Be a Contrarian!

We cannot always go along with the herd. Depression can raise its ugly head when our values and the values of the herd disconnect from one another. We lose ourselves, we think ourselves worthless since we are outside the norm while valuing the herd's values over our own selves. 

The masses have no guarantee of absolute correctness in its common wisdom, contrarians serve to keep the herd from destroying itself through its self-satisfaction.

Consider Diogenes, especially How to Swim Against the Stream: On Diogenes:

DIOGENES THE CYNIC once tried to enter the theater at the end of a performance, even as everybody else was leaving. When someone, puzzled, asked him why, Diogenes said: “This has been my practice all my life.” (This history is recounted by Laertius in Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, among many other stories starring Diogenes the Cynic.)

As with every Cynic “anecdote” (or chreia, as they called it in ancient Greece), several layers of meaning are buried inside.

There is, first, the notion of philosophizing as a live performance, which Diogenes embodied like few thinkers, ancient or modern. On this view, philosophy is not a purely theoretical affair, something to be thought out and formulated in impenetrable jargon, but rather a way of acting and being.

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At a deeper level, what we come across in the theater-entering chreia is the figure of Diogenes the contrarian. Socrates had been a vigorous naysayer in his time, yet Diogenes outdid him. Nothing brought him more pleasure than doing the opposite of what everybody else was doing. No wonder that, asked once “what was the most beautiful thing in the world,” Diogenes replied: “Freedom of speech.”

In our age of unapologetic conformism and generalized herding, such a contrarian spirit may be the one thing that can save our lives — politically, culturally, intellectually, and spiritually. Contrarianism shows that there are other manners of acting and being in the world. In any society, some will have to go against the stream of pious lies.

And let me recommend reading that American troublemaker, Henry Thoreau and his Walden and his Civil Disobedience.

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