Human instincts are behaviors that are genetically wired into us to that help us react to our environment, but most of the time they are more hurtful than useful. For example one of them is to follow and be influenced by our surroundings. Since birth we adjust to what family setting we may have and conform to what we see on the outside. At some point this human instinct becomes hurtful to us as conforming makes us most of the time act and think like everyone else. So how is it that conformity hurts individuality in our society? Our technology has gone so far and has improved better than it ever has so information is faster to spread and conforming easier to do. Conformity is in all of us and we don’t seem to realize it until later on, so we must take action now to understand how conforming in our world can be harmful to who we are and the individuality we may have left. In the essay “Anti-Intellectualism: Why We Hate The Smart …show more content…
He writes “Certainly the image presented by modern celebrities suggests that intellectualism has no ties to success and social legitimacy”(760). What Penrod is saying is that media glorifies non-intellectuals which in result makes intellectuals lose their ambition to continue with their accomplishments. Intellectuals conform to the idea that there is people who are looked up to who don 't have intellectualism so why should they? What is revealed is that Conformity hurts those individuals that may think differently and makes them lose particular characteristics that make them who they are. Not only does conformity take away characteristics but it can make a person obtain characteristics that weren 't there before. We can see this in the essay of Brent Staples “Black Men and Public Space” in which he explains how