In praise of the weirdos who most people don’t really seem to like

By David McElroy · August 30, 2011

There’s tremendous pressure in society to conform to what everyone else wants and expects. That might seem like a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your temperament and values. Are you a “conformity enforcer” or a “diversity generator”?

If you drove down my street, you’d have a pretty good indication that the people in one particular house aren’t conformers. While pretty much every other home on the street has closely cropped shrubs like something out of a landscaping magazine, this house has bushes that have been allowed to grow up almost to the roof of the second floor.

The yard is carefully kept and there’s a lot of other greenery in a side garden, so it’s obvious that this is intentional, not just a matter of being too lazy to cut shrubs. Is this a good thing or an eyesore?

It depends on your point of view. Personally, I don’t think I’d want my bushes that high, at least not with such a traditional style of architecture, but it doesn’t bother me in the least. I’ve talked to a couple of people on the street, though, who find it nothing short of scandalous.

In most things, I fall into the “diversity generator” camp, aka the weirdos. I’ve always identified with the unpopular groups who didn’t quite fit in. I probably shouldn’t admit it, but I’ve always seen the “conformity enforcers” as the enemy, because they represented the views of The Man in trying to put me into my place. In the last 10 years or so, though, I’ve come to see a broader perspective. These two groups might not like each other, but we need each other.

In a controversial 1997 book, “The Lucifer Principle,” author Howard Bloom suggested that all societies are made up of people filling certain necessary roles, whether they realize it or not. He proposed that there were five types of roles, but the ones relevant here are the conformity enforcers and the diversity generators.

Bloom believes that most people in any society are conformity enforcers, and it’s hard to dispute this notion. They’re the ones with the bushes more like those on the right. For those of us who don’t conform, it might sound like bad news that there are so many conformers, but Bloom says that a society with too few conformity enforcers will fall apart, because there’s nothing to hold it together. It’s the conformity to the norm that allows those people to stick together and live in peace.

The next biggest group — and the one that intrigues me the most — are the diversity generators. If a group has too many people who are going off and doing things differently, it doesn’t have enough stability to survive, but if it has too few of them, it becomes stagnant. In Bloom’s view, the diversity generators are the ones who try all sorts of crazy ideas and experiments. Most of them fail. Almost all of them are disliked and maybe even distrusted by the conformers. But a few of those crazy ideas work.

And here’s the interesting thing. The ideas that work spread to the rest of society. The conformers would never have tried them, but once they succeed and seem obvious, conformers start adopting them. At that point, the “crazy idea” becomes the embedded norm — and it lasts until the next generation of wild-eyed crazy radical comes along with something that works even better.

I’ll never be able to be a conformer. Honestly, I’m not terribly comfortable with them in the long term. But I acknowledge that society needs them for stability. I wish more of the broader society would acknowledge that people who chart their own courses and follow their own hearts and dreams are just as necessary to the long-term survival of the human race.

I want to close by quoting my favorite praise of diversity generators, which came from a television ad 14 years ago:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

If you have an internal “tick tock” telling you to go your own way, don’t conform. Break out and be your own person. If that’s who God made you to be, don’t try to be a conformist just because family or friends or co-workers expect it. The future of the human race might just depend on you being true to your heart.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts