Conformity Kills Creativity: Challenge Group Think Everywhere

Conformity Must be Defeated in Modern Life and Institutional Thinking

I was thinking about conformity the other day. It’s one of those amoral words where context is everything. It’s necessary for armies to take ground and high school football teams to score touchdowns. Ego is a killer in team sports. The unit is supreme when selfishness is kept at bay. It’s a disaster in the creative arts. Ever see the Chinese Communist propaganda posters from the Cold War era? They’re drab and one dimensional. It’s all “duty” and “labor” and “service”. It resembles religion because it has to. The input from free peoples isn’t wanted. Democracy is for capitalist dogs.

Conformity is terrible for ideas as well. After years of doing things one way it becomes tough to change. Institutions become entrenched in protecting themselves instead of creating new, better ways, to innovate. It’s true in corporations as well as government offices. As members in a social contract, however, we deserve to have a functioning state. But if it’s functioning specifically against the interests of the citizens, it’s time for change. Americans overwhelmingly wanted border security when George W Bush was president, also when Obama was elected. We never got it because Washington didn’t want it.

Conformity crushes opposing voices and popular concerns.

Changing Views

 In large part the way I read news has changed. A regular Economist subscriber for over a decade, I finally canceled my subscription around 2017 or 2018. They were very unfair to Trump. Not because he’s a Republican either. I’m used to them dumping on Republicans. With Trump it was especially nasty. He was clearly an outsider within the normal range of political animals and globalists hated him with a fierceness. I wasn’t on board with Trump at first. As a general rule I hate braggers. But I hate liars even more. Washington is full of liars. They wanted cheap labor and a dependent class from an open border. They didn’t care about the “huddled masses yearning to be free” like they told us.

 For whatever DJT’s sins as an exaggerator, he stood out as someone speaking truth to a corrupt cabal. I would’ve snickered at the phrase “corrupt cabal” before 2016 but now it’s as obvious as the border crisis.

Compromising Views

I’m of two minds on the idea that all politicians are compromised by some hidden fault or sin. Every corner of America sends representatives to the House and Senate. No matter their background or values, they mostly end up voting the party line. I don’t mean the partisan line either, I mean the D.C. groupthink line. Many of them are compromised.

The rest though, just want to be liked in their circles of influence. Peer pressure gets us all at some point. Why would we think it’s different in the nation’s capital? I heard Thomas Massey of Kentucky say something like this on Tucker Carlson’s show. Could he be downplaying the blackmail? Of course. He can’t exactly say the people he works with everyday are all crooks and perverts. He can’t possibly know anyway. Rumors are just rumor.

But I think his assertion is largely true. For the truth on why so many representatives end up voting against their previously stated principles, look to Occam’s Razor.

Peer pressure is the least complicated answer. We all know how powerful this can be when we think of high school. It’s only the most unique kid that charts a course of their own making, aside from any outside influence. Even that kid will feel pressure in some areas of life.

Changing Narratives

Conformity is so powerful and so simple that we often don’t consider it when trying to understand why our rep voted the way they did. That they caught him with a prostitute is a more complicated explanation, even though it happens. Ask Trump what it’s like being the most hated man in government circles. People all over the country used to love him. He was the “You’re Fired” guy from TV. He taught New York City how to rebuild old towers and make them prosperous again. He donated money to the Democrats and bought and desegregated Mar a Lago.

Now he’s Hitler.

He told Americans that China was ripping them off and that Washington D.C was in on it. He ran on border security because it mattered to the rest of the country. He blasted his enemies from his Twitter bully pulpit. He played the populist with such zeal it scared established politicos. Then he won. A wealthy brat from Queens who never missed a chance to promote himself, won. He’s been a target since then. From lawfare skullduggery to an assassination attempt, they want him gone. Trump doesn’t conform.

I won’t pretend that all of his qualities are beneficial to him or the country. But he plays offense. He attacks and pushes and forces. Because of this the Economist depicted him with a KKK hood for a bullhorn and implied he was spewing racism. I’d had enough by then. It showed me how closely aligned Big Media had become. Was ABC or NBC saying anything different?

 The similarity at least suggested the same playbook across media companies. White patriot who hates unchecked immigration, “racist”. Minority progressive who hates our Christian heritage, “patriot”.

Magazines can have their working biases and points of view, but why do they all take the same antagonist view of Trump? No one at the Economist could make a fiscal case for a secure border?

Conclusion

It's just one example where I started seeing collusion, or at the very least a lack of differentiation in media. Conformity forces everyone to think alike. Like so many institutions that represented the best of us, they’re stacked with loyalists and dying from the inside. A wholesale cleansing is needed. It’s already begun. Industry players like Musk and Zuckerberg have given tacit support to Trump, an unheard of development. Zuckerberg was largely responsible for the cheat during the 2020 election. Even if Trump isn’t elected in November. His example of offensive juggernaut will have a lasting impact on the way we approach these issues in the future.

Conformity must be defeated if we want a meritocratic society once again. Sometimes it takes a determined, offensive man to remind us of it. Otherwise we’ll start seeing those ghastly communist unity posters everywhere.