Conformity and Nonconformity

Conformity is the virtue of the slave and can become the vice of the saint.It is a gloomy lesson of history that whole populations will often enslave themselves to the will of an ambitious political leader if he can promise them security and a few pennies more wages per day. And as often as not, after they have sold their birthright to him by conformity they find that they get the few extra pennies only by long hours of toil, and that the security they need most is protection from their protector.The dictator, whether he be a political or a religious one, must be able to distribute little favors to the faithful, and these he always manages to have at hand. These favors are like the fish tossed to the performing seal, or like the salt lick of early American days placed near the shooting blind to entice the wary deer within range of the old muzzleloader. But conformity is what the dictator must have if he is to do any dictating worth speaking of.Now, conformity within limits is a good thing. The musician must conform to the laws of harmony, the engineer to the laws of physics and the farmer to the law of growing things. If I would learn a new language I must bow to its grammar, its vocabulary and its idiom. And civilized society is possible only because the majority of citizens conform quietly to the rules of civilized life.When this has been said in praise of conformity, there is not much left to say about it that is good. From there on it is almost wholly evil. It is evil because it can be and often is used by the dominant few to enslave the pliable many.