[6] Conformity

You are either right or wrong

Dear Readers,

It’s been a month since we launched Life in Color. 🤗 🤭 😄

As February comes to an end, we thought it would be fitting to do a piece on conformity. After all, February is the non-conformist month, it decided to only have 28 days (29 on leap years).

We explore conformity through the lenses of binary decisions (right or wrong, yes or no, etc).

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Have a wonderful week! ✌️

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“I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious…”

- The guy who I thought was a Conformist in the Matrix Movie

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Conformity is one of those ideas in the modern zeitgeist that is so anti-Hero’s Arc and anti-individualism. Most of the time, Conformity has a negative connotation. 

The irony is that at some level, most of us conform and evolution can explain away some of this. When the world was filled with animals that can eat you, it’s a lot easier to agree, band together and move in a pack. The last thing you want is to get ostracized by the group. 

To conform means to survive. 

Many of us do not want to admit it, but conformity has become our default mode. Sometimes it’s easier to just agree with everyone and move on. Sometimes the pressure to conform is just too great. Other times, you may not care about the issue at hand enough to argue. 

There is a time and place to conform and then there is a time and place to not conform. But in today’s society it’s a lot easier to conform than not-conform. The make-up of society isn’t conducive to individualism especially in “serious” topics. So we end up arguing more about where to eat dinner than arguing about an important issue at work where the pressure to conform is high. 

The tragedy is people would prefer to argue, debate and express their opinions, but if they do, they’ll suffer some backlash… it’s not your fault… blame your organization and the traditional systems that are in place.

Why Conformity is so Powerful?

Conformity starts when there is one person or unit in a group that has outsized power (not necessarily formal authority, influence also counts). 

The powerful person or unit has an idea.  Once they have convinced themselves they are right, they get people around them to validate it. They may frame it as “asking for your advice / opinion” but they are really asking for validation. (We all have an ego and prefer to be right versus wrong). Enough people buy into the idea and it becomes “too big too fail” or “big enough to not fail easily.”

Conformity exhibits a network effect of sorts; it’s harder to challenge an idea once many people buy into it. This is why new ideas are so hard to introduce and implement … it goes against a big group of people. The big group of people who bought into the original system have trouble admitting that they were all wrong. This is a tough pill to swallow because they all question: how can WE ALL be wrong, there must be something wrong with the non-conformist.

Worse, once you have a big group of people who conform, it becomes harder to go deeper on new ideas. Instead the new idea usually gets framed and evaluated at a high level as a binary decision (e.g. “right or wrong,” “yes or no,” etc) with no room to land somewhere in the uncertain and messy middle.

You are either for it or against it!

The problem with this thinking is that it assumes quantity (number of people buying into an idea or decision) is a signal for a quality outcome. Just because more people buy into a decision, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good decision or the right one.

Of course, there are times when “right or wrong” makes sense – these are for simple decisions or more obvious decisions. But when many variables exist and create complexity, there is a large spectrum between “right or wrong.” Applying a Right or Wrong framework forces people to make a decision for making a decision’s sake without factoring in the complexity of the problem and the nuances of it. This pushes us to be lazy and converge on an over simplified answer.

By the way, we are trained to do this largely at a young age through our education systems. On a grade school exam, a complex question is asked as a multiple choice question, as if all the choices the exam writer came up with is exactly the universe of choices that apply to that question.

The design of a large part of society forces us to choose between simple, absolute answers for complex problems that don’t have absolute answers. Couple this with the fact that conformity seems to give some people a psychological safety net as well. It becomes the perfect self-reinforcing flywheel.

It is no wonder why some of the decisions that are made, are made the way they are. 

BUT what if I don’t want to conform 😭

For (what seems to be) the few that are searching for Truth and are willing to go through the mess of finding a complex answer to a complex problem, they get ostracized by the crowd. (Remember, people hate the uncertain and messy middle.)

And if you can withstand many instances and layers of ostracization for being a non-conformist, you join the small crowd that society ironically admires. (“Wow you are so avant garde… respect 👊”)

This makes sense, it’s why we admire Heroes. After all, we don’t watch movies about conformists; we watch movies about the non-conformists and the contrarians. For many in society, hero movies become an escape from their reality of normal and sameness they face every day, so that for a few hours they can be a part of the Hero’s journey, even if it’s just through observation via the medium of a screen. But once the movie ends, it’s back to reality.

But wait, there are a lot of smart people in society, how can there be so many conformists? 

Ego. 

No one wants to be the person that realizes they’ve made a wrong decision and everything they believed in and acted upon was wrong. 

The narratives we tell ourselves tries to reconcile everything along simple spectrums. This goes back to wanting to think in “right or wrong” versus the messy, nuanced gray area in the middle.

And lets for a minute entertain the fact that hypothetically all problems can be answered with a binary / simple Right or Wrong spectrum. You can still be a non-conformist in this world, and you may even argue it’s easier to be a non-conformist in a world that argues through simple models (absolutes: either this or that) because there are fewer choices for you to make … so probability-wise, you have a higher chance of being right. But it’s also vastly easier to conform in this world because you also only have two choices and making the (conforming) crowd’s decision blatantly evident.

So either way, conformity is the tendency. It is the easy way out.

This means even as a smart person, rather than seeking truth, your natural tendency is to find ways to support your own version of truth. Whether it’s the actual Truth or not is beside the point. At the end of the day, it’s your truth and that’s all that matters. 

This fallacy leads society to a point where we would rather be wrong together than right alone. 

This is the ultimate easy way out and the easy way out has been reinforced multiple times over and over. There is almost something magical and beautiful about the conformity flywheel. 🎡 🎡 🎡

Maybe on some deeper level, conformity is the mechanism that keeps humans propelling forward because it allows us to move in lockstep… not too dissimilar from an ant colony.

Maybe this is our nature and we cannot escape it.

Maybe our capacity to evolve hinges on this system being in place so that we can enable the few to play the specific role of being non-conformist to move our society forward.

If everyone took the hard way out (i.e. not conforming), then it wouldn’t be the hard way out. The only reason we have heroes is because not everyone can be or wants to be one.

Heroes by definition are non-conformists … they stand out. A lot of us want to be the hero, but we don’t want to take on everything that comes from being the Hero.

This whole discussion has not factored in the fact that some people may just be content and their purpose in life is very different. 

The grand irony to all of this is that, if “Right or Wrong” is not meant to be applied to something as complex as this topic, then society is neither right nor wrong for their conformist tendencies. 🤯 🤯 🤯

Society is just a function of how many people buy into the system, and perhaps quantity does matter. To be in a society means to conform on some level; whether right or wrong is beside the point.

Is conformity bad? 

Meta isn’t it… because if I answer “yes or no” then I’ve also subscribed to a “right or wrong” framework to such a loaded question.

So let me take the easy way out … I have to answer this question with a question.

Would you rather be the person at the beginning of this post? i.e. Let’s all agree this is what steak should taste like, whether it’s a real steak or not… who cares...

OR

Would you rather be Neo, the protagonist of the movie?

I like to think we all can be the protagonist of our stories. 

But can and will are two different things.

The choice is yours. 🔴 💊 🔵