You've heard it all before.
About how Dartmouth students are lacking in individualism. About how they all dress alike and speak alike. And about how sad it is that things should be this way. What you never seem to hear is why exactly a strong sense of individualism should be at all important.
As I see it, many advocates of individualism make the mistake of taking non-conformity of dress and manner for non-conformity of mind. They seem to think that there is some kind of necessary association between wearing outrageous clothing and being original, or that eccentricity is somehow the father of creativity.
This belief, however, is as false as beliefs come. Sad as it may be for self-styled "creative" types to hear, the vast majority of those who added to the storehouse of human achievement weren't known for their sartorial distinctiveness.
People who associate eccentricity of dress and manner with creativity make the mistake of over-generalizing. They start with the fact that those men who have been possessed of the urge to do something truly new have often had to stubbornly contend against the unthinking conformity of the majority. Naturally enough, to an audience unappreciative of that which is new and different, such singular men have been seen as eccentric. "Look," some idiot says, "Archimedes spends all his days drawing circles in the sand!" But our modern-day Bohemians of the cloth go further, and assume that because the creative man is often seen as eccentric, all eccentricity must be indicative of, and an aid to, originality, an assumption which is simply nonsense.
The true importance of non-conformity lies in the mental sphere. I agree that there is a lot of conformity on this campus, but I am not concerned with what people wear, eat, or how they speak. All I care about is what goes on in their heads, and, for a large number of people, that's not very much once they are outside their classes. It's been nearly two and half thousand years since Socrates said "The unexamined life is not worth living," yet how many of you reading this essay can say you have subjected your desires and ambitions to rigorous scrutiny? How many of you can truly claim that you have examined your beliefs with impartiality, truly willing to cease to believe those you can find no strong reasons to keep on believing?
The truth is that for most Dartmouth students, a thing is true largely because everyone else says it is, because their parents have taught them that it is (and we all know our parents never err), or simply because a world where the thing in question was not true would simply be too unpleasant to bear. It never ceases to amuse me that a Dartmouth student, setting out to find the truth about a proposition, almost always either ends up finding more evidence for his original position, or else decides that there is inconclusive evidence for either side of the issue to prevail! Is it any wonder that consulting is such a popular career choice here? We so rarely are wrong about anything.
Yet it is not enough to merely question with sincerity. It is important that we must act on our conclusions. If it is the case that you feel your true calling is to be a scholar, to spend your years probing the wonders of Ancient Greek literature, then you owe it to yourself to at least try, rather than succumbing to the pressure from others to become a financial analyst. If what truly moves you is architecture rather than engineering, then why deny yourself a chance at career satisfaction, even if your father doesn't approve?
In his commencement speech to the class of 1996, David Halberstam stressed the importance of taking risks, of not settling for comfort and stability when there might be a chance at something greater. It would be dishonest to say that to deviate from the well-trodden paths to career success does not entail a chance of failure, but we are young, and as with all things in life, the less risk we are willing to take, the less the return we can expect.
Many of you reading this will probably be saying to yourselves, "What nonsense!" You are probably thinking that all that matters is that you get into _____ school (insert your choice of profession), and that you get a high paying job with a prestigious institution. I do not doubt that most of you who are thinking this will succeed in your ambitions. But beware. The time will come soon enough when, one day, in your comfortable office, in the evening years of your life, you will say to yourself "Is this all there is? What could I have been, had I ... But it's too late now."
