Seneca, On the Happy Life 3: The Lemmings Were Pushed

. . . 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