What is conformity?
"Conformity is the tendency to align your attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors with those around you. It's a powerful force that can take the form of overt social pressure or subtler unconscious influence. As much as we like to think of ourselves as individuals, the fact is that we're driven to fit in, and that usually means going with the flow."
- Why did Hitler have the following that he did?
- Why do we feel like we must conform as a species, even when we KNOW that what we are doing is wrong?
- Why do we have a NEED for acceptance from others?
Why these questions?
People are conforming, albeit into mainly two separate groups, and causing a great division in my country (the United States), but why?
We have bad people who support Donald Trump for bad reasons, corrupt financial reasons, and they exclaim how GREAT of a man he is and that YOU should support him because he is GREAT! HE WON! Follow HIM!
This is an example of using power to manipulate the masses. Once you start gaining conformity in your favor, its turns into a snowball effect, and more people will start conforming even when they believe it to be wrong.
The reason why the whole U.S. population will never conform to supporting Trump, although many people do, is because to an extent we have control over our decisions before the effects of conformity kicks in. We have an amazing feature inbuilt that we call morality, and it helps us determine right from wrong. If you oppose the views of something, you still have a chance to share your opinion's with someone else, and if that person shares a similar opinion as you, you two will conform on that opinion. Those two people conform with others, and again, you have a snowball effect leading to a mass conformation in opposition to the other mass conformation.
With the technology in social media we have today, we have the ability to project our voices far louder than ever before. We have the ability to create channels, groups, subgroups, etc. so that we are never alone. We are heard species, after all, and to some point we rely on conformity to survive. We need affirmation and support from others much like a train needs a railroad to navigate. If we are doing something that "goes against the grain", our brain naturally wants to say "Why?", or "Am I Wrong?". Its a deception, and when used incorrectly, it can be a powerful weapon against our fragile minds that just want acceptance from others.
Please feel free to express your views and opinions on the subject. I enjoy other's perspectives, as it help me gain insight as to WHY you think or feel the way you do, and I like brains :)
Upvoted because this post conforms to my regular upvoting guidelines :D
Great post and thought provoking too!
Thanks for the upvote!
I'm going to put a quote here from this post about "Psychology, Ideology, Utopia, and the Commons", a good reflection about conformity and behavior in social networks.
"Aronson (1980, p. 13) noted that the "tension between values associated with individuality and values associated with conformity" has been a focus of philosophical debate and political activity from Aristotle through Hobbes and Rousseau to the present. Too often, however, what has been given sole philosophical consideration has been the conflict between the community's "right" to insist on individual participation and the individual's "right" to be autonomous; what has been relatively neglected within both philosophy and psychology has been consideration of the importance to the individual not only of autonomy but, also, of a positive sense of belonging and mutuality. Also neglected, it should be added, are the benefits for the society as a whole of having members who are in control of the important areas of their lives. "
"Also neglected, it should be added, are the benefits for the society as a whole of having members who are in control of the important areas of their lives. "
I agree with this perspective to an extent. I do believe that not everyone is capable of handling a certain amount of power. For example, I don't think I have what it takes to be the President of the Unites States for several reasons, so I could accept to let someone else be the Leader of the Free World.
As an alternative perspective, I could also join forces to eradicate our centralized government in effort to create a more decentralized form, giving more power and transparency to the people. With a decentralized type governance, the decisions of the majority will always be most favored, giving a "fair" structure that we dynamically create.
Both of these scenarios have a vulnerability for corruption though, because of mass population manipulation and our need for conformity.
I don't know the best approach to an absolute "fair" form of governance, which is part of the reason why I don't think I am fit to be the President. I do know that what we have now is not the correct answer, and that it is rapidly approaching a paradigm shift (whatever that may be). This is obviously a very complex thing to try and solve, which is why it seems that no country has figured it out completely yet. It will be interesting to say the least to watch how everything plays out.
In my post publish today, I tried to show that the ideology of conformity always work as an obstacle to the emergence of Utopias and lead to the acceptance of the forces of Power.
To me, conformity is a kind of voluntary servitude, where people abdicate of their "Importance".
This again is another great perspective of the whole picture and an excellent point of view. I have never really stopped to think potentially how detrimental conformity is to us a a species. If we removed the need for conformity from our genetic makeup, we essentially could be a near perfect species, granted we all chose to be good people, but that's a conversation about morality and how it can be so vastly different between people. What I think is right may be worlds different than what you think is right, which explains why we have never been able to create that Utopia some of us long for. Its an extremely complex thing we have going on inside of our DNA, and we still aren't even close to completely understanding it.