Go Your Own Way

Personality: the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being.

Personality can never develop unless the individual chooses his own way, consciously and with moral deliberation.

A man can make a moral decision to go his own way only if he holds that way to be the best. If any other way were held to be better, then he would live and develop that other personality instead of his own. The other ways are conventionalities of a moral, social, political, philosophical, or religious nature. The fact that the conventions always flourish in one form or another only proves that the vast majority of mankind do not choose their own way, but convention, and consequently develop not themselves but a method and a collective mode of life at the cost of their own wholeness.

The smaller the personality, the dimmer and more unconscious it becomes, until finally it merges indistinguishably with the surrounding society, thus surrendering its own wholeness and dissolving into the wholeness of the group. In the place of the inner voice there is the voice of the group with its conventions, and vocation [the path of the inner voice] is replaced by collective necessities.

Conventions are soulless mechanisms that can never understand more than the mere routine of life. Creative life always stands outside convention. That is why, when the mere routine of life predominates in the form of convention and tradition, there is bound to be a destructive outbreak of creative energy.

The mechanism of convention keeps people unconscious, for in that state they can follow their accustomed tracks like blind brutes, without the need for conscious decision. This unintended result of even the best conventions is unavoidable, but is no less a terrible danger for that.

[C.G. Jung]
The Essential Jung, p.195, 198, 202

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'Has due recognition been given', Winnicott asks pointedly, 'to the need for everything to be discovered afresh by every individual analyst?' It was a position reactive to a Society which had, in Winnicott's view, equated development within a tradition with an uncritical compliance to the tradition.

[Adam Phillips]
Winnicott, p.91

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[...] we cannot expect him always to be the aristos. We are all sometimes of the Many. But he will avoid membership.

There can be no organization to which he fully belongs; no country, no class, no church, no political party. He needs no uniform, no symbols; his ideas are his uniform, his actions are his symbols, because above all he tries to be a free force in a world of tied forces.

[John Fowles]
The Aristos, p.212

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[On 'modern-minded man']

His highest hope is to think first what is about to be thought, to say what is about to be said, and to feel what is about to be felt; he has no wish to think better thoughts than his neighbours, to say things showing more insight, or to have emotions which are not those of some fashionable group, but only to be slightly ahead of others in points of time.

Quite deliberately he suppresses what is individual in himself for the sake of the admiration of the herd.

To be pointed out, admired, mentioned constantly in the press, and offered easy ways of earning much money is highly agreeable; and when all this is open to a man, he finds it difficult to go on doing the work that he himself thinks best and is inclined to subordinate his judgement to general opinion.

[Bertrand Russell]
Unpopular Essays ('On Being Modern-minded'), p.78, 79

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Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house,
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.

[Rainer Maria Rilke]
Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

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April You don't want to go, do you?

Frank Come on, April. Of course I do.

April No, you don't. Because you've never tried at anything. And if you don't try at anything, you can't fail.

Frank What the hell do you mean I don't try? I support you, don't I? I pay for this house. I work 10 hours a day at a job I can't stand.

April You don't have to.

Frank - Bullshit! Look, I'm not happy about it. But I have the backbone not to run away from my responsibilities.

April It takes backbone to lead the life you want, Frank.

Dialogue from Revolutionary Road (film)

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