Monday, August 3, 2015

Conformity, Social Pressures & Guilt

I mentioned before how guilt is often, perhaps even mostly just the fear of going against other people's opinions on right and wrong, rather than a sincere inward quest.

As I experientially follow this line of thinking, I find it interesting where my psychology moves to. It can be unnatural to hold onto at times if I stop thinking, I guess I tend to default back to a conformist interpretation of right and wrong. But if I maintain focus and awareness and look inside myself for what is right and wrong, I find something else.

I am aware that at times I have even been afraid to confront myself in how I really feel about something, this or that. When the group states its opinion about how right or wrong something is, I feel the overwhelming pressure to clam up on my inner self, to not even ask myself how I really feel and go into denial with myself. Like I feel like I'm just an unknowing creature, that wouldn't dare go against the tide of others. Like I wouldn't want to go against what the crowd is thinking, like I want to prove myself to the crowd that I'm not "one of those people", and this pressure pushes upon me is as if god himself was telling me I'm guilty and damned, and I'm desperately trying to escape accusation without so much as even considering to stop and ask myself how I really feel.

This kind of guilt, it's not even sincere guilt, I find. It's just conformity, the social pressures.

I guess you could say that we are feeble creatures, humans, and so for us other people hold authority, as we look for answers and right and wrong. But we should be the ones who hold authority. Not the arrogance of self-power, but consulting the self, and letting honesty, this inner sense be your guide, and your god, not other people (or ideologies, religions, political thought systems, etc.)


And yet it's still hard in many ways to fully face and confront the fact of just how different my conception is of how I really feel about everything, from what the world shows and tells me I should feel. How backward the world is, on both right and wrong. I think my personal and private world, my private self, in an aspect, gains it's sense of personalization and vulnerability from this concept itself. The fact that it differs so much, that what I really feel I am afraid to admit to, even to myself.
This difference between how the world says things are and how I really feel is profound and disturbingly disjointed. How to put.... I guess you could say kind of like a spiritual conspiracy theory.

And, on somewhat of a side thought, what are "conspiracy theories" anyways?  I think we as humans have attraction to them, on an emotional level. And I think that's because they represent something to us. This sense we have or wish to have that there is some grand design running beneath everything, hidden, and when we find it, it blows everything else out of the water. I think we have this attraction to the concept of conspiracy theories because it's a distant, removed metaphor for what we are sensing on a subconscious, spiritual level, towards our lives and existence in a much more general and deeper sense.