I can give only what I have. Some say I am able to package it nicely, and it is surely a pleasure for me to do the wrapping. But in the end, it’s what’s inside the packaging that counts.
It is my nature, built into my very DNA, to avoid conforming. It would be easy enough for that to become an excuse to make trouble for everyone else in the world. Lord knows, I’ve done that enough. Sometimes I’m really surprised I made it to 53. Somewhere back at the beginning, I managed to obtain a healthy fear of letting people know I didn’t accept their ideas about the world, and simply pretend for their sakes. That’s probably the reason society didn’t steer me into a life of crime. Instead, I managed to masquerade my non-conformist nature and learned about tactics for expressing it.
In these latter decades of life, I’m in a better position to avoid conformity with a purpose. That is, I set aside the junk I’m fed on just about anything, examine it from other angles, seeking particularly any angle not already covered. Sure, it all depends on how important I sense the thing is, whether I really dig into it or just take a quick glance. Still, I’ll probably be one of the last to buy into anything, if it matters to me at all. Right or wrong, I have a powerful sense of when something matters, and can decide instantly if circumstances demand it. The root word for “radical” is Latin radix — the root of a thing. To be a radical means someone who evaluates critically the nature of the thing, with a tendency to dismiss all the layers of social investment on top. I want to know the root nature of something, and the herd’s feelings be damned; I’ll rip it all off and decide for myself what I need to do with it.
Sometimes the functioning of the social structure does matter. It’s that I reject the most common assumptions about what matters, there, too. I have this notion about Eden being a paradisaical ideal, what God Himself intended. When something is offered me as a reflection of that, I have an obligation before God to investigate by His revelation whether it’s a reflection of His paradise or just some mythical nonsense being sold that way. Very, very often, I reject the sales pitch. A critical element in what drives me is setting things right, and irreverence about the great social standing of this or that person or idea is part of what makes it fun. But I don’t do it simply to reject and shock, because that serves no purpose. I’m a radical root-hunter, not a destroyer. Society does some really stupid stuff which hurts people, and it makes me angry when someone is being squashed unjustly. If someone has to get hurt, let it be the oppressive cattle prod wielding agents of brainless conformity. That’s the reason I retain some little element of violence in my nature, because I can’t just let the innocent suffer. Sometimes the oppressor won’t listen to anything at all, so it’s simply a matter of stopping them. I don’t pretend I can change anyone, but I am darned sure going to change situations if I have the power. Fixing the hurts of society can mean simply pouring the inevitable Pandora’s Box of evil consequences back into the laps of those who keep opening the box.
Sometimes no one is at fault. Once in awhile I can see where something fundamental in the social structure is itself the cause of human misery. At the same time, I have to realize this may be the best we can expect. I don’t forget what I preach, that Eden is a symbol of some deeper desire of God to bless His Creation, but that we are the ones who got ourselves kicked out. Eden is gone from this earth, and you can only go back there by dying. The whole thing is wrapped up in symbolism, so it has different meanings on different levels, but the point here is you should want it, even while you know you can’t actually have it. Instead, you do what you can by trying to bring pieces of it back to your world, fresh glimpses of Life as God meant it to be. It’s in the striving, not the achievement, so some misery is entirely the norm for our existence here.
It’s the madness of rejecting the just misery of our common human condition which makes things so bad in this life. God created fire for our use. You have to get close enough to cook with it, but avoid stepping in it. The instinct for building fences and barriers to protect people from themselves does not come from God. The only truly effective safety barrier is the one built into the soul. That’s not to say we don’t snatch our children back from walking into the fire, but we have no choice but to let them get burned just a little, or they’ll never really understand the danger. It’s a sin against God to be over-protective, as if there is something virtuous in abundant caution. Super-caution only works when the situation is utterly unknown. You can have people die by taking risks, or you can kill everyone — a living death — by making risks impossible. People have to be able at some point to choose stupidity, particularly as long as it hurts only themselves. To the degree they externalize that hurt to others, we do what we can to limit them, but we cannot possibly stop them and call it “justice” — God clearly says otherwise.
Conformity has limited utility, but does have some.
So when I seem to conform, it’s because I sense that matter is tested, tried from every angle, and I cannot contribute anything new. I adhere as much as I can to good rules of English grammar, but not the strictest regime. It’s just a good way to get things done; it’s practical. I vastly prefer the staid and stable corporate RHEL brand of Linux over all the flashy eye-candy of Ubuntu, but I can’t get CentOS (a clone of RHEL) to run on my hardware just yet. I get more done with CentOS than I do with Ubuntu, but the difference isn’t huge, so I compromise and run Ubuntu until CentOS catches up. I don’t eat everything my appetite calls for, but observe some flexible limits. On the other hand, I utterly reject conventional American notions about nutrition, for the most part. I rarely eat out, and I’m very picky where I go when I do. I’m hardly an athlete, but I do athletic stuff so I don’t have to live with high blood pressure. Besides, long solitary walks are one of the best ways to clear away the rubble of human interaction and rediscover who I am, with some hope of seeing who God intends me to be. So some of what I do seems conventional only because once in awhile, convention stumbles on what is right.
When I conform, it’s only because conformity has conformed to the Truth. That’s pretty rare, but it does happen.
