Never Conform!

This will be a long post. I've been stewing again. I'm continually shocked at the Gadarene Swine of liberalism, racing to the nearest cliffs in formation; obedient to the current theme, fad or effect (without cause) that liberalism dictates to the troops in its little paper armies. Whether it's the charade in Copenhagen, The Senate, or your local waste disposal committe, they're busy devising some morally unassailable scheme to steal from you, or proudly scaling some moral gradient on your behalf, whether you want them to or not.

The liberals of my generation, now fixed like dried blood on the pelt of America - in the universities, in the news bureaus and entertainment industries,- and throughout the towers of government, once claimed to be rebels. Today they're more dangerous to individual liberty than the totalitarians of the last century. You know who and what they are. We don't need to list their demands. Their asssumptions are so awful, political correctness was rigged to shield them from scrutiny and the tools of perception through ordinary language.

These folks "dropped out" (I know; I was there) by dropping in to a counter-culture which was already in place and a creation of the capitalism they claimed to despise. They considered themselves courageous for having adapted to a permanent masquerade party. Except for some skirmishes in the Civil Rights movement, they never fought against anything that posed a real danger.

Like jackals they snapped at the heels of dazed returning veterans, the hard-working bourgeoisie, or more broadly, at the soft, basically decent American culture and the squeamish authority of parents who were busy building the modern world. When these conformists discarded the tie-dye uniforms, they rode the wave of post-war prosperity into professions and material ease as no generation before them, and believed that they had something to do with it.

Now they're in Act II, Scene III of their lives and they plan to go out oppressing and controlling everything in sight. They're in charge almost everywhere, their ideas are the default ideas of the lazy, the stupid and the "idealistic", and the cancer of following the prevailing mood grows and grows. Consider the following, from "The Art of Non-Conforming" (1953) by British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge:

"If I were to write the Confessions of a Non-Conforming Man, they would begin with an assertion that the mid-twentieth century, far from being a period of enlightenment, has been notable for credulity and servility to a quite exceptional degree. It would be necessary, I should go on, to go back at least to the Dark Ages to find a generation of men so given over to destruction, superstition, and every variety of obscurantism...

Questioning, thus, the basic assumptions of the age, the Non-Conforming Man cannot but find its pretensions particularly derisory. Ironically, ignorance seems to grow with education and freedom seems to decay to the accompaniment of protestations and devotions to its cause...

Civilization presupposes the integrity and inviolability of each separate human being, and it is contemporary neobarbarisms like Fascism, Nazism, and Communism which have sought to destroy the individual in favor of the collectivity...the materialists, the power-worshipers, the demon-demagogues of our time, insist that individual men and women are of no account, and have no destiny of their own apart from mankind's...

Against such a trend, the impulse not to conform constitutes a kind of resistance movement, whose practitioners...are liable to be forced to become maquisards...living cautiously on the fringes of society. Without them, collective assumptions may pass unchallenged, and there may be no one to puncture the pretensions of established authority.

The basic failure of our time, future historians may well decide, has lain in the too ready acceptance of current orthodoxies, whether through fear of being suspected of rebelliousness and consequently punished, or just as a result of mass persuasion...Conformity is more and more the order of the day, inevitably bringing with it that subservience to prevailing fashions of thought, values and behavior which prepares the way for - to use the sombre expression by Belloc more than four decades ago - The Servile State.

To a civilized and free mind any enforced orthodoxy is abhorrent. It is inconceivable that the last word should ever be said about anything, or that history should reach any sort of finality. Non-conforming is a recognition that Man and all his works are inherently imperfect, and therefore susceptible to criticism, if not ridicule.

...Non-conforming is the basis, the very fount, of all humor. A totally conformist society never laughs - laughter itself being a kind of criticism, an expression of the immense disparity between human aspiration and human performance. As such, it is intolerable to all orthodoxy enforcers from Torquemada to Stalin...

...to the twisted fiend Harry Reid, the spider Nancy Pelosi and the monstrous Albert Gore. Today, this is the difference between them and us. They're the end of time, the death of imagination and free thought. We're not. Persuasion won't change them. This is war.