Quotes About Conformity

Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows 'what he wants,' while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.

Escape from Freedom attempts to show, modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.

The person who is normal in terms of being well adapted is often less healthy than the neurotic person in terms of human values. Often he is well adapted only at the expense of having given up his self in order to become more or less the person he believes he is expected to be.

Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling 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 outer chains have simply been put inside of man. The desires and thoughts that the suggestion apparatus of society fills him with, chain him more thoroughly than outer chains.

Yet all this bespeaks a dim realization of the truth—the truth that modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.

For centuries kings, priests, feudal lords, industrial bosses and parents have insisted that obedience is a virtue and that disobedience is a vice.

Contemporary society preaches this ideal of unindividualized equality because it needs human atoms, each one the same, to make them function in a mass aggregation, smoothly, without friction; all obeying the same commands, yet everybody being convinced that he is following his own desires. Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called "equality.

The unity achieved in productive work is not interpersonal; the unity achieved in orgiastic fusion is transitory; the unity achieved by conformity is only pseudo-unity. Hence, they are only partial answers to the problem of existence. The full answer lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, of fusion with another person, in love.

modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.

Der Anpassungstheorie liegen folgende Annahmen zugrunde: 1. Jede Gesellschaft als soche ist normal; 2. seelisch krann ist, wer von dem von der Gesellschaft favorisierten Persönlichkeitstyp abweicht; 3. das Gesundheitswesen im Bereich von Psychiatrie udn Psychotherapie verfolgt das Ziel, den einzelnen auf das Niveau des Durchschnittschmenschen zu bringen, unabhängig davon, ob dieser blind ist oder nicht blind.

Ballet trained you to obey orders. Your job was to become your teacher's vision. Nobody wanted a dancer with opinions.

Might never know, because she was one of those people who would always be defined by the way others perceived her.

Wives of the middle and upper classes increasingly became idle drones. They turned household management over to stewards, reduced their reproductive responsibilities by contraceptive measures, and passed their time in such occupations as novel reading, theatre going, card playing and formal visits … The custom of turning wives into ladies 'languishing in listlessness' as ornamental status objects spread downwards through the social scale. 4

I think I've always had a certain amount of skepticism of this whole 'shut up and smile' theory. I haven't ever swallowed that pill so easily, although I tried.

Success is the one unpardonable sin against one's fellows.

C'est que l'Occident ne veut pas qu'on lui ressemble, il veut seulement qu'on lui obéisse.

Group identification can powerfully reinforce these conformity effects. In experiments similar to Asch's landmark study, subjects have been found to conform much more when presented with judgments said to come from members of an in-group, and much less when judgments are said to come from out-group members. And it's not just that people tend to think what their fellow tribe members think. They will do what their fellow tribe members do—even to the point of savagery.

That must be rough, wanting to be the rag doll, wishing you were the ragged thing, when all you did wrong was be too perfect.

Because I'm supposed to be straight. I can't be gay, or stupid, or a failure. I can't. If I'm gay or stupid or a fuck-up, that means she left me and not him!

It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

We ike to think we are our own people, but sometimes it seems we are just playing out a script that was imprinted in us along ago.