Eccentricity has become the main identification mark of belonging to the “creative class”.
A creative person always behaves extravagantly and even defiantly. This stereotype is so firmly rooted in the public consciousness that eccentricity has become the identification mark of belonging to the “creative class”. And here is the result: when it comes to creative work, we obviously value the achievements of those people whose behavior seems to us eccentric, impudent, and beyond the generally accepted *. But if the geniuses of the past seemed to their contemporaries to be eccentrics, because they did not fit into the framework of the usual, now the picture is different: deliberate strangeness, unusual behavior is a way to meet the ideas of a creative person. True conformists today are those whose behavior corresponds to this stereotype, and the rest risk remaining in the shadows.
* European Journal of Social Psychology, 2014, vol. 44.