THE CONFORMIST
The Man Who Walks in the Shadow of Others**
In every society, there exists a silent but omnipresent figure:
That of the man who wants neither to see, nor to know, nor to understand.
This man is called the conformist.
He is not alive.
It adjusts.
He doesn’t think.
He repeats it.
He doesn’t choose.
He follows.
The conformist is not a bad person.
He is an unfinished being.
A being who has renounced his own light to take refuge in the reassuring shadow of the majority.
- The man who refuses lucidity. Where the outsider questions past generations, the conformist looks away.
He does not want to hear the voices of the ancestors, because they demand a courage from him that he has never cultivated.
He prefers ready-made certainties, official narratives, pre-chewed truths.
He distrusts the depths, because they force him to descend into himself — and he knows that he would find only ruins there.
The conformist does not meditate.
He escapes.
He is not looking for the truth.
He is looking for comfort.
School as a refuge, not as an awakening
Where school should awaken, it becomes a refuge for the conformist.
He clings to it as if to a crutch, repeating what he has been taught without ever questioning its source.
He believes that knowledge is about accumulating.
He doesn’t know that understanding means stripping oneself bare.
Servile society shaped him in its own image:
Docile, obedient, incapable of questioning what has been passed down to him.
III. The Conformist Facing Haiti’s History
In a country like Haiti, conformity is everywhere.
He accepts incomplete accounts.
He justifies injustices.
He’s getting used to the absurd.
He saw the Tonton Macoutes.
He saw the Chimeras.
He saw the Zenglendos.
He sees armed gangs today.
And yet, he said:
“That’s how it is.”
He never asks himself why the poorest hold society back.
He never asks himself why foreign interventions fail.
He never asks himself why the misery persists.
He prefers to believe that all of this is normal, because thinking otherwise would require an inner revolution within him.
- The Haitian man accepts the imposed names.
Where the outsider is outraged by the humiliating names left by the colonists, the conformist repeats them without batting an eye. He doesn’t see that words shape the soul of a people. He doesn’t see that the Dominican Republic, by preserving its Taíno names—Barahona, Higüey, Jaragua, Marién, La Vega, Puerto Plata, Xaragua—has retained a resonance, a memory, a continuity. The conformist doesn’t understand that renaming is rebirth. He doesn’t understand that Sale Trou could only become Belle-Anse through an act of dignity.
He prefers the legacy of ugliness, because he doesn’t know how to recognize beauty.
- The Conformist and Providence
The conformist believes that foreign powers can save the country.
He believes that the UN, neighbors, interventions, weapons, treaties, and speeches can change Haiti’s destiny.
He is unaware that Providence cannot be overcome by any human force.
He is unaware that divine laws always prevail.
He is unaware that grievances must be settled up to the fourth generation.
He believes in the strength of men.
He does not believe in the power of the soul.
- The man who refuses to recognize himself in his ancestors
The outsider knows that our ancestors are ourselves.
The conformist, on the other hand, believes that they are distant characters, frozen in books.
He doesn’t understand why heroes return.
Let the victims return.
Let the executioners return.
The cycles will repeat until consciousness awakens.
He lives in a present without depth, without memory, without roots.
VII. The Conformist as an Obstacle to Truth
The conformist is not an enemy.
It is a hindrance.
A weight.
A veil.
He prevents the truth from emerging because he is afraid of what it would reveal.
He prefers the peace of ignorance to the storm of lucidity.
He doesn’t understand that the truth never destroys:
She sets us free.
VIII. The Conformist vs. the Marginal Figure
The outsider disturbs the conformist.
He confronts him with his compromises.
It reminds him of what he could have been.
He shows him what he refuses to see.
The conformist is not afraid of lying.
He is afraid of the light.
- Conclusion: The man who dares not be born
The conformist is not a bad person.
He is a being who has not yet dared to be born to himself.
He lives in the shadow of others.
He follows the paths that are laid out for him.
He repeats the words that are dictated to him.
He accepts the names given to him.
He doesn’t know that life begins the moment you refuse to conform. The outsider paves the way.
The conformist sometimes follows it too late.
An answer to my mentee :
My dear Kerlens, I read Coach Lwigulira’s message carefully, but it didn’t move me to tears as it did you.
I understood and identified the true culprit long ago: not a person, but a system. I never accepted the role of victim when circumstances were against me; my nature has always driven me to excel. I have never been a conformist; I was the lucid and unconventional observer depicted in my trilogy:
*The Outsider*, *The Conformist*, and *The Reconciled*. Today, I have become the third element: a reconciler.
I have always sought to convey the trinitarian nature of man to anyone willing to listen to me, in all dimensions of existence.
Because, given the current structure of society—a structure that elevates competition to the highest virtue and diverts education from its primary mission—we have ended up confusing performance with self-fulfillment, ranking with self-knowledge. School, instead of being a sanctuary where the uniqueness of each individual is discovered, has been transformed into an arena where one learns to measure oneself against others rather than to encounter oneself.
Yet, just as no two fingerprints are identical, no two people possess the same set of gifts, the same inner structure, the same innate light. Each person comes into the world with a particular aptitude—sometimes visible, sometimes hidden—which they must master, refine, and share. Life is not a competition: it is a symphony where each instrument must find its true note so that the whole can resonate.
This is why it should be the responsibility of school—the true school, the one that nurtures rather than instructs—to illuminate the light with which each individual enters the world. To help them shed light on their own shadows, not to judge them, but to understand them. To teach them that their worth lies not in comparison, but in the fulfillment of their inherent potential.
A society that prioritizes competition produces fragile winners and wounded losers.
A society that reveals natural gifts creates well-rounded individuals, capable of complementing one another.
Education should be the art of revealing, not the art of sorting.
The art of igniting, not the art of extinguishing.
The art of liberating, not the art of conforming.
Frantz Rimpel
11/6/2026
Please read: My biography.