If it was up to the typical man, everyone would be exactly identical in look, thought, and action.
It’s not that he likes similarity. It’s that he feels compelled to enforce his orthodox views on everyone else.
The majority consistently homogenizes and reduces everything to its simplest, most palatable form. The majority would die if it had to make an independent decision without reference to what others were doing.
Take university. Why is it so important to go there? If you want financial security and interesting, valuable work, the trades make much more sense. Yet, a lawyer has more prestige than a glazier. Even a bankrupt lawyer in a town lousy with ’em.
Take Christmas. Why is it so important to “celebrate” that if you’re celebrating Santa, not Jesus? I’m not a Jesus-worshipper, but it seems to me that the obsessive need to give gifts and huddle with family on the Twenty-Fifth makes no sense if you’re not doing it for the religious originator of the celebratory holiday. If I ever have a family, I doubt very much I’ll be doing what everybody else does on Christmas. Maybe we’ll spend the day telling stories, sharing special love. Whatever it is, it won’t be sitting around a plastic tree hoping for our greed to be rewarded.
The majority not only obeys each other, it compels you to go along. If, for example, you missed Christmas, that would practically be grounds to call Child Welfare Department to take kids away from you. “Keeping up with the Joneses” is all about the tyranny of the majority, a race to the bottom based on insecurity of status and envious glances around.
What is tyranny? It is the use of various kinds of force to compel a societal outcome in your favor. The majority would rather cut off its cock than experiment sexually. The majority has no clue how to lead a full, fulfilling life. Dreaming is verboten is Majority-Land, unless everyone else is dreaming the same way. Actually, every activity, every kind of living is forbidden in Majority-Land unless it has many red messy handprints on it and the stamp of The Daily Normal upon it.
The irony — the delicious irony — is that the majority is dissatisfied with their situation. It’s not that they intellectually recognize the hollowness of their tyranny — heaven forbid! *knuckles pressed against own mouth* — it’s that the utter sameness becomes monotonous even for them. As thinking, marginally creative beings, they recoil from a crowd of black uniforms with silver lightning strikes on the sleeves.
It seems as though the ideal in life is to be just dumb enough to let it all wash over you, yet smart enough to survive comfortably in a complex world. Say, IQ 107. That’s the perfect median for the herd-animal that is the tyrannical majority.
Dark Sport 
You are absolutely right, most people live a life that is not their own, there are more dissatisfied people than truly happy ones. Unfortunately, the need to receive money to survive often leads us to make useful choices, but almost never satisfying ones. 👏👏👏👏👍
LikeLike
There is no doubt your “social math” is correct — with the dissatisfied outweighing the truly happy. It takes a certain strength to be happy in this world, and it helps to have an independent mind too. Unfortunately, high intelligence is often correlated with unhappiness. Ignorance is bliss, no?
LikeLiked by 1 person
“What you give up in a world of uniformity is resilience (Gladwell 88) . I’m reading “Revenge of The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell right now. The big idea so far is Conformity. I’m in Chapter 3: ” Poplar Grove.” Poplar Grove is an ultra affluent Florida suburb where grades are everything for high schoolers. Between 2005-2016 there was a suicide epidemic among them.
In the same chapter Gladwell parallels the Poplar Grove story with the story of domestic Cheetah breeding. Zoos tried for years to breed them to get the population above critical but failed. They wouldn’t breed / cubs kept dying. In 1980 zoologists realized that 12,000 years ago all but perhaps one of the Cheetahs died in a Great Mammal extinction event. All of today’s cheetahs are kin of the same lone mother that survived the extinction event. That mother happened to have a compromised immune system. So the gene affects all modern cheetahs. This is an example of “monoculture.” and epidemics love monocultures.
LikeLike
Very interesting quote, EF. I’m pleased to see you reading some deeper material than five-and-dime junk books. Too bad about the kids from Poplar Grove: they shouldn’t take themselves so seriously. A little levity, a little lightheartedness, goes a long way! (Helps prevent suicides.)
LikeLike
A little levity goes go a long way. It’s the parents’ fault. He quotes one of the faculty as saying “they’re fucking nuts.” … Private school are still a thing, which just slays me because that means people around my age are doubling down on their own parent’s seriousness. You have to be pretty fucking serious to pay $20K / year so your toddler can be indoctrinated in Jesus talk or whatever. They never got the joke.
LikeLike