Most people should conform, and most nonconformity should be punished.
For most people, conformity is an instrumental value, given consideration only because it helps implement some terminal value. Thus, your assertion contains an implicit "in order to advance terminal value X."
If I don't think conformity advances value X, or if I don't agree with value X, then I don't see why I should value conformity.
Here is a new post at EconLog in which Bryan Caplan discusses how signalling contributes to the status quo bias.