Perceptions Causing Individualism & Conformity

Individualism can be something so rare or so common depending on what environment you are in. When an individual is forced to think or act a certain way, they have no other choice but to accept the reality of what they are dealing with. Accepting anything you are put through especially situations a government imposes is the basis of conformity. There is a tendency to want to fit in with the majority of society rather than having your own identity. The frequent imitation and wanting of previous things in life is exemplified when Karen Armstrong discusses how “people would settle only in sites where the sacred had once become manifest because they wanted to live as closely as possible to the wellsprings of being” (30). People always want something they can’t have so instead they just try to imitate what that object does or who that person is. Perception, the creativity of what we observe, and the conformity we acquire is discussed in the essays “Immune to Reality” by Daniel Gilbert, “Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran”, and “Homo Religiosus” by Karen Armstrong. A student named Sanaz was “pressured by family and society, vacillated between her desire for independence and her need for approval” (Nafisi 249), which is an example of how society can force an individual to conform to things they don’t want to do. Do we give in to the reality of conformity or do we express unique individual forms of identities? Our realities allows for individual identities but the complex, creative, and different perspectives we obtain restrict us from having our own identities. Creativity plays a large role in how a person perceives situations around them. We as individuals tend to try to create multiple perceptions or outcomes of events. Daniel Gilbert discusses how “when we cook facts, we are similarly unaware of why we are doing it, and this turns out to be a good thing, because