Conformity Psychology Quotes

The Element is about discovering your self, and you can't do this if you're trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can't be yourself in a swarm.

The achievement of psychological maturity is an individual task-and so is increasingly difficult today when man's individuality is threatened by widespread conformity.

Introverts living under the Extroversion Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform

To be a hero you have to learn to be a deviant — because you're always going against the conformity of the group.

What counts in any man is the consistency and integrity of his behavior, and his courage in taking a stand, not his conformity to official dogma.

If you give people what they want, they like you, adore you, even. All you have to do is conform to standards while slightly rising above normal, and repress your true nature.

Men do oppress women. People are hurt by rigid sexist role patterns. These two realities coexist. Male oppression of women cannot be excused by the recognition that there are ways men are hurt by rigid sexist roles. Feminist activists should acknowledge that hurt, and work to change it—it exists. It does not erase or lessen male responsibility for supporting and perpetuating their power under patriarchy to exploit and oppress women in a manner far more grievous than the serious psychological stress and emotional pain caused by male conformity to rigid sexist role patterns.

It depends what you want your life to be like... if you're thirsty for water, then don't settle with the finest wine.

Emotional competence requires the capacity to feel our emotions, so that we are aware when we are experiencing stress; the ability to express our emotions effectively and thereby to assert our needs and to maintain the integrity of our emotional boundaries; the facility to distinguish between psychological reactions that are pertinent to the present situation and those that represent residue from the past. What we want and demand from the world needs to conform to our present needs, not to unconscious, unsatisfied needs from childhood. If distinctions between past and present blur, we will perceive loss or the threat of loss where none exists; and the awareness of those genuine needs that do require satisfaction, rather than their repression for the sake of gaining the acceptance or approval of others. Stress occurs in the absence of these criteria, and it leads to the disruption of homeostasis. Chronic disruption results in ill health. In each of the individual histories of illness in this book, one or more aspect of emotional competence was significantly compromised, usually in ways entirely unknown to the person involved. Emotional competence is what we need to develop if we are to protect ourselves from the hidden stresses that create a risk to health, and it is what we need to regain if we are to heal. We need to foster emotional competence in our children, as the best preventive medicine.

Your behavior isn't conforming to your known psychological profile.

Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women. According to Appel, cult members develop..."an attitude of moral superiority, a contempt for secular laws, rigidity of thought, and the diminution of regard for the individual." A premium is placed on conformity to the cult group; deviation is penalized. "Beauty" is derivative; conforming to the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for failure to achieve and conform to it] is "beautiful." The aim of beauty thinking, about weight or age, is rigid female thought. Cult members are urged to sever all ties with the past: "I destroyed all my fat photographs!"; "It's a new me!

Emotional competence requires • the capacity to feel our emotions, so that we are aware when we are experiencing stress; • the ability to express our emotions effectively and thereby to assert our needs and to maintain the integrity of our emotional boundaries; • the facility to distinguish between psychological reactions that are pertinent to the present situation and those that represent residue from the past. What we want and demand from the world needs to conform to our present needs, not to unconscious, unsatisfied needs from childhood. If distinctions between past and present blur, we will perceive loss or the threat of loss where none exists; and • the awareness of those genuine needs that do require satisfaction, rather than their repression for the sake of gaining the acceptance or approval of others. Stress occurs in the absence of these criteria, and it leads to the disruption of homeostasis. Chronic disruption results in ill health.

It is often disturbing to see how even intelligent people do not have straight thinking minds of their own. The pattern of the mind, whether toward conformity and compliance or otherwise, is conditioned rather early in life.

Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like'. Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality. It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick. Until we see how unbalanced our culture has become at this point, we will not be able to deal with the mammon spirit within ourselves nor will we desire Christian simplicity.

While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths (and will explore several such myths later in this book), the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the species by its encouragement and seeming validation of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth.

In any culture, subculture, or family in which belief is valued above thought, and self-surrender is valued above self-expression, and conformity is valued above integrity, those who preserve their self-esteem are likely to be heroic exceptions.

Happiness, after all, is generally measured as reported satisfaction with one's life - a state of mind perhaps more accessible to those who are affluent, who conform to social norms, who suppress judgment in the service of faith, and who are not overly bothered by societal injustice...The real conservatism of positive psychology lies in its attachment to the status quo, with all its inequalities and abuses of power. Positive psychologists' tests of happiness and well-being, for example, rest heavily on measures of personal contentment with things as they are.

...people who struggle against tyranny are more psychologically healthy than those who are docile and simply conform to current ways of thinking...there is much evidence that some of the most creative people in history were driven individuals who were terribly unhappy and out of sync with their social context. Creativity itself is a form of deviant behavior that requires individuals to break from usual assumptions and understandings in developing entirely new perspectives and approaches.

Scientists are dedicated to asking questions in the search for truth. But they too are human, and like all humans, they would like their answers to be clean and clear and easy. In their desire for simple solutions, scientists are prone to fall into two traps as they question the reality of God. The first is to throw the baby out with the bath water. And the second is tunnel vision. There is clearly a lot of dirty bath water surrounding the reality of God. Holy wars. Inquisitions. Animal sacrifice. Human sacrifice. Superstition. Stultification. Dogmatism. Ignorance. Hypocrisy. Self-righteousness. Rigidity. Cruelty. Book-burning. Witch-burning. Inhibition. Fear. Conformity. Morbid guilt. Insanity. The list is almost endless. But is all this what God has done to humans or what humans have done to God? It is abundantly evident that belief in God is often destructively dogmatic. Is the problem, then, that humans tend to believe in God, or is the problem that humans tend to be dogmatic?

The oversocialized person cannot even experience, without guilt, thoughts or feelings that are contrary to the accepted morality; he cannot think "unclean" thoughts. And socialization is not just a matter of morality; we are socialized to conform to many norms of behavior that do not fall under the heading of morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on a psychological leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down for him. In many oversocialized people this results in a sense of constraint and powerlessness that can be a severe hardship. We suggest that oversocialization is among the more serious cruelties that human beings inflict on one another.

Standing alone today demands even more courage and strength than it did in former cultures. From infancy, children have been programmed to perform. Rather than living from their own needs and feelings, they learn to assess situations in order to please others. Without an inner core of certainty grounded in their own musculature, they lack the inner resources to stand alone. Pummelled by mass media and peer group pressures, their identity may be utterly absorbed by collective stereotypes. In the absence of adequate rites of passage, ad-men become the high priests of an initiation into the addictions of consumerism.

Psychologically, there are two major reasons why people conform—they want to be liked and they want to be right.

We live in a society in which unnecessary conformities are the very essence of necessity

To awake or not to awake - that is the question.

The world doesn't need our airbrushed stories or curated, scripted, boring, conforming selves. It needs our truths, messiness, weirdness, creative energy, and resistance.

Mind control is the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition and/or behavioral outcomes. It is neither magical nor mystical, but a process that involves a set of basic social psychological principles. Conformity, compliance, persuasion, dissonance, reactance, guilt and fear arousal, modeling and identification are some of the staple social influence ingredients well studied in psychological experiments and field studies. In some combinations, they create a powerful crucible of extreme mental and behavioral manipulation when synthesized with several other real-world factors, such as charismatic, authoritarian leaders, dominant ideologies, social isolation, physical debilitation, induced phobias, and extreme threats or promised rewards that are typically deceptively orchestrated, over an extended time period in settings where they are applied intensively.

What happens when one has striven long and hard to develop a working view of the world, a seemingly useful, workable map, and then is confronted with new information suggesting that the view is wrong and the map needs to be largely redrawn? The painful effort required seems frightening, almost overwhelming. What we do more often than not, and usually unconsciously, is to ignore the new information. Often this act of ignoring is much more than passive. We may denounce the new information as false, dangerous, heretical, the work of the devil. We may actually crusade against it, and even attempt to manipulate the world so as to make it conform to our view of reality. Rather than try to change the map, an individual may try to destroy the new reality.

I was responding to earlier loving messages from my parents, hundreds of them, which said, “You are a beautiful and beloved individual. It is good to be you. We will love you no matter what you do, as long as you are you.” Without that security of my parents’ love reflected in my own self-love, I would have chosen the known instead of the unknown and continued to follow my parents’ preferred pattern at the extreme cost of my self’s basic uniqueness. Finally, it is only when one has taken the leap into the unknown of total selfhood, psychological independence and unique individuality that one is free to proceed along still higher paths of spiritual growth and free to manifest love in its greatest dimensions. As long as one marries, enters a career or has children to satisfy one’s parents or the expectations of anyone else, including society as a whole, the commitment by its very nature will be a shallow one. As long as one loves one’s children primarily because one is expected to behave in a loving manner toward them, then the parent will be insensitive to the more subtle needs of the children and unable to express love in the more subtle, yet often most important ways. The highest forms of love are inevitably totally free choices and not acts of conformity.

Extremism stifles true progression in all fields of human advancement; it is a detriment to everything but war, tribalism and the personal power of Nietzschean entities, striving only for the narcissistic vindication of their ego and will. The enlightened mind knows that all is challengeable, ergo questions all and thus, learns and grows; progression. The weak and narrow mind makes its beliefs sacrosanct; fearful of challenge, their creed becomes unalterable, defended with violence. Political extremists, much like religious zealots, are the latter. They destroy what they cannot convert. They annihilate those they cannot control, or force to conform. They have found no peace in life, no love, and so promote war and division, as emotional cripples – inflicting their own pain and misery and malignant stupidity on the world. Their language binds people together, but only by stirring the darkest excesses of the soul; language of hate, and intolerance, fear and conspiracy, and the need for vengeance. In war-scarred Europe, these cripples direct mass-psychology, and would make the world in their own likeness; mutilated by violence and tribalism and hate.

What happens when one has striven long and hard to develop a working view of the world, a seemingly useful, workable map, and then is confronted with new information suggesting that that view is wrong and the map needs to be largely redrawn? The painful effort required seems frightening, almost overwhelming. What we do more often than not, and usually unconsciously, is to ignore the new information. Often this act of ignoring is much more than passive. We may denounce the new information as false, dangerous, heretical, the work of the devil. We may actually crusade against it, and even attempt to manipulate the world so as to make it conform to our view of reality. Rather than try to change the map, an individual may try to destroy the new reality.

This exile is a fascinating symbolic act from our modern psychoanalytic viewpoint, for we have held in earlier chapters that the greatest threat and greatest cause of anxiety for an American near the end of the twentieth century is not castration but ostracism, the terrible fate of being exiled by one’s group. Many a contemporary man castrates himself or permits himself to be castrated because of fear of being exiled if he doesn’t. He renounces his power and conforms under the great threat and peril of ostracism. — Rollo May, “The Tragedy of Truth About Oneself” (The Psycology of Existence: An Integrative, Clinical Perspective by Kirk Schneider and Rollo May), pp. 14-15

There is clearly a lot of dirty bath water surrounding the reality of God. Holy wars. Inquisitions. Animal sacrifice. Human sacrifice. Superstition. Stultification. Dogmatism. Ignorance. Hypocrisy. Self-righteousness. Rigidity. Cruelty. Book-burning. Witch-burning. Inhibition. Fear. Conformity. Morbid guilt. Insanity. The list is almost endless. But is all this what God has done to humans or what humans have done to God?

Abraham Maslow, on the other hand, identified a minority of self-actualized individuals who did not act simply out of conformity to society but chose their own path and lived to fulfill their potential. This type of person was as representative of human nature as any mindless conformist.

I conformed to the beliefs of my class, including liberal feminist ideas about porn, BDSM, hook-up culture, evolutionary psychology, and the sex trade, which will all be addressed in this book. I let go of these beliefs because of my own life experiences, including a period immediately after university spent working at a rape crisis centre.

In order to not feel alone, we conform our selves to masks and hide in social solitude. We ignore the inner geniuses and envy the others.

However, being moral can include not only acts of kindness but also deeds of conformity and violence.

In addition to the psychological costs, there is another reason to fear ostracism. Groups will use it without compunction to assert their will and achieve their ends.

Society must adapt to diamonds, diamonds don't adapt to society.

The most effective way to control the people is to make them reliant on you through consistent reward with the least effort on their part.

It is psychology's task to cast light on what we want to keep concealed.

Totalitaria is any country in which political ideas degenerate into senseless formulations made only for propaganda purposes. It is any country in which a single group—left or right—acquires absolute power and becomes omniscient and omnipotent, any country in which disagreement and differences of opinion are crimes, in which utter conformity is the price of life.

The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams. And besides, a fresh reality will perhaps make us forget, detest even, the desires on account of which we set out on our journey.

Do you know what time is? Not by a watch, not chronological time, buy psychological time? It is the interval between idea and action. An idea is for self protection obviously; it is the idea of being secure. Action is always immediate; it is not of the past or future; to act must always be in the present, but action is so dangerous, so uncertain, that we conform to and idea which we hope will give us certain safety.

Sensory deprivation has a devastating psychological impact and can lead to the complete dissolution of the personality accompanied by hallucinations, delusional thinking and general incoherence. It is presently acknowledged as a form of torture; in fact, it is one of a group of “enhanced techniques” that are entirely psychological in nature and unique in that they do not conform to the general public understanding of what torture is.

The data on organised abuse has been simplified or distorted in an attempt force it to conform to mechanical psychological models of dissociative obedience or else to the psychiatric framework of ‘paedophilia’. Psychopathology alone is an inadequate explanation for environments in which sexual abuse has a social and symbolic function for groups of adults. Abusive groups do not emerge in a vacuum but rather they are formed within pre-existing social arrangements such as families, churches and schools.

were exhibiting strong signs of a psychological phenomenon often associated with man-made disasters, known as groupthink. Described as ‘the desire for harmony or conformity in the group [which] results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome,

theory of conformism, which states that when a person has neither the ability nor expertise to make a decision, he will look to the group to decide how to behave. Conformity can limit and distort an individual’s response to a situation, and seems to result in a diffusion of responsibility

In the domain of primitive spirituality, that is, supernatural spirituality, the mind loses all its sanity in the name of non-conformity and takes nonsense to be a form of higher sense and supernatural insanity and fallacy to be spiritual sanity and truth. In an attempt to break free from the chains of religious orthodoxy as well as radical rationalism, these mysticism-obsessed beings, who pompously prefer to call themselves "lightworkers", "yogis", “mystics” and so on, end up bound in yet another form of orthodoxy or extremism, replete with the primal psychological germs of supernaturalism.

The mentality of today seeks in fact to reduce everything to temporal categories: a work of art, a thought, a truth have no value in themselves and independently of any historical classification, but only as a result of the time in which they are rightly or wrongly placed; everything is considered the expression of a “period”, not of a timeless and intrinsic value, and this is entirely in conformity with modern relativism and with a psychologism or biologism that destroys essential values . This philosophy derives a maximum of originality from what in effect is nothing but a hatred of God; but since it is impossible to abuse directly a God in whom one does not believe, one abuses Him indirectly through the laws of nature , and one goes so far as to disparage the very form of man and his intelligence, the intelligence with which one thinks and abuses. But there is no escaping immanent Truth: “The more he blasphemes,” says Meister Eckhart, “the more he praises God.

A self-centered individual is usually not self-conscious, but instead evaluates every bit of information only in terms of how it relates to her desires. For such a person everything is valueless in itself. A flower is not worth a second look unless it can be used; a man or a woman who cannot advance one’s interests does not deserve further attention. Consciousness is structured entirely in terms of its own ends, and nothing is allowed to exist in it that does not conform to those ends. Although a self-conscious person is in many respects different from a self-centered one, neither is in enough control of psychic energy to enter easily into a flow experience

The analysis of the psychological motivations behind certain doctrines or ideas can never be a substitute for a rational judgment of the validity of the doctrine and of the values which it implies, although such analysis may lead to a better understanding of the real meaning of a doctrine and thereby influence one’s value judgment. What the psychological analysis of doctrines can show is the subjective motivations which make a person aware of certain problems and make him seek for answers in certain directions. Any kind of thought, true or false, if it is more than a superficial conformance with conventional ideas, is motivated by the subjective needs and interests of the person who is thinking. It happens that some interests are furthered by finding the truth, others by destroying it. But in both cases the psychological motivations are important incentives for arriving at certain conclusions. We can go even further and say that ideas which are not rooted in powerful needs of the personality will have little influence on the actions and on the whole life of the person concerned.

A less drastic obstacle to experiencing flow is excessive self-consciousness. A person who is constantly worried about how others will perceive her, who is afraid of creating the wrong impression, or of doing something inappropriate, is also condemned to permanent exclusion from enjoyment. So are people who are excessively self-centered. A self-centered individual is usually not self-conscious, but instead evaluates every bit of information only in terms of how it relates to her desires. For such a person everything is valueless in itself. A flower is not worth a second look unless it can be used; a man or a woman who cannot advance one’s interests does not deserve further attention. Consciousness is structured entirely in terms of its own ends, and nothing is allowed to exist in it that does not conform to those ends.

A self that is only differentiated—not integrated—may attain great individual accomplishments, but risks being mired in self-centered egotism. By the same token, a person whose self is based exclusively on integration will be connected and secure, but lack autonomous individuality. Only when a person invests equal amounts of psychic energy in these two processes and avoids both selfishness and conformity is the self likely to reflect complexity.

Ever more patients complain of a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness, which seems to derive from two facts. Unlike an animal, man is not told by instincts what he must do. And unlike man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions what he should do. Often he does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism), or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).

The vulgar Marxist concept of 'private enterprise' was totally misconstrued by man's irrationality; it was understood to mean that the liberal development of society precluded every private possession. Naturally, this was widely exploited by political reaction. Quite obviously, social development and individual freedom have nothing to do with the so-called abolishment of private property. Marx's concept of private property did not refer to man's shirts, pants, typewriters, toilet paper, books, beds, savings, houses, real estate, etc. This concept was used exclusively in reference to the private ownership of the social means of production, i.e., those means of production that determine the general course of society. In other words: railroads, waterworks, generating plants, coal mines, etc. The 'socialization of the means of production' became such a bugbear precisely because it was confounded to mean the 'private exploitation' of chickens, shirts, books, residences, etc., in conformity with the ideology of the expropriated.

Even so, the advance of the far right in Europe and the United States reveals the need to rethink memory work, to adapt it to new generations for whom the Second World War feels like a long-ago crisis. It's important to tell a story people can identify with, a story of ordinary people, the Mitlaufer, and not only of heroes, victims, or monsters. To raise awareness that, if history as such does not repeat itself, sociological and psychological mechanisms do, which push individuals and societies to make irrational choices by supporting regimes and leaders who are opposed to their interests, by becoming complicit in criminal ideas and actions. The most dangerous monster is not a megalomaniacal and violent leader, but us, the people who make him possible, who give him the power to lead. By our opportunism, by our conformity to all-powerful capitalism, which places money and consumption over education, intelligence, and culture, we are in danger of losing the democracy, peace, and freedom that so many of our predecessors have fought to preserve.

Some of the tensions of teenage life can be eased if the family provides a sense of acceptance, control, and self-confidence to the adolescent. A relationship that has these dimensions is one in which people trust one another, and feel totally accepted. One does not have to worry constantly about being liked, being popular, or living up to others’ expectations. As the popular sayings go, “Love means never having to say ‘I’m sorry,’” “Home is where you’re always welcome.” Being assured of one’s worth in the eyes of one’s kin gives a person the strength to take chances; excessive conformity is usually caused by fear of disapproval.

It would be a mistake to view human responsiveness to social norms as somehow separate from our evolved psychology. We are a rule-following species. A core part of our evolved psychology is to decipher social consensus, conform to group opinion, and adhere to social imperatives. Throughout human evolutionary history, people lived and died by their social reputations. Violating social rules, and especially sexual rules, brought shame to violators and sometimes reputational damage to their entire families. We care deeply about how we are perceived by others. As the evolutionary economist Robert Frank notes, “We come into this world with a nervous system that worries about rank.”15

There is a consensus among psychologists who study such subjects that people develop their concept of who they are, and of what they want to achieve in life, according to a sequence of steps. Each man or woman starts with a need to preserve the self, to keep the body and its basic goals from disintegrating. At this point the meaning of life is simple; it is tantamount to survival, comfort, and pleasure. When the safety of the physical self is no longer in doubt, the person may expand the horizon of his or her meaning system to embrace the values of a community—the family, the neighborhood, a religious or ethnic group. This step leads to a greater complexity of the self, even though it usually implies conformity to conventional norms and standards. The next step in development involves reflective individualism. The person again turns inward, finding new grounds for authority and value within the self. He or she is no longer blindly conforming, but develops an autonomous conscience. At this point the main goal in life becomes the desire for growth, improvement, the actualization of potential. The fourth step, which builds on all the previous ones, is a final turning away from the self, back toward an integration with other people and with universal values. In this final stage the extremely individualized person—like Siddhartha letting the river take control of his boat—willingly merges his interests with those of a larger whole. In

However, as we strive to become free, unique individuals, we still feel the need for unity with others, and in trying to balance these needs we may seek out the comfort of conforming to a group or an authority. This is a misguided approach, says Fromm; it is imperative to discover one’s own independent sense of self, and one’s own personal views and value systems, rather than adhering to conventional or authoritarian norms. If we try to hand responsibility for our choices to other people or institutions we become alienated from ourselves, when the very purpose of our lives is to define ourselves through embracing our personal uniqueness, discovering our own ideas and abilities, and embracing that which differentiates each of us from other people.

We must consider also whether soul is divisible or is without parts, and whether it is everywhere homogeneous or not; and if not homogeneous, whether its various forms are different specifically or generically; up to the present time those who have discussed and investigated soul seem to have confined themselves to the human soul. We must be careful not to ignore the question whether soul can be defined in a single account, as is the case with animal, or whether we must not give a separate account of each sort of it, as we do for horse, dog, man, god (in the latter case the universal, animal—and so too every other common predicate—is either nothing or posterior). Further, if what exists is not a plurality of souls, but a plurality of parts of one soul, which ought we to investigate first, the whole soul or its parts? It is also a difficult problem to decide which of these parts are in nature distinct from one another. Again, which ought we to investigate first, these parts or their functions, mind or thinking, the faculty or the act of sensation, and so on? If the investigation of the functions precedes that of the parts, the further question suggests itself: ought we not before either to consider the correlative objects, e.g. of sense or thought? It seems not only useful for the discovery of the causes of the incidental proprieties of substances to be acquainted with the essential nature of those substances (as in mathematics it is useful for the understanding of the property of the equality of the interior angles of a triangle to two right angles to know the essential nature of the straight and the curved or of the line and (the plane) but also conversely, for the knowledge of the essential nature of a substance is largely promoted by an acquaintance with its properties: for, when we are able to give an account conformable to experience of all or most of the properties of a substance, we shall be in the most favourable position to say something worth saying about the essential nature of that subject: in all demonstration a definition of the essence is required as a starting point, so that definitions which do not enable us to discover the incidental properties, or which fail to facilitate even a conjecture about them, must obviously, one and all, be dialectical and futile.

It is their usual reaction; they employ not words and reasoned conversation or discourse to resolve problems, but the truncheon, the jackbooted foot, or the gun. Sophistication requires more competence and skill than mere thuggery. It is a harder, loftier charge to be civilised than to let the beast in man devour man. The enlightened mind knows that all is challengeable, questions all, and thus, learns and grows. The weak, narrow mind makes its beliefs – whatever form they take – sacrosanct, defending them with violence if necessary. Political extremists, much like religious zealots, are the latter. They destroy what they cannot convert. They annihilate those they cannot control or make conform. They have found no peace in life, no love, and so promote war and division, as emotional cripples – inflicting their own pain and misery and malignant stupidity on the world. Their language binds people together, but only by stirring the darkest excesses of the soul; language of hate, and intolerance, fear and conspiracy, and the need for vengeance. In war-scarred Europe, these cripples direct mass-psychology, and would make the world in their own likeness; mutilated by violence and tribalism and hate. They use language in its most evil, twisted form. They appeal to the lowest form of understanding, on a level I hesitate to allow for the term ‘human intelligence’ to be associated. Children, fertile minds ripe for molestation. Now they will be taught what to think, not how to think. Language, that twisted poison. It scars purity.

The introverted attitude need not necessarily coincide with the figure of Prometheus, by which I mean that the traditional Prometheus can be interpreted quite differently. This other version is found, for instance, in Plato’s Protagoras, where the bestower of vital powers on the creatures the gods have created out of fire and water is not Prometheus but Epimetheus. Here, as in the myth, Prometheus (conforming to classical taste) is the crafty and inventive genius. There are two versions of Prometheus in Goethe’s works. In the “Prometheus Fragment” of 1773 Prometheus is the defiant, self-sufficient, godlike, god-disdaining creator and artist. His soul is Minerva, daughter of Zeus. The relation of Prometheus to Minerva is very like the relation of Spitteler’s Prometheus to his soul:

Identification with the one differentiated function means that one is in a collective state—not, of course, identical with the collective, as is the primitive, but collectively adapted so far as “the judgment of all minds is pronounced by our own” and our thought and speech exactly conform to the general expectations of those whose thinking is differentiated and adapted to the same degree. Furthermore, “the choice of all hearts is represented by our deed” so far as we think and do as all desire it to be thought and done. And in fact everyone thinks and believes that it is the best and most desirable thing when there is the maximum of identity with the one differentiated function, for that brings the most obvious social advantages, but at the same time the greatest disadvantages to those lesser developed sides of our human nature, which sometimes constitute a large part of our individuality.

The argument is not simply that some women are not beautiful, therefore it is not fair to judge women on the basis of physical beauty; or that men are not judged on that basis, therefore women also should not be judged on that basis; or that men should look for character in women; or that our standards of beauty are too parochial in and of themselves; or even that judging women according to their conformity to a standard of beauty serves to make them into products, chattels, differing from the farmer’s favorite cow only in terms of literal form. The issue at stake is different, and crucial. Standards of beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body. They prescribe her mobility, spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to which she can put her body. They define precisely the dimensions of her physical freedom. And, of course, the relationship between physical freedom and psychological development, intellectual possibility, and creative potential is an umbilical one.

In the pages that follow, I want to invite readers who don’t regard themselves as social conservatives to reexamine the traditionalist roots of attitudes about children they may have come to accept. And I want to invite all readers, regardless of their political and cultural views, to take a fresh look at common assumptions about kids and parenting. We’ve been encouraged to worry: Are we being firm enough with our children? Are we too involved in their lives? Do kids today feel too good about themselves? Those questions, I’ll argue, are largely misconceived. They distract us from—or even make us suspicious about—the shifts that we ought to be considering. The sensible alternative to overparenting is not less parenting but better parenting. The alternative to permissiveness is not to be more controlling but more responsive. And the alternative to narcissism is not conformity but reflective rebelliousness. In short, if we want to raise psychologically healthy and spirited children, we’ll need to start by questioning the media-stoked fears of spoiling them.

For millennia, the major theories of human nature have come from religion.1 The Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, offers explanations for much of the subject matter now studied by biology and psychology. Humans are made in the image of God and are unrelated to animals.2 Women are derivative of men and destined to be ruled by them.3 The mind is an immaterial substance: it has powers possessed by no purely physical structure, and can continue to exist when the body dies.4 The mind is made up of several components, including a moral sense, an ability to love, a capacity for reason that recognizes whether an act conforms to ideals of goodness, and a decision faculty that chooses how to behave. Although the decision faculty is not bound by the laws of cause and effect, it has an innate tendency to choose sin. Our cognitive and perceptual faculties work accurately because God implanted ideals in them that correspond to reality and because he coordinates their functioning with the outside world. Mental health comes from recognizing God’s purpose, choosing good and repenting sin, and loving God and one’s fellow humans for God’s sake. The

In view of this magical, absolute significance of words, which presupposes that words also imply the objective behaviour of things, the Sophist critique was very much in place. It offered a striking proof of the impotence of language. In so far as ideas are merely names—a supposition that remains to be proved—the attack upon Plato was justified. But generic concepts cease to be mere names when they designate the similarities or conformities of things. The question then arises whether these conformities are objective realities or not. These conformities actually exist, hence the generic concept also corresponds with some kind of reality. It contains as much reality as does the exact description of a thing. The generic concept differs from the description only in that it describes or designates the conformities of things. The weakness, therefore, lies neither in the generic concept nor in the Platonic idea, but in its verbal expression, which obviously under no circumstances adequately reproduces either the thing or the conformity. The nominalist attack on the doctrine of ideas was thus in principle an unwarrantable encroachment, and Plato’s exasperated counterstroke was fully justified.

I encounter forms of this attitude every day. The producers who work at the Ostankino channels might all be liberals in their private lives, holiday in Tuscany, and be completely European in their tastes. When I ask how they marry their professional and personal lives, they look at me as if I were a fool and answer: “Over the last twenty years we’ve lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are illusions, that everything is PR.” “Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as “human rights” and “freedom” as a blunder. “Can’t you see your own governments are just as bad as ours?” they ask me. I try to protest—but they just smile and pity me. To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated. Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colors to hide from predators. The butterfly’s predators had long died off, but still it changed its colors from the sheer pleasure of transformation. Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: during the Soviet period they learned to dissimulate in order to survive; now there is no need to constantly change their colors, but they continue to do so out of a sort of dark joy, conformism raised to the level of aesthetic act. Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching “modernization” to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: “managed democracy,” “conservative modernization.” Then he steps back, smiling, and says: “We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself.” And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle.

Heterosexual people, conforming to conventional dictate, are pillars of the society with which they are identified. Bisexuals and homosexuals, on the other hand, make valiant efforts to free themselves from the fetters of its conditioning power, and therefore come nearer to authentic behaviour. By reason of their rebellion, they are inclined to reject secondhand living as laid down by social conventions. It is not surprising that one finds many of them in the forefront of the fight for a new society, a society when authenticity is the guiding principle. But others are so much caught up in defensive behaviour that they neglect the pursuit of individual freedom in preference for a collective regimentation, which ensures a more successful battle against the cruel and subtle persecution by ‘normal people’. Nevertheless, they are, by virtue of their still precarious position, well endowed to realize that the assignment of roles which rules every aspect of behaviour, permeates society like an infectious disease, that there is a social sickness about which leads via hypocrisy and falsity to alienation. Their own fringe position makes them particularly sensitive to the schizoid shortcomings of our society where nobody knows what the other thinks, or feels, and where relationships lose their essential qualities—solidarity and trust.

Cummins marshals several forms of evidence to support the dominance theory. The first pertains to the early emergence in a child’s life of reasoning about rights and obligations, called deontic reasoning. Deontic reasoning is reasoning about what a person is permitted, obligated, or forbidden to do (e.g., Am I old enough to be allowed to drink alcoholic beverages?). This form of reasoning contrasts with indicative reasoning, which is reasoning about what is true or false (e.g., Is there really a tiger hiding behind that tree?). A number of studies find that when humans reason about deontic rules, they spontaneously adopt a strategy of seeking rule violators. For example, when evaluating the deontic rule “all those who drink alcohol must be twenty-one years old or older,” people spontaneously look for others with alcoholic drinks in their hands who might be underage. In marked contrast, when people evaluate indicative rules, they spontaneously look for confirming instances of the rule. For example, when evaluating the indicative rule “all polar bears have white fur,” people spontaneously look for instances of white-furred polar bears rather than instances of bears that might not have white fur. In short, people adopt two different reasoning strategies, depending on whether they are evaluating a deontic or an indicative rule. For deontic rules, people seek out rule violations; for indicative rules, people seek out instances that conform to the rule. These distinct forms of reasoning have been documented in children as young as 3, suggesting that reasoning emerges reliably early in life (Cummins, 1998). Perhaps not coincidentally, at age 3, children organize themselves into transitive dominance hierarchies. Moreover, young children also can reason about transitive dominance hierarchies earlier in life than they can reason transitively about other stimuli (Cummins, 1998).

As Jung notes: Individuation cuts one off from personal conformity and hence from collectivity. That is the guilt which the individual leaves behind him for the world, that is the guilt he must endeavor to redeem. He must offer a ransom in place of himself that is, he must bring forth values which are an equivalent substitute for his absence in the collective personal sphere.6 In calling individuation a myth, we mean that such an image, charged with affect, rich with possibility, and related to transcendent purpose, is a psychologically grounding force field for the conduct of a conscious life. Most culturally charged alternatives of our time have noticeably failed because in the end they are not effective, do not satisfy the soul; only the myth of individuation deepens and ennobles our journey. Rather than ask, what does my tribe demand of me, what will win me collective approval, what will please my parents, we ask, what do the gods intend through me? It is a quite different question, and the answers will vary with the stage of life, and from one person to another. The necessary choices will never prove easy, but asking this question, and suffering it honestly, leads through the vicissitudes of life to larger places of meaning and purpose. One finds so much richness of experience, so much growth of consciousness, so much enlargement of one’s vision that the work proves well worth it. The false gods of our culture, power, materialism, hedonism, and narcissism, those upon which we have projected our longing for transcendence, only narrow and diminish. Of each critical juncture of choice, one may usefully ask: “Does this path enlarge or diminish me?” Usually, we know the answer to that question. We know it intuitively, instinctively, in the gut. Choosing the path that enlarges is always going to mean choosing the path of individuation. The gods want us to grow up, to step up to that high calling that each soul carries as its destiny. Choosing the path that enlarges rather than diminishes will serve us well in navigating through our idol-ridden, clamorous, but sterile time and move us further toward meeting the person we are meant to be.

The preconventional level of moral reasoning, which develops during our first nine years of life, considers rules as fixed and absolute. In the first of its two stages (the stage of obedience and punishment), we determine whether actions are right or wrong by whether or not they lead to a punishment. In the second stage (the stage of individualism and exchange), right and wrong are determined by what brings rewards. The desires and needs of others are important, but only in a reciprocal sense—“You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” Morality at this level is governed by consequence.   The second level of moral reasoning starts in adolescence, and continues into early adulthood. It sees us starting to consider the intention behind behavior, rather than just the consequences. Its first stage, often called the “good boy—nice girl” stage, is when we begin classifying moral behavior as to whether it will help or please. Being seen as good becomes the goal. In the second stage (the law and order stage), we start to equate “being good” with respecting authority and obeying the law, believing that this protects and sustains society.   The third level of moral development is when we move beyond simple conformity, but Kohlberg suggested that only around 10–15 percent of us ever reach this level. In its first stage (the social contract and individual rights stage), we still respect authority, but there is a growing recognition that individual rights can supersede laws that are destructive or restrictive. We come to realize that human life is more sacred than just following rules. The sixth and final stage (the stage of universal ethical principles) is when our own conscience becomes the ultimate judge, and we commit ourselves to equal rights and respect for all. We may even resort to civil disobedience in the name of universal principles, such as justice.   Kohlberg’s six-stage theory was considered radical, because it stated that morality is not imposed on children (as psychoanalysts said), nor is it about avoiding bad feelings (as the behaviorists had thought). Kohlberg believed children developed a moral code and awareness of respect, empathy, and love through interaction with others.

As the Princess performs the impossible balancing act which her life requires, she drifts inexorably into obsession, continually discussing her problems. Her friend Carolyn Bartholomew argues it is difficult not to be self-absorbed when the world watches everything she does. “How can you not be self-obsessed when half the world is watching everything you do; the high-pitched laugh when someone is talking to somebody famous must make you very very cynical.” She endlessly debates the problems she faces in dealing with her husband, the royal family, and their system. They remain tantalizingly unresolved, the gulf between thought and action achingly great. Whether she stays or goes, the example of the Duchess of York is a potent source of instability. James Gilbey sums up Diana’s dilemma: “She can never be happy unless she breaks away but she won’t break away unless Prince Charles does it. He won’t do it because of his mother so they are never going to be happy. They will continue under the farcical umbrella of the royal family yet they will both lead completely separate lives.” Her friend Carolyn Bartholomew, a sensible sounding-board throughout Diana’s adult life, sees how that fundamental issue has clouded her character. “She is kind, generous, sad and in some ways rather desperate. Yet she has maintained her self-deprecating sense of humour. A very shrewd but immensely sorrowful lady.” Her royal future is by no means well-defined. If she could write her own script the Princess would like to see her husband go off with his Highgrove friends and attempt to discover the happiness he has not found with her, leaving Diana free to groom Prince William for his eventual destiny as the Sovereign. It is an idle pipe-dream as impossible as Prince Charles’s wish to relinquish his regal position and run a farm in Italy. She has other more modest ambitions; to spend a weekend in Paris, take a course in psychology, learn the piano to concert grade and to start painting again. The current pace of her life makes even these hopes seem grandiose, never mind her oft-repeated vision of the future where she see herself one day settling abroad, probably in Italy or France. A more likely avenue is the unfolding vista of charity, community and social work which has given her a sense of self-worth and fulfillment. As her brother says: “She has got a strong character. She does know what she wants and I think that after ten years she has got to a plateau now which she will continue to occupy for many years.” As a child she sensed her special destiny, as an adult she has remained true to her instincts. Diana has continued to carry the burden of public expectations while enduring considerable personal problems. Her achievement has been to find her true self in the face of overwhelming odds. She will continue to tread a different path from her husband, the royal family and their system and yet still conform to their traditions. As she says: “When I go home and turn my light off at night, I know I did my best.

To be an original human, you must die to all labels. This death brings the real vitality in life. Now one may ask, how can one achieve it? And there is the problem of the so-called modern humans. They all want somebody to tell them, how to achieve something. Here is a fact, calculus can be taught, quantum physics can be taught, molecular biology can be taught, but not freedom of mind. And why do you need a path in the first place? If there is a bottle labeled poison, on the shelf, you don't just bring it down and drink the poison to know whether it will kill you. Likewise, once you really see the poisonous implications of the socio-culturally passed on labels, you simply tear them apart - throw them away as far as possible. Does one need to deceive oneself, to understand self-deception! If not, then why do you deceive yourself, by conforming to the social labels, be it a religious label, a non-religious label, a nationalist label, an intellectual label, or a gender label. You are a human - that's it.

Science Fiction is a group of symptoms and not a disease,” so a medical student (failed) told me once. “It's like the old disease hydropsy that doctors treated for so long before discovering that it was only a collection of symptoms, sometimes for a heart disease, sometimes for a liver or kidney disease, or sometimes even for a septic throat.” Well, the symptoms for Science Fiction are a prowling avidity to search out and read certain occult texts; an uneasiness or excitement that permates the whole routine of life; it's the ‘itchy ears’, as mentioned in Scripture, seeking for ‘new things’. The symptoms are usually a falcon-like hunting or questing; a series of sudden tuneful encounters; a group of euphorias and buoyancies that cry in opposite directions to be hoarded like misers' treasures and simultaneously to be shared with fellow sufferers of the symptoms; feeling that the ‘World We Live In’ is somehow masked and needs to be unmasked. These and other symptoms indicate either a strange disease or diseases, or they indicate a perpetually new kind of health. Tracing the symptoms back to the ‘disease’ does indicate that the disease is multiple, that it has such names as Hard Science Fiction, Soft Science Fiction, High Fantasy, Low Fantasy, Non-Conforming Adventure Fiction. And sometimes it bears such non-consensus names as Biological Fiction, Ontological Fiction, Eschatological Fiction (did Teilhard, for instance, know that he was writing Eschatological Fiction?), Theological Fiction, or Psychological or Philosophical or Technological or Geological or Historical Fiction. These things and many others share the same complex of symptoms.

As a child, I truly believed that there was some blue alien-like god named vishnu looking after humanity, and when the time comes, another angry god, named shiva, would destroy everything, and then the god of creation with four heads, named brahma would create the world all over again. That’s what my environment conditioned me to believe. It wanted me to conform to its delusional thoughts and beliefs. But as I grew up, I discovered something rather remarkable. It was that, all those stories were mere means for an uncivilized and ignorant people to be content with their lack of real understanding of the world.

Their highest ambition, it seemed, was to rehabilitate fallen individuals to better conform to social expectations.

Emotional competence requires • the capacity to feel our emotions, so that we are aware when we are experiencing stress; • the ability to express our emotions effectively and thereby to assert our needs and to maintain the integrity of our emotional boundaries; • the facility to distinguish between psychological reactions that are pertinent to the present situation and those that represent residue from the past. What we want and demand from the world needs to conform to our present needs, not to unconscious, unsatisfied needs from childhood. If distinctions between past and present blur, we will perceive loss or the threat of loss where none exists; and • the awareness of those genuine needs that do require satisfaction, rather than their repression for the sake of gaining the acceptance or approval of others.

Shame is pain one feels for knowingly doing something wrong. Sex with a willing partner is not wrong, and therefore, no shame can be attached to it. Nudity is our natural state and is not shameful. Shame is not tangible. It cannot be purchased at the market, and it does not exist in your body as bone and blood do. It is entirely a psychological state of mind inculcated into us from our earliest years to force us to conform to societal norms that follow primitive religious doctrine. I had to ask what inculcated meant—Eve said it was, in simple terms, brainwashing. The rest of Klara’s point was now clear in the context of what I was about to do, and all at once I understood why Eve had given her diary, with all its sexual honesty, to a fifteen-year-old girl.

Whatever may be the opinion of utilitarian moralists as to the original conditions by which virtue is made virtue; however they may believe (as they do) that actions and dispositions are only virtuous because they promote another end than virtue; yet this being granted, and it having been decided, from considerations of this description, what is virtuous, they not only place virtue at the very head of the things which are good as means to the ultimate end, but they also recognise as a psychological fact the possibility of its being, to the individual, a good in itself, without looking to any end beyond it; and hold that the mind is not in a right state, not in a state conformable to Utility, not in the state most conducive to the general happiness, unless it does love virtue in this manner—as a thing desirable in itself, even although, in the individual instance, it should not produce those other desirable consequences which it tends to produce, and on account of which it is held to be virtue. This opinion is not, in the smallest degree, a departure from the Happiness principle. The ingredients of happiness are very various, and each of them is desirable in itself, and not merely when considered as swelling an aggregate. The principle of utility does not mean that any given pleasure, as music, for instance, or any given exemption from pain, as for example health, is to be looked upon as means to a collective something termed happiness, and to be desired on that account. They are desired and desirable in and for themselves; besides being means, they are a part of the end. Virtue, according to the utilitarian doctrine, is not naturally and originally part of the end, but it is capable of becoming so; and in those who love it disinterestedly it has become so, and is desired and cherished, not as a means to happiness, but as a part of their happiness.

the adult world values individuality more than conformity: it’s the mavericks and the ones willing to break the mold who come up with new solutions and are the most successful in life. An even bigger reason to be yourself is the psychological freedom you will gain. With no more worries over how others will perceive you, you will relieve yourself of a source of stress and anxiety, and the freedom to do the wild and weird things that make YOU happy will bring you untold joy.

Greece said, “Be wise, know yourself.” Rome said, “Be strong, discipline yourself.” Religion says, “Be good, conform yourself.” Epicureanism says, “Be sensuous, satisfy yourself.” Education says, “Be resourceful, expand yourself.” Psychology says, “Be confident, assert yourself.” Materialism says, “Be possessive, please yourself.” Ascetism say, “Be lowly, suppress yourself.” Humanism says, “Be capable, believe in yourself.” Pride says, “Be superior, promote yourself.” Christ says, “Be unselfish, humble yourself.

To reach the head of the class, students needed to conform to the school system and work equally hard at all subjects.

Often religious education teaches us to conform and creates a psychological prison which is difficult to escape.

Imaginemos la reacción de un joven entusiasta de los coches al que acaban de prestarle uno por primera vez en su vida. Al principio experimentará alegría, incluso euforia. Luego, conforme transcurre el tiempo, aunque sigue contento, la excitación de sentirse motorizado se va atenuando poco a poco. Y si pasado un mes disfrutando del auto a sus anchas, ya no puede continuar disponiendo de él y tiene que devolverlo, de entrada no recuperará su estado original: sentirá añoranza de cuando lo tenía. Lógicamente, con el paso del tiempo también esta morriña se irá desvaneciendo progresivamente, hasta volver al estado emocional de partida.

Dehypnotize the world, my friend, and you shall witness the dawn of real religion – the religion, not of books, but of people.

Had Jung been a Nazi sympathizer, would this provide grounds for rejecting analytical psychology in toto? Some insist that it would, apparently in the belief that a man's views should conform to contemporary notions of political correctness before serious attention can be granted to his work. Their contention could be justified were it proved that analytical psychology, so closely derived from the psychology of its founder, is imbued with a Fascist spirit. Fortunately, its emphasis on the primary importance of the individual psyche and the personal quest for wholeness, combined with its resistance to dogmatism, collectivism, and social conformity, places analytical psychology in an intellectual position as far removed from Fascism as it is possible to be.

It is. It’s a psychological phenomenon common in governments, business organizations, and political parties; a culture of conformity that discourages independent thinking and disagreement. Anyone who challenges the consensus of the greater body, regardless of how valid that challenge might be, is considered disloyal. This produces deviant outcomes. People thinking they are always right, everyone else is wrong, and their logic is unassailable, no matter how divorced from reality it might be.

Nobody can seriously doubt that environmental factors modify the expression of sex differences. The problem with socialization theories is that they ask the environment to do all of the work. They fail to recognize that the environment is acting on an evolved organ—the mind. Of course, forces such as reinforcement, imitation, cognitive schema, and conformity all modulate our actions. The pleasure of social approval, the ability to learn through observation, our internal representations, and the desire to be like others—these are part of human psychology everywhere. The question is whether these processes alone can explain the origins of the cross-cultural differences between male and female. Altering reinforcement contingencies for sex-typical behavior can temporarily change it: boys and girls will show cross-sex play where the environment is manipulated to encourage it and social approval is contingent on it. But when that intervention is removed, children revert to the same-sex preference that characterizes children everywhere.

Since every member of the family has to conform to the illusions of parental or family love, this process also demands that the child distort his or her sense of reality and of the self.

If gender differences are arbitrary, it is a curious coincidence that they follow such a similar pattern around the world. Even if sex differences were driven by differential parental treatment, we would still want to ask why a trait is considered more desirable for one sex than another. If they were driven by selective imitation, we would still want to ask why children might show a preferential and untutored interest in the behavior of their own sex. If driven by gender schema, we would need to ask why sex-specific conformity is so attractive to children. If driven by the division of labor, we still need to explain the preference of men and women for different social and occupational roles. Social constructionist and environmental theories explain the transmission of gendered status quo - but without asking where it came from.

Political rituals — the daily flag salute by schoolchildren, singing the national anthem — use public conformity to build a private belief in patriotism.

Post-hoc rationalization The action-reflex obtained by propaganda is only a beginning, a point of departure; it will develop harmoniously only if there is an organization in which (and thanks to which) the proselyte becomes militant. Without organization, psychological incitement leads to excesses and deviation of action in the very course of its development. Through organization, the proselyte receives an overwhelming impulse that makes him act with the whole of his being. He is actually transformed into a religious man in the psycho-sociological sense of the term; justice enters into the action he performs because of the organization of which he is a part. Thus his action is integrated into a group of conforming actions. Not only does such integration seem to be the principal aim of all propaganda today; it Is also what makes the effect of propaganda endure. For action makes propaganda's effect irreversible. He who acts in obedience to propaganda can never go back. He is now obliged to believe in that propaganda because of his past action. He is obliged to receive from it his justification and authority, without which his action will seem to him absurd or unjust, which would be intolerable. He is obliged to continue to advance in the direction indicated by propaganda, for action demands more action. He is what one calls "committed" — which is certainly what the Communist party anticipates, for example, and what the Nazis accomplished. The man who has acted in accordance with the existing propaganda has taken his place in society. From then on he has enemies. Often he has broken with his milieu or his family; he may be compromised. He is forced to accept the new milieu and the new friends that propaganda makes for him. Often he has committed an act reprehensible by traditional moral standards and has disturbed a certain urder. He needs a justification for this — and he gets more deeply involved by repeating the act in order to prove that it was just.

It’s a psychological phenomenon common in governments, business organizations, and political parties; a culture of conformity that discourages independent thinking and disagreement. Anyone who challenges the consensus of the greater body, regardless of how valid that challenge might be, is considered disloyal. This produces deviant outcomes. People thinking they are always right, everyone else is wrong, and their logic is unassailable,

In any event, if upon recounting your eerie encounter you get caught up in the spirit of the story and say you saw an ethereal being, then you may convince not just your audience, but yourself. One notable finding of modern psychology is how systematically misleading memory is. People often remember events wrongly from the get-go, and even when they don’t, their memory can later be steered toward falsehood. In particular, the act of reporting false details can cement them firmly in mind. You don’t just recount what you remember; you remember what you recount. (Football star O. J. Simpson’s former agent was sure Simpson had killed his ex-wife and also sure that Simpson believed he didn’t.) This built-in fallibility makes sense from a Darwinian standpoint, allowing people to bend the truth self-servingly with an air of great and growing conviction. And, clearly, bent truths of a religious sort could be self-serving. If you were a close friend or relative of the deceased, then the idea that his powerful spirit is afoot may incline people to treat you nicely, lest they invite his wrath. Another gem from social psychology: publicly espousing something not only helps convince you of its truth; it shapes your future perception, inclining you to see evidence supporting it but not evidence against it. So if you speculate that the strange, shadowy creature was the disgruntled spirit of the deceased, you’ll likely find corroboration. You may notice that one of his enemies fell ill only a week after your sighting, while forgetting that one of his friends fell ill a few days earlier. If you’re a person of high status, all of this will carry particular weight, as such people are accorded unusual (and often undue) credibility. If, in a hunter-gatherer band of thirty people, someone widely esteemed claims to have seen something strange—and has a theory about what it was—twenty people may be convinced right off the bat. Then the aforementioned tendency of people to conform to peer opinion could quickly yield unanimity.

Youths sharing antisocial tendencies and lacking close family bonds and expectations of academic success may find social identity in a gang. As group identity develops, conformity pressures and deindividuation increase (Staub, 1996). Self-identity diminishes as members give themselves over to the group, often feeling a satisfying oneness with the others. The frequent result is social contagion—group-fed arousal, disinhibition, and polarization. As gang expert Arnold Goldstein (1994) observed, until gang members marry out, age out, get a job, go to prison, or die, they hang out.

generations: Rituals offer a way for human beings to deal with a dangerous and unpredictable world. They generate community, conformity and courage. Asking whether they “work” in a literal sense misses the point. They work at a psychological level, and sometimes—as in the case of the Congolese village that fought off the Hutu militants—psychological reality turns into actual reality.

Anti-vaccination movements are high-pressure, highly conformist organizations in which dissenting views are discouraged. To the extent that people reject science because they wish to present a self-image as critical and skeptical, it can be useful to communicate to them the inherently skeptical nature of science and to portray antiscientific thinking as an example of unthinking conformity (Hornsey & Fielding, 2017).

When a big, new, persuasive idea is proposed, an army of critics soon gathers and tries to tear it down. Such a reaction is unavoidable because, aggressive yet abiding by the rules of civil discourse, this is simply how scientists work. It is further true that, faced with adversity, proponents will harden their resolve and struggle to make the case more convincing. Being human, most scientists conform to the psychological Principle of Certainty, which says that when there is evidence both for and against a belief, the result is not a lessening but a heightening of conviction on both sides.