R06 · Conformity and Digital Feeds
Conformity and herd mentality
Adopting the crowd's beliefs, tastes and fears out of a need to belong.
Cues
Showing 10 of 10 cues
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
“The concept of greatness entails ... being able to be different.”
“Nobody can build the bridge for you to walk across the river of life, no one but you yourself alone. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would carry you across this river; but only at the cost of yourself; you would pawn yourself and lose. There is in the world only one way, on which nobody can go, except you: where does it lead?”
“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
“For you see what our discussions are all about - and is there anything about which a man of even small intelligence would be more serious than this: what is the way we ought to live?”
“I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans”
“The impetus that makes you fly is our great human possession. Everybody has it. It is the feeling of being linked with the roots of power, but one soon becomes afraid of this feeling ... That is why most people shed their wings and prefer to walk and obey the law.”
“Whatever it be, whether art or nature, that has inscribed in us this condition of living by reference to others, it does us much more harm than good. We defraud ourselves out of what is actually useful to us in order to make appearances conform to common opinion. We care less about the real truth of our inner selves than about how we are known to the public.”
“When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think as I really think; after a time it always seems as though they want to banish me from myself and rob me of my soul ... I then require the desert, so as to grow good again.”
Cato ignores fashion
The Stoic Roman senator Cato deliberately ignored fashion and dressed differently, not for vainglory, but to accustom himself to being ashamed only of what was truly shameful.