Conformity
Throughout history there have been many men and women who were considered non-conformists and have fought for an injustice or protested against social norm to help promote an alternative way of life. What most people fail to realize is that the majority of people dubbed non-conformists are no better than the people or establishment they were fighting against. In their quest to correct what was unjust, they inevitably create a new social norm that everyone conforms to. Non-conformists do not really exist due to the fact that even when they come up with an original idea, other people grab onto the concept and then a few more and eventually it is accepted as the social standard in which it is turned into what the originator was trying to abolish in the first place. The world is continuously conforming the only thing that changes is what we are conforming to.
One of the most applicable examples from the recent readings is provided in “The Rhinoceros” by Eugene Ionesco. In the story the society is dominated by humans which are seen as the social norm, then as the story progresses there is a rhino spotted, then another and another, then a whole bunch of them. At first the rhinoceros are portrayed as the outcasts and they need to be removed from society. Near the end of the story more and more people are becoming rhinoceros and at the end, all but one person is a rhino making rhinoceroses the social standard and the narrator, the only human left, the social outcast or the the non-conformist. It was about a half to two-thirds of the way through the story that being a rhino was no longer a form of non-conformity but it became the bandwagon that everyone else followed. That point in the story could be called the tipping point as defined in “The Tipping Point: How little things can make a big difference”, the point in which an epidemic reaches its “tipping point” or the point at which it reaches its maximum exposure and becomes common, very similar to the...