You may agree with a reproach that is often directed at me, namely that I write in a style requiring more effort and attention than a novel, for example.

            But what is more stupidly intelligible than the rehearsal of prejudices that for centuries have done duty for thought, all the platitudes relentlessly chewed over from one generation to the next until they acquire the standing of eternal truths? [. . .]

            [. . .]

            The rock-hard assumptions of the past cannot be demolished without the hammer of ideas capable of pulverizing old banalities and offering the future pathways that it will in turn render banal.                                                   

The preceding remarks  are by Raoul Vaneigem. They come from Donald Nicholson-Smith’s English translation of Vaneigem’s book, A Letter to My Children and the Children of the World to Come (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019, pp. 11-12). Vaneigem, who turned 90 in March of this year, is a Belgian writer whose most widely known book is The Revolution of Everyday Life, first published in 1967. Along with Guy Debord — author of The Society of the Spectacle, which also appeared in 1967 — Vaneigem was a member of the Situationist International from 1961 until 1970, when he dropped out of that fellowship and began to critique the Situationist position.

Although he does not use the term itself, what Vaneigem says in the citation above points precisely to the universal human need today for us all to disaccustom ourselves from all that such society has so deeply accustomed us for so long.

*     *     *       

Whatever society to which we belong, we are in fact enchained by our socially imposed customs, caught in them as in a trap. Such imposed customs may look like no more  costumes that we don at our own free discretion. In reality, however, they are costumes cast  upon us irrespective of our individual wills. What is more, the practicing of such imposed customs — the wearing of such costumes cast over us — actually extracts a heavy toll from us.

All those connections are buried in the very words themselves, that is, in the very etymological history of connection between the words ‘custom,’ ‘costume,’ and ‘toll,’ just as the following citation from the Online Etymology Dictionary indicates:

custom (n.): c. 1200, custume, "habitual practice," either of an individual or a nation or community, from Old French costume "custom, habit, practice; clothes, dress" (12c., Modern French coutume), from Vulgar Latin *consuetumen, from Latin  consuetudinem (nominative consuetudo) "habit, usage, way, practice, tradition, familiarity," from consuetus, past participle of consuescere "accustom," from com-, intensive prefix (see com-), + suescere "become used to, accustom oneself," related to sui, genitive of suus"oneself," from PIE *swe- "oneself" (see idiom). A doublet of costume. An Old English word for it was þeaw. Meaning "the practice of buying goods at some particular place" is from 1590s. Sense of a "regular" toll or tax on goods is early 14c. The native word here is toll (n.).

Another citation from the same source brings us to the connection between customs and habits:

habit (n.): early 13c., "characteristic attire of a religious or clerical order," from Old French habit, abit"clothing, (ecclesiastical) habit; conduct" (12c.), from Latin habitus "condition, demeanor, appearance, dress," originally past participle of habere "to have, hold, possess; wear; find oneself, be situated; consider, think, reason, have in mind; manage, keep," from PIE root *ghab- "to give or receive."

In truth,  customs are precisely unconscious and unintended habits. That is, they are  the results of processes of “habituation” beyond our own control. Socially imposed customs — as costumes we are made to wear, not clothes we have chosen on our own — cover over what we really look like, rather than revealing us by highlighting our own features, as well and truly chosen garb does.

Thus, to become who we are we must disaccustom ourselves from all such old and unintended habits, in order to don new and truly self-revealing costumes.  

*     *     *

Habits are not only patterns of cloth to be donned, as Merton — after climbing his “seven story mountain,” to borrow the title of his famous biography — donned the habit of a Trappist monk. They are also acquired recurrent patterns of regular behavior, such as brushing one’s teeth every morning after breakfast, as I do.

We can change either sort of habit. We change habits of the first sort simply by putting on different clothes. Changing habits of the second, behavioral sort is not so simple, however.

To change our behavioral habits we need consciously, deliberately, and repeatedly to make ourselves act in the same way that we want to become habitual for us. If, for instance, one wants to acquire the habit of brushing one’s teeth every morning after breakfast, then one needs to make a point of reminding oneself — perhaps with a printed reminder taped up wherever one prepares one’s breakfast, or on one’s car window if one eats breakfast out—to do just that. After doing so for a while, one will find that one has disaccustomed oneself from letting one’s teeth go after breakfast, and has instead accustomed oneself to brushing them regularly right after breakfasting.