Of course, even when men feel completely free to behave as they choose, they usually end up behaving, if not like everybody else exactly, at least like a lot of other people. There is safety in numbers, and the desire for safety is not easily abolished; and in any case there are not so many different ways of behaving present in most people's imagination. The injunction or command to be yourself (as if you could be anyone else) ends up being the same as the command to be exactly as your neighbor.
~Theodore Dalrymple, The New Vichy Syndrome
Nonsense.
ReplyDeleteHis concluding sentence seems only loosely implied by what precedes it, but his diagnosis of actual behaviour accords with my experience of the world. Why do you disagree?
ReplyDeleteHuh. I never got the email that says you responded to my comment. Sorry. I mean that we have free will now in America, and plenty of people choose completely different lives even from the immediately preceding generation. Doesn't mean they all make the same reactive decisions (as the extremists of each generation would like us to believe) but that unless we take this on a huge cosmic scale (where I would probably quote the Teacher/Qohelet in agreement) this statement is unrealistic. Also, he is judging a man's inner character, which is not his place to do so. Perhaps it is simply that the quotation is out of context.
ReplyDeleteVery strange; I don't see how he says anything like what you describe. He speaks of the behaviour of men, not their inner thoughts. "[F]ree to behave...end up behaving...ways of behaving..."
ReplyDeleteAnd, honestly, do most of the people you know choose "completely" different lives from those of their parents? I know I'm not living off the grid in a third world country having rejected my parents' religion and social norms. Moreover, and more to his point, I think it's true that we don't really live and act that differently than our neighbours do, no matter how free we are to do so.
I think he's quite correct on what I took to be his fundamental point, that we all like to think of ourselves as unique, special, little flowers when we are not that different from the teeming mass of humanity. Further, most people actually make an effort to be like their peers rather than unlike.