by Paul E. Zimmerman

Created on: December 19, 2006   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

Non-conformism, as many people seem to understand and practice it these days, manifests as a twisted conformity to the thing(s) supposedly rebelled against.

To explain exactly what I mean by this, I offer as an example my brief experience as a DJ at a college radio station. The student managers of the station had it in mind that they were going to swim against the tide by being a "non-commercial radio station." What this meant in practice was that if a band's music was played on regular, advertising-funded stations, or if snippets of a band's songs were featured in product commercials, then our campus station would not play any of the music of the band in question. This was, in the minds of the student managers, a resistance to conformity.

What escaped their comprehension was that in taking this approach - deliberately doing the opposite of whatever someone else was doing - they in effect wiped out their own identity and were actually conforming to someone else's standard. They had defined the station we worked at as just being the opposite of whatever else the other stations were doing, not as anything unique in and of itself with its own self-generated identity. Thus, the character of our radio station was strictly defined by whatever it was that other stations were doing. Where the student managers of that station failed in their eagerness to be non-conformist was that they swallowed dogma, even though it was a different one from the supposed dogma they thought they were thwarting.

Non-conformity starts with a healthy questioning of dogmatic prescriptions (stopping short of fetishistic skepticism), and it ends as soon as one embraces some such prescriptions uncritically, even if those codes and creeds happen to be different from what is accepted by the mainstream. Being a non-conformist does not mean simply being a contrarian, for that can be done by anyone without even a hint of rational thought. Instead, being a non-conformist means acting as an autonomous, rational human being, individually assessing whatever situations might present themselves and taking action according to one's own values. That may result in one choosing something preferred by a large number of people, but this does not make one a conformist; only by blindly accepting someone else's lead, automatically and without a thought, does one become a conformist.

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