If you only deserved a brain

Albert Einstein once commented (forgive me for the actual words slip my mind and i'm too lazy to look it up properly..i'm sure you can search for it) that those individuals who march happily along with everyone else have already earned his contempt. They do not deserve their large brain when clearly the spinal cord would have sufficed. While I always found this amusing and to some degree life affirming I fear that sometimes statements like this can be taken too far the opposite. Does a rebel make a non-conformist? I think its just as easy to be a rebel as it is to be a follower. The rebel really is only someone who turns their back to everything. I say blue pen they say red. I believe the real value in Einsteins words (or anyone who has spoken directly or significantly about conformity..Nietzsche, Shaw, Twain, Ralph Waldo, etc) is that the real struggle is finding who you are and sticking to those values regardless of what the majority says or does. It's not blatant disregard for the majority view.

 Let me steal somebody's elses words and or well give them credit perhaps where they do not deserve it. Charles Pierce (that's what i'm going with anyways) spoke of three stages of adult thinking and conceptualizing. Black and White, Relativism, and Committed Relativism. It is my belief and probably the truth that most people do not leave the first stage. Those in the majority that tend just to follow along "marching happily" and the rebels who see things as only this way or that. That's a huge group of people. Relativism is the stage where people come to the understanding and recognition that two people in an argument are both equally right and equally wrong. That your own view on the situation or world is relative. Everything is relative. Reaching this stage is an important step but the people that get stuck here and unsatisfied or unhappy. Life has no meaning if all things are true. This leads to the existential crisis. If all things are true (and therefore nothing is true) how does one make meaning out of life? The true non-conformists has reached the committed relativism stage then. They recognize that all these options exist and that all of them are true but have chosen their own views and values and have committed to them. They may walk with the majority but that does not make them conformists.

Good luck on your journeys.