The night before Barack Obama’s inauguration we watched the 1998 movie ‘Patch Adams‘. It turns out that Patch has a bit in common with Mr Obama. Both can provide us with inspiration for dealing with challenging times and for getting more life out of life.
Patch Adams is an American doctor who believes, literally, that laughter is the best medicine. He was made famous by the aforementioned film which was inspired by his life. You may remember it starred Robin Williams. Patch eschews what he sees as the over-seriousness and false hierarchy dominating western medical care. He also likes acting the clown.
Barack Obama is President of the United States. (I know that you know that, but that’s the first chance I’ve had to write it as a statement of fact rather than hope). Obama has a great respect for the traditions which keep history alive. He has little respect for conventions which kill off innovation and original thought.
The powerful quality shared by Adams and Obama is what we might call ‘selective conformity’.
From very early in our lives, most of us start carrying with us a swag of social norms. Doing so is essential to acceptance. Society isolates and casts out those who are excessively different in the same way that the immune system wards off germs.
Unfortunately we become so used to carrying our collection of conformances with us that we forget to set them aside at times when they are no longer useful.
Our norms have us accepting outdated work practices. They cause us to disregard interesting but risky ideas, hampering innovation. They see us granting respect to position rather than merit. They allow racism and other discriminations to fester. They keep many in dead-end jobs and spiritless lifestyles. They promote government and business cultures in which political agendas and ideology stifle enterprise for the common good, the knee-jerk outnumbers the thought-through and mediocrity is the only winner.
Selective conformity allows those who possess it to carry enough norms with them to achieve acceptance but not so many that they are held back. It allows a doctor to wear a red nose if it makes his patient laugh and a president to appoint a cabinet member from the previous administration because he’s the best man for the job.
Of course, selective conformity is available to all of us. We can all draw on it by being honest with ourselves, by asking ‘why?’ more often, by challenging the status quo as an end in itself. It does require courage, taking us closer as it does to the precipice of social unacceptance. But I suspect we’d all find some liberation in the lighter load.
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I've been work- ing in business, one way or another, for the last 20 years, and writing for the last ten. My main interest now is to get messages across - yours and mine - in a readable and approachable fashion. 
