Grey Sheep

Most sheep clearly follow one of the paths laid out for them: the white sheep follow the "good" path, and everyone else follows the "black sheep" path, which encompasses everything from outright "evil" to the simply sleazy or evasive. In distillation, the white sheep represent all that sounds like a good idea to one's fellow citizen and therefore makes for good business, a standard achieved by offending no one, stating no opinion which could contradict the hopes or interests of another, and allows them to be as insincere as they want because the public political image is so extreme that there is no way the human consciousness considers it to be real, or even relevant. Being a white sheep means that you use appearance to make yourself appear uniformly benevolent and that you can then use that benevolence to justify inaction in other areas.

Conformity is the process of making uniform by independent, "individual" action. Our society is currently going through a period of vast normativization because this increases the breadth of the lowest common denominator appeal in the citzen base, making them even more dramatically easy to utilize as customers and taxpayers. Democracy reconstructed government as a conflict between organized interests and those of the people, and we now see how that balance has kept up appearances but over time slowly delivered people to their enemies, who are far more focused and active than the citizen base. The result is that more and more people are calling themselves "white sheep" but are doing increasingly deviant things for personal profit at the expense of the whole. Further, the citizens are terrified of the black sheep and thus run headlong into the arms of their predators.

Government and society is only one vector for conformity. Conformity occurs most prominently on the social level. Since people are told they are individuals, they attempt to do "individual" things which amount to novelty and a greater amount of time and energy expended on making products into a configure that is unique enough to be called a statement of individuality. You are what you buy, how you arrange it, and the reasons you think it's ironic or cheerful. Further, these people are then sent to jobs, which, in addition to breaking spirits and encouraging uniformity, urge a cooperative spirit that considers itself before the individual, causing these brave individuals to become "team players" who scurry to books for reference before even thinking about a question. There is mouselike fear in the devotion of people to jobs, churches, and other social functions which both control them and offer them limited abilities to socialize.

The result is that a self-fulfilling prophecy enslaves humanity: because they predict a need for conformist behavior, they become conformist; because they are living in the same box that traps everyone else, they lose self-confidence and become bitter, and thus join the final normative process in becoming another burnout like the empty hulks of wisdomless rule-recital we call "authority figures" in this society. Who are the black sheep? Anyone who's not a white sheep. Who are the white sheep? Why, the people who are normal of course!