. . . Now nothing gets us into greater
troubles than our subservience to common rumor, and our habit of thinking that
those things are best which are most generally received as such, of taking many
counterfeits for truly good things, and of living not by reason but by
imitation of others.
This is the cause of those great heaps
into which men rush till they are piled one upon another. In a great crush of
people, when the crowd presses upon itself, no one can fall without drawing
someone else down upon him, and those who go before cause the destruction of
those who follow them.
You may observe the same thing in human
life: no one can merely go wrong by himself, but he must become both the cause
and adviser of another's wrong doing. It is harmful to follow the march of
those who go before us, and since everyone had rather believe another than form
his own opinion, we never pass a deliberate judgment upon life, but some
traditional error always entangles us and brings us to ruin, and we perish
because we follow other men's examples: we should be cured of this if we were
to disengage ourselves from the herd; but as it is, the mob is ready to fight
against reason in defense of its own mistake.
Consequently the same thing happens as
at elections, where, when the fickle breeze of popular favor has veered round,
those who have been chosen consuls and praetors are viewed with admiration by
the very men who made them so. That we should all approve and disapprove of the
same things is the end of every decision that is given according to the voice
of the majority.
—Seneca
the Younger, On the happy life,
Chapter 1 (tr Stewart)
Seneca’s
distrust of popular opinion may seem disturbing in our supposedly democratic
age, but I have never seen his argument as being based upon any inherent
superiority or inferiority of the few or the many. Rather, it rests upon a very
concrete observation about the individual choices that each one of us makes,
and why it is so much easier to conform than it is to think for oneself. The
draw of comfort and security can be strong, and it sometimes seems that doing
nothing, and blending in with the crowd, is safer and easier than doing
something, and risking exclusion.
Now the
inaction of avoiding a judgment will most often be far more dangerous than the
action of making a judgment, but it may certainly not seem so at the time. The
Stoic, of course, is quite aware of the danger of following impressions, and
not reflecting upon their meaning, and the Stoic is also attuned to the power
impressions have over us when we turn off our thinking.
What
some people call “groupthink” is hardly the domain of the rich or the poor, the
educated or the uneducated, the chattering classes or the unwashed masses. I
have seen groups of all sizes and kinds, where the pull of conformity drowns
out any critical voice, from the roar of the sports arena to the refined
intimacy of a fancy cocktail party. Our actions never exist in isolation. We
both allow ourselves to be easily influenced, and we also easily influence
others in turn.
I was
once taking a friend from out of town through a neighborhood of Boston called
the North End, which is known for its many fine Italian restaurants. It came
time to eat, and my friend seemed drawn to a place with a long line out front.
It was fascinating to see how the appearance of demand seemed to breed even greater
demand. His wife referred us to a restaurant guide, and insisted we follow the
opinion of the best food critics.
I
suggested a small place off the main road, for the simple reason that I had
eaten there a dozen times over the years, and had always been impressed by the
cooking. Until they took their first bite, they were deeply apprehensive of the
humble interior and wobbly tables.
They
still mention that meal to me many years later. “How did you know to go there?
What was the secret?”
There
was no secret wisdom at all, but I just knew what I liked, and I was not
interested in what the mobs of tourists or the snobs in the media told me was
best.
There is
a surreal irony, both beautiful and ridiculous, in the way we consider lemmings
as symbols of blind conformity. We have all heard, for example, that they will
commit mass suicide to control their populations. Naturalists roll their eyes
at this, and point out that while lemmings will indeed migrate in large groups,
and that some may die during such travels, they are hardly taking their own
lives.
Instead,
the myth about suicidal lemming conformity is itself the result of our own foolish
human conformity. Like so many other American children, I had seen an old
Disney documentary called White
Wilderness, which offered actual footage of the lemmings appearing to hurl
themselves off of a cliff. The filmmakers, however, had actually imported the
lemmings, herded them around, used some clever editing shots, and then
apparently even thrown a few off the cliff themselves. The lemmings were
pushed.
It took
the manipulation of an image on a screen to convince a generation of young
people that lemmings killed themselves, and those people told others, who told
others, and before we know it, the crush of conformity, the power of the herd,
is now about us, and not about those little animals. This is why Seneca warns
us that we risk deluding ourselves when we blindly follow every example.
Written in 9/2010
No comments:
Post a Comment