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2 • Cultural Blocks - Part 3

Now we have said that some conformity is good and even necessary. So to put a proper perspective on when you should and when you shouldn't, and when you need to and when you don't, let's take a look at the "big" picture of a modern man in his total environment.

Imagine a large circle. In the very center of the circle, put a small dot. This dot is a modern man and the circle is the environ­ment in which he lives. By a "modern" man we mean you—or any other person you care to think of. This is not a cave man wresting a bare existence out of his prowess as a hunter; it is not a medieval serf working in lifetime servitude for his lord and master; it is not a pioneer American carving a new country out of the wilderness. It is you and the way you live today.

Now divide that mental circle into three parts. One part we label "WORK." The second we label "OTHERS." The third, we label "SELF." Together, they make up the three basic relation­ships a man has to consider in his living. The lines between the segments represent opportunities to compartmentalize your think­ing. Let's start by considering the thinking needed for the part of your life reserved for WORK:

We use the term WORK, rather than job, to make it as all-inclusive as possible. After all, the job you have today may not be the job you will have tomorrow. But the same mental approach will have to be used. Now any kind of work demands a certain amount of standardization just for efficiency and quality. This is why we have organizational charts and job descriptions in busi­ness. Even a medical doctor, who may consider himself the most free of men, will follow certain procedures in an operating room and insist on certain standards of purity in the medicines he prescribes. And, to carry out this standardization in our work, it may even be necessary for us to learn to think in terms of standardization and set patterns. But carrying on our day-to-day standardized routines does not require us to standardize our thinking toward the larger pattern of our WORK. Nor does it mean that we have to carry production-type thinking over the boundary on either side of WORK so that it creeps into our relationships with either OTHERS or SELF.

In deciding just how much "creep-over" we will allow in our three areas, we have to exercise some judgment. We have to decide just what kind of life it is we want to lead.

If our social life—away from our official WORK area— includes mostly people and friends with whom we work all day, then we have removed, or at least punctured, the barrier between the areas of WORK and OTHERS.

If we become so dependent upon a group to think or decide for us that we cannot think or make a simple decision contrary to the group opinion, then we have destroyed the barrier between OTHERS and SELF.

Actually these barriers do exist, or can exist, for any man. In exercising independence of thought and action, it is completely possible for a man to move freely and without harming others if he just remembers that the barriers are there, and that it is on his own volition that he crosses them. There is no social pressure that can force a man to lower or destroy the barrier between his inner SELF and the outside world of OTHERS. There is no job or business pressure that can force a man to sacrifice the integrity felt by his inner SELF for the expediencies of WORK. If any such sacrifices, or giving in to conformity, do occur, they will only happen if the individual himself decides to allow them to happen.

Conformity, then, is a voluntary thing. And it can be voluntary to almost any degree in different areas of environment. The important thing is to make certain that you do not let conforming to someone else's way of doing something rob you of your own initiative to think independently wherever and whenever you are in control of the situation. The big danger in conforming to a pattern is that we don't question why the accepted pattern is accepted, or by whom it was accepted in the first place, or whether the original conditions of acceptance still prevail. It is not a crime, or even morally wrong, to conform—but to sacrifice your independence to decide whether or not you will conform is.

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