“In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill started by admitting that democratic nations did offer their citizens a high degree of freedom, in contrast to the situation in, for example, the Russian Empire. And yet, Mill insisted, what makes a person free is a complex thing, and if we’re really interested in promoting freedom we should stop being so bluntly, or naively, legalistic.
“At a simple level, being free means being able to do what you please without the threat of being hauled into prison. Mill’s target was “the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.” He criticised “the pinched and hidebound type” oppressed by “the collective mediocrity”. “Whatever crushes individuality is despotism” – be it a tyrant, or the casual, unthinking narrow-mindedness of the neighbours.
“How rapidly people seem to divide the world into two camps, the camp of the normal and that of the abnormal. Our experiences and beliefs are liable to be dismissed with a slightly alarmed “Oh right? How weird”, amounting in a small way to a denial of our legitimacy and humanity.
“What, then, should we do to regain our liberty?
“Chiefly, remember the degree to which accusations of abnormality are regionally and historically founded: “the exclusive pretension made by a part of the truth to be the whole must and ought to be protested against”.  What is considered abnormal in one group at one moment is not in others, will not always be, has not always been. We should remember that “every age has held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd.”
“Fitting in comes naturally to most children: they naturally mimic their friends. In Mill’s account, it’s having the courage to assert differences that constitutes real maturity.
[Alain de Botton]