You must have heard of the ego, but you may not have heard of the collective ego. In very plain language - so don't quote me ;-) - the ego is a man's instinctive desire to preserve himself. I find it useful to think of collectives and even man-made systems as if they had an ego - a tendency to preserve themselves.
Every collective has its own, mostly unwritten, rules of conduct, including what is praised, accepted, avoided, and prohibited. These are actually rules of the collective ego of that collective.
As we grow, we learn these rules by watching and then imitating other, older members of a collective to which we are supposed to belong. And we belong to more than one collective at the national, regional, and other levels.
Having observed various collectives at various levels and various degrees of obedience to their rules by their respective members, I have the impression that a sufficiently large number of members of many collectives obey these rules, whether willingly or unwillingly.
I've come to identify one pair of very powerful means used by any collective to enforce these unwritten rules on its members. They are rewards and punishments. Unfortunately (when I was in the middle of the incident) and fortunately (after the fact), I experienced being ostracized by a collective called junior high school as a result of my refusal to obey one of its unwritten rules that made no sense to me.
You may wonder what "terrible" rule it was. I simply refused to obey the unwritten rule requiring every student to join one of the few sports clubs as part of the extracurricular activities. After this refusal, I was humiliated in public. I still remember how the other students as well as our teachers looked at me. Many years later, I visited the very place and found harvested onions instead of humans. ;-)
This experience in my young adulthood seems to have developed my sensitivity and immunity to the "tyranny" of the collective ego, until I came to consider myself a "professional outsider." ;-) Whatever collective I join or am made to join, I start to feel suffocated sooner or later and almost always end up leaving it consciously before I'm ostracized.
Ostracization is a rather extreme - but not necessarily uncommon - example of a punishment imposed upon those members of a collective who don't obey one or more of its most fundamental rules.
Rewards include recognition by other members of the collective and a good reputation among them, which sometimes leads to financial prosperity. So it seems quite natural that many people weigh rewards against punishments and conclude that obeying the rules is more beneficial than disobeying them, even when doing so may conflict with their values.
Of course, I fully understand this rationale and even admire them in a sense. But as for me, I've realized that I can't always deceive myself, especially when these rules fundamentally contradict my core values. I can't betray what I know to be true. When some friends of mine tell me I should have become a diplomat because I'm a polyglot, I quote this sentence of mine as my answer to them. ;-)