Defending a cause to the point of risking one’s life requires cultivating a certain amount of non-conformism as well as cultivating an ideal. When one enjoys a high level of material comfort and has never really been confronted with deprivation, it is difficult to drop everything to throw oneself wholeheartedly into a fight. We all adhere to a certain level of conformism, that’s the way life in society is. Nevertheless, if we wish to be totally free, we must know how to question certain privileges or comforts that we enjoy, even to the point of sometimes wishing to renounce them in order to be in agreement with what we call truth.
Exclusion is a suffering that we can get used to if we know how to give it a meaning. It can be the soil for developing an original thought that struggles to germinate in conformism. Putting oneself for a while on the fringe can help to embody an idea through experience and the reality one faces. It is thus illusory to want to defend multiculturalism, for example, if one has not immersed oneself in a multicultural society.
Being marginal often simply means experiencing life from a minority perspective. It is through experiences outside of the norm that one can develop empathy for a cause or invalidate the one they were previously committed to. There is no better school than the real world to test our own ideas that may turn out to be dogmas.
We cannot become the instigators of a non-conformist life even if it is true that it can be caused by socio-economic and cultural conditioning.
To be able to revolt, we must know how to make our guts speak, we must be pushed by experience to cry out with our heart, which is not possible in a purely intellectual way. The reason can understand many things but it still requires to rub with the real to give it depth and cohesion. Ideas, in order to be truly their own, need to be embodied in a body transformed by the experience of reality.
