Manly Thor's Day Special: Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist

 "We learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned in school." Bruce Springsteen

"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all." Paul Simon

"This [jazz] was something we had found for ourselves, that wasn't taught at school (what a prerequisite that is of nearly everything worthwhile) ..." Philip Larkin

"Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those quotes tell you something about boys and young men. They tell you something that isn't completely good.

There was a kid on the bus going back to campus with a case of beer last Saturday. He was talking to his buddies and he said, "I went to the Heineken brewery in Amsterdam and afterwards they gave us free tastings and I stole every glass they handed me." He was a wimpy little boy and my I thought, not seriously, about getting off at his stop and taking his case of beer away from him and then asking him why, given that he'd just bragged about stealing stuff from people who'd given him hospitality, I shouldn't feel completely justified in doing so.

 But who would I be kidding? I'm sure the Heineken people calculated for guys like him when they budgeted for their tastings and my own record on this front is far from perfect. It's probably a lot worse than I remember. And if anyone had treated me that way back in the day, the only lesson I would have learned was how to be angry and resentful, which was hardly anything I needed more help with.

And this aggressive rejection of social norms is something guys just do. More than a few girls do it too but it's more a guy thing. I know a few professors and they always complain about how increasingly docile and compliant students have become in recent decades and I think, "Does this really surprise you given that the proportion of women has gone up?" Sometimes I even say it out loud.

 It's a guy thing to react to authority. And there isn't enough sensitivity training or Ritalin in the entire university to stop us, so get used to it.

Emerson tried to formalize it all. He tried to give it a fancy name of "self reliance" but that's nonsense. We aren't self reliant and Messrs Springsteen, Simon and Larkin would all have ended up begging on street corners if they'd had to get through life solely on what they'd learned from records. We are all dependent on others. The obnoxious little turd on the bus I complain of above can only be what he is because he is protected by the very property laws he brags of flouting. (And while I could take his beer without much effort, there are lots of other guys out there who could take my beer just as easily, especially so now that I'm not so young as I used to be.)

The notion that we can be nonconformists is an illusion but it is a healthy illusion. Try it and you'll find that you simply jump from one sort of conformism to another. And there is no form of conformism more rigid and unforgiving than the conformism of the self-declared rebel.

But even if ya gotta serve somebody, a moment of thinking you don't is good for you because it matters a whole helluva lot who and what you serve.

Back in university during the eighties, I saw a guy spraying graffiti on a wall and took his paint away from him and spray-painted his leather jacket and Nike runners for him. He was very unhappy about it. I'm pretty sure he learned nothing at all from the experience but it sure felt good doing it to him. If I took a time machine back to talk to my twenty year old self that night, I'd pat myself on the back.

And if I met that guy I'd spray painted again, I'd laugh in his face.

Was what I did nonconformist?  Depends how you define such things. A lot of my fellow students, and the guy himself was one of them, would have insisted that he was expressing legitimate free speech rights and that property rights didn't matter. I certainly wasn't conforming to their values. Others would have agreed the guy was doing something wrong but insisted that two wrongs don't make a right. I would have told them I didn't care. Others would have argued that no matter how justified I felt, what I did was a serious go-to-jail crime. I'd admit that was true but that it didn't matter. I mean the guy was hardly going to call the police.

Yeah, it was nonconformist. I wouldn't do it now though.