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Conformity as a religion

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edgewaters
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01 Jul 2012, 12:39 am

enrico_dandolo wrote:
However, the T-shirt/jeans combo might not be a choice in the same way the business suit is. It might be necessity for someone who can't afford anything else, just as some people actually cannot use grammatically correct language, because they do not know the rules of the standard language.


It isn't truly a natural default, though. For much less money, one could wear a loincloth as humans did for many thousands of years, or just wrap a sheet or blanket around oneself. There are minimum standards of conformity in our culture, though. We like to think of them as natural, but a prehistoric hunter-gatherer would find them extremely bizarre and elaborate.



techstepgenr8tion
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01 Jul 2012, 8:15 am

edgewaters wrote:
techstepgenr8tion wrote:
What I really meant was conformity-naziism. People who nick pick social presentation and performance in the same way grammar nazi's pick at grammar. I looked at the OP and my specific word usage could have been slightly misleading so I'm glad to clear that much up.


I believe the word you are looking for is procrusteanism.

That replacement runs into its own problems. Merriam Webster has no definition for it, Google only had a few representation of it and it goes back to fables that I get the impression most people wouldn't have heard of. In other words I'd be at just as much of a loss for communication to have used 'procrusteanism' as I was to say social-grammar nazi, perhaps more so. Procrusteanism also speaks to a symptom not a cause.


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edgewaters
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01 Jul 2012, 1:03 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
edgewaters wrote:
techstepgenr8tion wrote:
What I really meant was conformity-naziism. People who nick pick social presentation and performance in the same way grammar nazi's pick at grammar. I looked at the OP and my specific word usage could have been slightly misleading so I'm glad to clear that much up.


I believe the word you are looking for is procrusteanism.

That replacement runs into its own problems. Merriam Webster has no definition for it, Google only had a few representation of it and it goes back to fables that I get the impression most people wouldn't have heard of. In other words I'd be at just as much of a loss for communication to have used 'procrusteanism' as I was to say social-grammar nazi, perhaps more so. Procrusteanism also speaks to a symptom not a cause.


Merriam-Webster has it.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/procrustean

Admittedly it's not a commonly used word, but the meaning is accurate. There's no sense coining a new word when we already have one. This just results in an excess of superfluous words. I'm mystified by why people bother having dictionaries, when they consider all terms they're unfamiliar with to be pedantic and refuse to learn any new terms. I liked it better when people used to play crossword puzzles and enjoyed learning new words. Today, we seem to live in an idiocracy, and 1t5 a11 ab0ut th15 n0ns3ns3, lmao (forgive the sarcasm).

I'll agree this makes the word useless in daily conversation, but it can still be useful in the right context, such as print.

"Procrusteanism" is admittedly quite rare, I had to verify that one and I've never heard it. It's typically just "procrustean", used as an adverb. It has been used in popular literature, that everyone is familiar with (EA Poe uses it, for example).

You're right it doesn't deal with the causes, but it labels the phenomenon accurately enough.



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02 Jul 2012, 8:00 pm

Conformity is something people choose to follow. Like how people choose to be religious or non religious.



techstepgenr8tion
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02 Jul 2012, 8:36 pm

Joker wrote:
Conformity is something people choose to follow. Like how people choose to be religious or non religious.

But it has such a diehard impetus and people gravitate to it so strongly without any firm rhyme or reason over peer pressure that it feels like we're missing much stronger mechanics to it all. Seems like there's a lot more to it than it just being 'one of those things'.


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02 Jul 2012, 8:38 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Joker wrote:
Conformity is something people choose to follow. Like how people choose to be religious or non religious.

But it has such a diehard impetus and people gravitate to it so strongly without any firm rhyme or reason over peer pressure that it feels like we're missing much stronger mechanics to it all. Seems like there's a lot more to it than it just being 'one of those things'.


I didn't face peer pressure to be religious. It was my own personal choice. Conformity and Religion and two diffrent things.



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02 Jul 2012, 8:43 pm

Joker wrote:
I didn't face peer pressure to be religious. It was my own personal choice. Conformity and Religion and two diffrent things.

!?

I don't get it, why are you sharing that?


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02 Jul 2012, 8:43 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Joker wrote:
I didn't face peer pressure to be religious. It was my own personal choice. Conformity and Religion and two diffrent things.

!?

I don't get it, why are you sharing that?


Because you brouht up peer pressure.



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02 Jul 2012, 8:53 pm

Joker wrote:
Because you brouht up peer pressure.

Uncanny choice of examples I guess. I thought you might of been implying that I'd written the thread on peer pressure toward religion.


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edgewaters
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02 Jul 2012, 8:55 pm

What if the mechanics are neurological?



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02 Jul 2012, 8:59 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Joker wrote:
Because you brouht up peer pressure.

Uncanny choice of examples I guess. I thought you might of been implying that I'd written the thread on peer pressure toward religion.


No never implyed that your assuming I did when I in fact did not.



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02 Jul 2012, 9:31 pm

Joker wrote:
No never implyed that your assuming I did when I in fact did not.

You'd have to forgive me, it seems like almost every response I got for a while on this thread was way out in left field. I was almost afraid someone might go on a long diatribe about the history of windmills at the rate things were going.


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02 Jul 2012, 9:33 pm

edgewaters wrote:
What if the mechanics are neurological?

Now you're confusing me. Who suggested they aren't?


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02 Jul 2012, 9:34 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Joker wrote:
No never implyed that your assuming I did when I in fact did not.

You'd have to forgive me, it seems like almost every response I got for a while on this thread was way out in left field. I was almost afraid someone might go on a long diatribe about the history of windmills at the rate things were going.

No problem :wink:



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02 Jul 2012, 9:35 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
edgewaters wrote:
What if the mechanics are neurological?

Now you're confusing me. Who suggested they aren't?


I guess nobody did, but if they're chemical/neurological, we can't analyze the decision-making process involved, because there isn't one. At least not at a conscious level. We'd be better off analyzing what's going on when overrides take place.



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02 Jul 2012, 10:00 pm

edgewaters wrote:
I guess nobody did, but if they're chemical/neurological, we can't analyze the decision-making process involved, because there isn't one. At least not at a conscious level. We'd be better off analyzing what's going on when overrides take place.

I can't really agree there. We have evolutionary drives for instance that throw so many of the behaviors we have out there that seem social Darwinian. OTOH I can understand social Darwinism causing people to evaluate practical conformity or having it to where if an adult makes two mistakes in one day they're essentially ignored for the rest of the day or told nonverbally to go sit with the children. Procrustean conformity though, as you put it, doesn't make nearly as much sense. The closest I can come up with is that certain people generally don't have the mental resources (intelligence) to understand why they believe what they believe, so they group things by 'feel' rather than content, and being that the dumb will use such tools bluntly everyone on up the intelligence ladder has to deal with what the dumb do in order to keep themselves safe; which entails bringing all kinds of arbitrary things into the equation because the reaction or their feeling of it is built on form rather than substance.

I could have completely answered my own question on this but I'm sure there are more aspects it than that even that are worth discussing. Mainly I was wondering if there was any additional dogma in this or why, if none of the above are correct, why its been such a constant in human history to the point that quite often there's no logical way to even push back and get the dumb to make an exception where practicality surpasses image (it seems people can do that in other areas, why pick strange little islands of thought to correct here but not there?).


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