Individuality Vs Conformity Essay

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Conformity vs Individuality: Can we escape conformity? An estimated 75% of people conform in the world. We all do. Sometimes we conform and don’t even know we do it. It seems impossible to escape. It’s like running into a dead end with a killer right behind you, there’s no escape. The world is filled with conformists, you are probably a conformists yourself. The world is filled with conformity, but the real question is can we escape it? In Harold Takooshian’s short but significant article “The 1964 Kitty Genovese Tragedy: What Have we Learned?”Takooshian acknowledges a tragic event that occurred on March 13, 1964, which took the life of a 28 year old women by the name of Kitty Genovese. She was brutally beaten on the streets of New York City while 38 witnesses watched the event happen and no one so much as bothered to phone the police and report the brutal murder. The murder took an excruciating half-hour. How can 38 people watch and not say anything? How do we let this happen? What would we have done if you were there? Questions we should be asking ourselves. We might say “I would have definitely helped her” but would you really? Would you be the one individual to stand out amongst others? …show more content…

It is human nature to conform, we all do it. We all want to not conform, but we also don’t want to be the one individual standing out of a group. We don’t want to seem “weird.” Conformity is like a jail cell and individuality is freedom. There are only few in the world who are free, but most of us are locked up behind a cell with the words conformity plastered on the front. We see the keys to get out, but we never end up going after them. Why? As Marty Rubin once said “Freedom began on the day the first sheep wandered away from the herd.” Will you be that sheep in a herd of conformity? Will you be the outlier in a group of people who have conformed? Are you that