Set Yourself Free from the Tyranny of the Collective

‘All the best people are crazy’ on #FreedomMusicFriday

"I think I know man, but as for men, I know them not."
—Jean-Jaques Rousseau

Marx, Rousseau, and other notables of the left famously “loved humanity but hated people.”¹ In other words—they loved “the people” as an abstract concept. Actual individual humans…not so much.

Churchill and other conservatives are noted for expressing the opposite view. They like the individual people they like, but they are wary of “the group” as an abstract whole.

I like talking with strangers. I am an extrovert, so I am naturally inclined to like people—or at least to want to connect with them in the moment. But at the end of the day, I am with the conservatives. “The people” as a collective pose some problems.

There are, of course, many really cool group phenomena, but there are also a lot of ugly ones…

Our tendency to fall into hierarchies leads us to follow “authorities” even when they tell us to do horrible things. (Milgram)

Our ultra-social nature leads us to deny obvious fact we are seeing with our own eyes, just because everyone else is doing it. (Asch)

And don’t even get me started on what happened during covid. That destroyed any final illusions I might have had about “mankind” in the abstract.

I also don’t like the phenomenon of social proof. Why should I do what everyone else is doing just because my ultra-social biological wiring is telling me to? Shouldn’t I check to see whether what they are doing makes sense before I do it?

At a young age, I also came to hate the phenomenon of conformity. I remember likening it to a giant scythe blade swinging back and forth over everyone’s heads, all the time. The message: Don’t be too different. Uniqueness will get your head sliced off.

Everyone must be roughly like everyone else. Don’t color too far outside the lines, or people will say you’re ‘weird.’

The degree to which I find this phenomenon repugnant can hardly be overstated.

I recall a few occasions where I would say something a little too ‘different,’ and it would elicit the “Uhhh…okaaayyyyyyyy” response from the occasional teenage girl. And my thought was, You are one of the most boring people on the planet, and yet you are reacting derisively toward ME? And I was not a bitter incel, by the way—I did reasonably well with the ladies, if you must know. I just really hated the pressure to conform to some lowest-common-denominator, middle-of-the-bell-curve blob.

Of course, I don’t wish to make a spectacle and be obnoxiously different just for the sake of it. I am not trying to make waves for the sake of making waves—that sort of behavior sometimes seems to be rooted in anger. I am not that kind of ‘nonconformist.’ But the tendency of the group to enforce conformity is, frankly, tyrannical. (And, come to think of it, maybe the wave-makers’ anger is rooted in resentment of this very phenomenon.)

I could talk about this subject a lot more, and perhaps we shall do so in the comments. In the meantime, I will just throw this song out there and dedicate it to all the people who aren’t in that lowest common denominator. People who aren’t a denominator at all, but rather who are crazy, unique, edge-of-the-bell-curve individuals!

It’s Melanie Martinez’ “Mad Hatter” (video below), and while it’s not our typical #FreedomMusicFriday fare, it’s appropriate to the topic at hand.

Set yourselves free from worry about what other people think. Set yourselves free from conformity and social proof. Be you. Fully, totally YOU.

ALL THE BEST PEOPLE ARE CRAZY.

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1. Buchanan, Mark. The Holy Wild: Trusting in the Character of God. Multnomah Books, 2003. pg. 192