Did We Mortgage Our Identity? The 1960s Worries About Conformity

Mid-century Americans were beginning to wonder if they were paying too much for the comforts of modern life.

Arial view of Levittown, PA
Levittown gave thousands of families a chance to leave the city and live in their own suburban home. Over time, though, the planned community became a symbol of Americans’ vanishing individuality.

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By the 1950s, it was clear the 20th century wasn’t going to be the era of peace and prosperity Americans had predicted in 1900. It had brought them a world war, a major depression, and another world war, and now an interminable cold war. Americans were getting tired of the constant belt-tightening and war preparedness; they wanted to enjoy the society they’d built. But many were disappointed with the society they found. There was a general sense that things could, and should, be better.

Even if Americans didn’t feel a troubling malaise, the media certainly made a case for it. Journalists continually wrote of problems in American society, such as racism, alienation, and materialism. They also referred to the problem of “conformity.”

There was no single definition of the term. Popular magazines and television talked of conformity as the desire to fit in: Americans, like their milk, were becoming homogenized. They were abandoning their individual differences to fit in and get ahead. A popular song of 1962, “Little Boxes,” talked of people, their lives, and their “ticky tacky” houses all looking the same. But conformity was more than just the desire to accommodate the mainstream of America.

Between 1959 and 1963, three authors, each highly regarded for his insight and judgment, weighed in on the subject.

Erich Fromm, the renowned psychologist and philosopher, wrote “Our Way Of Life Is Making Us Miserable” in 1964. The need to conform, he said, didn’t arise in Americans but in their organizations, which rewarded people…

who cooperate smoothly in large groups, who want to consume more and more, and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, yet who arc willing to be commanded, to do what is expected to fit into the social machine without friction; men who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without an aim except the aim to be on the move, to function, to go ahead.

Our society is becoming one of giant enterprises directed by a bureaucracy in which man becomes a small, well-oiled cog in the machinery. The oiling is done with higher wages, fringe benefits, well-ventilated factories and piped music, and by psychologists and “human-relations” experts; yet all this oiling does not alter the fact that man has become powerless, that he does not wholeheartedly participate in his work and that he is bored with it.

[We should give Fromm credit for recognizing his profession might be enabling the system by helping citizens endure an unfriendly system.]

The ‘organization man’ may be well fed, well amused and well oiled, yet he lacks a sense of identity because none of his feelings or his thoughts originates within himself; none is authentic. He has no convictions, either in politics, religion, philosophy or in love. He is attracted by the “latest model” in thought, art and style, and lives under the illusion that the thoughts and feelings which he has acquired by listening to the media of mass communication are his own.

He has a nostalgic longing for a life of individualism, initiative and justice, a longing that he satisfies by [watching cowboy movies.] But these values have disappeared from real life in the world of giant corporations, giant state and military bureaucracies and giant labor unions.

He, the individual, feels so small before these giants that he sees only one way to escape the sense of utter insignificance: He identifies himself with the giants and idolizes them as the true representatives of his own human powers, those of which he has dispossessed himself.

Such ideas aren’t particularly surprising, coming from a humanist and psychologist. But much of what he says was echoed by other Post contributors in the early 1960s, including a social critic from an unexpected quarter.

 

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Comments

  1. “Big, better, best – never let it rest.” If you’re concerned about a swankier house or car or the latest tech toy, that’s not necessarily “conformity” – that’s a deeper problem.

  2. Conformity – that’s what my shrink
    Maintains makes me a mental case.
    Conforming what I do and think
    To feel I fit in the rat race.
    I’m hitting my shrink’s couch so much,
    My body imprint’s on display
    From all of my conforming touch.
    My shrink says I’m making headway.
    In order to pay my shrink’s fees,
    A second job I’ve had to take.
    But my shrink says that my disease
    Means never getting a couch break.

    My shrink says that I’ll never be
    Fully cured of conformity.

  3. There is a lot to think about and ponder in this week’s Saturday Evening Post leading e-mail story about our thoughts and ideas being our own, and the illusion of such, when in fact it’s a calculated veil of illusion cleverly designed to give that very impression.

    What was true in the early ’60s (in this regard) is still true today in this regard even though the time periods are drastically different otherwise in too many ways to mention here.

    I will ask this timely question here. Is it really YOUR idea to go out and buy the the latest telecommunication’s company overly loaded “cell-phone-of-the-moment” (which in fact is barely a “phone” at all anymore) or are you buying into the multi-billion dollar telecommunication companies’ “nuclear arms race” of one upmanship with each other, trying to make it “appear” it’s about you, and your “need” of their latest, ridiculous gimmick, when it’s all about THEIR greed need to sell the cell!

    Primetime TV is overwhelmingly dominated by these brainwashing ads. To them, one of their own products from April 2010 is already “ancient”. My cell phone from 2003 works as great as ever, and I definitely don’t need a phone with any more features than this one has. Life HAS gotten a lot more complicated since ’03; and one of the main reasons for THAT is that TECHNOLOGY has made it that way, people! Today’s overkill technology is a lot like the drug ads you hear on TV. It’s supposed to fix one problem, but has so many drawbacks otherwise it’s unbelievable. Not to lessen the severity of the drug disclaimers, but it is hard to believe they can say it with a straight face! Any of the ads for men are perfect examples, I’d say. Scary.

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