#11: Conformism
Today’s piece is inspired by this wonderful post from Paul Graham, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers and essayists. It introduces the concept and differences between independent-minded and conventional-minded people. I will provide a quick summary of the essay and then provide my thoughts in more detail.
Summary
In The Four Quadrants of Conformism, Graham argues in most societies, you can break people into four quadrants. He uses kids as an example, where those in the upper left are the aggressively conventional-minded—the tattletales, and those in the upper right quadrant are the aggressively independent-minded—the naughty, with the passive versions of both types in the lower quadrants.
Graham claims it is an unequal distribution and that there are more conventional-minded people than independent-minded people, and more passive people than aggressive ones. Therefore, the passively conventional-minded people are the largest group, and the aggressively independent-minded the smallest. Graham’s thesis is that all new ideas come from the aggressively independent-minded, and for this reason, he says we must protect the independent-minded.
Analysis
I found the piece fascinating not necessarily because I agreed with everything Graham said but because it challenged me to think more deeply about many concepts, and it called attention to a number of interesting ideas.
While I am not sure if it’s as neatly defined as quadrants, I certainly agree with Graham that there are spectrums of conformity, and that conventional-minded people are in the majority. I tried to see where I would fall based on his definitions. I initially had difficulty identifying where I landed. I think this was because I used to be a passively conventional-minded person as a young kid. Graham defines passively conventional-minded kids as,
careful to obey the rules, but when other kids break them, their impulse is to worry that those kids will be punished, not to ensure that they will
However, once middle school and high school came around, I became more independent-minded. I was like many high-achieving Asian kids in that I was shy, nerdy, and unpopular in grade school, but I also felt I was different from most other students I was surrounded with—I just wasn’t sure why. Because of this—in an environment designed around cliques—I had just a few close friends who were from different friend groups and different age groups. Often times it was lonely, but looking back, I think I was struggling to conform to the ways of high school life.
Graham says that one’s quadrant depends more on one’s personality than the nature of the rules, meaning my independent-mindedness, whether passive or aggressive was likely always there, even at a younger age. He shares an interesting anecdote on conventional-minded people and their tendency to think their current thinking is what has always been the norm:
Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote:
I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.
He's too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn't. And indeed, our default assumption should not merely be that his students would, on average, have behaved the same way people did at the time, but that the ones who are aggressively conventional-minded today would have been aggressively conventional-minded then too. In other words, that they'd not only not have fought against slavery, but that they'd have been among its staunchest defenders.
Graham is spot on here. Slavery is obviously inhumane and clearly wrong for so many reasons, but I am not foolish enough to think that I may not have been one of its supporters back in the late 1700s given my passive nature (though I would hope my independent-mindedness would’ve prevailed).
Graham’s point is even clearer with more recent examples. I think about the first time I smoked weed when I was a senior in high school back in 2009. Before I did it for the first time, I had been vehemently against it, but a friend of mine encouraged me to read into why it was outlawed and its harmfulness (or lack thereof), and this convinced me to change my mind. However, I do not forget how passionately some people judged me when I shared I smoked even after I asked them to do the same as my friend did. They simply accepted the law for what it was at the time. And I do not forget how many of those same people are judgmental of those who are now not open to legalization or who are not more socially progressive in their thinking. This is the conventional-mindedness Graham speaks of.
So many people forget that Obama did not believe in gay marriage in his first term in office—he was advocating for civil unions. To be fair, I did not fully understand the difference until a queer friend of mine explained the significance to me. However, if you talk to many conventional-minded people, they will tell you they have always felt this way about the topic (or any topic). They often conform to ideas once those ideas are societally comfortable, and then they forget that they haven’t always felt that way.
All this leads to Graham’s thesis—that the aggressively independent-minded must be protected at all costs because they have all the new ideas. Graham then makes an argument for free speech and a marketplace of ideas, which he views as being under an increasingly larger threat in today’s society.
In the last few years, many of us have noticed that the customs protecting free inquiry have been weakened. Some say we're overreacting — that they haven't been weakened very much, or that they've been weakened in the service of a greater good. The latter I'll dispose of immediately. When the conventional-minded get the upper hand, they always say it's in the service of a greater good. It just happens to be a different, incompatible greater good each time.
As for the former worry, that the independent-minded are being oversensitive, and that free inquiry hasn't been shut down that much, you can't judge that unless you are yourself independent-minded. You can't know how much of the space of ideas is being lopped off unless you have them, and only the independent-minded have the ones at the edges. Precisely because of this, they tend to be very sensitive to changes in how freely one can explore ideas.
The conventional-minded say, as they always do, that they don't want to shut down the discussion of all ideas, just the bad ones. You'd think it would be obvious just from that sentence what a dangerous game they're playing. But I'll spell it out.
There are two reasons why we need to be able to discuss even "bad" ideas…The first is that any process for deciding which ideas to ban is bound to make mistakes…So instead of getting the margin for error we need, we get the opposite: a race to the bottom in which any idea that seems at all bannable ends up being banned…The second reason it's dangerous to ban the discussion of ideas is that ideas are more closely related than they look.
Graham makes a few powerful statements here. One, when you restrict ideas, you are not just limiting the bad ones, you are likely limiting the good ones. And if you don’t believe this, it’s likely that you’re conventional-minded because those are the people who often cannot see the other types of ideas that are being limited. Thus, it is not an overreaction for independent-minded people to feel threatened because they are able to see the full potential of ideas more clearly than conventional-minded people. Two, mistakes happen so even ideas with good intentions that seem bad may end up being deemed bad because of the perceived feeling rather than the intention.
I do agree with Graham that more often than not, more speech or more discussion is better than less speech or less discussion. It is no surprise that everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. to Bernie Sanders to Mark Zuckerberg has advocated strongly on behalf of free speech or more discussion rather than banning ideas and speech.
Are there risks to more speech? Certainly, and I think Graham downplays those in this piece. However, I think the asymmetric opportunity that can be gained from free inquiry outweighs the potential risk of any bad ideas.
I’ve found my independent-minded personality has attracted me to different types of personalities, communities, and friends. I’ve been attracted to viewpoints I disagreed with and to people who were unconventional. I did not always agree with them—in fact, many times I vehemently disagreed with them. But often, I appreciated the space and the venue to have these discussions, and I truly believe independent-thinkers, particularly the aggressively independent-minded ones flourish in these environments.
How can you start to become more independent-minded? I will dive into this related essay tomorrow.