one of those concepts that's flitted around my head off and on, mostly when I'm getting reminder that we're a race that puts conformity shibboleths, the more logically unreachable on their own the better, pretty close to the top of paramount values. One of my more painful crashes with this was when I was 17 or 18, got the impression that people had thought I was off or crazy because I'd say things that weren't making sense (really a long story behind that - you could say I was trying to socially find my place, realized other people unspokenly demanded that conversation be about nothing, and I got lost following that) and that I was going to fix that habit by making sense. I found out very quickly that this was nowhere close to being enough - ie. you can't just be following the conversation, you have to branch to the next topic in the same exact way that the other four or five people in the group would. Even if you made a perfectly coherent choice, even if there was no stupid jump backward, way off to the side, even if you're comment was in the line of concern they seemed to be following - the slightest variance from what anyone else would think, effortlessly, was enough for social ostracism if it happened with any consistency.

At a certain point I pretty much figured out - effortless conformity is what's needed. Although I'm sure it's spread out and a lot of people only have one foot in and pay the price to varying degrees it seems like the underlying structure is that the people who have the most expedient path to success, resources, partner, etc.. barring any major health maladies stopping them are the people who can say something completely out of the blue, way off topic, and everyone laughs. It seems like one might divide competition into two tiers - one where you have direct competitions of merit vs merit in particular fields, and the field for everyone else - ie. how relatible are you, by extension likable, based on how effortlessly other people understand not just what you say or why you say it but where you're coming from.

The scary thing about it - to not have effortless conformity is a major gap in protection in employment, it's also a terrifying thought not just for the efforts of looking for a life partner but also realizing that no matter how well a guy can fight, how sharp a girl looks, etc. etc.. that if they're weak in this category their authority to hold the outside world's encroachments at bay with respect to their relationship or right to it is damaged and similarly if they become parents they'll have to deal with other parents who are terribly cultured, just as often bullies, and they have to protect the interests of their child as well as protecting their child in general. I used to in a way bundle this with natural selection but people quite often mean alpha genes or traits when they say that - I'd have to call it social selection because a person can be diabetic, have sickle cell, major heart problems, and be highly rated in this regard. In the social world we live in your formidability seems like its pretty much 100% social and people who couldn't handle themselves to save their own lives often enough can rise to the top because they're able to be socially cutting and project enough anger, vitriol, arrogance, or whatever else that it covers the difference. If someone's knee-capped in conformity it means half of what they say, no matter how well formulated, will be ammunition against themselves because they're failing shibboleths when dealing with foes and there's next to nothing they can do about it if they would in any way chose to be socially active rather than largely passive or removed. The only resolution I was able to find to that problem, and I learned this when I had to deal with really self-entitled Machiavellian types, is that I had to not just be rarely seen or rarely heard but be impeccable at whatever work I did and bring the most bottom-line unarguable truth any time I opened my mouth. That seems to be only available as a source of power though when they go too far out on a limb or where their own aggression passes the thresholds that they and their group have set for themselves.


Getting to why I'm throwing this in PPR - I was thinking about how Jordan Peterson talks about Logos, sort of like self-aware attention and logic/reason combined in the search and assertion of truth, is the primary driver in the west and its a significant part of what's been called The Patriarchy (TM) or the phallogocentricm that Derrida refers to. I'd have to say that this might be true for higher minds, which are obviously in rare quantity. With the sheer degree that we decide so many rights of entry based on shibboleths of conformity though, I still feel like I'd have to argue that Conformitas might be the far more active deity in the picture. In attempting some compassion here I get that if you're in way over your head intellectually with life, couldn't trust your own thoughts to save yourself, and have to get by you'll obsess with the letter of the law and the letter of the social rules you're given and I think that might be a fair amount of this. It's also a fascinating problem to the degree that social prestige has meshed so deeply with consumer life that we may very well strip-mine the world to the point that we'll eventually be out of everything that isn't stone, wood, or brick without exorbitant costs and we could be headed right back to the dark ages as we can't replace much of anything that breaks down in this great technological infrastructure that we've got now.

As far as dominance hierarchies are concerned though - I get that they're there, I get why they're there, it's something I think our race needs to introspect on a heck of a lot more though. Bundling things together by 'ease' and effort, the way we do now and the way I'm sure we've done for thousands of years, seems like it's outright dangerous. It's how mental midgets rise to the top and freeze progress because anything above their intellectual capacity is a dark, debatably nonexistent, zone. To that extent though dominance hierarchies seem to just be whatever we have the interest or intelligence to make them. If they're lead by Logos - perfect, if they're not or only claim to be then they're as pernicious as anything else.

All that said I get that I'm a weird guy who writes weird posts so this will probably fall off the page with no replies. For whatever sickness drives me though I wanted to write something interesting. If anyone feels inspired to say something cool, if not I get it.

Yup. Pretty much.
But I guess as a non-conformist, and by that I mean pathologically incapable of valueing the herd above one's own opinion, one has to find a safe niche and ... Watch the sun rise and set.

What I mean is: the whole herd mentality has it's purpose, and being an outsider has, too, from an evolutionary standpoint.
A certain amount of outsiders is good for a population as a whole. Doesn't mean the population has any idea what to do with him/her.
Obviously, evolution doesn't give a damn if millions of nonconformists are unhappy, as long as billions of conformists are.
Evolution is yet to figure out capitalism and environmental catastrophe. It's uncharted territory...well. Yeah, we might go the way of yeast in a wine bottle.