> The conformity is kind of the point and makes it better for the rest of us
So when you say "rest of us" here you're coming from a society that's on the edge of survival?
That's a context I definitely wasn't thinking. I'd assumed based on the conversation we were talking about cities vs small towns in relatively well established countries.
Honestly, I'm not sure I buy your hypothesis though, even if I think of struggling countries, feel you'd have to back it up with more reasoning and data. I don't really see how conformity would help. It still seems to me like it's just an obstacle, all innovation or attempts at change or trying new or different ways are shut down and repressed. If the current way of life isn't yielding the kind of outcome needed to lift them above that edge of survival, continuing to strictly enforce and being against anyone trying to go against it seems counterproductive to me.
I'm not saying you get rid of law and order. But I don't see the benefits of say banning certain type of medicine, foods, dances, music, art, social interactions, love making, natural selection of a mate, methods of trade, methods of construction, etc.
> there is a reason individual choice is emphasized almost solely in societies rich enough to afford letting people make mistakes
I feel you might have the cause and effect reversed. It could just as well be that there is a reason societies that emphasize individual choice are often the ones to become prosperous and rich.
> I wonder if what the aforementioned comment suggested is still unresolved; would some or all of us lose incentive and/or mechanisms that temper and shape our proclivity to compromise and coexist despite still unaltered and conflicting values and behaviors?
Would some of us lose the pressure to conform? Yes. And I think this is all to the better.
Ultimately, I think that conformity is what this entire conversation is all about. I do not value conformity and I reject the notion that forcing people to conform is a societal gain.
> The conformity is kind of the point and makes it better for the rest of us.
The 'rest of us' being people outside the monoculture? Things aren't so good there.
Conformity limits people's freedom, often greatly, often in very fundamental ways. People can't chose their religion, sexual orientation, politics, interests, career, etc. You are free to chose conformity if you like, but the problem is that conformity is forced on others.
Everyone wants this. An end to bullying would be great. Social expectations, roles, and conformity is harmful when it leads to groups ganging up on individuals.
And it doesn't end in school. I have personally had job interview in which the lack of popular social activity outside schools hours resulted in me not getting the job. Every time I see a studying looking at appearance and conformity to social expectations and norms I see a global phenomenon where society rewards conformity and punish non-conformity. Faking conformity is not a solution, but I can't say there has been much progress in removing the underlying issue. From my view there was progress until about mid 1970, in which the trend reversed and now we have a polarized world in which you either must conform to a naturalist or purist view (The Chromium Fence).
> When I worked in a hospital, I was constantly amazed at the idle chit chat relatives made with people who had very short time left.
Measure the stress levels and I think you would get a interesting correlation. There were a study done on parents to cancer sick children, and there were some direct correlation between behavior and stress management. In short summery to what I recall, suppressing the idea that the child was sick gave short-term stress reduction but that had a major price to pay when reality crashed in. Those that accepted reality early and gave themselves some room to exercise control (like making sure someone was in the room, that the nurses read the right bed-night story, and so on) generally faired better in the long run. It is not a fun study, but it is a good explanation for human behavior.
> If I sat down and tried to design a set of social norms for discouraging people from being their best selves, I honestly don't think I could have done a better job than this.
> Why don't we want people to be good at things?
Historically most people were peasants or serfs. The only thing they were expected to be good at was that, and were actively discouraged from doing anything else.
We have gone from "Civilization and Its Discontents" to the Human Potential Movement in the blink of an eye.
> the people participating in a society should be able to set prerequisites for participating in that society
This is exactly what I’m saying with a different emphasis.
Some societies will want to lean more towards conformity and collective good, other societies will want to lean more on individual choice and individual good. In America there’s a tendency to split into 50:50 camps between each (and each camp seems to alternate between individual freedom and conformity depending on the topic)
Why is it that the way one camp thinks needs to dominate the other? How do you decide between individual choice and authoritarianism?
I.e. Abortions? Individual choice. Vaccines? Authoritarianism. (Reverse for opposite political allegiance)
There isn’t just one political philosophy for all societies and there seems to be pretty big disagreements (and self contradictions) all around. Most people though act like their opinions are the only possible opinions, and have no respect for different ideas and little concept of the actual issues at hand.
That's the trivial part. Conformance isn't about petty differences in lifestyle or ideas. It's about being able to function together.
Humans can't cooperate with other people if they're not predictable enough. The flip side of "theory of mind" is that you're going to have a bad time with me, if you can't intuitively grasp my reactions and behavior. And vice versa. The major job of culture and civilization is to reduce variance in people, because the easier it is for us to understand each other, the better and more peacefully we can cooperate.
Again, this is not about different learning styles or different personal preferences. It's about whether or not I can trust this person to work with me, to live around me. Will they melt down or get violent at slightest provocation? Are they telling the truth? Can I trust them with work, or with not randomly swerving their car into a crowd because fuck knows why? That's the other end of the spectrum of conformance, and people who are stuck there end up being segregated away - committed to prisons or mental institutions or otherwise pushed aside and kept away from civilization's more powerful toys.
In this broader spectrum, it's rather obvious that conformance is both an advantage and a necessity. Not total conformance - just enough to be able to be a part of society. And society itself can be accepting of only so much - there's only so much unpredictability our wetware can process before fight-or-flight kicks in.
If you'd read the very next sentence ("We are only rarely aware that we do anything, or avoid doing other things, because we want to conform."), you'd have realized that the author is making exactly the opposite point you thought. The whole article is about how conformity pressure does slip in, and how we make excuses for it to convince our conscious minds that something else is actually at play.
> Conformance is an advantage, a way to progress and get what you need or want.
How much should we expect people to conform? How much effort should we expect a nonconforming person to make, and what kind of social pressure should we apply to those people?
I am generally more in favor of letting people be themselves to the extent that they are happy with it (absent social pressure) and that it does not harm anyone. That means a social standard of accepting non-conformity, rather than expecting it or as is often the case coercing it.
> When it comes to who you are or how you choose to express your individuality
I’m from an Asian society and I’ve seen the pain the strict social framework can cause people who biologically cannot conform to social expectations. However, I feel like your phraseology sweeps more broadly than necessary. Society should think very hard about what would be good social norms, and evolve them as appropriate. (For example, the social norms against women on the front lines may need to be re-evaluated in the age of fly-by-wire F22.) And society should accommodate people who for biological reasons are different.
But that does not require unstructured, wholesale accommodation of how people “choose to express their individuality.” You can accommodate people without abandoning the rule that, “in general, society expects you to be a certain way and do certain things.” Abandoning that rule is a recipe for unhappy, directionless people and a disharmonious society. The fact of the matter is that (1) society is better and more well functioning when people conform; and (2) most people are pretty similar and will be made happy by the same things. The stunning irony of millennials is that they were raised to “follow their bliss.” But they grew up, and what’s their number one complaint? That they can’t find steady work that will let them afford a house in the suburbs and a couple of kids.
>kind of thinking reminds me of biotruths, eugenics, social Darwinism, and other authoritarian concepts which seek to explain why it’s okay to have inequality between and within countries.
I don't know where to start with this comment. Perhaps you should stop grouping arguments by stereotype.
At an individual level, different people require different interventions, because they have different personalities. Some people can handle responsibility. Some people need financial motivation. Some people respond to love. Others best learn through violence or fear (I was far too smart to listen to my parents until they threatened a spanking, for example).
If you take all of these different personalities and force them to live under together under a single set of rules, regardless of whether their needs are met, they will compete, if not for resources them for social clout. It is human nature. Particularly in a universe where resources are scarce and time is short.
Though large scale human interaction has a normalizing effect, within the high dimensional space of human belief and behavior there is ample room for these same micro behaviors to be reflected by macroscale cultural trends. And, similarly, because the "ideal" form of government depends ultimately on widely varying beliefs, forcing multiple peoples with significant cultural distance will inevitably lead to inequality and clash - this is not a statement of superiority, sand though it can be used as part justification for some of the antisocial beliefs you raised, that doesn't mean it isn't untrue or that these real problems that we are seeing emerge across the world will simply go away if we ignore them. This pattern has been repeated across time and space and is an unnecessary source of unacknowledged strife in the modern world.
Society wasn't created in a vacuum to create a way of life you feel most accustomed to, that then becomes immutable. It changes all the time. and you don't notice it until it's too late because it happens so gradually.
So it will now. Society could shift to accommodating these other people and you wouldn't notice it, because you already do the thing it is shifting towards, which is maintaining better boundaries for yourself.
> never understood how they reconciled trying to be strict in some areas but being lax in others
IMHO you’re describing all humans ever. We all live with constant choices between conforming and rebelling - religious, societal, etc. It’s not that surprising?
It's called society. If most people didn't follow other people (or demand it!) we would not have societies at all. We'd be individualistic animals, or at best small tribes.
>It's also dehumanizing
You're completely wrong. People copying and following the path of others is one of the reasons we've dominated earth. Only a very small portion of us are risk takers that make new trends that others follow.
> I think differences in politics are largely formed through a lack of knowledge
Knowledge doesn't make everyone want or value the same things. There's significant evidence that gene's play a role in a persons interests, desires, and even morality [1]. You're speaking of a Utopia that would require forced mental uniformity, requiring a perspective that there are no grey areas in life. I don't think this is compatible with the reality of humanity.
> Is culture necessarily partially ineffable?
My friend once said something like "Anything that's useful, we call technology. Anything that's not useful, but cute, we call culture".
> grew up in suburban Midwest America. Monoculture is great if you're aligned with the monoculture, but it's quite miserable if you're unwilling or unable to conform.
The conformity is kind of the point and makes it better for the rest of us.
> Maybe, just maybe, those traditionally suppressed lifestyles were suppressed because those societies had memories of what happens when they are not suppressed.
That would be more plausible if we saw that all mature cultures ended up with the same or similar norms. But we don't. Instead, we see a rich variety of norms across history and cultures, but also many examples of territorialism where specific cultures try to impose their idiosyncratic norms on others. And maybe there's good to be found even in that (uniformity is easier to govern), but it does run against the pluralist principles of the modern west.
> The argument that this is a net positive for society could use a little substantiation.
The majority of societies that have tried anything different were/are significantly worse for the average person. That seems like more than a little substantiation.
>should we adapt society to make all cultures and values equally successful?
Given that this includes people who value a society where particular values aren't successful, it is probably not possible to have a society like that.
So when you say "rest of us" here you're coming from a society that's on the edge of survival?
That's a context I definitely wasn't thinking. I'd assumed based on the conversation we were talking about cities vs small towns in relatively well established countries.
Honestly, I'm not sure I buy your hypothesis though, even if I think of struggling countries, feel you'd have to back it up with more reasoning and data. I don't really see how conformity would help. It still seems to me like it's just an obstacle, all innovation or attempts at change or trying new or different ways are shut down and repressed. If the current way of life isn't yielding the kind of outcome needed to lift them above that edge of survival, continuing to strictly enforce and being against anyone trying to go against it seems counterproductive to me.
I'm not saying you get rid of law and order. But I don't see the benefits of say banning certain type of medicine, foods, dances, music, art, social interactions, love making, natural selection of a mate, methods of trade, methods of construction, etc.
> there is a reason individual choice is emphasized almost solely in societies rich enough to afford letting people make mistakes
I feel you might have the cause and effect reversed. It could just as well be that there is a reason societies that emphasize individual choice are often the ones to become prosperous and rich.
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