One problem that society has always faced is that its members selfishly choose to conform to social norms instead of altruistically doing unique things. Individuals usually benefit from merely following the herd — the herd is usually headed in a safe direction, and often the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. But the herd’s choice of direction is critically dependent on its members steering it away from danger, which they cannot do if they are merely following it.
This is true across many fields — mainstream investments are safe because some investors use their investment sense some of the time; mainstream morals are not completely depraved because some moral actors use their moral sense some of the time; mainstream science is mostly correct because some scientists use their critical thinking abilities some of the time; and so on.
But that’s not the only benefit of nonconformity. There are many fields of human action where the value of an effort is precisely in its uniqueness. Copying an existing painting is of relatively little value; painting something new is valuable, especially if the product is successful, as few are. (The majority of novel paintings are in themselves worthless, but their very worthlessness is educational.) Repeating an already-proposed hypothesis, reimplementing an already-written program, or replicating an already-performed experiment is of some value, but not nearly as much value as proposing a new hypothesis, writing a novel program, or performing a new experiment, at least if they are successful. Advances are made by people doing things that nobody else has done yet, by originality.
Even aside from enterprises where originality is not a sine qua non, specialization is enormously economically beneficial, and that’s true even if you leave money out of it. People are simply more productive when they work in a narrow area where they have developed very deep skills, cultivated deep relationships, and acquired or gained access to specialized capital goods that improve the productivity of that area. But such specialization unavoidably requires a more diverse set of occupations.
In the limit of job specialization, every person is doing a job that nobody else in the world is doing. Jason Evans, for example, is the maintainer of the jemalloc memory allocator, one of the highest-performance general-purpose allocators, used in many pieces of software by a few billion people. Nobody else knows as much about jemalloc as he does, despite his efforts to explain it to people. Anyone can use and modify it (it’s free software) but if you need to debug a performance problem with it or want to add features to it, he can very likely achieve this with less effort than anyone else can.
Finally, there are rival resources that can serve many more people if their tastes differ. If you prefer cafés with loud music, and I prefer cafés with no music, we will tend to go to different cafés. That sort of thing prevents everyone from just going to the single best café, which would then be either overcrowded or (to my taste anyway) oversized.
Unfortunately, in every society, many people are too selfish to manifest their uniqueness. Because they merely imitate others, the society is robbed of the originality they could have produced; its choices are poorer, sometimes fatally so, because it is guided by fewer minds; its economic productivity is vastly lower than it could be, because of underspecialization; and its rival resources are oversubscribed.
There are always social rewards for conformity and punishments for nonconformity, but these undermine the very fabric of society. Ironically, in many societies, nonconformity is confused with selfishness (perhaps because it seems arrogant) and conformity with altruism, but in fact it is impossible to be simultaneously altruistic and conform.
Uniqueness involves risk. Most new things fail. Most new ideas are wrong. Most dissenters from the scientific consensus are mistaken. For every abolitionist or pacifist, who dissent from society’s moral consensus, there are five rapists of children. If you order a dish your friend knows is tasty, you won’t get an inedible dinner. If you drive a truck, like millions of others, instead of writing your own memory allocator, you have a pretty good idea what the job market is like. Jason Evans worked on a bunch of unique software projects before he hit on one that got adopted by billions of people and created the unique occupation of Jemalloc Maintainer for him.
Traditional societies, since the advent of agriculture, have lived close to the Malthusian population limit. They could not tolerate much risk. Poor people even today can’t tolerate much risk, so the burden of uniqueness falls on the middle and upper classes. But as a civilization we are blessed with so much abundance that we are collectively capable of absorbing much more risk than before by allowing people to be unique — and when we do, everyone benefits.
(Inspired by http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/02/18/a-dent-in-the-universe/.)