There's a reason teenagers want to be individuals, yet end up sounding like carbon copies of their peers: they actually want to be like everyone else. And while most grown-ups probably think they've grown out of such mindless conformity, they haven't. Adults discussing hot-button issues sound like clones of each other for the same reason: they're not actually thinking for themselves.
College and university professors, the mind vice of social media like Twitter, mainstream political pundits, or just everyday peer-group influence: all provide the material with which to form convictions and opinions that are not really your own. It may be comforting to know you're just like everyone else, and all the evil is within the people you disagree with, but it doesn't make you original, authentic, or right. And to anyone looking in from the outside, you just sound like a mindless automaton speaking someone else's words.
Today on MindMatters we discuss these issues: conformity, originality, authenticity, and breaking free from the prison of ideological language designed not to find the truth, but as a weapon to bludgeon one's ideological enemies.
Running Time: 01:06:57
Download: MP3 — 61.3 MB
Harrison Koehli
Harrison Koehli co-hosts SOTT Radio Network's MindMatters, and is an editor for Red Pill Press. He has been interviewed on several North American radio shows about his writings on the study of ponerology. In addition to music and books, Harrison enjoys tobacco and bacon (often at the same time) and dislikes cell phones, vegetables, and fascists (commies too).
Corey Schink
Corey Schink was born and raised in the Midwestern United States, where he worked on farms and as a welder, musician, and social worker. His interests in government, philosophy and history led to his writing for SOTT in 2012 and to becoming a SOTT editor and SOTT Radio co-host in 2014. He now resides in North Carolina, where he enjoys the magnificent views of the Appalachian Mountains.
fake people=amerikans
hofstede ranks US the most individualistic society on earth, followed closely by Australians NZ, Canada, then UK...while his other comparisons are erroneous this is accurate
"only in amerika do people act like machines, r treated like machines and only in US r machine metaphors used to describe human behavior". G Gorer
the Parsonian Philip Slater: "amerikans poorly understand that individualism produces uniformity"
"what unites the slavophiles, Alexandr Herzen, Peter Kropotkin and the Marxists is that western individualism is an enemy of individuality". Vladimir Golstein
"individuality has entirely decayed in amerika". Horkheimer/Adorno they described amerikan conversations as the same: "shallow, bombastic, fatuous"
the liberal David Riesman observed amerikans were afflicted w a "shallow national character" and described them as "over conformist semi-automatons"
Arthur Kosester fluent in German, English French--lived in USSR spoke Russian, a virulent anti-communist, compared amerikans to 5th century Romans: "a similarly contactless society populated by automatons...a similarly soulless political y corrupt everybody for themselves society"
George Simmel examined more than 1000 societies and found that only in primitive individualist tribes where individuality was absent were genders homogenized and fashion brought closer to the body.....in the USA masculines Females (Hochschild, etc) feminized males---Gorer, wrote only in the USA is the father vestigial---the amerikan minded conscience is feminine"---the most feminized males on the planet...."the amerikan ideal is that everybody should be the same". James Baldwin. in civilized collectivist nations colored hair is absent...when Riesman described amerikans as semi automatons, the only people that had tattoos ere some lower ranks in the US Navy, biker gangs, criminals....in collectivist societies---criminals, a few members of the military, vulgarian rock stars...
USA=the only peer group society on earth---in all other nations I have lived, now live different age groups and people that disagree socialize...in USA is is insecure herds of the same age.... if an amerikan is alone she will be copulatiing w a mobile phone
puritans do not think or feel