Conformity

In everyday usage, conformity is often treated as a social phenomenon—the tendency to align beliefs, behaviors, or appearances with those of a group. ISITism invites a deeper interpretation. Conformity is not merely social; it is ontological. It reflects a shift from active participation in reality toward passive adoption of existing structures. In this sense, conformity is best understood as an ITistic orientation, one that prioritizes stability, predictability, and external validation over emergence and agency.

This becomes clear when conformity is contrasted with authentic choice, which is ISish by nature. Conformity does not eliminate choice; it obscures it. The individual continues to choose, but the choosing becomes unconscious, outsourced to norms, expectations, and inherited patterns. Rather than engaging directly with uncertainty, conformity resolves it in advance by deferring to what is already established. This is deeply ITistic: it replaces lived participation with pre-formed answers.

Conformity is therefore appealing precisely because it reduces the burden of ISish engagement. To act from IS requires presence, awareness, and tolerance for uncertainty. To conform is to allow ITistic structures—rules, roles, traditions, ideologies—to carry that weight instead. This is why conformity often feels safe, efficient, and socially rewarded. But it comes at a cost: the gradual erosion of conscious agency. When conformity dominates, life is lived reactively rather than creatively.

ISITism does not frame conformity as inherently wrong or pathological. ITistic structures are necessary for coordination, continuity, and shared reality. Language itself is a form of conformity. Culture depends on it. The issue arises when conformity becomes invisible—when individuals mistake inherited patterns for inevitability, and compliance for truth. At that point, conformity ceases to be a tool and becomes a constraint, limiting awareness’s ability to respond freshly to reality as it unfolds.

Seen through the ISIT lens, conformity helps illuminate the deeper distinction between IS and IT. Conformity shows us what IT feels like from the inside: stable, inherited, and externally defined. Resistance, creativity, and authentic expression show us what IS feels like: emergent, uncertain, and self-authoring. ISITism does not call for perpetual nonconformity; it calls for conscious conformity—the ability to recognize when we are aligning with form, and to remember that alignment itself is always a choice.