How Is Conformity Beneficial To Society

The first step on the moon, the first call on the telephone, the first racially-integrated school: what do they all have in common? All were made possible by people who thought outside the box and dared to do “the impossible.” Walt Disney once said, “It’s kinda fun to do the impossible.” Doing the impossible is not only fun, but a necessity, in contemporary times. Progress stems from outside-the-box thinking; however, in modern society, conformity is the norm, but doing the impossible is necessary to facilitate development and improve the world. Scientific advances in the past from philosophers and scientists who were rejected in their times for their foreign ways of thinking have sculpted the society of today. It was once thought impossible to travel to space, to set foot on the moon, to explore Mars; however, because of the perseverance of early scientists like Dalton with the atom and Newton’s physics, Lance Armstrong was able to set foot on the moon in the twentieth-century, and more recently, NASA has sent probes to Mars for exploration. The incredible knowledge gained from these expeditions
Psychological studies have shown that under the guise of following authority, blind compliance leads to irrational actions; the participants in this study were told to administer increasingly painful shocks to a subject if he or she answered a question wrong, even when the participants could witness the subject’s pain, up to the brink of “death” (the subjects were not actually being hurt). This reflects the mindless compliance that led to genocides and the Holocaust--destroying thousands of lives, cultures, and societies, as well as displacing and destroying families for