On Monoculture

Excerpt from F.S. Michaels' book Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything

When you conform to the monoculture’s version of who you are and what the world is like, you lose your freedom along with your ability to be truly innovative in terms of your own life.

Being able to draw on many different stories, not just the economic one, allows you to creatively and authentically meet the challenges that face you in your life. The monoculture, determinedly single-minded, insists that economic values and assumptions can be used to solve your problems, whether those problems are spiritual, political, intellectual, or relational.

Those pressures to conform to the monoculture aren’t new. They are remarkably similar, in fact, to the pressures experienced by those who lived under communist rule in the ideologically-rigid society of Czechoslovakia, as described by Václav Havel, playwright and first President of the democratic Czech Republic.

In a society grown rigid with ideology, Havel said, you come to accept that you should live according to that society’s values and assumptions. If you were to refuse to conform, there could be trouble. You could be isolated, alienated, reproached for being idealistic, or scorned for not being a team player. You know what it is you are supposed to do, and you do it, not least to show that you’re doing it. You go along to get along, he said, and so you confirm to others that certain things in fact must be done if you are to get along in life. If you fail to act as you’re expected to, others will view your behavior as abnormal, think you arrogant for believing you’re above the rules, or assume you’ve dropped out of society.

The society grown rigid with ideology gives you and everyone else the illusion that the way things are is the way things are meant to be; the story you hear is natural.

It has been told and retold for years. Everyone tells it.

In truth, Havel said, that story is not natural; there is an enormous gap between its aims and the aims of life. Whereas life moves toward plurality and diversity and the fulfillment of its own freedom, the system demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline.

The system, Havel said, “is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality.” That world of appearances operates on a kind of automatic pilot, permeating and shaping the whole society. Though the world of appearances is partly stable, it’s also unstable because it’s built on appearances. Living within that world, you don’t have to believe in it, but you have to act as if you do to get along in life.

Sometimes the whole thing seems innocuous enough for you to shrug and say, What’s wrong with going along with the world of appearances anyway?

You then accept the rules of the game, Havel said, become a player in the game, and so make the game possible in the first place. But that pattern of conformity also helps you hide from yourself that you are relating to the world through a rigid ideology, and the ideology creates the illusion that the way things are is a natural extension of the human order and the order of the universe.

By accepting your life in the world of appearances, Havel said, you begin to “live within a lie.” That eventually leads to a profound crisis of human identity: you’re left with no sense of responsibility for anything more than your own survival in the system.

If you try to live apart from that world of appearances, which Havel described as an attempt to live within the truth, “the bill is not long in coming,” he said.

You may lose your position and your promotion, your salary and vacation.

Those around you will wonder about you, “not out of their own convictions, but because they want to avoid contamination by association…”

The cost of living apart from the world of appearances is high because your act has repercussions far beyond the act itself.

When you break the rules of the world of appearances, you show it is possible to live within the truth instead of living within the lie. Nonconformity must therefore be snuffed out.

Michaels, F.S.. Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything