I Refuse To Conform Quotes

Accepting the facts is always tough, so we search for forgiveness to this universe everyday to break the shackles, hurt is a prison and I from a very young young age refused to be held prisoner or even conform.

I'm a young woman who subverts the conventionally accepted gender paradigm because I refuse to conform.

My Venus is damaged, or in exile, that’s what you say of a Planet that can’t be found in the sign where it should be. What’s more, Pluto is in a negative aspect to Venus, and in my case Pluto rules the Ascendant. The result of this situation is that I have, as I see it, Lazy Venus syndrome. That’s what I call this Conformity. In this case we’re dealing with a Person whom fortune has gifted generously, but who has entirely failed to use their potential. Such People are bright and intelligent, but don’t apply themselves to their studies, and use their intelligence to play card games or patience instead. They have beautiful bodies, but they destroy them through neglect, poison themselves with harmful substances, and ignore doctors and dentists. This Venus induces a strange kind of laziness—lifetime opportunities are missed, because you overslept, because you didn’t feel like going, because you were late, because you were neglectful. It’s a tendency to be sybaritic, to live in a state of mild semiconsciousness, to fritter your life away on petty pleasures, to dislike effort and be devoid of any penchant for competition. Long mornings, unopened letters, things put off for later, abandoned projects. A dislike of any authority and a refusal to submit to it, going your own way in a taciturn, idle manner. You could say such people are of no use at all.

refused to compromise who I was to conform to their unwritten rules.

I have not yet been able to stereotype my theological views, and have ceased to expect ever to do so. The idea is preposterous. None but an omniscient mind can continue to maintain a precise identity of views and opinions. Finite minds, unless they are asleep or stultified by prejudice, must advance in knowledge. The discovery of new truth will modify old views and opinions, and there is perhaps no end to this process with finite minds in any world. True Christian consistency does not consist in stereotyping our opinions and views, and in refusing to make any improvement lest we should be guilty of change, but it consists in holding our minds open to receive the rays of truth from every quarter and in changing our views and language and practice as often and as fast, as we can obtain further information. I call this Christian consistency, because this course alone accords with a Christian profession. A Christian profession implies the profession of candour and of a disposition to know and obey all truth. It must follow, that Christian consistency implies continued investigation and change of views and practice corresponding with increasing knowledge. No Christian, therefore, and no theologian should be afraid to change his views, his language, or his practices in conformity with increasing light. The prevalence of such a fear would keep the world, at best, at a perpetual stand-still, on all subjects of science, and consequently all improvements would be precluded.

The very essence of Australia is our lack of sophistication–our refusal to conform to pretension and superficiality. We ought to be upholding our ‘fair-dinkumness’ and all the qualities so well documented in our folklore, the non-conformity of the swagman in Waltzing Matilda whose down to earth motto would I’m sure, have been ‘I’d rather be ignorant and fair dinkum than sophisticated and false’. Of course life has been a fight against ignorance, but the danger has always been that gaining knowledge rarely occurs without an increase in sophistication or falseness.

I refuse to have my vagina photographed because I have no interest in being desired on the basis of its appearance. It has taken me decades to appreciate its power and beauty, and not merely because it birthed a child. Responsive to tenderness and the source of a luminous ecstasy, my vagina has enabled me to transcend an otherwise limited sense of self. I feel no need to make it conform to another’s aesthetic or have it applauded by strangers.

I don't think the point is: Why are we different? Why have we refused to walk one of two narrow paths, but instead demanded the right to blaze our own? The question is not why we were unwilling to conform even when being beaten to the ground by ridicule and brutality. The real burning question is: How did we ever find the courage? From what underground spring did we draw our pride? How did each of us make our way in life, without a single familiar star in the night sky to guide us, to this room where we have at last found others like ourselves? And after so much of ourselves has been injured, or left behind as expendable ballast, many of us worry "What do we have left to give each other? Upon what basis will we build something lasting between us?" I think we have a whole world to give back to each other.

I realize that I will always find respite amongst the migrants, the refugees, the expatriates, the homeless, the pirates. I will always be the fence-sitter. I will pass as I see fit and fail to pass when I was really hoping I would and refuse to pass when it serves my purposes.

I think I've done a reasonable job of conforming to the conventions of this world. I've made adjustments, I've modernized, I've adapted. But one thing I refuse to concede is my right to punch the lights out of any man who dares to insult you. Not because you're helpless; God knows you're not. But because no man can stand by idly and see his idol defamed.

Future historians, I hope, will consider the American fast food industry a relic of the twentieth century — a set of attitudes, systems, and beliefs that emerged from postwar southern California, that embodied its limitless faith in technology, that quickly spread across the globe, flourished briefly, and then receded, once its true costs became clear and its thinking became obsolete. We cannot ignore the meaning of mad cow. It is one more warning about unintended consequences, about human arrogance and the blind worship of science.The same mindset that would add 4-methylacetophenone and solvent to your milkshake would also feed pigs to cows. Whatever replaces the fast food industry should be regional, diverse, authentic, unpredictable, sustainable, profitable — and humble. It should know its limits. People can be fed without being fattened or deceived.This new century may bring an impatience with conformity, a refusal to be kept in the dark, less greed, more compassion, less speed, more common sense, a sense of humor about brand essences and loyalties, a view of food as more than just fuel.Things don’t have to be the way they are. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I remain optimistic.

(Inevitably, someone raises the question about World War II: What if Christians had refused to fight against Hitler? My answer is a counterquestion: What if the Christians in Germany had emphatically refused to fight for Hitler, refused to carry out the murders in concentration camps?) The long history of Christian “just wars” has wrought suffering past all telling, and there is no end in sight. As Yoder has suggested, Niebuhr’s own insight about the “irony of history” ought to lead us to recognize the inadequacy of our reason to shape a world that tends toward justice through violence. Might it be that reason and sad experience could disabuse us of the hope that we can approximate God’s justice through killing? According to the guideline I have proposed, reason must be healed and taught by Scripture, and our experience must be transformed by the renewing of our minds in conformity with the mind of Christ. Only thus can our warring madness be overcome. This would mean, practically speaking, that Christians would have to relinquish positions of power and influence insofar as the exercise of such positions becomes incompatible with the teaching and example of Jesus. This might well mean, as Hauerwas has perceived, that the church would assume a peripheral status in our culture, which is deeply committed to the necessity and glory of violence. The task of the church then would be to tell an alternative story, to train disciples in the disciplines necessary to resist the seductions of violence, to offer an alternative home for those who will not worship the Beast. If the church is to be a Scripture-shaped community, it will find itself reshaped continually into a closer resemblance to the socially marginal status of Matthew’s nonviolent countercultural community. To articulate such a theological vision for the church at the end of the twentieth century may be indeed to take most seriously what experience is telling us: the secular polis has no tolerance for explicitly Christian witness and norms. It is increasingly the case in Western culture that Christians can participate in public governance only insofar as they suppress their explicitly Christian motivations. Paradoxically, the Christian community might have more impact upon the world if it were less concerned about appearing reasonable in the eyes of the world and more concerned about faithfully embodying the New Testament’s teaching against violence. Let it be said clearly, however, that the reasons for choosing Jesus’ way of peacemaking are not prudential. In calculable terms, this way is sheer folly. Why do we choose the way of nonviolent love of enemies? If our reasons for that choice are shaped by the New Testament, we are motivated not by the sheer horror of war, not by the desire for saving our own skins and the skins of our children (if we are trying to save our skins, pacifism is a very poor strategy), not by some general feeling of reverence for human life, not by the naive hope that all people are really nice and will be friendly if we are friendly first. No, if our reasons for choosing nonviolence are shaped by the New Testament witness, we act in simple obedience to the God who willed that his own Son should give himself up to death on a cross. We make this choice in the hope and anticipation that God’s love will finally prevail through the way of the cross, despite our inability to see how this is possible. That is the life of discipleship to which the New Testament repeatedly calls us. When the church as a community is faithful to that calling, it prefigures the peaceable kingdom of God in a world wracked by violence.

...Life is filled with unconforities—revealing holes in time that are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, and understanding; holes that relentlessly draw in human investigation and imagination yet refuse to conform, heal, or submit to explanation in ways we might desire or think we need. Sometimes the gaps are too wide, the people, the animals, the objects, the worlds too gone, the time too much for the little time we have. Adrift on a sleepless night, it can feel vertiginous, an abyss of infinity. But then I leave my apartment and head down the packed morning subway and rattle along below Broadway crammed between all these New York bodies, all this human warmth and possibility, this intimate, reassuring connection to the city and the planet and to everything and all of us passing through.

O my God! how much I long to be the missionary of Your holy will, and to teach all men that there is nothing more easy, more attainable, more within reach, and in the power of everyone, than sanctity. How I wish that I could make them understand that just as the good and the bad thief had the same things to do and to suffer; so also two persons, one of whom is worldly and the other leading an interior and wholly spiritual life have, neither of them, anything different to do or to suffer; but that one is sanctified and attains eternal happiness by submission to Your holy will in those very things by which the other is damned because he does them to please himself, or endures them with reluctance and rebellion. This proves that it is only the heart that is different. Oh! all you that read this, it will cost you no more than to do what you are doing, to suffer what you are suffering, only act and suffer in a holy manner. It is the heart that must be changed. When I say heart, I mean will. Sanctity, then, consists in willing all that God wills for us. Yes! sanctity of heart is a simple “fiat,” a conformity of will with the will of God. What could be more easy, and who could refuse to love a will so kind and so good? Let us love it then, and this love alone will make everything in us divine.

Now, in the academy, you cannot just say anything about male theory. You have to proceed with an immanent critique, that is to say, you have to expertly play the parts against the whole. You show, for example, how certain assumptions in the work actually defeat its stated purpose of human liberation, but once remedied, i.e. salvaged, the theory will work for women. An immanent critique can stay within the masculinist academic circle. In this position women become the technicians of male theory who have to reprogram the machine, turning it from a war machine against women into a gentler, kinder war machine, killing us softly. This is a very involving task and after years of playing this part it is understandable that there may be little desire to admit that the effort was virtually futile. An investment has been made, and the conformity is not wholly outer. What attitudes and feelings does this sexist context produce towards oppositional women who refuse this male material? Does a male-circled woman have the power and security to be generous? Having compromised her freedom, will she be less willing to compromise ours? Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this arrangement, besides the ways it sets women against one another, is the fact that although the male academy values owning our freedom, it does not have to pay a lot for it. Masculine culture already controls gross amounts of female lives. Still, it seems to want more, but always at the same low price. The exploited are very affordable.

Creating “Correct” Children in the Classroom One of the most popular discipline programs in American schools is called Assertive Discipline. It teaches teachers to inflict the old “obey or suffer” method of control on students. Here you disguise the threat of punishment by calling it a choice the child is making. As in, “You have a choice, you can either finish your homework or miss the outing this weekend.” Then when the child chooses to try to protect his dignity against this form of terrorism, by refusing to do his homework, you tell him he has chosen his logical, natural consequence of being excluded from the outing. Putting it this way helps the parent or teacher mitigate against the bad feelings and guilt that would otherwise arise to tell the adult that they are operating outside the principles of compassionate relating. This insidious method is even worse than outand-out punishing, where you can at least rebel against your punisher. The use of this mind game teaches the child the false, crazy-making belief that they wanted something bad or painful to happen to them. These programs also have the stated intention of getting the child to be angry with himself for making a poor choice. In this smoke and mirrors game, the children are “causing” everything to happen and the teachers are the puppets of the children’s choices. The only ones who are not taking responsibility for their actions are the adults. Another popular coercive strategy is to use “peer pressure” to create compliance. For instance, a teacher tells her class that if anyone misbehaves then they all won’t get their pizza party. What a great way to turn children against each other. All this is done to help (translation: compel) children to behave themselves. But of course they are not behaving themselves: they are being “behaved” by the adults. Well-meaning teachers and parents try to teach children to be motivated (translation: do boring or aversive stuff without questioning why), responsible (translation: thoughtless conformity to the house rules) people. When surveys are conducted in which fourth-graders are asked what being good means, over 90% answer “being quiet.” And when teachers are asked what happens in a successful classroom, the answer is, “the teacher is able to keep the students on task” (translation: in line, doing what they are told). Consulting firms measuring teacher competence consider this a major criterion of teacher effectiveness. In other words if the students are quietly doing what they were told the teacher is evaluated as good. However my understanding of ‘real learning’ with twenty to forty children is that it is quite naturally a bit noisy and messy. Otherwise children are just playing a nice game of school, based on indoctrination and little integrated retained education. Both punishments and rewards foster a preoccupation with a narrow egocentric self-interest that undermines good values. All little Johnny is thinking about is “How much will you give me if I do X? How can I avoid getting punished if I do Y? What do they want me to do and what happens to me if I don’t do it?” Instead we could teach him to ask, “What kind of person do I want to be and what kind of community do I want to help make?” And Mom is thinking “You didn’t do what I wanted, so now I’m going to make something unpleasant happen to you, for your own good to help you fit into our (dominance/submission based) society.” This contributes to a culture of coercion and prevents a community of compassion. And as we are learning on the global level with our war on terrorism, as you use your energy and resources to punish people you run out of energy and resources to protect people. And even if children look well-behaved, they are not behaving themselves They are being behaved by controlling parents and teachers.

But I think you can tell that voice to shut the fuck up. I think you can learn to look at your sagging breasts and your belly and your wrinkles and those three nipple hairs that we're all secretly plucking and see a human instead of a meatsack designed to give someone else pleasure. I think that you can love your weirdest, ugliest self more deeply than you're supposedly allowed to, and demand that others either love her or fuck off. And I think that whatever you might lose by refusing to conform will always be less than the pieces of yourself you lose by pretending to be the woman you are not.

Fearing someone is to do the person's will Proverbs 9:10King James Version (KJV) 10 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding. I remember when we were children, when dad was stepping to the house, everybody was packing what he or she was doing in order to behave normal. Because there was a fear that if dad comes and meet us playing instead of studying, he will just beat us up. Today The world doesn't care about fearing God. Who is also a father to us, even more than a father : our creator. People will send devotional message without even doing what they send, people will dress anyhow, women with trousers when the bible is against it(Deut22,5), women being preachers when the word refuses it, men putting on short on the road side like gays, having strange hair cut and calling it SWAGG, people obeying the church instead of the Word, putting artificial and removing the natural. Why? Because there aren't having fear of anything. But the the true children of God will stay with The Word and only The Word. You who read this message, take heed before it is too late, for Jesus-Christ isn't coming for people who conformed themselves with the world but will rather take those that will be transformed by The Word. Shalom

Peter Pan Syndrome" I have peter pan syndrome I refuse to conform I refuse to transform I have peter pan syndrome I have peter pan syndrome Oh don't take away my visions Don't take away my dreams Oh don't take away my visions Don't take away my dreams I am living it up I am living in a dream I am living in a dream I am living it up I am living in a dream I am living in living in a dream I refuse to make kennies I refuse to be teased I refuse to be big I refuse to make us now I refuse to make kennies I refuse to be teased I refuse to be big I refuse to make us no Let's be small Oh let's be verbal I rather be an idiot than me be a crybaby a crybaby, cry, baby, cry, cry crybaby, cry, baby, cry, cry Oh don't take away my visions Don't take away my dreams Oh don't take away my visions Don't take away my dreams I am living it up I am living in a dream I am living in a dream I am living it up I am living in a dream I am living in living in a dream I refuse to grow I refuse to get old I refuse to be serious Oh, I wanna be delirious I have a peter pan syndrome Oh, peter pan syndrome Oh don't take away my visions Don't take away my dreams Oh don't take away my visions Don't take away my dreams Oh don't take away my visions Don't take away my dreams Oh don't take away my visions Don't take away my dreams (Dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams) (Dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams)

Too often we still live with the pinched expectations of a culture of conformity, which sees daring as dangerous. Go along to get along: that’s its mantra. Only a principled refusal to be terrorized by these stingy standards will save you from a Frankenstein life made up of other people’s expectations grafted together into a poor imitation of existence. You can’t afford to do that. It is what has poisoned our culture, our community, and our national character. No one does the right thing from fear, and so many of the wrong things are done in its long shadow. Homophobia, racism, religious bigotry: they are all bricks in a wall that divides us, bricks cast of the clay of fear, fear of that which is different or unknown.

Because ye willna accept me for who I am! I can only be the Duchess of Nottingham now, not permitted to wear wool or speak with a burr or believe what I have spent my whole life believing. I canna turn around without your oldest friend lecturing me on superstition or you calling me daft for believing in curses " His usually gut reaction beckoned--- spin away, refuse to engage in what he deemed a ridiculous argument. But a quiet Stay resonated within him, and this time he didn't think he was misunderstanding. He shoved his hands in his pockets to anchor himself. " I love to hear you speak. I care very little what you wear, so long as you have what you need and are happy in it." She snorted. " Your society disagrees " "Yes, they do. And you can either conform to their expectations or defy them. Whatever your choice, I will stand beside you. But it is the other that really bothers you, and that is my fault. My failing. Your opinions and beliefs are worth no less than mine.

I shrug. “I am me, and I refuse to apologize for it. I don’t conform well, but I also don’t play games. If I have something on my mind, you’ll always know it. I don’t mince words, and I often offend people who prefer social graces and subtext.

This is not a book I could have imagined writing a dozen years ago. When an older couple from another town attempted to set up and lead a Bible club at my daughter's public elementary school in Southern California in 2009, they might as well have been alien visitors showing up at a beach party. The purpose of the club was to convince children as young as five that they would burn for an eternity if they failed to conform to a strict interpretation of the Christian faith. The club's organizers were offered free and better space in the evangelical church next door to our school, but they refused it; they insisted on holding the club in the public school because they knew the kids would think the message was coming from the school. They referred to our public school as their "mission field" and our children as "the harvest." ... As I researched the group behind these kindergarten missionaries, I saw that they were part of a national network of clubs. I soon discovered that this network was itself just one of many initiatives to insert reactionary religion into public schools across the country. Then I realized that these initiatives were the fruit of a nationally coordinated effort not merely to convert other people's children in the classroom but to undermine public education altogether. Belatedly, I understood that the conflict they provoked in our local community- -I was hardly the only parent who found their presence in the public school alarming was not an unintended consequence of their activity. It was of a piece with their plan to destroy confidence in our system of education and make way for a system of religious education more to their liking.

In response to the command to enjoy, contemporary cynicism is an effort to gain distance from the functioning of power, to resist the hold that power has over us. Hence, the cynic turns inward and displays an indifference to external authorities, with the aim of self-sufficient independence. Symbolic authority—which would force the subject into a particular symbolic identity, an identity not freely chosen by the subject herself—is the explicit enemy of cynicism. To acknowledge the power of symbolic authority over one’s own subjectivity would be, in the eyes of the cynic, to acknowledge one’s failure to enjoy fully, making such an acknowledgment unacceptable. In the effort to refuse the power of this authority, one must eschew all the trappings of conformity. This is why the great Cynical philosopher Diogenes made a show of masturbating in public, a gesture that made clear to everyone that he had moved beyond the constraints of the symbolic law and that he would brook no barrier to his jouissance. Byfreely doing in public what others feared to do, Diogenes acted out his refusal to submit to the prohibition that others accepted. He attempted to demonstrate that the symbolic law had no absolute hold over him and that he had no investment in it. However, seeming to be beyond the symbolic law and actually being beyond it are two different—and, in fact, opposed—things, and this difference becomes especially important to recognize in the contemporary society of enjoyment. In the act of making a show of one’s indifference to the public law (in the manner of Diogenes and today’s cynical subject), one does not gain distance from that law, but unwittingly reveals one’s investment in it. Such a show is done for the look of the symbolic authority. The cynic stages her/his act publicly in order that symbolic authority will see it. Because it is staged in this way, we know that the cynic’s act—such as the public masturbation of Diogenes—represents a case of acting-out, rather than an authentic act, an act that suspends the functioning of symbolic authority. Acting-out always occurs on a stage, while the authentic act and authentic enjoyment—the radical break from the constraints of symbolic authority—occur unstaged, without reference to the Other’s look. 9 In the History of Philosophy, Hegel makes clear the cynic’s investment in symbolic authority through his discussion of Plato’s interactions with Diogenes: In Plato’s house [Diogenes] once walked on the beautiful carpets with muddy feet, saying, “I tread on the pride of Plato.” “Yes, but with another pride,” replied Plato, as pointedly. When Diogenes stood wet through with rain, and the bystanders pitied him, Plato said, “If you wish to compassionate him, just go away. His vanity is in showing himself off and exciting surprise; it is what made him act in this way, and the reason would not exist if he were left alone. Though Diogenes attempts to act in a way that demonstrates his self-sufficiency, his distance from every external authority, what he attains, however, is far from self-sufficiency. As Plato’s ripostes demonstrate, everything that the cynic does to distance himself from symbolic authority plays directly into the hands of that authority. Here we see how cynicism functions symptomatically in the society of enjoyment, providing the illusion of enjoyment beyond social constraints while leaving these constraints completely intact.

This resistance of the anal father to critique becomes especially apparent in the case of Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society. While the film’s final scene shows the students successfully transgressing the demands of the headmaster (the representative of the symbolic father), no such transgression occurs with Keating. Earlier in the film, Keating commands three students to walk around the school courtyard, and when they begin to walk uniformly with the other students clapping in unison, Keating stops them and upbraids them (kindly of course) for their conformity. He urges each student to discover his own individual way of walking—i.e., to find his own private enjoyment. When Charlie Dalton (Gale Hansen) refuses to walk at Keating’s command, this moment of disobedience does not in any way subvert Keating’s authority. On the contrary, Keating points out that Dalton proves his point: his subversive display fits right into Keating’s “lesson plan.” In the face of the anal father’s demand for each student to find his private enjoyment, there is no clear path to subversion. In refusing to play along, one plays along all the more. Unlike the symbolic father, the anal father invites our subversion and thereby quells its subversive sting.

I looked at her and said no, but she still really doubted my answer. The rest of our conversation was mostly about her trying to convince me that I was gay – and it pissed me off. I trusted her, and I opened up to her – but apparently, as a guy, I wasn’t supposed to have those needs. It took me years to realise that what I felt wasn’t unnatural, unmanly or weird. I was human, and I realise now that what I did was bold. I refused to conform to toxic, stereotypical gender norms. I wanted to keep my humanity.

A better system will not automatically ensure a better life,' Havel wrote. 'In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.' The smallest choices you and I make, every single day, can change the world for better or worse. The simple act of refusing to live a lie has the power to transform who we are and what we are capable of, both as individuals and as a society. In other words, trying our best to live a congruent life is one of the most important things we can do for ourselves and each other.

Today I embrace that I do care what some people think. But I refuse to present myself in any other way than honestly. I had to box myself in my whole life to stay safe. I'm not doing that anymore. It doesn't mean I don't need to work on things or change a few things. Ofcourse I do we all do. But I accept that it's ok to be where I am and the responsibility of loving myself right where I am. I'm not perfect. I don't want to be. I am sarcastic as fuck and clingy to some. Sorry about that clingees. I cry for no reason, I hate crowds. The sun blinds me and my inner monolog drowns the outer world to utter silence. But I'm also loyal as fuck, honest when it even if it hurts. Repsectful...mostly. I swear like every other word. I hate being boxed in any way. I like dissecting people. I need to know the driving forces behind everything. I would have made a great detective. I have a way of reading people .... that's unique...I do not simply assess the tonal quality the structure of the way you arranged the words but the inflection as well as how the body language matches up to the words. Thats not it. Everyone does that and interprets it to their own ways of processing. I also feel the person. I can sort of ..adapt? To The environment and there's an energy about everyone and I use that to Guage everything. I know what isn't said because I'm fluent in all forms of communication. The sad reason is I had to read a room from a young age. Sometimes I don't always understand what I need to change about myself in order to be the most honorable version of myself spiritually but I know enough to know enough about myself to know that I Guage what's right to me and it doesn't matter if that means the crowd will crucify me. I simply will not squish into that box and that is why my life's been hard. Because as far back as I can remember it didn't matter what they said was right, I knew. And sometimes I knew different and tried to help them see the way but I was met with harsh crowd control measures and forced to conformity. I rebelled myself all the way to ....that's a different story. I shall continue another day.

You got in a lot of trouble, didn’t you?” I gather, imagining a younger version of Enzo sneaking out at night, drinking liquor straight from the bottle, and slipping through the windows of blushing girls. The last part makes me a little jealous, but I’m not sure if it’s because I didn’t know him then and he wasn’t slipping through my window, or if it’s because I never got to experience things like that growing up. Kevin never allowed me to have friends. He never allowed me to live. “We did,” he says. “Not as much as I would’ve liked, though.” “It sounds mundane.” He hums, a deep, rumbling sound of amusement. “It was, which is exactly why I acted out. Everything is a sin to Catholicism. I was sexually repressed, but considering I refused to conform, I sure as hell wasn’t going to allow them to take pleasure from me, too. I attended confessions more times than I could count. I asked for forgiveness, but I never really wanted it.” I snort. “I bet the nuns loved you,” I tease. “They hated me,” he says with mirth. “Most of them, anyway.

In the intoxication of being twenty and swept up by my reading, I hoped to live in the light of day, in joy, refusing submission, shackles and conformity.

In the intoxication of being twenty and swept up by my reading, I hoped to live in the light of day, in joy, refusing submission, shackles and conformity.

This is not a book I could have imagined writing a dozen years ago. When an older couple from another town attempted to set up and lead a Bible club at my daughter’s public elementary school in Southern California in 2009, they might as well have been alien visitors showing up at a beach party. The purpose of the club was to convince children as young as five that they would burn for an eternity if they failed to conform to a strict interpretation of the Christian faith. The club’s organizers were offered free and better space in the evangelical church next door to our school, but they refused it; they insisted

All forms of orgiastic union have three characteristics: they are intense, even violent; they occur in the total personality, mind and body; they are transitory and periodical. Exactly the opposite holds true for that form of union which is by far the most frequent solution chosen by man in the past and in the present: the union based on conformity with the group, its customs, practices and beliefs. Here again we find a considerable development. In a primitive society the group is small; it consists of those with whom one shares blood and soil. With the growing development of culture, the group enlarges; it becomes the citizenry of a polis the citizenry of a large state, the members of a church. Even the poor Roman felt pride because he could say 'civis romanus sum'; Rome and the empire were his family, his home, his world. Also in con-temporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union in which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the herd. If i am like everybody else, if i have no feelings or thoughts which make me different, if i conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, i am saved; saved from the frightening experience of aloneness. The dictatorial systems use threats and terror to induce this conformity; the democratic countries, suggestion and propaganda. There is, indeed, one great difference between the two systems. In the democracies non-conformity is possible and, in fact, by no means entirely absent; in the totalitarian systems, only a few unusual heroes and martyrs can be expected to refuse obedience. But in spite of this difference the democratic societies show an over-whelming degree of conformity. The reason lies in the fact that there has to be an answer to the quest for union, and if there is no other or better way, then the union of herd con-formity becomes the predominant one. One can only understand the power of the fear to be different, the fear to be only a few steps away from the herd, if one understands the depths of the need not to be separated. Sometimes this fear of non-conformity is rationalized as fear of practical dangers which could threaten the non-conformist. But actually, people wantto conform to a much higher degree than they are forced to conform, at least in the Western democracies.

All forms of orgiastic union have three characteristics: they are intense, even violent; they occur in the total personality, mind and body; they are transitory and periodical. Exactly the opposite holds true for that form of union which is by far the most frequent solution chosen by man in the past and in the present: the union based on conformity with the group, its customs, practices and beliefs. Here again we find a considerable development. In a primitive society the group is small; it consists of those with whom one shares blood and soil. With the growing development of culture, the group enlarges; it becomes the citizenry of a polis the citizenry of a large state, the members of a church. Even the poor Roman felt pride because he could say 'civis romanus sum'; Rome and the empire were his family, his home, his world. Also in con-temporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union in which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the herd. If i am like everybody else, if i have no feelings or thoughts which make me different, if i conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, i am saved; saved from the frightening experience of aloneness. The dictatorial systems use threats and terror to induce this conformity; the democratic countries, suggestion and propaganda. There is, indeed, one great difference between the two systems. In the democracies non-conformity is possible and, in fact, by no means entirely absent; in the totalitarian systems, only a few unusual heroes and martyrs can be expected to refuse obedience. But in spite of this difference the democratic societies show an over-whelming degree of conformity. The reason lies in the fact that there has to be an answer to the quest for union, and if there is no other or better way, then the union of herd con-formity becomes the predominant one. One can only understand the power of the fear to be different, the fear to be only a few steps away from the herd, if one understands the depths of the need not to be separated. Sometimes this fear of non-conformity is rationalized as fear of practical dangers which could threaten the non-conformist. But actually, people wantto conform to a much higher degree than they are forced to conform, at least in the Western democracies.

At the sessions after I was indicted for an upholder and maintainer of unlawful assemblies and conventicles, and for not conforming to the national worship of the church of England; and after some conference there with the justices, they taking my plain dealing with them for a confession, as they termed it, of the indictment, did sentence me to a perpetual banishment, because I refused to conform.  So being again delivered up to the jailer’s hands, I was had home to prison, and there have lain now complete twelve years, waiting to see what God would suffer these men to do with me.

Getting married and trying to conform to societies standards did not work. No one can cut a part of who they are out completely and expect to be successful. It is when I found my creative voice refusing to be silenced that things started moving forward again.

At last, she seemed to have heard me. Comprehension lit her eyes for the first time in forever. “Dear God . . . you . . . you . . . love that monster.”... You will rue it!” ... “I-I spent eight years in an institution, caged, trapped—for you! But you refuse to hear me. To see.”.... My grandmother might be a murderer for the Arcana cause. And now her player was refusing to conform. .... “You want Death so badly, he’ll end your life. He will take your head; I swear it. And if you’ve truly fallen in love with him, then you deserve it!

What do you do when another people group with proven military strength dominates you? What do you do when its cultural hegemony erodes one’s own culture and values? What do you do when you are being drawn into the very systems and societal patterns that are also taxing, exploiting, humiliating, and executing you on a regular basis? The uncritical or despair–filled stance is to adopt an “if you can’t beat them, join them” mentality. Paul, however, takes a more subversive posture: “I exhort you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a sacrifice—alive, holy, and pleasing to God—which is your reasonable service. Do not be conformed to this present world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may test and approve what is the will of God—what is good and well–pleasing and perfect” (Romans 12:1–2). These two verses challenge us with an embodied, decolonizing way of life that refuses to join the oppressive systems that manage and puppet most people’s lives. First, we are told that we must put our very bodies, through action, on the line. Our bodies must become living sacrifices. Our bodies, and what we do with them, actually matter. We are not disembodied souls, and God cares about more than our spiritual lives. God says, Put your body on the line! What kind of bodily life will you engage in? Will your body be aligned with the rituals of American civil religion? Or will you vulnerably place your body in confrontation with the establishment, as Jesus did with his own body when he flipped tables in judgment of the injustice and idolatry in the temple? Apparently such bodily involvement is our reasonable service to God.

Are we not the clay and God the potter? When he refuses to conform to our wills, do we discard him? If you are looking for a religion centered around yourself, Ben, I must agree that Christianity is a poor choice.

In a letter written to the play's director, Peter Wood, on 30th March 1958, just before the start of rehearsals, Pinter rightly refused to add extra lines explaining or justifying Stanley's motives in withdrawing from the world into a dingy seaside boarding-house: 'Stanley cannot perceive his only valid justification - which is he is what he is - therefore he certainly can never be articulate about it.' But Pinter came much closer than he usually does to offering an explanation of the finished work: We've agreed: the hierarchy, the Establishment, the arbiters, the socio- religious monsters arrive to affect censure and alteration upon a member of the club who has discarded responsibility (that word again) towards himself and others. (What is your opinion, by the way, of the act of suicide?) He does possess, however, for my money, a certain fibre - he fights for his life. It doesn't last long, this fight. His core being a quagmire of delusion, his mind a tenuous fuse box, he collapses under the weight of their accusation - an accusation compounded of the shit- stained strictures of centuries of 'tradition'. This gets us right to the heart of the matter. It is not simply a play about a pathetic victim brainwashed into social conformity. It is a play about the need to resist, with the utmost vigour, dead ideas and the inherited weight of the past. And if you examine the text, you notice how Pinter has toughened up the original image of the man in the Eastbourne digs with 'nowhere to go'. Pinter's Stanley Webber - a palpably Jewish name, incidentally - is a man who shores up his precarious sense of self through fantasy, bluff, violence and his own manipulative form of power-play. His treatment of Meg initially is rough, playful, teasing: he's an ersatz, scarpegrace Oedipus to her boardinghouse Jocasta. But once she makes the fateful, mood-changing revelation - 'I've got to get things in for the two gentlemen' - he's as dangerous as a cornered animal. He affects a wanton grandeur with his talk of a European concert tour. He projects his own fear on to Meg by terrorising her with stories of nameless men coming to abduct her in a van. In his first solo encounter with McCann, he tries to win him over by appealing to a shared past (Maidenhead, Fuller's tea shop, Boots library) and a borrowed patriotism ('I know Ireland very well. I've many friends there. I love that country and I admire and trust its people... I think their policemen are wonderful'). At the start of the interrogation he resists Goldberg's injunction to sit down and at the end of it he knees him in the stomach. And in the panic of the party, he attempts to strangle Meg and rape Lulu. These are hardly the actions of a supine victim. Even though Stanley is finally carried off shaven, besuited, white-collared and ostensibly tamed, the spirit of resistance is never finally quelled. When asked how he regards the prospect of being able to 'make or break' in the integrated outer world, he does not stay limply silent, but produces the most terrifying noises.

Then, in a bookstore of a Bethesda (Maryland) mall, I chanced upon the unlikely shelving of a striking title: One Dimensional Man (1964). It entranced me. Herbert Marcuse argued that both capitalist and communist societies were totalitarian. Barely touching on the Eastern bloc, however, he directed his scathing critique almost exclusively at the West and the U.S. in particular. The “technological rationality” of “administered life” in “advanced industrial society” infiltrates existence and effectively mass-produces and controls everything. In meeting needs and even in providing affluence for some, it eradicates individuality. The system determines needs and then satisfies them, making for a “willing” conformity with its own demands. The administered society is “totalizing” – nothing, not even criticism of it, escapes its reach. I thought of my hero, Bob Dylan; he refused the role of political spokesman, writing sometimes bizarre, surrealistic, reflective, and lovelorn songs instead. But by Marcuse’s reckoning, even, or especially, the caustic criticism of his early folk career had been commodified and coopted. My