Conformity Is Worth Everyone

The path leading to new discovery and insight has always required a leap of faith. While there is a great ease in following the crowd that trudges down one road, there is a tremendous loss at the finish line, prepared to greet those who lack an original mindset. The practice of conformity functions as a security blanket, almost forcing members of society to cling on to what is safe and known, an unfortunate side-effect of being concealed in a culture that’s continuously rejecting new perspective. After all, what is new does not necessarily line up with what is socially acceptable. Consequently, an attitude like this infects an individual with a sickly sense of discomfort in their endeavors, always begging the question, “Is this worth anything?”
and thus preventing them from breaking through the barrier of unhealthy obedience. In the passage from Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a student finds herself afflicted with mind-numbing fear when it comes to writing an original essay. In order for her to find the creativity she misplaced, her teacher had to continuously decrease the scale of her writing topic, forcing her to look at every nook and cranny of her subject matter. As a whole, the passage clearly signifies the importance of daring to find success by searching through the unexplored.
Writing a paper on the subject of something as large as an entire country may sound like a wise decision.
However, a topic so vast may leave a student with a contrived paper built on regurgitated opinions and common facts. It is then better to revive the deteriorated imagination by changing the focus to something different. The student in the passage is used to merely collecting information and using those ideas as a crutch throughout her studies which therefore challenged her in finding a cure for the aforesaid societal disease. The author even expresses this sentiment when he writes, “She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.” (Pirsig) This is the moment where the main point of the passage reaches its peak. Most people struggle with “original and direct seeing” because they have never been taught to ignore the voices telling them to err on the side of caution and to be normal. This opens up the door to the realization that each and every writer must look past the ordinary and into the minute details. Writing is about more than a vague description of the blatantly obvious. It is about broadening one’s horizons enough to get inside of the subject and to express it with fervor. Robert Pirsig took his understanding of this phenomenon and translated it into a story that will draw attention to the problem, and hopefully better the world. And so, when a crowd begins the woeful journey to one end of the spectrum, it is much more noble to travel in the opposite direction. Only then can success be found in writing and
beyond.