Conformists speak the truth by accident. The truth can fit in. This makes anti-conformists equally untruthful. Anyone who craves or resents community is corrupted. They are too familiar with familiarity. Conformists and anti-conformists fight familiar battles because they speak the same languages, just in different dialects. Their honesty is arbitrary because it is securely attached to a community or its neighboring anti-community. The conformist asks what fits in and the anti-conformist asks what fits out, but fitness for both is assessed with respect to communal reactions.
The epistemic opposite of a conformist is not an anti-conformist for both inhabit the same planetary system. Gravity keeps conformists terrestrial and anti-conformists caught in the atmosphere. Neither can float freely.
Floaters defy gravity itself. They are aliens to the planetary, strangers to community. Their ability to float is proportional to their insecurity. The more familiar they get with a community or its anti-community, the more attached they become to a planet and the harder it gets for them to float. The gravity-free are community-less. They are free to be independent because they are free from secure attachments.
Truthfulness is a trajectory that neither conformists nor anti-conformists can reliably follow. Theirs is always planetary, biased by gravity. Only floaters can reliably follow a truthful trajectory, but success is rare. Most have no trajectory at all. They live stuck in place in space. They are freed from gravity but caught by aimlessness. To avoid anxious independence, floaters return to gravity, blind themselves to reality, or kill themselves. Truthful floaters make their own way through space. Their ways are socially unbiased, gravity-free, community-less, insecurely attached — in a word: individual. Truthful floaters individuate space. They create new and distinctly personal trajectories.
But the insecurely attached are sick. Their systems are dysregulated by trauma and unregulated by social expectations. Only those violated by security prefer the anxious independence of floating in space. Only the sick find comfort in anxiety.
If the sick are best positioned to speak the unbiased truth, truthfulness itself is a kind of sickness.
When Jesus heard that, he said, “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby.” - John 11:4
Where is God gone? … What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forewards, in all directions? - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Madman