Conformity vs. Self-Reliance
An ideology or an idea
I came across this great Guillermo Del Toro interview with the Directors Guild of America1 while researching my next video. In it, he said:
The difference between an ideology and an idea is that an ideology is inherited from someone else, and you don’t really know how it works, you just accept that it is […] An idea is born out of instinct and experience, and you then construct your own vocabulary to articulate the world.
This immediately struck a chord with me, because conformity and self-reliance are key themes of the aforementioned video (which is on Pan’s Labyrinth, if you must know). And by Guillermo’s definition, conformity is an ideology in itself. It doesn’t matter what you’re conforming to, the very fact that you “just accept that it is” makes it ideology.
Self-reliance, on the other hand, produces ideas. Ideas unique to you, born from your instinct and experience. Ideas that can change the world if you have the courage to embrace them. Ideas that, “like grass, […] grow better for being stepped on.”2
Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985)3 can most succinctly be described as George Orwell’s 1984 if it were a satire brimming with dry British humor and absurdism (which is funny, btw, because Gilliam claims he hadn’t read 1984 before making Brazil). But more precisely, it is about conformity, and how the vast majority of us are willing to play the game of life in order to satisfy our ambition, or what the world tells us “success” means, no matter how many sins we commit or ignore in the process.
In the film, we see a plethora of characters “just doing their jobs.” Doctors turned state-sanctioned torturers, security guards who violently suppress dissidence, beurocrats who sign off on abhorrent policies, socialites who turn the other cheek because they care more about appearance than justice, I could go on (and I will, at a later date).
The genius of the film is that we can recognize our own tendencies and the tendencies of those around us in all these characters, even the ones who commit atrocities. It is a concept reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil, which she coined to describe infamous Nazi conformist Adolf Eichmann.
In her chronicling of Eichmann's trial4, Arendt boldly claimed he was not antisemetic nor sociopathic nor sadistic. He merely wanted someone to tell him what to do, and he was willing to commit atrocities for the approval of his peers and superiors. She writes:
May 7, 1945, the official date of Germany’s defeat, was significant for [Eichmann] mainly because it then dawned upon him that thenceforward he would have to live without being a member of something or other: “I sensed I would have to live a leaderless and difficult individual life, I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and commands would any longer be issued to me, no pertinent ordinances would be there to consult—in brief, a life never known before lay ahead of me.”
I can see the devastating impacts of conformity all around us. How many people in the Israeli army, I wonder, are going along with their atrocities in Palestine for no reason other than “just doing my job”? How many people elsewhere are unwilling to speak up because of what Ursula K Le Guin (through the character Bedap in The Dispossessed) called “the innate cowardice of the average human mind.”2
We are living in a scary and dangerous cultural moment. Technological change is happening at the quickest rate since the Industrial Revolution, and government is proving pitifully unable (or unwilling) to compensate with regulation. The digital penopticon5 has more visibility into our private lives than ever before, and increasingly we are slaves to algorithms and corporations.
Most people, not dissimilar to Adolf Eichmann, want to be told how to live. They want to adopt an ideology—whether it be religious or political or philosophical or any combination of lenses through which to view the world—that gives them a stock answer to every issue, “and woe to you if you want to set your chair between For and Against.”6
But the world is not black and white, and the more I learn about it, the less I know.
But just because I cannot know anything for certain does not mean I cannot trust myself.
The answer to conformity, I believe, is self-reliance and mindfulness. As Nietzsche would say, be like a child. Question everything, try new things, be receptive to new ideas.
Trust yourself, learn all you can—but don’t carry the notion that you need to know everything in order to have a valuable opinion. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes:
Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood […]
Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.7
And for the love of god, get off social media and away from groupthink and filter bubbles.
Spend time with yourself. Set 30 minutes each day for mindfulness—be it meditation or simply being with your thoughts; it will do wonders for your ability to generate ideas and think creatively.
“Only silence enables us to say something unheard of. The compulsion of communication, by contrast, leads to reproduction of the same, to conformism.” - Byung Chul Han8
Write, or create, or do whatever you do, but do it for yourself, not for the feed. Check out this video on mini essays if you're intrigued by this concept.
The world is at a crossroads, technologically, politically, culturally, structurally. We need people thinking independently, relying on themselves, and bringing fresh ideas to the table. It is no doubt easier to go with the grain, but when you are so afraid of disagreement, you run the risk of turning into (albeit a less extreme version of) Adolf Eichmann, contributing to the banality of evil.
Sources + Further Learning
Guillermo Del Toro interview with the Directors Guild of America
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Brazil (1985) dir. Terry Gilliam
Adolf Eichman In Jeruselum: a Study in the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt
Philosophize This! #181 - Are we heading for a digital prison?
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han
Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
Pan's Labyrinth (2006) dir. Guillermo Del Toro
I love this! 🙌🫶💛