|
|
Everywhere we are confronted most terribly with conformity. People walk on the paths, and avoid the forbidden carpets of grass. People eat one food with a fork but never with a spoon. People shy from one monstrosity, yet lovingly adopt another. We are programmed, be it by nature or nurture, by innate predilection or learned tendency, what to do, and how to do it. Education is propaganda. Genes instill us with age-old, evolutionary instinct: and the stomach rumbles, the blood boils and the passions stir. Society teaches us shock at nudity, love of money and ridicule of failure. Teachers impart to us the plausible daydreams of the physicists and biologists and chemists. Corporate business, through the supplications of lure and want and credo, engage us to wear the uniform, drink the going drink, and purchase the latest necessity. Our society, from the moment of our emergence, is imploring us to adopt and adhere to its rules, its regulations, its taboos and its no-nos. Our are surrounded and ambushed by tradition, common sense, logic, conformity and orthodoxy. Our burgeoning intellectual and personal mindsets are besieged by the popular delusions that we adopt. For children are not warriors and tots are not revolutionaries. Every six-year-old, smeared with jam, is an eccentric, and yet we stamp it out of them. Wash your hands! Get out of that puddle! Leave that cat alone! Perhaps the paternalist instincts Nature has wisely bestowed upon us linger. In our mature impatience, we seek in haste to bypass the follies and excesses and accidents that adorn youth. Keep the hand out of the fire. Hide the knives. Perhaps it is from the instinct of care for our young that means we seek to remove the eccentricities of our children. We do this to make children conform to the collective orthodoxy that shall assail them at every step of their lives. In teaching children orthodoxy, do we exercise our care for them, or, sinisterly, do we unknowingly obey the silent overlord? Mother knows best- but we cannot stay children forever. There is some invisible motivation in our collective unconscious that drives us to smother and suppress individual instinct. This may be the legacy of evolution, which instills in us the importance of herd and pack behavior. The individual is put a part of a larger organism. The selfish desires of one contradict, most usually, those of the whole. The majority is an unconscious organism, and it is complimentary to those who add to and support it. When our instincts identify us as part of a majority, they automatically activate to separate and supplant dissent. Whether we wish it or not, we have an instinctive, amoral attitude programmed into us, to support the Many, and to remove the Few. I perceive a system in Nature. I think there are two principles in Nature: Survival and Change. All things are compelled to survive. And all things are compelled to change to do it. I perceive, then, a system in Nature, of survival and change. There is a third principle; but it is not so much a principle, as a volition, or tendency. It is one of selfishness, born of the first principle, of Survival. All creatures want to belong to a majority, wherein they will find sanctuary, mutuality and contingency. ‘United we stand, divided we fall,’ goes the rallying cry. Strength in numbers. All creatures, man included, want to belong to the Many. To do this, they will create a majority. By ‘majority,’ or ‘many,’ I do not simply mean numeric. I mean, to belong to that section of that society, or herd, or social grouping, that dominate.
|
