We are governed by form. Call it regulation, decorum, habit, familiarity. By any name, life is made easier when we are guided by what we already know and do. Certainty displaces anxiety. This simple psychological principle determines the direction of our behavior. It is the ultimate mental comfort food. It allows for smooth social interaction. It also increases our employer’s perception of our job performance and that leads, successively, to the certainty of job security and that to financial stability, and so forth. We are engaged in a cycle of behavior that can, if we are diligent in its precepts, allow us to glide through much of our lives with little in the way of original thinking, by virtue of our other needs, a strictly counterproductive activity. So why bother to strain the conventions that appear to make us happy?
Well, for one thing, it’s natural. In the last Letter, I mentioned that we are an unstable lot. By that I meant that humans appear stable only because they obey whatever social standards dictate their behavior. We have ideas of what is civilized. This directly determines most of our actions.
Consequently, we conduct ourselves in a moderate fashion. But instability ensues when this chain of behavior is broken. At once, humans appear irrational. For example the difficulty society had with the millions of immigrants flooding New York toward the end of the nineteenth century illustrates how upsetting were those who did not obey the rules of that period’s standard behavior. The Irish and Germans came with their own set of conventions and many were in conflict with the standard domestic patterns of that time.
On the micro, personal level, though reduced in scope, conflicts also arise with the introduction of new ideas, ideas which will displace or even distort the commonplace. “Let’s try this,” short of desperation, might lead to “nobody does that.” Suggesting a new route to a destination could evoke “we never go that way.” These are very simple patterns that could easily extend to the workplace, personal relationships, the voting booth, or nearly anywhere within an accepted, stable environment. Change comes at the price of discomfort; new ideas effect the dislodging of dogma. Sometimes, painfully, cherished traditions succumb to new ways. The value of the results, on hindsight, are mixed, but often, as on a national, social scale, unavoidable. On a smaller scale, the workplace or the home, standard patterns are easier to retain and easier to assess through opinion or immediate result.
Now, to reduce the issue of change to the level of the individual. The impulse to right our social balance is still strong because we do live in that country, work with those people, connect emotionally with some who have purposely determined throughout our lives how we are to think and behave. So, even in isolation, freedom of thought is not easily attained. Yet it is there, when alone, that we are able to disregard society’s told, self-sustaining language with all it’s historical imperatives. Change within the solitary individual is where all change begins. For some, the idea of being alone is terrifying. The gratifying and reassuring noise of interaction disappears. Others use solitude as a means of self-discovery by a walk in a park or the woods or use it to assimilate the random sounds of waves along a shoreline. In this natural exchange, new ideas form, some absurd, some epiphanic, but all original and all implying change. A thread of history has been created which will affect either the individual’s attitude or possibly all of society if directed through passionate expression.
If we can free ourselves, even temporarily, from form and the tyranny it represents and under whose governance we function, can, at the least, realize our ability to act creatively. We should expect no praise in doing so because we will be seen at that moment as alien, relating thoughts for which society has no vocabulary, and therefore no response. We will be deemed as rebellious, out of step with the norm and out of bounds from what is expected of us. We will induce change even at the lowest level, apparently insignificant yet vital.
