"Didn’t anyone tell you that you are not 18 anymore?"

The words struck me, when first spoken, with equal measures of surprise and irritation. Here was a patient in my clinic, a late-40-ish typical Southern male, assuming to critique my clothes. I dressed, that particular day, no different than usual: jeans, conservative long-sleeve shirt and loafers (and yes, I was wearing socks). The fashion consultant nee automotive parts manager wore khaki pants, short-sleeved nylon mesh t-shirt and nondescript shoes. Not, to my eyes, that far different from my own attire. So what, indeed, was his pique with my clothes?

As I stumbled for a pithy retort, I was limited to a tepid, mousy "Gee, Tom, this is what I wear most days." Now, bringing the picture into a clearer view: here I am, in my own office, seeing a patient 10 years younger than me and being not-so-good-naturedly ragged about what I wore to work. What the hell is the world coming to?

I, being more than a tad OCD, spent the next several days ruminating about the encounter and, as I am prone to do, rolling it around in my head. What I should have replied to his dig? Some of my better bon mot’s were: "Well, Tom, when you own your own business - which you don’t - and are your own boss - which you are not - you can wear whatever the hell you want to work". Or: "At least I am not a 250 pound, turkey-shooting, beer-drinking, asocial, soon-to-unemployed car parts salesman without enough self-discipline to lose weight without a doctor’s help". These gave me small comfort but, as the moment for a pithy retort had passed, they would have to suffice as the only balm for my bruised, hypersensitive ego.

Psychologists have known this tendency for decades even if we, it’s practitioner, wander through life repeating the mantra: "Who cares what other people think?". We all do care and the proof is easy enough to find. In the 1950s, Solomon Asch showed that people conform, quite easily actually, to peer pressure. His studies, which I paraphrase from the entry on Wikepedia, went like this:

Each of 123 male volunteers was put into a group with 5 to 7 "confederates" (People who knew the true aims of the experiment, but were introduced as participants to the naive "real" participant). The subjects were shown a card with a line on it, followed by another card with 3 lines on it labeled a, b, and c. The participants were then asked to say which line matched the line on the first card in length. Each line question was called a "trial". The "real" participant answered last or penultimately. For the first two trials, the subject would feel at ease in the experiment, as he and the other "participants" gave the obvious, correct answer. On the third trial, the confederates would start all giving the same wrong answer. There were 18 trials in total and the confederates answered incorrectly for 12 of them, these 12 were known as the "critical trials". The aim was to see whether the real participant would change his answer and respond in the same way as the confederates, despite it being the wrong answer. Asch thought that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong, but the results showed that participants conformed to the majority on 37% of the critical trials. However, 25% of the participants did not conform on any trial. 75% conformed at least once, and 5% conformed every time.

Thus, peer-pressure is a very real part of our daily lives, whether we admit to it or not. One more bit of psychological research and I think we can call it a fact: Stanley Milgram showed in 1963 that people will not just succumb to peer pressure on benign things like the length of a line on a piece of paper but, also, will take it a step farther: they will actually inflict harm on another human being in order to conform to the expectations of an "authority figure".

I will leave it to the reader’s level of curiosity to read of the actual experiment. Instead, I want to focus on Dr. Milgram’s thoughts as published in Harper’s Magazine in 1974's as "The Perils of Obedience". Milgram begins the essay with these ominous words, "For many people, obedience is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed a potent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct." Later, he opines this:

"The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. [Emphasis mine]

"Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority". [Emphasis mine]

There is nothing wrong, prima facie, with conformity or obedience. All who live in a social milieu, require some degree of both to coexist with other Homo sapiens. We know this because we have laws to prohibit certain negative behaviors (running naked through a mall, stealing candy from a store, destroying private or public property, et cetera) and compelling positive behaviors (stopping at red lights, driving on the right side of the street, wearing seat belts and the like). Society cannot exist without some degree of conformity and obedience.

The sticky wicket arises when we lose sight of who our legitimate authority figures actually are. Who are the people that have the authority - the mutually agreed upon "law givers" - to compel our actions? Well, in brief, that would be the federal, state, county and city governments under which we have consented to live. You will notice that they do not include friends, neighbors, peer groups, social or professional organizations, family (unless you are a child under 18) or coworkers. [Your boss, of course, is a special case. You don’t have to do as he wishes but you can also expect to searching for a new job if you don’t. Alas, some unpleasantries in life must be borne in silence.]

The problem with democracies, in general, and American, in particular, are that they have the unhappy effects of blurring the lines of authority and conformity. This was observed early in our history by Alexis de Tocqueville in his prescient Democracy in America (1835). He observed that democratic nations are enamored of uniformity, standardization; they hate the eccentric, the grand, the mysterious. He wrote: "(In America) Men are much alike, and they are annoyed, as it were, by any deviation from that likeness; far from seeking to preserve their distinctive singularities, they endeavor to shake them off in order to identify themselves with the general mass of people, which is the sole representative of right and of might in their eyes."

The truth of this is no better exemplified by the ferocious way that Americans attack their "celebrities" for transgressions that, if found in their own townships or even their own neighborhoods, they would not have the least interest. But let Lindsey Lohan lose weight, Alex Rodriguez be accused of using steroids in baseball, Amy Winehouse be found drunk or drugged out, Mel Gibson get a divorce for a younger woman or any other hint of nonconformity from those in the public eye and they become a pariah. The paparazzi clamor for a photo-op and the muckraking "journalists" give voice to the Great Mob’s indignation for the affront to their delicate sensibilities. While the same (or worse!) missteps occur everyday in Hicktown, U.S.A., they are fair game for the wrath of the leveled American.

Surely, the youth still rebel and endeavor to assert their identity, their individuality and their uniqueness, at least for a time. They still smoke, try drugs, dress bizarrely (to our aged eyes), listen to alien music and flaunt authority’s power over their lives. But what becomes of that spirit when we grow older? I suspect it is quashed by our incessant quest for the conformity of democracy which demands not that we "keep up with the Jones’" but, instead, be "like the Jones’." When someone (like Tom, my own personal fashion police) is truly indoctrinated, they are disturbed (offended? frightened?) to their core by someone who still fights to be the round peg in a world of square holes (especially when that someone is a decade older than they are and "should know better!)

Well, sorry, Tom. I have never been a conformist in any part of my life and, alas, I probably never will be. I will continue to wear whatever I like ("age-appropriate" or not; I am giving some serious thought to tie-dyed t-shirts for work) to work and beyond. I will, to the best of my ability, believe and express ideas that might not be anyone’s "party line" (or anything close to being "politically correct") and, within the limits of existing law, act as my conscience leads me. I will gleefully revel in my own dissidence, follow my own compass and refuse to square-up the round peg that is my own singular spirit.

As psychiatrist Rollo May said, "The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity." I am no knight errant, charging at the windmills of conventionality for the sake of standing out from the mob. But I am an individual. warts and all. If nothing else, I believe I am...well...interesting.

But that is just my haughty opinion.