Be Your Own Person

by James Hudson

  One common form of conformity is known as groupthink. It is most common in desk jobs, but is found in other contexts as well. People turn off their critical analysis abilities when in a group and just go along with the majority opinion, even if they have good reason to have subconscious doubts. The most famous example of this is the Cuban Bay of Pigs event of 1961. The planning groups never expressed any doubts that the plan might not work out in reality. They just went along with the group consensus. They thought as a group with a single dumbed-down mind instead of as rational individuals, according to Janis. They had elaborate emotional rationalizations for not criticizing top management and delusions of invulnerability. People who stop thinking with their cerebral cortex often exhibit such symptoms,

  Don’t Be A Team Player

  Other people’s opinions and expectations are unimportant because they are not your opinions, and your opinions should guide your life. It is up to those who claim to be in the right to explain why they are worth listening to in the first place, and it is up to you to pass judgment on them. Again, people are not in the right because they are people other than yourself. The expectations other people have for you are completely unimportant unless they can demonstrate in a rational manner that they are in the right. Both other people and what they expect of you are almost entirely instinctual, meaning at the opposite end of the spectrum from being intellectual. They just want you to conform to the emotional instincts swirling in their heads. But there is absolutely no reason to conform. They are just controlling people like you, and you do not benefit from being controlled by others.

  Some people seek to control you and trip you up in a dozen different ways. They want you to do things that are not in your self interest in any way. Exactly what is it that they want to steer you towards except acting like everybody else? They will never tell you. You can find out what they have in mind for you by looking at other people to whom they talk. Most of them just wait around for the real leader of the team of horses to which they belong to tell them what to do with the rest of their lives. The problem is that the team leader cannot think ten minutes ahead because he is incapable of reacting to anything more than the stimuli of the present moment. He is not smart enough to do more. He cannot do anything more than try to control others because he feels like it. His opinions are simply of no importance because he does not engage in rational behavior. Conformity to the instinctual party line is the goal, and conformity is purposeless except for the emotional satisfaction of the emotionally instinctual group leader. It just does not add up into anything rational. Conformity never got anyone anywhere. If it did, the rest of the world wants to know the specific details and measure the results.

  There are three types of conformity

  The first type is physical conformity. This involves things along the lines of people dressing the same as each other. This is no the basis for getting ahead in anything except lining up at the factory gate.

  The second type of conformity involves intellectual conformity. This involves things such as talking the same as other people. It may have minor uses in offices or factory floors, but this is not where leaders and self-motivated people come from. Thinking like others means you will never move ahead of them.

  The third type of conformity is emotional conformity. This is the worst. Following the expectations of other people is emotional and is rooted in the amygdala. Thus is how people get led into doing strange things that are not under the control of the cerebral cortex, the rational part of the brain. When a man joins a group to stick a sharpened spear into an animal out in the forest, this is purely the emotional part of the brain speaking. If someone claims it is rational, it is up to them to prove it is rational. It is simply a manifestation of a Stone Age instinct, period, and it is our Stone Age instincts that make him follow the expectations of others surrounding him to engage in such action. Naturally, it is not important to follow the mindless expectations of others. If so, the precise reason needs to be spelled out in a rational manner. It is simply due to the Stone Age instincts such as suggestibility and gullibility working in tandem with the instinct of following the expectations of others that is behind it.

  It is important to fully grasp that doing what other people ask or expect of you will lead you to nowhere. This is purely instinctual behavior on the subconscious level. If you ask such people exactly why you should do as they ask, you will get a blank stare and no real answer because they do not have any real information to give you. They are simply herd animals following the mindless herd wherever it may wander into. It may be the case that crows wander in a particular direction simply because a random noise started it moving in that manner. Among birds and certain other animals, this is known as flocking behavior, a genetically embedded instinct. It may look very neat and orderly to see a formation of birds moving though the sky in a V pattern, but that ultimately has no rational meaning. It is purely instinctual behavior, period, and has no larger rational purpose at all. The opinions of birds are not important because instinctual, follow-the-leader opinions and behavior are not important. They are completely non-intellectual instinctual animal behavior, like the flocking of bids in the sky, according to Konrad Lorenz.

  Society is organized around group needs and group actions on the three lowest common denominators. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that society is a joint stock company in conspiracy against the manhood of its members. This exactly what we face from parents, schools, organized religion and employers. What they are looking for from you is instinctual passive obedience in response to their demands in the form of expectations of a verbal and nonverbal nature. Henry Adams said that nine out of ten minds take polish passively, only the tenth reacts sensibly. Most people are not very smart.

  Why is this important to you? You are being propagandized and programmed without your conscious knowledge or consent all your life by people in your environment. You are programmed for life with anti-intellectual garbage that gets you nowhere. Nobody you encounter tells you this or prepares you for a life of your own, meaning something that is not promulgated by others for their own benefit, as opposed to yours. Parents want you to be a good little boy like Johnny across the street, not prepare yourself to leave Johnny and your parents behind in the dust by thinking for yourself. Teachers love and encourage passively obedient students because it makes it easier to program them for instinctually obedient behavior. This why schools turn out majorities of people who are unprepared for becoming gainfully employed. The world is run by people who are not passively obedient members of the unintelligent masses. Organized religions of all sorts preach the virtues of passive obedience to all forms of authority, but not about the virtues, or lack of them, of those in authority pretending to cater to you. Many organized religions do this because they started out as state-organized religions that served the interests of kings and others who wanted lots of docile, instinctually obedient serfs.

  In the present era, a high school diploma gets you ready for nothing tangible. Being programed by group instincts does not get you ready for anything above the level of standing in an orderly line in a passively obedient manner. This what your parents, teachers and employers expect of you. If you want to think rationally, you must do it on your own. For that matter, thinking beyond the level of instinctual expectations is always an individual matter.

  Other people most often do not have your best interests at heart. In most cases you are just a throwaway piece of collateral damage to them. Most of our problems in life come from individuals and groups trying to control us, often by deceptive means. They never tell you about the negative consequences of what they expect you to do. In the twentieth century, Jean Paul Sartre went on to say that “Other people are my hell.” Knowing what others are capable of can point us away from allowing others to become our personal hell. Instinctual people guided by pre-human instincts destroy those who oppose them and their instincts are particularly at fault. You must know about others and what they will try to do to you to escape av
oidable problems. There is no payoff from being anyone’s private herd animal. Assume the worst about others.

  Groups of animals and people attract members whom they use to draw off predators from the main body of the groups by allowing predators to obtain access to marginal individuals, according to Hamilton. Staying close to others in a herd allows them to seek cover. The selfish avoidance of a predator can lead to aggregation, meaning clustering together to the detriment of those out on the fringe. This behavior is found among fish and human beings.

  Among humans, it is common to use new team members to work on long-festering problems such as non-productive sales territories, blocking attacks on sports positions by the opposition and other activities which the entrenched elite have no vested interest in pursuing. Any elite has no vested interest in allowing problems to become their problems that ride on their backs. They want the new guys deal with it.

  One thing you will find out fast if you watch other people carefully is that those who do most of their thinking with their group instincts are uneducated and generally ignorant about a long list of things. Knowing the least bit of truth about them will pay plenty on the job, in school and around other people. Anyone who says you should do something because other people are doing it will lose a lot of time, effort and money in a stock market crash, for example. They want you to follow the crowd as it jumps off the cliff. This sort of instinctual conformity response is strictly for losers. You do not accrue any sort of survival advantage from instincts because you do as others expect you to do. The world is run by intellectual people, not herd animals.

  Being instinctual will not help you get any sort of intellectual work done. There is no intellectual way that you can operate a machine tool or put together a marketing strategy by being a dumbed-down conformist coasting along on instincts which are primarily emotional in nature. You need to use your cerebral cortex to activate the rational and intellectual capacities of the human brain.

  Again, note that the human race was mentally submerged for most of its history, for over two hundred thousand years, until people started using the rational parts of the brain and began doing things beyond the instinctual, such as mechanized agriculture and creating the first bows and arrows. When the human race ran on instinct, agreeing to go on living up to other people’s expectations got them nowhere. According to Nietzsche “The extraordinary limitation of human development is attributable to the herd instinct of obedience.” Obeying other people’s expectations and requests leads to nothing except on the most primitive level, meaning joining other instinctual people who stick sharpened spears into the animals they will be cooking and eating for dinner. This is the herd instinct.

  Team spirit mismanages your interests. Team spirit cannot be explained in rational terms or in terms of benefits to the individual, and benefits to yourself. In some cases such as football player who gets a broken spine for his troubles, team spirit can even kill its victims.

  Groups And Individualism

  Teams and group expectations are designed for the specific purpose of accomplishing things that isolated individuals cannot accomplish. Groups of any kind do things such as surrounding an animal such as a mastodon and killing it with spears. Groups do things in the modern world such as working on an assembly line in an auto plant where the enormity of complex tasks to be done is clearly beyond the scope that a lone individual can accomplish on their own.

  However, both types of tasks are not necessarily something that benefit the individual. If a mastodon sticks a tusk into a member of the hunting party, that is just too bad for the individual involved. If an auto factory catches fire and kills a few auto workers that is just too bad for those who die. In groups, the interests of the individual are always subordinated to the interests of the group, which are almost always imposed upon the individuals. A small dictatorial group or even a supposed leader makes all of the decisions about how group interests are allowed to take precedence over individual concerns. If it does not take your personal interests into account, it is not worth your bother.

  Groups exist because they are pushed into existence due to purely instinctual drives. Individual consent is never required. The only input that originates with individuals is usually instinctual--- people get hungry and decide to band together under the leadership of the best hunters in the tribe to catch some food of the four-legged variety and bring it home to cook and eat. An individual might decide to plant seeds near his home just to see what happens and later watches corn seeds sprout into mature and edible plants. This is almost always an individual matter. Groups have never invented anything new and useful. It is only the individual who is not under the control of his group instincts. In modern society, we sometimes have a group of likeminded individuals who have spent many years doing pretty much the same thing to the extent that they can finish each other’s sentences. These are the sort of people who work together to build computers and software. Their multi-disciplinary intellectual resources are the result of individual thoughts on the part of several people, not the result of a group instinct that impels them to do an emotionally irrational hunting dance.

  People who are nothing on their own are always trying to push others into their instinctual group mindset based on a tribalistic hunting instinct that will never move beyond the Stone Age level precisely because they are perfectly adapted to a mindlessly instinctual Stone Age work environment. Most other people are not. The intelligent people do not need them. They cannot do much of anything beyond sticking sharpened spears into animals and push other people to do so as well. Group instincts and group activities are all they have, and you cannot build cars and computers with group instincts. You need individuals with individual intelligence.

  As far as most people are concerned, exhortations to submit to any sort of group control or leadership is contrary to their survival interests. John Stuart Mill noted that “If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode.” The individual always knows what is best for himself, while an external group does not know what is in an individual’s best interests and definitely will not promote thinking for yourself.

  It is natural to expect people who want you to do what they want you to do as expressed in the form of group expectations expressed by animalistic people who use a real or implied threat to push you into instinctual obedience mode. William Graham Sumner said that “The group force is employed to enforce the obligations of devotion to group interests. It follows that judgments are precluded and criticism is silenced.” This is what a football team does to non-supporters. You cannot expect democracy or nonviolence from a group. They want passively obedient bootlickers, not individual thinkers. They are violent against both uncooperative people as well as outsiders. They are narcissists who like being the bosses.

  Groups are not rational or intelligent and they want anybody they can push into following group expectations to follow their explicit or implicit commands. John Stuart Mill said that “He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.” Following expectations is for apes. Instinctual people are always in an emotional state of mind.

  Nobody ever brings up the unmentionable topic of just why their group instinct should be important to anyone other than themselves. Emerson wrote that “The virtue in most request is conformity.” But conformity is not a virtue, any more than making people into mindless conformists is a virtue. Conformity is a vice. If someone says that it is a virtue, then it is up to them to prove that it is so. It boils down to some people being of the subjective opinion that their instinctual emotion should mean anything to other people who do not share those instinctual emotions. In the absence of proof, instincts mean nothing. Instincts are for animal minds.

  The Stockholm Syndrome

  In 1973, a group of bank employees were tak
en hostage by bank robbers in Stockholm. They soon began to exhibit bizarrely irrational behavior. They made excuses for the bank robbers who had taken them hostage and repeatedly threatened them. After they surrendered, some of the hostages refused to testify against them and even raised money for their legal defense.

  This is a form of identification with the aggressor, an instinct which was first identified by Anna Freud, though that it has been around during all of human history. Many, though not all, people defer to the aggressor in many situations. The biggest toughest guy in class may threaten people and get respected by those he threatens for no objective reason other than his threats. His victims identify with the aggressor, in the sense of taking his side, because he is threatening.

  The same thing happens in many social situations. People often try to control others with expectations, which are usually expressed in verbal form. There is nothing rational about expectations, meaning animal emotions. If there is anything in them beyond the desire to control another person, the world wants to know what it is. Group behavior is always irrational, impulsive and anti-individual. Naturally, there is nothing in expectations other than the desire to control without any reason being given or any rational payoff for the person being controlled by the expectations of one or more other people. Anyone who doesn’t like it is of course free to lie to the group in any way they feel like without explanation or apologies later on. Groups are naturally coercive. Individuals can decide against doing or saying anything others want them to do at any time.