No important institution is ever merely what the law makes it. It accumulates about itself traditions, conventions, ways of behaviour, which are not less formidable in their influence.
I look at ordinary people in their suits, them with no scars, and I'm different. I don't fit with them. I'm where everybody's got scar tissue on their eyes and got noses like saddles. I go to conventions of old fighters like me and I see the scar tissue and all them flat noses and it's beautiful. Galento, may he r3est in peace. Giardello, LaMotta, Carmen Basilio. What a sweetheart Basilio is. They talk like me, like they got rocks in their throats. Beautiful!
The essence of independence has been to think and act according to standards from within, not without. Inevitably anyone with an independent mind must become "one who resists or opposes authority or established conventions": a rebel. If enough people come to agree with, and follow, the Rebel, we now have a Devil. Until, of course, still more people agree. And then, finally, we have --- Greatness.