Tao Te Ching
Conformity
One of the deepest and most common human motivations revolves around some version of approval seeking. In our genetic past, without approval from our hunter-and-gatherer groups, survival became impossible. Throughout the ages of our varying cultures and civilizations, gaining and maintaining approval continued as both a prioritized goal and a means to our other desires. Approval became a road toward wealth, power, fame, and better breeding potentials. Unfortunately however, this goal comes with a cost: conformity. Most groups become easily threatened by the diversity, innovation, and uniqueness necessary for creative problem solving and evolution but antithetical to true-believing group orthodoxy.
Gaining approval often relies on deception, arrogance, and greed. We sell our souls, our true selves and deep inspirations for the smiles and respect of those around us. Most of history’s wise teachers and prime movers followed their inner visions rather than society’s norms. Leonardo da Vinci said, “If you are alone, you are all your own; with a companion you are half yourself” and Michelangelo, “I am always alone and speak to no one... I have no friend of any kind and I do not want any.” Most of us would not and would be better not to take anti-conformity that far. Most also though could profit from selling at least a less less of their souls for the currency of acceptance and conformity.
Every historical period and culture has balanced a conservative, herd-instinct conformity with an innovative, creative approach to the current issues. For almost all of history, however—mainly up until modern times—external circumstances changed extremely slowly so the appropriate balance tilted toward conservatism. With the extraordinary rate of change in today's world, this balance needs to shift away from the animal-realm, conventional allegiance. Unfortunately though, evolutionary forces haven't had much time to make this important transition.
Quotes (118)
“the majority of people suffer from a common disease, as in a plague, with their false notions about things, and their number is increasing (for in mutual emulation they catch the disease from one another, like sheep)”
“Stop believing in wise words and reason; you will become your own sage.”
“Only those not seduced and controlled by something external will remain unmanipulated, uncorrupted by power.”
“There is nothing more foolish, nothing more given to outrage than a useless mob.”
“To reduce one's diet, consign one's body to the flames, or wear coarse clothing are among the most difficult things in the world do o. And yet people will do them because they know their superiors will be pleased.”
“Don’t chase after people’s approval. Don’t depend on your plans. Don’t make decisions; let decisions make themselves.”
“While he does not follow the crowd, he won't complain about those who do... The man of Tao remains unknown.”
“I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.”
“Alas! all joy has vanished from my life,
Alone beside the hill.
Never to follow fashion will I stoop,
Then must live lonely still.”
“Let your eyes see what they see, not what others want you to see.”
“Whoever observes complicated rules of propriety is rotten in his innermost heart.”
“Everything in the world may be imitated except truth, because truth that is imitated is no longer the truth.”
“I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.”
“The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
“What sort of man at such a time would come to visit the teacher?
As this is not a time for flowers, I find I've come alone.”
“You say I gave too much; I say too little. What I paid was my social body, my town body, my family body, and all my inherited jewels.”
“It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority.”
“To say that a blind custom of obedience should be a surer obligation than duty taught and understood is to affirm that a blind man my tread surer with a guide than a seeing man by a light.”
“Everyone is as others wish them to be... win their hearts and so their tongues.”
“affect ignorance... In everything the taste of the many carries the day... follow it in the hope of leading it to higher things.”
“Nothing is thoroughly approved but mediocrity. The majority has established this, and it fixes its fans on whatever gets beyond it either way.”
“Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.”
“When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
“those who walk in the beaten path always throw stones at those who would show them a new way”
“Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude.”
“I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.”
“Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of the few; and number not voices, but weigh them.”
“I begin to grow heartily tired of the etiquette and nonsense so fashionable in this city.”
“There is nothing more odious than the majority. It consists of a few powerful men who lead the way; of accommodating rascals and submissive weaklings; and of a mass of men who trot after them without in the least knowing their own minds.”
“All education is despotism… Go there; do that; read; write; rise; lie down… teachers, politics and modes of government poison our minds before we can resist, or so much as suspect their malignity. They deprive us of our vitality”
“We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.”
“When we come to see how superficial and futile are most people’s thoughts, how narrow their ideas, how mean their sentiments, how perverse their opinions; we will understand that to lay great value upon what other people say is to pay them too much honor.”
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds but it will be seen that they go mad in herds. They only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new… The head monkey in Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.”
“the majority of us scarcely see more distinctly the faultiness of our own conduct than the faultiness of our own arguments or the dullness of our own jokes... by dint of admitting to himself that he was too much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike them”
“Almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.”
“Since the beginning of time, the craving for community of worship remains as the main cause of our suffering. For that we’ve killed and tortured each other, said ‘Put away your gods and worship ours or we will kill you and your gods.’”
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform… Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.”
“so engrained in the human heart is the desire to believe that some people really do know what they say they know, and can thus save them from the trouble of thinking for themselves, that in a short time would-be philosphers and faddists became more powerful than ever, and gradually led their countrymen to accept all those absurd views of life”
“everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor is henceforth called evil; the submissive, modest, conforming mentality, the mediocrity of desires attains honors.”
“A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence. It has no critical faculty... It respects force and can only be slightly influence by kindness... It wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters. Fundamentally it is entirely conservative and it has a deep aversion to all innovations”
“Civilization: the matter of wearing your shirt in the confines of your trousers.”
“Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to de-numb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.”
“Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance.”
“Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.”
“Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.”
“Most men die at twenty or thirty; thereafter they are only reflections of themselves: for the rest of their lives they are aping themselves, repeating from day to day more and more mechanically and affectedly what they said and did and thought and loved when they were alive.”
“A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.”
“adolescence is the only period during which we really leaned anything... later we see things from a more practical point of view in conformity with the rest of society”
“so long as men are not trained to withhold judgement in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans.”
“One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.”
“When a civilization becomes so standardized that the individual can no longer make an imprint on it, then that civilization is dying. The 'mass mind' has taken over and another set of national glories is heading for history's scrap heap.”
“it ended apparently in the triumph of chastity. Love was suppressed, held in darkness and chains, by fear, conventionality, aversion, or a tremulous yearning to be pure.... But this triumph of chastity was only an apparent, a pyrrhic victory.”
“It was an entry into the monastery of the world, a submission to the vow to believe only in what was probably, average, commonplace, barren of meaning, to renounce everything strange and significant, and reduce anything extraordinary to the banal... only surfaces that hid nothing, only beginnings without continuations, failures that claimed to be problems, oppressively narrow horizons, and the unending desert of routine.”
“Without really wanting to at all, they pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and it could all be done or left undone just as well by machines... the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead.”
“'Oh Tigger, where are your manners?' 'I don’t know, but I bet they’re having more fun than I am.'”
“The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.”
“The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different... Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.”
“You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.”
“The Inquisition left its evil mark on European society, made torture a recognized part of legal procedure, and drove men back from the adventure of reason into a fearful and stagnant conformity.”
“Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.”
“One should be either sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.”
“People imagined that it was out of date of follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people's notions, notions that were crammed down everybody's throat.”
“Is it a mad society or a sane one? And even if it's pretty sane, is it right that anybody should be completely adjusted to it?”
“The right way is not always the popular and easy way. Standing for right when it is unpopular is a true test of moral character.”
“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”
“Human history began with an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience.”
“Life's more important than a living. So many people who make a living are making death, not life. Don't ever join them. They're the gravediggers of our civilization - The safe men. The compromisers. The moneymakers.”
“If other people do not understand our behavior—so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us… know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself—to his reason and his conscience.”
“As long as mankind is made up of independent individuals with free will, there cannot be any social status quo. Men will develop new urges, and these will give rise to new problems, which will require ever new solutions. Human life implies adventure, and there is no adventure without struggles and dangers.”
“If people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter… We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.”
“We must learn to be different…If Wakan Tanka likes the plants, the animals, even little mice and bugs to do this, how much more will he abhor people being alike, doing the same thing, getting up at the same time, putting on the same kind of store-bought clothes, working in the same office at the same job with their eyes on the same clock and, worst of all, thinking alike all the time.”
“In a society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behavior is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.”
“The more people there are who agree, the more the point they agree upon becomes of great significance and importance. Contrary views are taken to be wrong views, mistaken perceptions.”
“The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how to behave, and what the values are that they should be living for.”
“The moment you meet a teacher, you should leave the teacher, and you should be independent.”
“What T. S. Elliot meant in his poem, The Waste Land... a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you're told, with no courage for your own life. That is the wasteland.”
“Going along with the rest and wanting to say 'we' were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible.”
“Just because this has always been this way, doesn't mean that it is the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality”
“‘official psychotherapy’ lacks integrity and becomes the obedient tool of armies, bureaucracies, churches, corporations, and all agencies that require individual brainwashing… the therapist who is really interested in helping the individual is forced into social criticism.”
“Everything that everybody does is so—I don't know—not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless... And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.”
“I kept thinking that the imitators never knew and don’t know how miserable these men were.”
“The group, whether We or You or Them… has no consciousness of its own. Yet we may shed our own blood and the blood of others for this bloodless presence.”
“Imitation is a real evil that has to be broken before real teaching can begin… Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade… in college, you are supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating”
“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves… because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”
“I have a pathetic tendency to unerringly choose the easier of two evils. Like a cow catching sight of the trough; I gallop without premeditation… I go along with the exterior motions because it is safer”
“The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.”
“To repeat words is to speak them as though another were saying them, in which case I am not saying them... Even to repeat my own words is to say them as though I were another person in another time and place.”
“Wanting approval and appreciation easily becomes a strong chain in the herd instinct dynamic, something noticeably diminished in the lives of history-changing innovators.”
“Christianity, more or less, has been a religion of a future life. Life here is very ephemeral and we are here only in order to prepare ourselves for another life, a greater life, which comes after death... A great deal of social evolution didn't take place because the attitude was to keep to the status quo since this life was not supposed to be improved; you are supposed to accept it as God's will”
“There's room at the top they are telling you still, but first you must learn how to smile as you kill, if you want to be like the folks on the hill… A working class hero is something to be.”
“I try my best to be just like I am but everybody wants you to be just like them... I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more”
“But I mean no harm, nor put fault on anyone that lives in a vault. But it's alright, Ma, if I can't please him.”
“One of the qualities I most treasure in Chuang Tzu is his sense of the spontaneous, the uncapturable. This makes it easy to follow in his footsteps. Since there are no footsteps, all you an follow is what he himself followed: the Tao.”
“From Ushikawa’s perspective, they were irretrievably shallow. To him, their minds were dull, their vision narrow and devoid of imagination, and all they cared about was what other people thought… completely lacking in… any degree of wisdom.”
“I thought you would’ve learned to question the status quo a little better by now.”
“The content of dreams is nothing other than projections of our own mind, but without the controls or manipulations that we impose during the day... the bonds that hold the conventional mind in place become unglued.”
“We do not need to live our lives measuring ourselves against external standards set for us by others.”
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