The people who don't are, they imply, suffering from some kind of moral fault. They are unable to resist peer pressure. They have a fear of freedom. They are too willing to go-along-to-get-along. They just aren't smart enough. They are dreadful conformists.
Insults are not explanations, even if they do make the reader feel superior.
For one thing, follow the crowd at chow time
is a very effective rule-of-thumb. If it wasn't, the human race would not have survived. Nor would starlings or any of the herd animals.
For another thing, there is no correlation between dodging groupthink, and intelligence or occupation. A lot of the most cliched material I read about our customers and markets at work was produced by clever young people with good degrees from Russell Group universities. Consultancies pay good money to young people who are smart and energetic
What proportion of the population follow the crowd at chow time? This has always been a puzzle, but recently we had what I think is the definitive answer.
According to a study in 2020, 93% of the UK population (who expressed a preference) wanted or approved of the March 2020 lockdown(*). Call them the Convergents.
Not because they were brainwashed, lead on, hoodwinked, mislead, lied to, deceived, tricked or bamboozled into their opinion. Neither were they lazy, scared, conformist, or virtue-signalling. You're not allowed to be rude about or make excuses for 93% of the population. Half of the under-35's who approved had a degree. A quarter of everyone had a degree. All those people made that judgement in the belief it was well-informed and well-judged.
So what about the 7% who were right? The Divergents. They weren't smarter. They may not have even been as well-informed as some of the people (including most medical professionals) who got the answer wrong.
What they did have is a sixth sense for something not-being-quite-right about a situation, proposal, argument or bunch of alleged facts. Not all the time about everything, but often enough for it to be a common feature of their lives.
It's the pupil who senses that the teacher's explanation has crucial missing bits, and finding their own explanation. It's the instinct we all have in varying degrees about when someone is being insincere and when they aren't. It's a knowledge of red flags in other people's behaviour, or in press releases, or the statements of experts. It's knowing that people only appeal to `expert consensus' when the facts aren't on their side. It's having a mass of usually unsystematic background knowledge about one's society and economy, and about how different industries and markets work. It's having a sense of which anecdotes are data, and which are just anecdotes. It's knowing when absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It's being dissatisfied with the usual way of doing something and wanting to make it quicker, simpler, more accurate. It's wanting to fill in the missing pieces of knowledge, or questioning the received opinions based on flimsy research. It can have a hundred sources.
Faced with a boat with a small leak, the Convergents would treat leaks as a feature, take the boat and appoint a couple of people to bail out. The Divergents would point out that leaks are a bug, and look for a way to fix the leak.
Almost all daily activity is by clever, ingenious, hard-working people who apply what they were taught in school and in their professional courses, to keeping the ramshackle Behemoth of the economy rolling. Changing the way they do things is not in their job description: they are there to work what already exists. If any change is needed, it will be imported or imposed from outside. This applies to research in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering. It applies in the arts as well, especially when the world is having one of its recurrent moral panics.
Convergents live by if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Divergents point out that just because it ain't broke, don't mean that it's what you need, and figure out what we need.
Innovation, change, insight, originality happen in the fringes. Sometimes it becomes mainstream, other times it doesn't. Too much `disruption' and a society or an economy stops working well enough to be worth keeping. Too little and it is eroded by outside forces. Divergents need Convergents to keep it all running: Convergents need Divergents to stop it all decaying.
(*) I can't find out if that was on the basis that the lockdown would be for three weeks. Please leave me with the illusion that most people would have objected to an indefinite lockdown!
I've witnessed a couple of anti-lockdown protests while in central London. As crowds go, they are completely different to the usual people you see marching each weekend through the capital for various causes.
ReplyDeleteThere were many more normies and they were very difficult to pin down politically. Even though being anti-lockdown has been characterised as, somehow, right-wing, there were no Football Lads/Tommy Robinson types.
I suspect a sceptical attitude to authority has a large part to play in whether someone is anti-lockdown, which immediately rules out the authoritarian Left or Right.