How Is Conformity Beneficial To Society

The first step on the moon, the first call on the telephone, the first racially-integrated school: what do they all have in common? All were made possible by people who thought outside the box and dared to do “the impossible.” Walt Disney once said, “It’s kinda fun to do the impossible.” Doing the impossible is not only fun, but a necessity, in contemporary times. Progress stems from outside-the-box thinking; however, in modern society, conformity is the norm, but doing the impossible is necessary to facilitate development and improve the world. Scientific advances in the past from philosophers and scientists who were rejected in their times for their foreign ways of thinking have sculpted the society of today. It was once thought impossible to travel to space, to set foot on the moon, to explore Mars; however, because of the perseverance of early scientists like Dalton with the atom and Newton’s physics, Lance Armstrong was able to set foot on the moon in the twentieth-century, and more recently, NASA has sent probes to Mars for exploration. The incredible knowledge gained from these expeditions
is readily available to a growing number of humans through the growth of technology, smartphones, and the Internet with the turn of the twenty-first century. The human race has more access to information now than ever before to better understand how the world and universe work from the hard work of forward-thinking men and women who dared to do what was impossible only decades before: expand the frontier of exploration to space. Similarly, the unlikely discovery of Penicillin made way for life-saving advances in the medical field. Biomedical-engineering, a rapidly growing field--and one of the most desired at schools like Johns Hopkins and Stanford--has enhanced the lives of thousands with the creation of nearly life-like prosthetics, gene-therapy, and stem-cell treatments. Outside of science and technology, creative social advancements have led to a more vibrant society. With great turbulence in the 1960s, America began changing with civil rights movements. The African-American community fought bravely against the grain for equality through the NAACP, Freedom Riders, and Black Panthers, and leaders like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X; they helped overturn Plessy v. Ferguson with Brown v. Board and integrate schools so children of all races and ethnicities would have an equal educational opportunity. This has created a more aware modern environment where students take action to acknowledge and fight racism and bigotry that exists in schools and on social media with movements like “Black lives matter” and variety shows to celebrate diversity (like COD at the Park). On the contrary, some argue that conformity is beneficial to society: it creates a necessary cohesion and identity to unite people, as well as make society function smoothly; however, history has shown that blindly following authority or government does not lead to a better civilization.
Psychological studies have shown that under the guise of following authority, blind compliance leads to irrational actions; the participants in this study were told to administer increasingly painful shocks to a subject if he or she answered a question wrong, even when the participants could witness the subject’s pain, up to the brink of “death” (the subjects were not actually being hurt). This reflects the mindless compliance that led to genocides and the Holocaust--destroying thousands of lives, cultures, and societies, as well as displacing and destroying families for
generations. Society needs more people who do the impossible. Whether for “fun” or not, doing the impossible, thinking outside-the-box, and making discoveries advances modern civilization into the next, better era, just as past advancements pushed the world into the new, progressive era of today. The next Steve Jobs, Charles Darwin, or Rosa Parks could be on the brink of breakthrough today.