Martin-Pierre Frenette

• What is post-conformism?

  28.04.2011,Post-Conformism,Martin-Pierre Frenette,

  Piaget, a famous French child psychologist, defined various cognitive stages in the development of the child's intellect. As the kids mature, they grow in these stages one by one roughly all at the same time but with slight variations.

  For example, most kids enter the concrete stage as some point during first grade and grade school is built around the notion that most kids are in their concrete cognitive stage during grade school.

  But for some kids, it takes a little longer and it requires a lot of effort on their part in first and sometimes second grade to be able to learn, until they magically leave the preoperational stage of 2-6 years old and enter the concrete cognitive stage.

  Psychologists have also identified conformity stages in kids. Most kids before grade school are pre-conformists: they do not understand the need to conform, they do because they fear punishment or they don't if punishment never comes or if they don't learn fast enough the link between the bad behavior and the punishment.

  When they enter the concrete cognitive stage and grade school however, they generally become hyper-conformist.

  After all, conformity is:

  Agreement between an individual's behavior and a group's standards or expectations. A conformist is one who follows the majority's desires or standards.

  Kids in grade school want to fit in with the group, so they generally become hyper-conformist. They follow the rules blindly and allow no exception.

  Eventually, they learn nuance, starting with 3rd grade (8 years old), and they begin to see the difference between rules you need to follow (like not stealing) and rules which are just guidelines (like eating a snack at snack time, regardless of if you are hungry or not).

  Slowly, they develop their sense of right and wrong on it's own and can see the difference between rules which are there to protect them and rules which they see as being completely ridiculous.

  But they usually follow them until they are teenagers and enter an anti-conformism phase.

  A teenager in teen angst is often not so much rebelling against authority in general, but against all those stupid rules he couldn't understand as a kid and which he is tired of following.

  Junior High

  In Junior high, my high school had almost no supervision after lunch time and thus, forced all of the kids to go play outside almost regardless of the weather. "A little rain never killed anyone".

  That meant that we had to freeze outside in icy cold winds simply because there wasn't enough adults to watch us inside.

  I found it completely ridiculous and a few of my friends and I found a classroom with a lockable door and no window to sneak in during lunch time and play games like Dungeon and Dragon.

  For two years, I spend the majority of my lunch time inside without ever getting caught. Not that it would have mattered much, the punishment for staying inside during lunch time was detention.... during lunch time!

  I found it moronic. To punish kids who didn't want to go freeze outside, you forced them to stay inside to sulk and think about the consequence of their action.

  In this case, the consequence of not playing outside in the rain was... not playing outside in the rain. Check. I understand...

  It may well be a ridiculous example, but it's exactly the kind of things that teenagers often rebel against, extending their curfew by 30 minutes just to prove that the curfew was arbitrary.

  Eventually however, most teenagers become respectable adults and by respectable I mean conformist adults. Some stay partially anti-conformist, but they usually reject the conformity as a protest.

  Farm Analogy

  I came up with an analogy. Imagine that humanity lives on a farm as farm animals. Some people are gracious and dignified like horse if you want. They see themselves as the elite of the society, there to serve a real purpose.

  Others are pigs, there just to take and until they die, not really serve a purpose. They are happy to roll in the mud and be served.

  Others, like chicken, produce a lot in their lives and are functional members of society, producing eggs everyday, but never rising above their comrades.

  But my point isn't that there are various levels of usefulness, it's that people are convinced of that. People erect barriers between others who think differently than they do.

  They judge and as a result, they box themselves in. They do not see that in many cases, the non-productive humans might be stuck there simply because they are rejected for how they look or how they think and that accepting them might solve a lot of their problems.

  Worse, they might themselves be rebelling against the society that shuns them without realizing that it is their rebellion which shuns them.

  To add to it, in many cases, the division is purely artificial: you reject someone because of their religion, their sexual orientation, the way they dress, the way they talk, the education they got, what they eat, their political beliefs, etc...

  Meal sharing

  I am allergic to milk products and my wife has other food restrictions (She cannot diggest most types of potatoes for example). It's not my fault, but many of the people I know who bond over sharing meals feel odd around us because they can't invite us over for supper and don't understand that I prefer not to share meals with others because of my allergies and my wife's problems.

  But they learned to bond strictly over meal sharing and as such, do not know how to interact with us.

  They boxed themselves behind their little fences and can live their own life comfortable there, simply avoiding anyone outside of their fences and only having relationship with people who share their same values.

  Most "open-minded" people simply accept more areas in the farm, but they still follow the fences.

  Post-conformists however, are a little like birds in the sense that we don't see the importance of those fences, of those divisions in human society.

  Unlike pre-conformists, we see the reasoning behind the rules. Meal sharing as a bonding tool makes a lot of sense in many circumstances. It builds trust and reinforces the friendship by methods which have proven themselves since prehistoric times.

  But the difference is that the post-conformist doesn't see these rules as a rule, but as a tradition and will prefer honest gestures to blind following of old traditions.

  In my case, we have food issues and as such, prefer to avoid sharing meals.

  Friendship

  On a different note, some of my friends are completely different from me and many are confused as to how I can be friends with them because they couldn't see themselves being friends with someone like that.

  As a post-conformist, I judge people on their own merit, not on how similar they are to me. In fact, I don't judge people as a whole. I see qualities and defaults in almost everyone I know and I accept both.

  Sure, if we have nothing in common, it will make for an odd friendship, but I don't mind sharing one activity with a friend I have nothing else in common with.

  I don't mind talking to someone whose only point in common with me is their lack of judgement of others.

  Sure, I have limits. People who don't respect others like homophobes and racists would never really be my friends unless their truly wanted to change.

  But I don't mind how my friends dress, vote (or don't vote) or which jobs they have (or don't have).

  To me, even thought these are important things, they are personal things and I simply don't judge people on them.

  To me, that's being post-conformist. Accepting others for who they are, and not for who you think they should be.

   

   

• Reading and conformity

  25.04.2011,Blog, Post-Conformism,Martin-Pierre Frenette,

  Reading is most likely one of the most important activity a person can do. Reading books allows you to open your mind to other possibilities, other mindsets, other points of view which helps the reader accept more easily other people.

  Sure, movie adaptations can help, but watching a 90 minute movie and investing yourself in reading the original book doesn’t carry the same emotional investment.

  The movie shows you the action and gives you the dialog, but generally makes you lose the perspective of the characters.

  In the book, you often hear about the emotional dilemmas and internal dialogue of the characters in depth, helping you to forge your own identity by exploring other mindsets.

  Additionally, I believe that each time you read a book, your reading speed slightly increases and your reading endurance fortifies itself.

  Reading to my daughter

  I have been reading books to my daughter since before she was born. Every night (or at least every few nights), I would read to my future daughter the book “Lambert le Lionceau” while she was still in my wife’s womb.

  Far from being futile, it helped me bond as a father to my future kid and helped me establish a routine which years later, I still follow.

  It’s no surprise therefore that my daughter expressed young a desire to read herself to discover the wonders of books she was hearing every night.

  It’s no surprise her speed and agility as a reader quickly surpassed those of her follow classmates.

  At 8 years old, she already reads for the pleasure of reading, the joy of discovering new stories, new characters. 

  She fell in love with the first book of the trilogy “La quête d’Ewilan”, by Pierre Bottero, seeing it was the first book that challenged her compared to the kids book found in her class.

  Agatha Christie

  Once she was done, she decided to change style and read “Murder on the Orient-Express” by Agatha Christy. Her teacher confirmed she had the ability to read it and was rather proud of her, just as we were.

  Every time she had, she would devour the pages and get excited as to what was coming next, forming her theories on who the murderer was.

  But her joy was short lived. 

  Her teacher got an appointment and a substitute teacher made a snide comment on the fact that a 8 years old shouldn’t read books like that, in view of the whole class.

  Another specialist teacher (those that teach other subjects once per week) saw her read her book and made equally judging comments.

  Eventually, a third teacher questioned her choice of a book and it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  Cognitive Dissonance

  My daughter decided, in a fit of cognitive dissonance, that the book wasn’t interesting for her anymore and she stopped reading it, preferring a more age appropriate book.

  I don’t mind that she reads a book for kids, don’t get me wrong, but why does it feel like society in general and school in particular is desperately trying to stop the growth of children and pull them down to the normality whenever one expresses a bit of unusual growth?

  Why is it so damn important to ensure that no kid ever exceeds the norms and the averages?

  What was the harm in my daughter reading a literary masterpiece instead of a formulaic stupid book about fairies which is an obvious rip off of Harry Potter, minus the interesting characters?

  Why was it so important for teachers who are not even responsible for her full time to pass a judgement and bring her down?

  Why is conformity so important that they need to destroy the hopes and dreams of a 8 year old daughter?

  Is the ability to read classics so threatening in today’s bookless society that they were not able to accept that a 3rd grade kid was reading a book they themselves had never read?

  My own youth

  I wasn’t much older when I read the same book. I was perhaps 10 or 11 and I too had to hide my reading habits because it wasn’t normal for a kid that age to read over 150 books per year.

  I learned to reject conformity to forge my own identity but I tried to teach to my daughter that people were good and that she could be herself safely.

  Apparently, one way or another she will see how people really are: close-minded and afraid.

  I wish it could be another way, but every time I think it cannot get any worse, someone surprises me and proves me wrong.

• Prejudice and decision making

  30.11.2010,Post-Conformism, Leadership, Development,Martin-Pierre Frenette,

  Prejudice occurs when you have a pre-made mindset about something. Anything. Racism and sexism are two kinds of well known prejudices.

  A racist employer might hire an under-qualified white candidate over a better qualified black candidate and cause his company to suffer because he was unwilling to let his racism aside and simply hire the best employee.

  Most people officially fight prejudice and even go so far as to try to combat stereotypes. Yet, time after time, prejudice prevails in non-obvious ways.

  How many times have you spent more money to get a superior product only to discover that the only difference with its competitor was a higher price ?

  Prejudice in Software Development

  When I used to build windows applications I was posed with a serious WIN32 development problems.

  In Windows, to draw graphic on the screen, you need a DC object (a Device Context object).

  Device Context allow you to draw on a screen or even for a printer anything you want. Lines, text, images, etc...

  But when you are programming for the screen, you need one DC object per window. If you have 3 windows in your application, you need 3 DC objects.

  The problem is that when you build an application using the MFC API every button, every menu, every image on the screen is a separate window.

  We were trying to display several line graphics on the screen and as such, created multiple classes to display those graphics, the lines, the grid, etc...

  Each of these classes was officially a window and needed it's own DC object. Switching from one DC to another took time and seriously restrained our ability to accelerate the graphic.

  We would display the grid, overlay the comparison line, the moving average line and the live line needing 4 separate DC object each requiring several milliseconds to activate.

  To achieve 30 frames per seconds, we had to spend less than 33 milliseconds per frame, but simply switching from one DC to another took more than 50 milliseconds back then.

  We could have generated one function to generate all of the display but we loved that each of the 3 lines were managed by the same object.

  Our solution

  Instead, our graphic lines stopped being windows and became piggy-backing on our grid using the same DC saving us enough time to run our display in real time while taking a lot less CPU power.

  Eventually we created a lot of these "windowless controls" which enabled us to display anything on the screen in the same manner as a normal control (and with the same functions) but without needing a separate DC object.

  We were then able to convert any windows-based classes to a more efficient windowless control by just changing a few lines of initialization.

  Better yet, we even used macros to enable switching from one mode to another.

  Had we kept the preconception that every control under Win32 needs to be an Win32 window, we wouldn't have been able to create lightning fast displays without using advance libraries like DirectX which was still experimental back then.

  We saved a lot of money in development time and blew away our competition in raw speed, power and efficiency.

  That is, until they started using specialized libraries. I didn't stay long enough after we created Windowless controls but this is the kind of breakthrough which can only be achieved by putting aside all prejudices.

  Whether it's against certain type of people, certain type of processes or certain decisions we are afraid to make.

   

• Post-conformism versus open-mindedness

  07.04.2010,Post-Conformism,Martin-Pierre Frenette,

  I am a self-declared post-conformist. I personally defined what post-conformism is, but when I explain my theory, most of the people simply claim : "Oh, then you are an open-minded person".

  Yes, by my definition, post-conformists are open-minded. In fact, being open-minded is one of the requirements of being a post-conformist. But it all depends on what you mean by being open-minded.

  The farm analogy

  Imagine that all of the humans on the planet are living on a farm, like farm animals. There are fences separating the various human groups as if they were different types of animals.

  In one group, you might have the religious right. In another group, you might have the social-democrats.

  The groups are not that clearly labelled, because you might belong to multiple groups, having multiple aspects in your life. For example, you might belong to the Psychologists, Atheists, Liberal, Pop-music listeners and Heterosexual groups.

  The religious aspect

  However, let's focus on only one set of groups at a time. Let's take the religion aspect, because it divides people so much.

  If you are a Catholic or a Muslim, you might only feel close to members of your group, but perhaps an Anglican might also feel close to the Catholics because, let's face it, there aren't that many differences.

  If you are close-minded, you will only accept people in your own groups. Those that fit nicely within the fences that surround you. Everybody else are just outsiders. You might still respect them, but to you, it's clear they are outsiders.

  Being open-minded means that you also accept people in other groups. An open-minded Catholic might have no problems with other Christians or even with other monotheists and thus, call himself an open-minded Catholic even if they would look down on Hindus or Pagans.

  But being a post-conformist means more than that. It means not even seeing the boundaries and accepting people for who they are without noticing the fences, well, most of the time, after all, they are not perfect.

  The place of Post-conformists in the farm

  To go back to the farm analogy, it's like post-conformists are birds. They do see the fences, after all, they stand on them to rest and "talk" to those inside the fences. However, they simply don't understand why the people within the fence simply do not fly in the air like they do.

  In my analogy, the birds can do so because they can fly, which the sheeps and pigs are not able to do.

  But in the real world, every human has the same capacities to avoid being sheeps and pigs and just live free from the shackles of society.

  On a last note, there are other people who do not respect fences. Anarchists for example, voluntarily refuse to let themselves restrained by the fences imposed by society.

  However, I postulate that without self-realization, self-determination and self-discipline, anarchists aren't post-conformists, they are just bound by other rules without necessarily taking their lives into their hands.

• The pressure of not-drinking alcohol

  01.03.2006,Post-Conformism, Philosophy,Martin-Pierre Frenette,

  I don't drink Alcohol, at least, not when I have something else to drink. I am not an alcholic or an ex-alcholic. I just don't see the point into drinking alcohol, especially since the only drink I like, a Screwdriver, tastes better IMHO without the Vodka in it.

  Medical excuse

  I used to have a medical reason to refrain from drinking: I had hypoglycemic tendendies, which meant that drinking Alcohol, even in small quantity, made me sleepy really rapidly. Then, things were easy when questionned on my non-drinking habits.

  But a few years ago, I cured my hypoglycemia by abstaining from almost all sugar for two years enabling my system to stabilize itself. As such, I no longer have an excuse, and worse, since I have Essential Tremors and Alcohol reduces the symptoms, I actually have a medical reason for drinking.

  The pressure of not-drinking

  Yet, I still prefer not to drink alcohol and it drives almost every conformist in society at odds with me. Most people do not think about it: drinking is natural them and almost required to function in society.

  How do you celebrate or thank someone ? With a toast. What is the greatest pleasure in life for most people? A good bottle of wine drank slowly between friends. How do you thank your friends for helping you move ? With beer. What is the best gift to give to a hostess ? a bottle of fine wine.

  Alcohol becomes the great social catalyst. The occasion around which people gather and share a common bond, that of common drinkers. When a member of a group doesn't drink, it create uneasyness and tension. Is that person an alcoholic ? If he likes us, why doesn't he drink our wine ?

  Oddly enough, they are more comfortable with alcoholics than non-drinkers, because an alcoholic used to drink socially but was forced to stop. The AA insistence that alchololism is a sickness, and not a problem deresponsabilizes the person in the eyes of the drinkers.

  Alchohol is also the tension breaker. Everybody relaxes a little more and things often get more personal, less inhibited. People drink to be able to get closer to others, and perceive the non drinker as holding back.

  My point of view

  As a post-conformist, I see things the way they are. I do not personally need alcohol to unwind, to lose my inhibition and all of my friends who went dancing with me can attest that I am as much active as them despite my lack of consumption.

  I do not have the unhealthy inhibitions amongst friends, and I do not belive in shedding them when I cannot trust the people around. As such, why should I drink?

  I believe that at social gatherings, the bond between the persons present should be the catalyst, not a fermented breuvage. This will enable deeper and more meaningful relationships.

  I think that most people should question themselves as to why they are uneasy with someone who doesn't drink, and who knows, perhaps they will learn a better understanding on why they think they need to.