Lack Of Originality

Recently I encountered the following quote:

“Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

To contemplate the quote more deeply, I shuffled my Tarot deck, and drew the Page of Pentacles.

This Page, in relation to the quote, makes perfect sense. Here the Page is a young person, just starting out in adult life, working towards what is hoped to be a stable and strong financial and material future.

And society has pushed this young person into conformity at every turn. We send our children to school, an institution that works to ensure that they will grow up to be good, stable employees and consumers. If they don’t quite fit with the norm, doctors stand by with drugs designed to bring kids a bit closer to that norm. Crushing peer pressure as they go through adolescence will ensure that most don’t express too much unique individuality, that they all either fit in with the herd or are ostracized from it.

That is viewed, as the quote suggests, as a key to success.

But is it?

Is pushing our Page to conformity, to discouraging uniqueness within the individual actually the key to success?

As I write this, I think of Apple Computer.

Steve Jobs, a strange guy, gave the world the decent personal computer. Without him, we’d all still probably be using a command line interface, and the things wouldn’t be any fun at all.

He made Apple into Apple.

Then they fired him, and brought in some respectable management. Businessmen who could and did conform with business norms.

The place collapsed.

In desperation, they brought Jobs back. That gave the world the phones we do so much with today. Without him, we’d probably still be using our phones to call people more than anything else.

Now a respectable businessman runs Apple again.

And Apple hasn’t brought out anything truly world changing since Jobs died and the respectable guy took over.

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Undoubtedly the well trod path is a path that can lead to success. Conformity, not too much originality. Going along with the herd. We can make money in that way, we can be successful in that way. Importantly, we can avoid failure and embarrassment in that way.

But we can never find true greatness.

True greatness comes only to those who are original. Who are unique. Who think and dream in utterly unique ways.

But this unique pathway is a scary pathway, for while it can lead to greatness, it can also lead to great failure and struggle.

What should our Page choose? His or her unique self, or conformity?

The quote was published here on Substack by Philosophors.