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The conformity gauntlet — 40 Comments

  1. I saw some rebellion from my students to the woke claptrap before I retired. But it was very passive aggressive. They were more concerned with just getting through the system than creating huge waves like in the 60s. I suspect it’s still the same.

  2. neo:

    You’re right, the supposed nonconformity of the 60s entailed stratospheric levels of conformity. Counterculture conformity was ironclad and hidebound.

    Did you read Sloan Wilson’s novel, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”? It was on the reading/study list of one of my best English Lit courses, and I thought then and still do that it portrayed with considerable acuity and insight the conformity and alienation of life in the so-called executive suite. The counterculture purported to be a reaction, and a remedy, to that conformity and alienation. But of course the counterculture turned out to be every inch as conforming and alienating as corporate life, with tie-dye cotton standing in for gray flannel.

  3. Allan Bloom picked up the trail of the Frankfurt School in closing, the conformity is procrustean, it is stifling to sane people, as the insanity piles up

  4. It is often assumed that the brighter the student, the more independent thinker the student will be. Unfortunately, the urge to belong to a group, to align one’s beliefs with the beliefs of the “right kind” of people, can be just as strong among the bright as it is among the not-as-bright.

    Nearly 40% of students at Brown University identify as LGBTQ+ — doubling the share from 2010 The article points out that this is more than five times the national average. This appears to be a case of conformity, virtue signaling, group affiliation, peer pressure, what have you.

    I became aware of this in high school. A peer- brilliant enough to be a Merit Finalist- said that his father had signed a petition, along with all the cool people, against the Vietnam War that appeared in the New York Times. All the cool people are against the Vietnam War, so I am, too. Even brilliant people can succumb to conformity, virtue signaling, group affiliation, peer pressure, what have you.

  5. IrishOtter:

    Since it was colder where I was during the late 60s, I remember a lot of army jackets being worn by antiwar protesters. Seemed ironic to me.

  6. neo:

    Yes, army field jackets became the epitome of counterculture chic, replacing the tie-dyed fashions that reached their apogee, I reckon, during the Summer of Love or thereabouts. I remember reading an essay that explained the tie-dye-to-field jacket transition as a consequence of the supplanting of the “happy hippie” peace-and-love spirit with a grim, violent, up-against-the-wall-muthafucker revolutionary ethos.Thus, in the same way that tie-dyed t-shirts were discarded for army field jackets, Monterey Pop and Woodstock gave way to Altamont mayhem and Symbionese Liberation Army terrorism.

  7. I started college in 1950. Yes, it was a time when people adhered to certain standards. We dressed similarly, we watched the same movies (Most movies then were morality tales about good and bad. The good guys wore white hats and were clean shaven.)
    We all wanted to be the good guys.

    Attendance in class was expected and your grade suffered if you didn’t attend. Grades were on a curve. A gentleman’s C was unheard of. People actually flunked out in those days.

    Most everyone I knew was attending college with the hopes of translating their field of study into a job after graduation.

    About the most nonconforming acts were panty raids, and post-football game riots.

    Most of the people I knew believed that they could improve their lot in life by applying themselves and working hard.

    The males all knew we were going to have to deal with the prospect of being drafted after we graduated, and the Korean War was on. Yet most looked at that prospect as just the way things were, not a tragedy or a crime.

    Life was pretty good unless you tried to buck the system. The laws were enforced, and if you broke the law and were arrested, you could expect to be punished.

    The conformity was based on the expectations I have noted above. Play your cards right, and you might prosper.

    All of us were children during the Depression. Most had seen how the Depression affected their parents and didn’t want that to happen to them. We were also children during WWII and knew that war was not some mystery or something that happened to others.

    IMO, bucking the system on a large scale happens in countries that have given up on law enforcement, or where the Marxists are trying to take power.
    We have both going on here in the U.S. right now. I’ll take the conformity of the 50s.

  8. re 1950s conformity…it’s hard to tell whether the conformity was worse then or whether it’s worse now. My general feeling is that it’s worse now…but OTOH, I was struck by something I ran across in an article by William Whyte. He mentions a documentary put out by Monsanto about its research , circa 1952:

    “It was a pretty good film, but what did it have to do about Monsanto’s research–much of which has been most imaginative? In one part of the picture you see five young men in white coats conferring around a microscope. The voice on the sound track rings out boldly, “No geniuses here. Just a bunch of good American working together.”

    I doubt that very many companies would want to make such an assertion about their researchers today.

    Mentioned & discussed in my review of Herman Wouk’s ‘The Caine Mutiny”

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/43106.html

  9. In the Fifties, people who’d had their formative years turned upside-down by depression and war, were just trying to life normal lives. A younger generation that was brought up in relative affluence could rage against conformity, the rat race, and the system, but their parents had to work within the system and apply themselves to give the younger generation that affluence and security.

    The critique of Fifties conformity has a lot to do with politics, and I’m not sure how legitimate that is. People did come back from the wars more broadminded, and more open to those of different backgrounds. This was a big change, but it wasn’t much noticed by social critics, even when they were a part of that change. Today, in period films, there’s always the bad, bigoted character, who’s afraid of what the neighbors will think or just hostile to those who are different, but the change in the Fifties was that groups that had lived closed off from one another before were beginning to interact with each other and live in a shared world. Some people were still shut out, but the changes that were in motion were also coming for them, and might not have happened without the change in attitude that was already at work.

    I also wonder how much of the criticism of conformity was by leftists and related directly to the decline or suppression of the left after the war, the expectation being that nonconformity meant joining the leftist bandwagon, espousing the same ideas, and mouthing the same slogans (but I also wonder whether criticism of conformity isn’t always about politics in one way or another, since conformity or non-conformity in fashion or lifestyle is relatively trivial by comparison).

    One thing that occured to me lately: the revolt against conformity was related to the revolt against corporate dominance of society. Public interest and activist groups developed in the 60s and 70s as a part of that revolt. Did anybody forsee that those activist groups would join forces with corporate America and become part of the establishment? How many people don’t see that supposed public interest groups have often become just another racket, and very much part of the system.

  10. so Catch 22 was really more about the subsequent era the 50s, then Heller’s own experience in the Med, the film made it even clearer Vietnam subtext, with the once enfant terrible Orson Welles playing a Colonel Blimp type, and other dialogs about neutrality,

  11. The left’s insistence upon conformity makes perfect sense… when the goal is to establish an idiocracy as deep and wide as possible. The Road to Serfdom is paved with liberal “useful idiots”.

  12. I don’t think Heller really accomplished much after that Good as Gold, was sort of a satire on Kissingerian careerism, there was one interesting one that contrasted Athenian and Dutch Culture

  13. Abraxas..”In the Fifties, people who’d had their formative years turned upside-down by depression and war, were just trying to life normal lives. A younger generation that was brought up in relative affluence could rage against conformity, the rat race, and the system, but their parents had to work within the system and apply themselves to give the younger generation that affluence and security.”

    This ties to Koestler’s theory about the Tragic and Trivial planes of life…as explained by his friend, the writer and fighter pilot Richard Hillary:

    ““K has a theory for this. He believes there are two planes of existence which he calls vie tragique and vie triviale. Usually we move on the trivial plane, but occasionally in moments of elation or danger, we find ourselves transferred to the plane of the vie tragique, with its non-commonsense, cosmic perspective. When we are on the trivial plane, the realities of the other appear as nonsense–as overstrung nerves and so on. When we live on the tragic plane, the realities of the other are shallow, frivolous, frivolous, trifling. But in exceptional circumstances, for instance if someone has to live through a long stretch of time in physical danger, one is placed, as it were, on the intersection line of the two planes; a curious situation which is a kind of tightrope-walking on one’s nerves…I think he is right.”

    My thought is that those who had gone through WWII had had plenty of Tragic (in Koestler’s sense) in their lives, and were ready for some Trivial.

  14. I went to a small state college in the late 70’s to early 80’s. I remember absolutely no political issues on campus and I was actually a member of the student government. I do remember hoping that grownup government was better than we were. (Manically laughing)

    Students were more interested in course work finding relationships and, well drinking.

    I wonder if the small state colleges are hotbeds of progressive thinking.

  15. “Liberal Education and Politics”, David Bolotin:

    There is no discussion of these matters in class. In other words, we read the books, but we never even entertain the possibility that what they say is true. Which is to say that we don’t really read the books.

    But why don’t we? Why are the clear opportunities that our Program offers for reflection on our political and moral convictions not taken up? Well, the most visible and most immediate reason, I would say, is because of what is known as political correctness or the cancel culture. For just as Plato wrote in the passage I read from the Republic, it isn’t safe to challenge contemporary orthodoxy. To be sure, there is no threat of imprisonment or death. But the threats to one’s reputation and even livelihood are very great indeed.

    https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/34/4/liberal-education-and-politics#_ftn2

  16. miguel cervantes:

    A Vietnam context may have been present in the film of Catch-22 (I hated the film and liked the book). But it certainly wasn’t present in the book, which came out in 1961.

    If the book had any antecedents, I think it was Robert Graves’ WWI memoir Goodbye to All That.

  17. IrishOtter49:

    My personal recollection is that the two sartorial styles co-existed. It really depended on the weather more than anything.

  18. Neo: [Sixties nonconformity] was mostly cosmetic, and became a type of conformity in and of itself.”

    That’s in fact a bit of an understatement, at least judging by my own experience in the “counter-culture” of the late ’60s. It was extremely conformist.

    And, fifteen years later, as an employee in a high-tech company, which as we now well know tended to include a lot of left-leaning people, I was astonished to hear from a co-worker his reservations about a new hire: “I don’t know about him. His politics are ok, but…” That the new guy’s politics would be the first thing mentioned shocked me, but not as much as the fact that they were mentioned at all. Though I had strong political opinions (turning conservative at that point), it was no more a factor in my opinion of my co-workers than hair color.

    That obviously was an early sign of what was to come in corporate culture. The speaker in that exchange was about my age, and also a former campus hippie/radical.

  19. @ miguel — “ditto” & link to substack post

    I believe el gato malo is onto something.
    Lots of the ellipses are skipping over screenshots that support his observations.
    I’ve eliminated some white space (can we still say that?) to shorten the excerpt visually; can’t do anything about the style — has anyone ever seen gato and miguel at the same time??

    as many of you likely saw, bill ackman is going scorched earth on academia. after some folks at MIT came after his wife’s dissertation, he decided to take a look at the publications of every professor and leader at the school.
    you can read his (quite long) discourse on this HERE. (link)

    to be sure, bill is a formidable foe. he’s also arguably unhinged. but whatever your take on him, but he’s certainly one who relishes a fight and who has a legions of smart, obsessive analysts working for him to bring to bear and a set of new AI tools to fuel them.

    this is just the tip of the iceberg.
    but it’s also ancillary.
    consider:
    overton windows are funny things.

    you just cannot get a conversation going about certain topics or ideas until the world is ready, but once it is, it happens like a torrent.

    slowly, slowly, then all at once.

    ackman is not nemesis but a symptom of nemesis. the time had come for this to happen. he happened to be front and center when it did.
    and that’s a VERY important distinction because it means he is not alone.
    he’s part of a tide that sweeps clean and once in motion, the tide does not stop.

    a fun and perhaps less considered aspect of the impending rummage through academic publication:
    plagiarism is going to be the least of it.

    this has been an incredibly isolated and unaccountable ivory tower.
    small groups of hyper-politicized and fetishistically tribal hyper-partisans took over entire fields of endeavor. they took over the journals. they took over the grant giving. all of it.

    this has made a lysenko level mess out of entire fields for decades. it has turned peer review into an ideological commissariat whose primary purpose has been to speak power to truth and to prevent truth from being spoken at all.

    and now, suddenly, these obscure journals and dissertations, previously read only by other like minded members of “the club” who cared about nothing save ideological purity are going to be read widely.
    propensity for plagiarism will be the least of the revelations.
    the content is going to horrify.</b.

    it’s SO much worse than people suspect.

    and none of this is new.

    it’s just that no one was paying attention because who cares what the current iteration of “how many angels can dance upon the head of a pin” happens to be?
    it was a parlor game for tweedy irrelevancies.

    but people are interested now. this spilled out into politics and economics and regulation and child rearing. it filled elementary schools and boardrooms alike.
    and that crosses a rubicon.
    and now comes the pushback.
    academia is open for audit.


    and when the world gets a look at what has been passing for academia, it’s going to get very, very interesting for the academics because these people are so corrupt, so self-absorbed, so out of step, and so detached from reality that they have not only destroyed but actually inverted the whole system of “higher education” and turned the university into a self-serving fallacy factory for deranged doctrine.

    and enough is enough.
    occult academia has thrived and festered in obscurity.
    it’s going to be amazing what a little sunshine can disinfect.

  20. re 1950s conformity…it’s hard to tell whether the conformity was worse then or whether it’s worse now. My general feeling is that it’s worse now…
    ==
    That depends on what norms they’re respecting. In the 1950s, divorce, illegitimacy, sexual deviance, sexual misbehavior (among women), use of profanity in mixed company, physical cowardice (among men), observable psychiatric issues, and species of immodesty were all status-lowering (sometimes status-wrecking). Being in certain racial categories was as well. So was a history of affiliation with totalitarian outfits. Other than the ascribed traits, pretty much everything on this list should be status lowering, if not to the extent they were at that time.

  21. Maybe Groucho’s “I would never join a club that would allow people like me to be a member” should replace “E Pluribus Unum”…

    Hmmm. Not sure how you’d get it on the currency, though…

    Hold on: “IWNJACTWAPLMTBAM” might work.
    (Kinda looks like it could be Latin—or even better, Cree.)

  22. neo:

    My personal recollection is that the popularity of tie-dyed clothing waned steadily and progressively in the late sixties and early seventies, and had pretty much disappeared by the mid seventies. At Michigan State (my first school) in 1968 the SDS people and other up-against-the-wall- muthafucka elements all affected the army field jacket look. If you wore tye-dye you simply weren’t a serious person.

    I arrived in Boulder CO in the late sixties (CU was my third school) and it was, at the time, in that counterculture hotbed, almost nowhere to be seen — it had become passé among adults, sort of a joke, worn mostly by preteens and kids. Also, down jackets and vests were ascendant, replacing army field jackets as the preferred cool weather outdoor wear. Down jackets and vests made by Holubar, a local company, represented the height of Rock Mountain chic.

    That’s how I remember it. As it happened, I had an army field jacket. I still do. I love the look.

  23. There’s a horror a novel by Robert Bloch were he talks about how hippies say they value individuality and all dress the same. Bloch hated hippies.

    A lot of non-conformists are like the goths on South Park. When one of the characters tries to join them they tell how to be non-conformist: “You have to dress like we do and listen to the same music as we do.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05_GNs6brkk

  24. A Field Jacket without a liner in pretty much worthless if you need to stay warm. But when did or does fashion make any sense. Fidel and Che wore commie equivalents of Field Jackets for propaganda purposes, fighting the hegomonic capitalist running dogs (aka Dog Faced Pony Soldiers)?

    Brains full of mush. Now they wear a kafia (not black togs with runes).

  25. I started collage in 1956 and was in medical school by the time the 60s came around. About 1966 it all came to a head and the junior class refused to take the final exam on Surgery. They said it “wasn’t relevant.” The professor, one of my favorite characters, said, “OK. I will just give you all an incomplete.” By June they realized that an incomplete became a D if not corrected. They decided to take the exam after all. One student failed the exam and went to the professor to complain. He said “You asked the wrong questions on that exam. I know so much more about Surgery than was on the exam.”

    The professor, well known for a sense of humor, said, “OK I will mentally give you a passing grade. I’ll just put the F on the paper.”

    The kid said “But it’s what’s on the paper that counts !” The professor just smiled as he told the story.

  26. IrishOtter:

    I agree that tie-dye clothes had a fairly brief run (a few years) as did army jackets, but I recall their run as being concurrent.

    I had an army jacket that was very warm. It was padded.

  27. I think that conformity pressure has always been with us to some extent.

    Part of the benefit of the USA is that there was always somewhere to bleed off those most resistant to it.

    The USA, meanwhile, represented a place for much of Europe and even Asia to dump their “miscreants” and “troublemakers” off to. As the local culture got too constricting, peeps would move west to the edges, or even into the unexplored, to get free of the binds that society was wrapping about them.

    This is one reason why we need to open up Space to the masses, to provide that escape route for those who need less conformity and more freedom… ‘Cause there ain’t no more west, really.

  28. }}} The professor, well known for a sense of humor, said, “OK I will mentally give you a passing grade. I’ll just put the F on the paper.”

    The kid said “But it’s what’s on the paper that counts !” The professor just smiled as he told the story.

    I had a professor who marked me “wrong” on my answers for a couple questions on a final exam… Enough to drop my final overall grade by half a letter grade.

    I went to him, talked to him about the places where he’d taken off points, and pointed out that, from my interactions in class he clearly knew I knew what he had deducted points for. He openly acknowledged to me that I was correct. That he knew I knew the correct answers, I simply hadn’t phrased them the way he’d been looking for, having presumed certain information I considered obvious to anyone.

    .

    SOB still refused to give me the points because — and I quote: “He didn’t like me.”

    Bastard. I hope he’s being graded in Hell the same way. :-/

  29. I’m reminded of one particular gut course in business school, operations which is the science of scheduling it was particularly difficult because the instructor didn’t really go into the details, I haven’t seen any business make proper use of it,

  30. }}} this has made a lysenko level mess out of entire fields for decades.

    Indeed, this is where the massive issue of The Decline Effect, aka The Reproduceability Crisis is coming from.

    An erstwhile blogger by the name of Wolf Howling wrote about it well over a decade ago:

    The Scientific Method & Its Limits – The Decline Effect
    http://wolfhowling.blogspot.com/2011/01/scientific-method-its-limits-decline.html

    Hint: It hasn’t gotten any better in the intervening timeframe.

  31. I attended Michigan State early to late Sixties. It occurred to me that people sought out the group(s) they liked or aspired to. A degree of conformity within each group would not be off-putting.
    It would be different conformities, and obvious in many cases due to dress. Frats, business school, SDS types, so forth.
    The enforced stuff did not come into my view One exception would be a couple of anthro grad students who said cultural relativism was crap but they were required to teach it.
    We had a fraternity reunion of, roughly, classes of 65-70 in the early nineties. A surprising number had served. And were married to their first wives.

  32. It’s fun to trash the hippies who opposed conformity with a vengeance, then established their own rigid conformity. No argument there.

    But there were voices in that world who noticed the contradiction:
    __________________________

    I hear the sound of marching feet down Sunset Boulevard to Crescent Heights and there at Pandora’s Box, we are confronted with a vast quantity of plastic people…

    Then go home and check yourself
    You think we’re singing ’bout someone else
    But you’re plastic people
    Oh baby, now you’re such a drag

    –Frank Zappa, “Plastic People” (1967)
    https://musicfor.us/2018/07/09/frank-zappa-plastic-people-1967/

    __________________________

    I have yet to notice any difference in this respect between hippies, Democrats, Republicans and conservatives. A few may break their tribal programming, but damn few.
    __________________________

    You think we’re singing ’bout someone else

  33. @ ObloodyHell – “Indeed, this is where the massive issue of The Decline Effect, aka The Reproduceability Crisis is coming from.”

    Thanks for the link. I’ve seen posts with the same lament over the years, but it’s always good to have a reminder.

    Wolf Howling is still active at two sites (if it’s the same person you cited, and the viewpoint and writing look similar).

    These are recent, although duplicate, posts.
    Relevant today in re both the Penn stature debacle, and the attempted revisionism in posts about Rufo’s victory cry over President Gay’s resignation. (“Scalped!”)

    https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/contrary_to_leftist_revisionism_native_american_culture_was_indeed_savage.html
    November 29, 2023
    Contrary To Leftist Revisionism, Native American Culture Was Indeed ‘Savage’
    By Wolf Howling

    https://www.bookwormroom.com/2023/11/29/savage-indians-modern-canards/
    Savage Indians & Modern Canards
    Posted on November 29, 2023 by Wolf Howling
    An edited version of this post appears at American Thinker.

    Here’s a different, older post, which also has some relevance now, given that the Left is probably not going to be happy with whatever the Supreme Court does in re Trump’s legal questions.
    https://www.bookwormroom.com/2022/07/21/progressives-playing-calvinball/

    Calvin and Hobbes was a popular cartoon series about the fantasy life of a six-year-old brat and his tiger sidekick. Calvinball was a game with no set rules, except that Calvin — or on occasion, Hobbes — made up new rules to the game to give themself the advantage as the game was being played. It was funny as a cartoon; it is deadly serious when it is replicated in our nation’s politics, with progressives playing Calvinball to remake the Constitution.

    Progressives are changing the rules about whether they must adhere to decisions of the Supreme Court. They would change the filibuster rule that has protected the minority in the Senate since about 1805. And Progressives want to make the Supreme Court into a permanent progressive majority. Indeed, the last time democrats acted with such disdain for the Constitution and the norms of this nation was when they believed Republicans would free the Democrats’ slaves.

    [a review of decisions by the conservative-majority court that precipitated much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the left]

    This is the stuff of adolescent tantrums and Calvinball. But Calvinball has no place in our nation’s government. These scum engaging in it are playing a very dangerous game. That said, it is not as if they have not done so before in our nation’s history.

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