One might argue mass societies are tolerant of those who do not observe common practices: After all, there are many people with body piercings, tattoos, or even deliberately different hairstyles such as mohawks. On college campuses in particular, one finds a great variety of cosmetic departures from the norm.
This contingent of those who adopt a certain out of the ordinary ‘look’ are all too often in their own words, ‘being original.’
Such persons, however, tend to confuse their often ostentatious trappings with the actual state of being different in one’s values and formative experience.
In fact: the ‘original’ emphatically embrace the larger extrovert culture promoted in Western mass society. They exhibit the belief that the outer advertisement they have adopted creates the desired reality underneath. The man with the blue mohawk at the club, or the woman in college dressed like a hippie are just exhibiting the common set of attention-getting behaviors that the mass society promotes. Adopting an unorthodox exterior is just another way to gain recognition and increase status within the accepted order. The ‘original’ undergo a personal upgrade so that their self-banner can get more clicks. Those who are ‘original,’ desperately try to cultivate this status, expending considerable capital and actively changing their appearance, habits, and music preferences so that they can be accorded this title.
Such ‘originals’ are certainly celebrated in segments of the mass society: ironically, they more than most adhere to the accepted values.
Those who are different never tried to be as they are. In fact, those who are different needed not make any effort at all; the distinction of otherness was thrust upon them by no choice of their own. Their condition is not a commercial ploy for ‘originality’ but a stigma that follows them through life, though they might try to hide it.
Many who are different have spent years of their life at some point in lamentation. The journey to self-acceptance and conscious departure is a long hard one against every current in the stream. One who is different often knows pride for having endured, but does not flaunt it. It is a grim sort of pride, the divergent self that has been ‘earned’ is absolutely to be concealed from public ridicule. The one who is different is circumspect in their personal matters. Being different was never the aim, but rather the privilege to be different. It is a privilege that can be revoked at a moment’s notice, so one who is different often fits a personality type known as ‘introverted.’ It is in the interest of one who is different to avoid attention, to live beneath the surface and limit one’s close associations to kindred souls.
Those who strive to be ‘original’ are a mockery of everything the different introvert represents. By ‘being themselves’ they attempt to change who they are. By ‘being unique’ they aggressively reduce themselves to a public commodity.
Their lack of understanding is implicit in the fact that they try to earn as a distinction what is inflicted as stigma. Their ‘rebellion’ that stays strictly within the context of accepted society is an exercise in conformity. Their approach of putting form before substance is the opposite of everything they simulate having become.
Ultimately, ‘original’ and different are inimical. The former firmly within the sunlit world and the other under the light of the moon.
3 Comments
All those people who are different because of their looks (piercings, hairstyles, tattoos…etc) are really just part of the same consumer culture. All the differences you mention are things you need to buy to be different; they are all cosmetic, pre-packaged, and purchased differences, while as you say real originals come from within.
Regretfully, our society allows differences only to the acceptable range, with no room for the real outliers, which have to be brought back in (usually through public ridicule).
I think it is better to be original than it is to be different, because everyone is different, whereas it takes effort and imagination to be original. What’s the point in being so smug as an introvert, that you don’t want to do anything? What’s the point in not creating original works for the world to see and admire, just because it’s supposedly less admirable to be a commodity? Don’t people who are different create things that are to be bought and sold? If not, then your argument is correct, otherwise it is self-righteous waffle.
Thank you for articulating what I have observed in life for so long. Often tattooers and rockers claim originality but when put to the test they demonstrate the same conventional, superficial behaviors that instinctively defend the herd. They could never REALLY rebel; that would require a complete break with the doctrine of their subculture. It’s a bittersweet irony that most true introverts can be found on the fringes of these kinds of subcultures. There are similarities and sympathies but the introvert goes further and deeper; to Dangerous and Hidden places.