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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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Ruthless impersonal judgment is typical tool of cultural conformity

By David McElroy · March 20, 2018

I was 12 years old when we moved to Pensacola, Fla., and I was enrolled in a brand new school. It was my seventh school so far if you counted kindergarten, so I was accustomed to being the new kid.

But I had never experienced anything quite so different. I had always been in middle class suburban schools where almost everybody looked and acted like me. But when we moved to Pensacola, we lived on the beach — and the beach kids were bused all the way to the inner city, where nobody looked like me.

Academics were terrible and the classes were way behind where I’d been in my previous schools. Mostly, though, it was a different culture. There was only one other white boy in all of the seventh grade. Almost every student in the school was black and they came from homes and neighborhoods very different from mine. It was a culture clash.

On one of my first days at the school, a knot of kids gathered around me in a hallway to make fun of my pants.

“Why you wear flood pants, white boy?” they taunted.

I had no idea what they were even talking about. What in the world were flood pants? I just knew from their jeering that I was the butt of their jokes. I was humiliated — and I would have done anything to blend in and be left alone.

I’ve been thinking today about all the ways in which we judge each other — and that triggered this old and painful memory. I quickly learned what “flood pants” were and I tried not to wear things that would make me the center of ridicule. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was one of my first open encounters with the ways in which culture uses cruel judgment to enforce conformity.

You will dress this way.

You will talk this way.

You will educate your children as we do.

You will live in a house that looks like our houses.

You will learn to think as we think — or we will ridicule you and judge you mindlessly. We will make fun of you. And if you still refuse to change, we will ostracize you.

We learn to have opinions about other people because we quickly find that they have opinions about us. It becomes second nature to have opinions about how other people should dress and talk and act and live. Without even thinking about it, we gravitate toward those who look and act as we do. And even among “our people,” we constantly keep judging.

We judge what your romantic relationship should be.

We judge whether you do the kind of work we approve of.

We judge whether you dress your children in ways we approve of.

We judge how you interact with your family.

Without even thinking about it, we judge those of our group — our friends — for how they act in the world. Some people are more lenient. Some are more judgmental. But all do it to some extent. We know how you should act — and “the right way to be” is invariably the ways we have been trained to be.

I’d like to tell you that I don’t care about the ways in which people judge me, but that would be a lie. I try not to care, but the judgment of others wounds me deeply, even when I know I’ve done what’s right for me.

Some people mindlessly conform without being bothered by it. (Some of the most successful people I know are like this.) A few are complete nonconformists and aren’t bothered by judgment. I live with the worst of both worlds. I’m a nonconformist who feels desperately different from those around me — but I’m also deeply hurt by the judgment I feel when I inevitably go my own way and others disapprove.

We all conform to some extent. Some people conform without even thinking about it — and many of those are never aware of how much their lives are guided by the fear of other people’s disapproval — and some people make conscious decisions about it. There are those like me who are very unconventional thinkers in the intellectual sense but who choose to look like everybody else. If you see me in a work setting, I’ll be wearing a white shirt and a red tie — I have a couple dozen variations of red ties like this one — simply because this is the “safe” uniform I choose to blend in when it suits my purposes.

I believe we would be happier if we weren’t so full of judgment for others. In fact, I have come to believe we would be less stressed if we didn’t have so many opinions at all. Why do I really need to have opinions about your life? Why do I need to be condescending — even in my private thoughts — about the ways in which you dress or speak or act?

Isn’t getting my own life where I want it to be difficult enough? Why should I waste my time with forming opinions and making judgments about you?

For the people we choose to be in the most intimate places in our lives, we really do need partners whose thinking and actions are similar to our own. (We will both feel more understood under such circumstances, for one thing.) But beyond that, how much better off would we be if we quit having opinions about other people — and focused on making our own lives what they ought to be?

I hate being judged. You probably do, too. But we both judge others more than we should. It would be healthier for both the judger and the judged if we could learn to focus on ourselves instead of judging others.

In most ways today, I see myself as a nonconformist. But the power of cultural conformity is so strong that I will always make sure my pants aren’t too short — so they won’t be “flood pants” — because I’m terrified of being humiliated again.

Whether conscious of it or not, we’re all terrified of that shame. So judgment and conformity are very difficult to leave behind.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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