From the ever present need for conformity, which steered humanity toward the establishment and the enforcement of various laws, rules, methods, norms and guidelines, came great strength. All modern technological marvels we now take for granted, which were brought forward by civilization, would never have been without the powerful social engineering tool we call conformity.
From the very thick books of law to the most painfully translated technical instruction manual, from the very ancient legends to the most persistent online gossip, almost everything looks driven by some kind of desire for conformity, which could be to conform to a greater order, something more powerful than one self, or not.
As we witness growing widespread adoration for religious, sacred and/or self-help books, as well as worldwide propagation of increasingly efficient communication systems, and all kind of emerging scamming techniques, many groups of people seem to actively rely on the conformity toolset as a way toward recruitment and reinforcement, with hugely varying and fluctuating outcomes.
And so the need for conformity also becomes an appealing driving force for darker character individuals with lower instincts, as their evidently counter productive objectives are put to use in an ever growing number of ways, while most of them are partaking in various ass covering schemes and techniques, profusely hiding behind arbitrary nonsense, which appear to greatly contributes in hindering human creation.
Think of every siloed individual well entrenched in out of reach organized systems and hierarchies you've ever had to deal with: from the power infatuated school teacher you once crossed to the stubborn lady at the Department of Motor Vehicles, from the self important insurance company compliance officer to the programmers of those angry emails triggering algorithms, from the mostly aggressive and vulgarly yelling police officer to the degrading and falsely opinionated media person you're trying to avoid reading or listening to, from all loud nonsensical politicians to every annoying neighbors, all of them hiding behind a wall of conformity in order to empoison your very life.
Or so you thought. The thing is, you yourself most probably use obfuscating comformity techniques in order to avoid doing what you should do, that is, be a competent, if not great, human being. The use of imposed comformity as a way to slap arbitrary dead ends toward anyone who indisposes you while you're caring about your grocery list should absolutely carry a death sentence, but in the end, should we all die.
And so we can do better. As some of us grow higher in some hierarchy, we should start with telling the truth, at every turn. Because for one, telling the truth is many order of magnitude easier to manage than anything else. Then, we should stop all tentatives of control over anyone else, because after some easy starts, it will always backfire, as it does all the time, eventually, as surely as the sun goes down. Finally, we should always design all systems, from specific to wide scale, to serve people, not the other way around.
All that is rotten in human creation always hide behind a mask for a while, so it can live longer without being discovered and shamed, or put to death. As we all carry a bit of a rotting side, some more than others, we should never be hiding, if not in plain sight.