Amerika

When the hippies took over the educational system, the view of students changed: we were all to praise the creative, non-conformist, boundary-breaking and contrarian instead of the time-honored.

This was silly, really, because the actual non-conformists were not conforming or non-conforming; they had their own agenda, and like that of the top students, it related to positive goals in reality. Artists gotta art; A-student football players must overachieve.

But what defined the hippies was that they were the first people to face a future of corporate jobs and increased government control of society, and in response, they became rebel contrarians who refused to conform to anything that the mainstream accepted.

Of course, they were thoroughly conformist, only to their social group and not the majority of society. They conformed to nonconformity, which is part of the general liberal psychology that holds that the world is bad and must be rebelled against with contrarian tantrums.

Non-conformity is part of the tantrum that individualists have against the world. You are either transcendentalist, or guided by the beauty of life toward affirmative and positive goals of further creating goodness, or you are an individualist stranded in your self and social ego.

Individualists retaliate against the world with a single strategy: “things are not as they seem.” This seduces us, because things are rarely as they initially seem, until we debug from effect to cause, but things are as they seem once you get to that cause.

They like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In rejecting initial impressions, they also reject the ability to ever understand anything about reality, and in its place they substitute a strong anti-realism that favors symbols that are emotionally stimulating over reality.

Non-conformists thus have a great strength in motivating people away from illusions, but then replace those illusions with an even greater illusion. This is the basis of all superstition, symbolism, compromise, and self-worship.

Not surprisingly, the Abrahamic religions favor non-conformity as a retaliation against reality. Kevin MacDonald analyzed a “culture of critique” among Jews but took it too far. The secret to Jewish success is in part non-conformity.

This is why the idea of a unified Protocols of the Learned Elders of Ziyon style “The Jews”™ is laughable, and also explains why there are as many Christian sects are there are churches. Non-conformity to their own religions keeps them surging forward with growth.

In particular, among the Jews, non-conformity means finding a message that always appeals to people. No one wants to hear that reality is as the textbooks established centuries ago; they want new ideas which might be easier, more fun, and less restrictive.

With Christians, non-conformity means always deviating from what succeeds in order to explore what makes people “feel” better, a term that means more liberation from obligation to reality than actual pleasure. In fact, the Christians tie it to martyrdom and suffering!

The downside of Abrahamic non-conformity is that it makes their people forever reactive, and therefore always responding to previous non-conformity with new non-conformity, which separates them from realism and makes the transcendental impossible.

Similarly liberalism pursues a Hegelian stepladder of reactions to past reactions, with no one stopping to think that maybe they should cease reacting to reality, and instead just explore it.

The pagan idea of harmony is ill-understood in a pacifistic time because we think of “harmony” as a lack of conflict, but to them it meant all parts working together toward a whole oriented in the future, not the present.

We can see through this lens how non-conformity, while it is perennially popular, distracts from the pursuit of actual goodness and hope for the future. Instead of reacting to the world like it hurt us, we can find a place within it and maximize that for future outcomes.

Tags: abrahamism, contrarianism, hegelian stepladder, non-conformity, paganism