Dangers Of Conformity

One clear October morning, I was sitting in a seminar in southern England when a hand settled on my shoulder, and a low, female voice asked me to step outside, adding quietly that I had better bring my laptop.

James Conway | October 20, 2026

I recently read a piece of literary reportage in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal in which the writer deliberately reports himself to China’s Ministry of State Security through its anonymous informant portal.

Little happens, but that is the point. China controls journalism through implicit dread, utilizing what scholar Perry Link terms the “anaconda in the chandelier”; the mere possibility of being reported on by friends or acquaintances is enough to enforce conformity without a single strike.

I used to regard such climates of fear as distant foreign realities. That distance narrowed hugely when I found myself facing anonymous reporting and ideological scrutiny here at home.

I never expected to encounter the pressures of self-censorship, or the prospect of anonymous informants, in my own country — least of all within England’s university-led teacher-training.

It is this kind of pressure that makes the language of V for Vendetta resonate beyond fiction.

Where British subjects once held the freedom to object, to think and speak as we saw fit, we now have “censors and systems of surveillance coercing [our] conformity and soliciting [our] submission.”

You might think this melodramatic. Perhaps, you might argue, the suppression of a handful of unpopular opinions is simply the price of social harmony in modern, multicultural Britain. 

Yet in his 1938 “Broadcast to the United States from London”, Winston Churchill warns us about precisely this kind of dictatorship: “A state of society where men may not speak their minds”.

Writing in the same era, George Orwell cut straight to the core of the issue:

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a........

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