Tax Lawyer's Blog

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you….”

- Rudyard Kipling -

I found an exceptionally insightful article by Kiplinger.com’s Bob Frick titled “Don’t Trust the Crowd if you Value the Truth.”

What’s scary about the herd mentality is how insidiously it gets you to see things differently. In fact, a recent experiment showed that we may actually be hard-wired to believe what the crowd tells us. In the experiment, conducted at Emory University, participants were asked to look at an object (an assemblage of cubes) and then judge how it would look if it were rotated slightly.

But there was a twist: Other participants — who in reality were actors hired for the experiment — were instructed to give wrong answers in an attempt to sway the opinions of their fellow participants. Sure enough, the real subjects, influenced by the actors, gave incorrect responses, despite what their own eyes told them.

Frick says it’s even worse than that:

Brain scans found that participants didn’t just decide to go along with the crowd. Instead, the crowd’s opinion actually changed their perception of the problem. Participants “saw” the objects differently. The herd, it seems, alters our perception of reality.

Frick’s research seems to explain why otherwise decent people can do horrible things to their neighbors when they are acting in concert with a gang or mob. The South has a long history of mob-style lynchings, the great majority of them a product of mob-frenzy. And world history is replete with incidences of the execution of “witches”, yet not a single witch was killed who hadn’t been burned at the stake or hanged at the behest of the salivating masses.

And here are some other ways the herd mentality has historically manifested itself:

1. Communists like Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Mao and Chavez easily persuaded the masses that it was righteous and moral to confiscate the wealth of the propertied classes;
2. In America during World War II FDR was able to persuade the majority of Americans to acquiesce in the internment of  Japanese -Americans; and
3. In Nazi Germany Hitler managed to persuade millions of otherwise decent Germans that their Jewish neighbors were vermin and deserved to die.

Fortunately, we have had more than a few towering figures who have somehow summoned up the courage to go against the mob. Here are several that come to mind:

• America-founder John Adams risked his political career and even his life by defending in court the British soldiers who fired on the American colonists at the Boston Massacre.
• Georgia Governor John M. Slaton commuted the death sentence of the Jew Leo M. Frank and had to declare martial law to save his own life. He never held political office again.
• Galileo was condemned for life (escaping death only because he was already ill) because he stood against the mob and maintained his heretical belief that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

Today, we could use a few men like Adams, Slaton and Galileo.

The poet e.e. cummings knew a little bit about how difficult it is to buck the mob when he wrote:

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Bookmark & Share: