Hierarchy, Social Rules, Influence, Conformity and Obedience

charlie777pt (64)in #psychology • 6 years ago

Hierarchy, Social Rules, Influence, Conformity and Obedience

All my youth I lived under a fascist-colonialist regime, and I was a nonconformist and a free spirit and I can't be controlled by conventional rules and I act by my own choices centered in Human Values above Materiality.

Photo by Spenser H on Unsplash
Mussolini was the first fascist that married politicians and enterprises celebrated in the actual "Revolving-Door" under control of media and savage capitalism with fake-globalization that reinforces the concentration of power of "the Machine" over people's will.
No wonder that lately, the most elected "eclectic" fascistic figures in politics are rich powerful entrepreneurs in business as usual.
There is a rise in extremist new ideologies that are winning the elections all over the world like examples of Trump, Le Pen, Erdogan, Neocons, Norbert Hofer in Aústria that wants guns to kill refugees, the anti-Islamist in Holland, Jimmie Akesson anti-immigration in Sweeden, Frauke Petry in Germany, Andrej Babis media millionaire ,The "Trump" of the Czech Republic, and the list goes on.

Groups tend to generate unanimity between people, making people share the "same" opinions and beliefs making it easier to express your ideas.
The force of conformity is stronger when we express our opinions in public and the resistance to accepting group influence is bigger in privacy like when we vote.
Groups are important for people because to belong to the group implies that the individual, have to adopt behaviors, norms, and values of the group.
The lack of self-esteem normally associated with low autonomy seems to be correlated with the degree of conformism of a person because these people rely less on their opinions and judgment and tend to follow the people with more self-reliance.

Conformism for me is very related to actual Conservatism, Propaganda, and Censorship.
The relation between centralized systems of business and government organizations, Justice, Intelligence and the Media is now a "Big Fraternity" against autonomy and an educated and liberated will of the citizens.

The escalade of the fascist type leadership profile and the rise of conservative behavior and ideas, with dictatorship and propaganda to promote mass behavior making people to conform with the Power point of view.
Today's society is becoming mainly conformist and has a root in people imitating the dominant behaviors as well as the forces of the system that are modeling them.
In actual society, conformism is turning into a mass behavior with zero social tolerance to deviant dissident ideas or behaviors.
Dissidence behaviors or groups today is used to by the power to aggregate a majority and control their destinies using outside "escape-goats".

For the conformist society is not people in the interaction that exchange influence and ideas, he sees society as laws, rules or institutions that everybody should conform and they tend to follow "benevolent" dictators.
The conformist forces other people to be compliant with the rules he already knows and interiorized as "normal".
Change is the worst enemy of the conformists and makes them feels all deviant behavior as a threat to their sense of security.
The anti-conformist is an independent autonomous and critical person and normally is behind innovation and creativity.
It seems that a very repressive education by the family with rigid norms and a fascistic State domination helps the growth of the conformist character and a dialoguing family and real democracy can be the seed for an anti-conformist constructive and innovating behavior.

Some Anti-Conformists we should know

People should read the book "The Conformist" from Alberto Moravia that helped me and him after writing to understand how fascistic power builds a conformist.
A quote from the book of Alberto Moravia - The Conformist:

" Marcello spends the entire novel in a search for what he perceives to be a normal life - normal activities, a normal appearance, normal emotions, and so on. However, he confuses normality with conformity, and in his quest to conform, subjugates his already-repressed emotions. When the natural course of his life presents him with ethical dilemmas - the assignment to betray Professor Quadri, his attraction to women other than his wife - he is ill-prepared to deal with them.." Source: Wikipedia on Alberto Moravia.

Moravia wrote this book during the emergence of fascism in Italy and only after some years he found out that the book was about the effects of fascism building conformity and trying to eliminate autonomy in his mind during that time.

The most difficult movie to see and understand is the "Saló, 120 days of Sodom" by Pier Pasolini that is the expression of the mass psychology of fascism showing the relation between dictatorship, corruption, abuse of power, sadism, perversion, and sexuality to interiorize and establish conformism in the youth.

Wilhelm Reich wrote an interesting book called "Mass Psychology of Fascism" that should be brought to light again because it was a prediction of today's sign of the Times. To him, fascists and "red fascist" bolsheviks were the same.

"You have to revamp your whole way of thinking so that you don´t think from the standpoint of the state and culture, but from the standpoint of what people need and what they suffer from. Then you arrange social institutions accordingly" - Wilhelm Reich

The book is about how people go against their interests when the masses are guided to authoritarianism through the child education. It starts with the small dictatorship of the family and later school that prepares the children for the upcoming general authoritarian system when they are adults. Repression and control of this structures are built upon sexual inhibition, anxiety, and results in a character shield ( in his words "muscular armor") in our body by the positions and his expression that is represented by our daily behavior.