Conformity

Conformity is a distinct theme in Brave New World Revisited, built around the “Social Ethic” Aldous Huxley borrows from William Whyte’s The Organization Man. Huxley describes a “new Social Ethic” replacing the traditional individual-centered system, whose key words are “adjustment,” “adaptation,” “belongingness,” “team work,” “group living,” and “group loyalty,” and whose basic assumption is “that the social whole has greater worth and significance than its individual parts” — that “inborn biological differences should be sacrificed to cultural uniformity.” Its ideal is the man who displays “dynamic conformity” (Huxley’s “delicious phrase!”) and “an intense loyalty to the group, an unflagging desire to subordinate himself, to belong.” (source: Brave New World Revisited)

The book treats conformity as both a product of over-organization and a target for resistance. Huxley’s antidote — “salvation and enlightenment are for individuals,” since “the kingdom of heaven is within the mind of a person, not within the collective mindlessness of a crowd,” and his warning against “herd-poisoning” — pairs with Kyle’s marginal note “Become unprogrammable.” This links conformity to the wiki’s Propaganda and Collectivism threads: the same engineered uniformity Huxley dissects in mass communication is what coerced Collectivism demands. (source: Brave New World Revisited)

Context: Conformity is the tendency to align beliefs and behavior with group norms; in mid-20th-century social criticism (Whyte’s The Organization Man, Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, and Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited) it became shorthand for the pressure of mass society and corporate life to suppress individual judgment in favor of “belonging.”

Where this appears

• Brave New World Revisited — Huxley’s “Social Ethic” and “dynamic conformity,” the over-organization that produces them, and Kyle’s “Become unprogrammable” counter-note.