Quotes About Conformity

We have learned to live our lives trying to satisfy other people's demands.

Ahora nos domesticamos a nosotros mismos según el sistema de creencias que nos transmitieron y utilizando el mismo sistema de castigo y recompensa.

We are an autodomesticated animal.

During the process of domestication, we form an image of what perfection is in order to try to be good enough. We create an image of how we should be in order to be accepted by everybody. We especially try to please the ones who love us, like Mom and Dad, big brothers and sisters, the priests and the teacher. Trying to be good enough for them, we create an image of perfection, but we don't fit this image. We create this image, but this image is not real.

We need to hear the opinions of others because we are domesticated and we can be manipulated by those opinions.

Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans. We have learned to live our life trying to satisfy other people's demands. We have learned to live by other people's points of view because of the fear of not being accepted and of not being good enough for someone else.

Eventually we become someone that we are not. We become a copy of Mamma's beliefs, Daddy's beliefs, society's beliefs, and religion's beliefs.

Tras la domesticación, ya no se trata de que seamos lo suficientemente buenos para los demás. No somos lo bastante buenos para nosotros mismos porque no encajamos en nuestra propia

Nos deshonramos a nosotros mismos sólo para complacer a otras personas. Incluso llegamos a dañar nuestro cuerpo para que los demás nos acepten.

We are so well trained that we are our own domesticator. We are an autodomesticated animal. We can now domesticate ourselves according to the same belief system we were given, and using the same system of punishment and reward.

Debido a ese miedo a ser castigados y a no recibir la recompensa, empezamos a fingir que éramos lo que no éramos, con el único fin de complacer a los demás, de ser lo bastante buenos para otras personas.

With that fear of being punished and that fear of not getting the reward, we start pretending to be what we are not, just to please others, just to be good enough for someone else.

They had no control over the programming they received, so they couldn't have behaved any differently.

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.

She had come to him to escape her mother's world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceble. But he, too had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them all alike, made no, absolutely no distiction between Tereza's body and the other bodies. He sent her back to the world she tried to escape, sent to march naked with the other naked women

In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.

It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch.

She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.

Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.

In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster

The young can't help playacting; themselves incomplete, they are thrust by life into a completed world where they are compelled to act fully grown. They therefore adopt forms, patterns, models— those that are in fashion, that suit, that please—and enact them.

Behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil, and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting syllables in unison. p. 100

Because people who decline organized leisure activities are deserters from the great common struggle against boredom, and they deserve neither attention nor helmets.

It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. We do not know how to lie. The Tell the truth! imperative drummed into us by our mamas and papas functions so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman during an interrogation. It is simpler for us to argue with him or insult him (which makes no sense whatever) than to lie to his face (which is the only thing to do).