Conform or Reform

Conform or Reform – by P.K. Odendaal - November 2018

Everything we do in life is that we either want to conform to a situation or we want to reform a situation. We accept or we reject, we accommodate or we remain intransigent, we compromise or we contest, we concede or we deny.

This encompasses our whole life. Some of us are rebels and we question or reject what we do not believe in, and others stand for nothing and fall for everything. Be it in politics, in business, in relationships or in private life - we experience everything in these two frameworks, and we usually choose the wrong one.

It is said that religious people compromise when they should fight and fight when they should compromise. A more mature approach which also gets us nowhere is the three tiered approach of the Hegel dialectic. We start at the thesis, someone else stands for the antithesis, and just as a side issue we might both fall for the synthesis.

It is said that compromise or synthesis is worse the both the original theses. They, however, only go by other names like resolution, absolution, dissolution and revolution. Pick your choice... or be a fence sitter. I like fence sitting. From a high fence I have the advantage of looking down on a situation or argument, and then it is quite easy to fall to any side, although I might concede that sitting there permanently might become a bit boring.

What choices do I have and should I exercise them?

I am a rebel by nature and I like revolution, but a revolution kills its mother and its children. Is it easy to get onto the fence again after you have fallen by the wayside.

Of course, deceit and lies and can keep the mothers and children alive for long, but so can it for the conformists. I know someone who used to be a friend and who stood for nothing and fell for everything, and now I regard him as the biggest coward I have ever seen. Needless to say, his company is bland and boring and I stay at a modest distance from him.

On the other hand I know of many who changed everything in the book and became heroes. You and I do not want to be heroes, so how do we navigate the road to change, innovation or invention by staying under the radar?

Maybe Falstaff (in Shakespeare's King Henry lV Part 1) has the answer:

If thou embowel me to-day, I'll give you leave to powder me and eat me too
to-morrow. 'Sblood,'twas time to counterfeit, or that hot termagant Scot had paid me scot and lot too. Counterfeit? I lie, I am no counterfeit.

To die is to be a counterfeit; for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man: but to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed.

The better part of valour is discretion; in the which better part I have saved my life.'Zounds, I am afraid of this gunpowder Percy, though he be dead: how, if he should counterfeit too and rise? By my faith, I am afraid he would prove the better counterfeit.

Falstaff represents the other extreme of counterfeit integrity. He attempts to establish this intentionally, through deception.

However, the world has turned into Falstaffs and we only need real integrity today to confound their deception.

They deny the existence of things they do not like, like the godless who turn to atheism and many other deceptive niceties. Talk of a virtual world - we are finally living inside it and go for excursions into the real world if we stay sane at times.

The truth spoken with bad intent beats every lie you can invent.