I’m currently reading Erich Fromm’s 1956 treatise The Art of Loving. It’s a joyful thing to behold (leaving aside the neolithic sexual and racial essentialising peppered throughout). As some of you might know, I quote the philosopher and psychologist several times in This One Wild and Precious Life. I draw on his wisdoms in the penultimate chapter as I try to determine what matters in the final wash-up. Fromm’s answer to the ultimate question, “What is left if we might lose it all?” is “to live life as a study in love and work”.
Which just sings. Yeah?
Fromm pivots from this original point:
Humans experience a very unique loneliness.
It’s a loneliness that other species do not experience; our felt loneliness is brought about by our self-conscious awareness that we will die (and therefore don’t matter). This causes us to live in the future, and to abandon being present - at One - with nature.
And so we feel forever seperate and condemned to spending our lives searching for ways to unite, to experience the Oneness with it all once again. We do it in a bunch of ways.
We use drugs and have sex. These work (rapturously!), but are short-lived.
The most successful way is to love, which is to say to do productive love - to give love, as opposed to being loved. More on this below.
But the most common way we go about this search for unification, this reconnecting with the One, is conforming.
We conform by signing up for practices, morays and norms that coral us into the herd. We effectively hand the quest and the experience over to the church, to governments, “democracy”, autocrats, cult leaders, and so on. All these institutions and models evolved and took off to the extent to which they were able to make us feel less seperate, which in turn kept us from despairing, and thus progressing up the food chain.
But we now delegate our non-separation to capitalism.
Fromm argues, as early as the 1950s (so, pre-neoliberalism), that capitalism tells us to do certain things and buy and look certain ways, promising that when we do we will belong to a big friendly herd of fellow… consumers. Capitalism is the most common way for humans to feel less seperate because it’s the easiest way. The system does it all for us. We just have to hop on the conveyor belt. And, I’d argue, not question things or think independently. (Sign me up! cries an exhausted and sucked-in generation.)
Conforming via capitalism is beige. And destructive. Der.
My friend Angela and I were walking around Bondi Beach in Sydney’s eastern suburbs on the weekend and we were lamenting a very same-same scene going down: the same brands, the same tattoos, the same lips, the same “happiness” aesthetic, the same gym routines, the same SUVS, almost regardless of demographic. It wasn’t pleasant; cynicism never is.
Same-sameness and herd mentality doesn’t have to be a problem in itself. Except that it is when driven by capitalism. The vested interests of the market system are not motivated by our welfare and survival; they are driven wholly by greed, and they prod our worst, most selfish tendencies while driving us from the humanity we wish to be - communal, caring and, yes!!!, less seperate. The cruel irony!
I’ve been speaking to a number of writers and thinkers who have returned to Australia from (variously) Iran, Afghanistan, New York and Paris in the past few months who note the same, and have commented on the lack of original thought circulating in conversations both private and broadcast, as well as the rampant individualism that has seeped into the culture. They have all, in different ways, been baffled by how many of their Australian friends chime in on the same lazy “woke” opinions and socialise in very tight silos (dinner parties are with the parents of their kids’ friends; social activities rarely include new or single people, as they do elsewhere). All of which is something I have spoken about (in this podcast with broadcaster Josh Szeps) and written about:
That said, I suppose I do feel some compassion when I see it through the lens of a humanity seeking belonging, less separation. The world is, as the magnificent Patti Smith wrote, “in search for our fingerprint on the cosmos”.
But conformity bothers me for another reason.
…and I want to break it down a little more, as I did with my mate Angela the other day.
If we take Fromm’s logic, conforming is like the cheap drug fix for the massive, original ache of our separation.
And when we have cheap fixes available to us, we won't be bothered to test out the meaty, successful but much harder method (namely, practicing love).
To this extent you could say that conformity stops us from doing the hard work of loving and giving.
Conformity also holds us back from going to our edge, the virtues of which I write about here:
It keeps us cocooned from our courage and our curiosity. We mostly have to be forced - shoe-horned or motivated - into courage and curiosity (our edge). Our ache for connection has traditionally forced us to engage with such virtues. But the comfy conveyorbelt of consuming our way into the herd negates or demotivates us from this important human process.
Plus, conformity in a democratic but capitalist culture is particularly powerful (and dangerous) because it sells the idea that the person remains very original and individualised in their behaviour. Their tattoo is radical (even though everyone has one); the world’s most popular SUV denotes adventurous “lone wolf”.
At least in an autocracy the people know they have lost their agency. Their conformity was imposed; in our culture we “buy” into it. Those living in dictatorships remain alive to it all; we slip into a distinct lack of curiosity and numbness, which we don’t fight or rise up against.
This is my beef with conformity: the lack of aliveness, the suffocating stuckness of it.
Conformity is like obsessive thinking. OCD , as well as anxiety and depression, are often described as a repeating of unhealthy thoughts that create deep ruts in our cognition, making it difficult to pave a new cognitive route when we want to (our wheels are locked in). Treatments for these conditions entail a dislodging from or disruption of the ruts (eg: psychedelics; Michael Pollan very much describes the benefit of such drugs in these de-rutting terms). And the creation of fresher, better routes.
So what’s the alternative?
Jung asked in The Development of Personality: “What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist?” (Jung answered his own question with the idea of having a “vocation”, a drive that comes from God.)
Well, perhaps the way out of our stale, conveyor belt-ish conformity is to just do the more difficult path. Practice love! Now! Do not pass Go!
After all, as Fromm argues, conformity doesn’t satiate. “Union by conformity is not intense….it is calm, dictated by routine, and for this very reason often is insufficient to pacify the anxiety of separateness.” Fromm believes we need intensity for unification to feel real, to stick. Love is sufficiently intense, he says.
But Fromm is promoting, specifically, productive love.
“Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved , rather than that of loving , of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable…”.
Productive love is a faculty, an art. It’s the giving of love. It’s not something we wait for. Or that we have to fear that we will miss out on. Love is what the alive “productive character” gets to experience.
The productive character? Yeah, that would be the person who has not fallen into a numb, intellectual, spiritual and emotional rut. It’s the person who has refused to board the conveyor-belt (my gawd I just did some horrific metaphor mixing - sorry!).
I implore everyone here to become alive to their conformity. So that we can access more productive love. We - and the world - will need every bit of it that it can get going forward.
Sarah xx
Couldn't agree more.
Living around Byron Bay (north Bondi) it is something i often ponder.
The endless lines of self described non conformist who carry shopping bags of clothes, wear all the same brands by companies preaching individuality and think driving a Landrover Defender and wearing RM Williams boots makes them an urban farmer surfing the Pass.
Having spent a lot of time working in PNG, seeing people with nothing but love and values that continually demonstrated to me that we do it all wrong. Classic conditioning really.
You want actual cool individual counter culture, skateboarding makes surfers look like private school toffs.
As we sadly know and is well worn;
Race disconnects us
Religion separates us
Politics divides us
Wealth classifies us.
We don't have to let it though, that's the beauty.
Be somebody you'd love to meet, give five compliments a day and live like you have no material wealth, only love to give.
Oh and always do the grocery shopping with earphones listening to some great tunes. Can't recommend this highly enough.
And I love reading other comments too! Makes me feel like I’m not alone in my non conformity 🤣