The Uncompromising Reverence For One’s Own Conscience
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
Mark Twain
In the randomness life spins its dynamic, one must emancipate self-ownership. The drive to invoke values in an individual must not be inhibited by conformity. Human nature, as we all know, has gesticulated evolutionary peregrination that we are not merely a compliant adherent or a cog in someone else’s wheels, bending ourselves to locus of centralized control should be the yardstick you least want to gauge your sense of being with. Instead, to the locus of your own is much more ideal. Friedrich Nietszche once reprimanded us, “He cannot obey himself will be commanded.” Since evolutionary theorists would tell you that humans are social species, it seems much easier to succumb our existence to tribalism, so long as it favors us in return. There is no flaws in that kind of dynamic until the reciprocity turns unfavored — then it springs subtle drawbacks. The phrase ‘subtle drawbacks’ is rather overlooked given how smooth the counterstatement operates. From this vantage point, it gives the impression of ‘the emperor has no clothes’. The fact that human beings can be very inclined to feel in debt despite everything should not necessarily be denied. All kinds of favorable loops accumulated as time lapses, and had they been invested in altogether so strongly, grow pre-existing belief to the point where it stamps out the courage to contradict, when necessary. Let alone rationality, humans already fell into groupish tripwires. There is a good chance people being imbibed with cool-aids unheralded up to this point. When conformity sieges one with solidarity, it is understandable to see beyond the herd seem hard, partly because security in tandem with approval upstages their own individuality to the extent of subvervience. Since solidarity bounds together for better or worse, aggregating individuals to share commonality with one another, all too often it leaps one from speaking for oneself to be for a group. It’s not unreasonable to argue that the valence of which ‘solidarity’ has would be more counterintuitive than it seems. Surely one might retort, “we’re in the position against any form of oppression, so that should have indicated the opposite.” The sentiment behind is fairly understood hence why solidarity is often used to justify moral acts. Nonetheless, when one already bases himself on the kneeling position by virtue of seeing the world in hierarchical dominance: superiority and inferiority, solidarity may cultivate itself a one-upmanship thinking predicated on power. One should rather, in my view, either embodies oneself as if a keen-sighted confomist or a negotiable rebel. Indeed, all of which sound oxymoronic on its own, but is much more soundly than it would otherwise be. There is a fine line that can be extrapolated between contradictions, to live in harmony with collectives means to shed disrespute on false consciousness in exhange for individual sovereignty which comprises thinking and speaking for oneself to be pathologized. That, I think, the essense of a contrarian mindset.
