> Speaking out against racism, bigotry, and systemic issues that overwhelmingly impact POC and the LGBTQ+ community is not what I consider "conventionally minded"
It’s so unconventional that almost every Fortune 500 corporation has done so in unison.
I think there’s a part of pg’s essay that’s doing a lot more work than people realize, because everyone keeps missing it:
“ When measuring conformism, of course, you have to say with respect to what, and this changes as kids get older. For younger kids it's the rules set by adults. But as kids get older, the source of rules becomes their peers. So a pack of teenagers who all flout school rules in the same way are not independent-minded; rather the opposite.”
>It’s so unconventional that almost every Fortune 500 corporation has done so in unison.
For literally the first time in history, and most of the Fortune 500 "speaking out" is just empty words without any real action. Look how progressive Amazon is, putting the BLM banner on their homepage for a couple weeks. Meanwhile Bezos is still perpetuating awful working conditions that disproportionately impact his POC employees.
I'm in my 30s and rules in my life are not set by my peers. They're set by the older generations who overwhelmingly feel and act like "Fuck you, got mine". My life is overwhelmingly dictated by the rich and powerful and privileged, everywhere from where I live and how I live to where I work and how I work. I have very little say in how my life works, and it's rare that I ever see someone my age having any impact on that.
Also, people (and university students) don't live in a bubble. It is absolutely independently minded to grow up around parents and teachers that all have the same beliefs and then to be able to form your own beliefs that diverge largely from theirs. Just because you have people around you that made the same step doesn't make you conformist.
So you have an external locus of control, that sounds like a personal problem but let’s roll with it. Maybe you’re right and the rules aren’t set by your peers, but that wasn’t the point of the example. The point was conventional-minded people can often feel rebellious by following a certain garden path of “conventional rebellion” that has been specifically laid out for them. That doesn’t actually make them independent-minded. In fact, you’re even worse off than you think because both the society that you live in and the specific way in which you choose to rebel against it are both completely outside your control and presented to you as closed systems that you have no input or contribution to.
As one example, flouting your skepticism in r/atheism is easy.
Coming out as an atheist in the Bible Belt without living on r/atheism first?
Orders of magnitude more difficult.
Being a pro-social justice liberal in the universities is trivial - the whole social environment supports it.
Be an open, conservative Catholic in one?
We are anti-slavery today because we really believe it, but let's not forget that one huge factor in us being so is that it's laughably easy to be so in the modern West.
What is conventional rebellion? I label myself as anti-capitalist which is pretty uncommon in the US, but communism as a concept is not in any way unique or new and there have been millions of supporters of communism throughout history.
If I identify with values that less than 1% of the population identifies with, am I conformist?
It’s so unconventional that almost every Fortune 500 corporation has done so in unison.
I think there’s a part of pg’s essay that’s doing a lot more work than people realize, because everyone keeps missing it:
“ When measuring conformism, of course, you have to say with respect to what, and this changes as kids get older. For younger kids it's the rules set by adults. But as kids get older, the source of rules becomes their peers. So a pack of teenagers who all flout school rules in the same way are not independent-minded; rather the opposite.”