Conventionality, why and why it shouldn't - Bertrand Russell

It is a sad evidence of the weariness mankind has suffered from
excessive toil that his heavens have usually been places where nothing
ever happened or changed. Fatigue produces the illusion that only
rest is needed for happiness; but when men have rested for a time,
boredom drives them to renewed activity. For this reason, a happy
life must be one in which there is activity. If it is also to be a
useful life, the activity ought to be as far as possible creative, not
merely predatory or defensive. But creative activity requires
imagination and originality, which are apt to be subversive of the
status quo. At present, those who have power dread a disturbance of
the status quo, lest their unjust privileges should be taken away.
In combination with the instinct for conventionality, which man
shares with the other gregarious animals, those who profit by the
existing order have established a system which punishes originality
and starves imagination from the moment of first going to school down
to the time of death and burial.

From Political ideals - Russell