Confronting fate: The futility of fighting conformity

Coming in contact with people from my past now that I’m back in Beaumont, I find a certain sameness we share. It’s through them that I’ve noticed this phenomenon, but I certainly don’t think it’s out of the ordinary. In fact, when it comes to word choice, interests, appearance, and religious, political, and moral values, I find people have far more in common than I initially tend to notice.

To some extent it is regionalism. When I visited Michigan about a year ago when I planned to attend law school at Michigan State the following fall, I did find a certain change in assumptions. The depressed economy and racial homogeneity created a culture that was indifferent on issues like immigration and racial equality and more focused on economic issues such as foreign policy, labor laws, and corporatism. While I was there, the US congressman’s office was vandalized and an anti-war protest commemorating the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq included obscene slurs and gestures against the local police, shouting matches with dissenting pedestrians, and hilariously naïve chants such as, “No more warfare! The system needs welfare!”

The “system” needs welfare? I’m guessing they mean they want more handouts and wish to increase regulations on businesses that created their economic problems in the first place, but with people who love to call anyone to the right of Dennis Kucinich a fascist, I imagine most of them probably didn’t really know what they were screaming about.

What most concerns me about the common threads we share is that maybe even though I think I’m a beautiful, unique snowflake, I might actually be pretty much like everyone else. Though I engage in slightly contrarian behaviors and possess atypical viewpoints, my deviations are inconsequential. They represent diversity within accepted norms. I worry that my ideas are in some sense forced, the product of contrived chance – like I’m just flipping a coin to avoid going with the flow of the majority.

Stepping back, I can point to consistency within my ideas that do suggest I am not a product of mere chance. By bucking convention I can argue that I am less a creation of my environment and swayed instead by logic and reason.

But what nags me, what sits in the back of my mind, is the understanding that the universe is a convolution of cause and effect relationships. Whether or not it has a first cause, each perceived action has a corresponding reaction. All these relationships are bound by consistent physical laws.

I’ve argued that a higher proportion of atheists possess Calvinist ideas than Christians. In other words, religious people have more room for freewill in their belief systems than non-theists. Our reliance on science over magical thinking leaves us lacking the anthropocentric contrivance that we are in control of the universe and a supernatural man in the sky loves us, wants us to be happy, and provides us with freedom.

So where does that leave me? Do I create my environment or does my environment create me? My hope is that my acknowledgment of these relationships can provide me some respite from its forces. To know that fate is my enemy may be my only chance to overcome it.