"How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity"
About this Quote
Burroughs doesn’t just dislike conformists; he hates the people who manufacture conformity like a product and market it as virtue. The target is institutional, not personal: schools that train obedience, advertisers that sell lifestyles as identities, police and psychiatrists who pathologize deviance, censors who call their pruning “decency.” “Dedicated” is the knife twist. It implies zeal, a moral mission, the creepy sincerity of those who believe they’re improving you while they shrink your range of motion.
The line works because it refuses the polite liberal framing that conformity is merely boring or unfortunate. Burroughs treats it as an active force, something engineered, with specialists and incentives. Coming out of a writer who lived through Cold War paranoia, the postwar cult of the “normal,” and the punitive war on drugs, the sentence carries the air of someone who has seen how quickly a society can turn difference into evidence. His generation watched “security” become a pretext for surveillance, and “health” become a justification for control. Burroughs’ broader project - slicing up narrative, destabilizing authority, staging language as a virus - is a formal rebellion against the same impulse.
The subtext is also autobiographical: a queer, drug-using, anti-bourgeois figure reading conformity not as taste but as threat. Hatred, here, isn’t just temper; it’s a survival response. If conformity is something produced, then dissent isn’t a quirky personality trait. It’s a form of self-defense.
The line works because it refuses the polite liberal framing that conformity is merely boring or unfortunate. Burroughs treats it as an active force, something engineered, with specialists and incentives. Coming out of a writer who lived through Cold War paranoia, the postwar cult of the “normal,” and the punitive war on drugs, the sentence carries the air of someone who has seen how quickly a society can turn difference into evidence. His generation watched “security” become a pretext for surveillance, and “health” become a justification for control. Burroughs’ broader project - slicing up narrative, destabilizing authority, staging language as a virus - is a formal rebellion against the same impulse.
The subtext is also autobiographical: a queer, drug-using, anti-bourgeois figure reading conformity not as taste but as threat. Hatred, here, isn’t just temper; it’s a survival response. If conformity is something produced, then dissent isn’t a quirky personality trait. It’s a form of self-defense.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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