female instead of male;
an inner conformist, fully internalizing received values;
an outer conformist, paying lip service to received values;
a non-conformist, questioning and rejecting received values.
I did not choose to be a non-conformist but found that I was one.
This has repercussions for Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series. If history were effectively rewound and run forward again, as it is in "Delenda Est" and The Shield Of Time, then the random processes of procreation might very well have, indeed arguably would have, produced a different person as a result of every single act of human copulation - and different persons would have made different choices and decisions, thus changing the course of history unpredictably. The original timeline would have been unrecoverable.
My friend, Andrea, is right: Fortuna rules.
Kaor, Paul!
ReplyDeleteMy observation has been that many who make a fetish of being non-conformist end up repeating old mistakes, often catastrophically so. Which is why I am skeptical of the extreme value placed on "non-conformism."
Kipling's poem "The Gods of the Copy Book Headings" comes to mind!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
ReplyDeleteI do not make a fetish of non-conformism. That was not the point of the post.
The point was that, if a different sperm and egg had met, then my parents might have had a child who was either an inner or an outer conformist. There is a randomness here. The post was not about non-conformism, let alone about fetishizing it.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
ReplyDeleteBut I had in mind people who are ostentatiously non-conformist. That was why I said "...many who make a fetish..."
Ad astra! Sean
Well, yes, you can comment on that, of course.
ReplyDeleteKaor, Paul!
ReplyDeleteWhich is what I was trying to do.
Ad astra! Sean
Sure.
ReplyDeletePaul: you're right. The odds of having the same people born would be very small, and then vanishingly unlikely.
ReplyDeleteKaor, Mr. Stirling!
ReplyDeleteIt's almost a dead certainty none of us would now exist if someone had knocked up Gavrilo Princip's arm before he murdered Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yup. My mother's parents wouldn't have met in a military hospital in 1917, for starters.
ReplyDeleteAnd having a particular individual born requires a specific sperm, a specific egg, and them meeting at a very specific time because genetic recombination is fairly random.
My father wouldn't have been born, in other words, though my paternal grandparents met before 1914.