Interesting article. The problem with independent thinking today, of course, is the anti-vaxxers in the US. Science is built on concensus, and we have to know when to listen to others who have more knowledge about a subject than we do. Read Isaac Asimov's famous quote about the cult of ignorance in the US and about people thinking 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge".
It is possibly a good thing that the article centers more around morality and absolute truth, you are right, science requires a certain degree of empirical evidence building that may not need independent assessment in each instance. But someone who first proposed what we see as the wonders of science today did take that first step in questioning what was the popular narrative
Ewe are exactly the sort of weak minded gullible stooge the article addresses! Think harder. Think. Actual vaccines impart immunity. NONE of the Rona jabs do! Think! IF after receiving the jabs you can still contract the disease and spread it, then Ewe are Not immune and the jabs are Not a vaccine.
Also, no vaccine in history has ever been developed in just a few weeks or even months! The fastest any actual vaccine has been developed was 7 YEARS, not weeks or months. Even then, it takes years to conduct proper tests of safety and efficacy. You simply cannot expedite longitudinal studies. Think dammit!
Dr. Fauxci is a psychopathic mass murderer who should've been fired in the 1980s following his HIV-AIDS debacle. The jackass promised a vaccine then, too, but 40+ years later there's still no vaccine! Dr. Mengele would be jealous, and Ewe have the memory capacity of an impaired gnat.
PS. Be sure you're up to date on all your jabbies and boosties, clown! 🤡🐑💩
This is a similar reason why I stopped voting. I learned in college during the Obama era, while running a business, that the group often goes for shinny things. The elagent toung or the great reputation or just what sounds different from everything else. This for sure will bring the correct changes we need as a nation. However, none of this ever happens in the long run. Hindsight is 20/20, and the long term takes years to see the group got dupped again.
We shuffle back and forth from Democrats to Republicans instead of meeting in the middle and just accepting what is right is often what our reps won't get extra money for or any incentive for their personal accounts. At the end of it all the parties and the laws always have a mysterious way of making their way to the highest bidder.
This, however, is where the problem lies. No one ever wants to meet in the middle and compromise on a moral level of what is fair if their isn't something extra in it for them. Money is and has always been the bottom line, and we as the people are prone to the same illusion of power. We only want what is going to help our pockets at the end of it all.
I can't judge a rep or a neighbor for doing what I myself have done, but I'm willing to give something up for the greater good. Perhaps extra money that could go to schools or healthcare or even road work.
Fek compromise! What is this mythical "center" you claim to cling to? People prattle vapidly about "extremes" but dont bother to define what they mean. What is the "middle ground" between liberty and tyranny, freedom and slavery, life and death? You need to think longer and harder, and give those naïve childish notions of "compromise" a desperately needed courtesy flush.
Democrats are Communists masquerading as Socialists only because most of them still find the C word unpalatable... for now. Many of them behave like Nazis, actual Fascists, as they accuse their political opposition of atrocities they themselves are committing (just as Karl Marx instructed them to do).
Know this: Rights either exist or they do not. Speech is either free or it is not. Rights cannot be compromised! Rights that can be regulated or restricted, licensed or limited, are not rights at all, but rather government owned permissions that can be revoked at the tyrant's whim. eg: All gun laws are infringements one way or another and therefore unconstitutional, illegal, crimes against the supreme law of the land. All Democrats are guilty AF.
Please consider: Income taxes are abhorrent. Criminal. Before 1913 income taxes were illegal, Americans kept what they earned. That all changed with the 16th Amendment. And since passage of the Federal Reserve Act (also in 1913) the US dollar has lost 96% of its value. Fact. Democrat Woodrow Wilson enacted that wholly unconstitutional crap, and our governments have been gang raping Americans ever since.
Most everything that people think they know is wrong, and the dimmest among us defend it. Government is malevolent insatiable unsustainable bloated overreaching oppressive and toxic shite.
“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
I love our three branch system of checks and balances and our constitution. I just don't trust people who are elected to represent our interests, we the people, because we are not the highest bidder.
This is radical but those who we elect should not be considered a member of we the people or allowed to have outside investments or income other than what tax dollars pay for. They live in DC outside the borders of the U.S. as it's own district just for government affairs as the Constitution intended.
Good article. My personal experience is that traditional indigenous societies, although ruling by consensus, have more freedom of thought and expression than either of our more modern hierarchical secular/religious societies.
I'd say that my personal experience (actually in-depth practical, academic and historical knowledge) with some religious societies indicates that they have more freedom of thought and expression than the current and emerging social consensus believes about them.
Maybe the next chapter of this essay is about consensus and over-simplification (covered to a certain degree by Laura's comments on the perceived necessity of having an opinion even if one has no knowledgeable basis for it.)
I worry more about part I - the fear of disagreeing with perceived consensus - than II - exposure to different ideas. We’re very exposed to different ideas, they’re just dramatic media friendly extremes.
But it’s so important to confidently believe and see the ways that this is not a country of cruelty, that the majority of us do not agree with the short sighted, anti institution actions being taken.
Interesting piece, but it's mostly diagnostic without offering much of a roadmap forward. And I'm not sure it fully captures how different things are now.
Asch's experiment assumed one majority to conform to. Today we've got dozens of competing groups, each with their own conformity pressures and loyalty tests. You can be a rebel in one space and a perfect conformist in another. The whole framework doesn't really scale when different groups are looking at completely different lines and insisting theirs is the only truth.
What really stands out to me is how these aren't just social groups anymore — they're identity bunkers. People aren't going along to be polite; their entire sense of self is wrapped up in staying aligned. It's emotional, not always factual. The stakes feel existential, even for things that won't matter in six months.
I keep waiting for someone to talk about solutions, but mostly we just get more articles explaining the problem.
You’re right ma’am, susceptibility to conforming is however a bit of an abstract problem (outside of the era and experiment referenced). Solutions will present themselves contextually but all solutions can only come when we initiate the process of questioning - being curious isn’t an end state but only the beginning of where we start to find solutions - You possibly are further along the process and hence your need to see action. 😊
But as you’d appreciate, coming up with a solution isn’t always easy, my belief is that with more people encouraging the need to question what’s accepted we make a more conscious shift toward the solution or a roadmap to a solution than being paralysed by needing to decide.
Ma’am, the article encourages independent thought in parts and although it isn’t a solution to anything, there wasn’t a clear cut problem to start with…only a couple of thought provoking reflections. That you’re questioning the state of things (in looking for a solution) already is a win! We must all be curious and that really is where solutions are to be found.
I appreciate the response, though I'd push back on the idea that there wasn't a clear problem to start with. The article opens with conformity under McCarthy-era pressure, references Asch's experiments on group dynamics, and discusses Mill's concerns about tyranny of opinion—those aren't abstract reflections, they're identifying a specific problem: our susceptibility to conforming against our own judgment.
Curiosity is necessary, but it's not sufficient. Being curious about a broken system doesn't fix it. At some point, thinking about the problem becomes a way of avoiding the harder work of proposing what to actually do about it. I'd argue we've had enough thought-provoking pieces. What we're short on is roadmaps.
That's not a criticism of the author—it's a gap in the broader conversation. But calling the gap a 'win' feels like settling for diagnosis when we need prescription.
Consensus used to be a good thing among indigenous cultures, but then everyone was on the same page. Nowadays our "environment" includes the whole world, rather than just issues immediately in front of us, and it's quite impossible to achieve any level of clear understanding about what's going on outside of one's immediate circle (read: bubble).
That’s great! If you have time to share more about why, please do. I’m writing another article in response to valuable criticism I’ve received on this one, so any more is welcome.
The defining conflict of our era runs deeper than parties, nations, ideologies, or social classes. It is a psychological struggle between two states of mind: one conditioned into authoritarian submission and system-justifying beliefs, and another—still emerging—that sees concentrated, unaccountable power for what it is and refuses to grant it legitimacy.
The UDHR can be read as a shared floor for civilization: a minimum below which no person, anywhere, may be pushed if rule is to count as legitimate at all. It encodes basic protections for food, housing, healthcare, education, social security, freedom from torture and degrading treatment, freedom from arbitrary detention and disappearance, and protection from targeted persecution in the name of growth, security, development, or national interest.
It also sets a limit on self-enrichment. No individual, corporation, or state can credibly claim legitimacy for wealth or power built on practices that systematically push people below that floor—through war, debt, ecological devastation, or economic policy.
The UDHR is therefore a measuring device for aligning local and global action around that floor and evaluating institutions, laws, and fortunes against it. It links civil and political rights to economic and social rights as a single operating system for keeping human life above the baseline threshold.
The article concludes humans are hard-wired to trust the "map" of consensus, over the "territory" of reality to avoid social isolation.
This dichotomy is something I am quite interested in, and I believe the experiment provides confirmation of a micro-level psychological contributor to the macro-level structural failures I've been analyzing.
Specifically, I am writing about how our organizational structures are selecting to extract value from this gap. I have three published works, making the "systems thinking" as approachable as I can.
If you enjoyed this article, I believe you'll find these posts interesting, if a bit cynical.
Conformity is a societal survival instinct which probably allowed man to call on the power of the collective when we weren’t the dominant species. But we’ve been at the top of the food chain for centuries now and any progress we’ve achieved has been at great cost by those who dared to question the majority narrative. Your article poses very interesting questions…about conformity, bias, community weight and individual expression!
This is precisely the effect I find when confronting atheists with known science that demolishes the foundation of their faith. Academics running science fear the God of the Bible so much they got even Christians to believe in unseeable dark matter and undetectable dark energy. Much worse that information has no meaning and life emerged from wet rocks taking us all back to the old theory of worms emerging from muddy pools of water.
Yes indeed, a good truthful commentary on one of the weaknesses of humankind (that is, "subject to peer pressure")
However, when one accepts Christ** as his Personal Savior and receives the Holy Spirit***, he then becomes independent-minded, gains substantial wisdom, inherits better discernment between good and evil, and gains a better understanding of humankind and its politics throughout world history. Of course Christians understand my latter assertion; non-Christians reject it (1 Cor. 2:14). Ergo, the latter is one of humankind's strengths; that is, Free Will (to choose).
** The Second Person of the Holy Trinity (Triune) Godhead.
*** At our conception, God granted the quantum multi-dimensional entities of both the mortal human- and immortal soul-spirits. The Holy-spirit is an additional quantum multi-dimensional entity that God grants we humans when Christ is accepted as One's Savior (of one's immortal soul-spirit). It's the Holy-spirit than opens our minds to the good and evil ways of the world and/or humankind.
The Obamination is a bigoted fraud who was elected based on the color of his skin despite the content of his character... He is not "eloquent" and cannot speak without a teleprompter, and the ideas the POS spouted were Communist to their core. MLK Jr. would've spat on him. Everyone with an ounce of integrity should. Democrats are a sick twisted gullible cult of obedient sheeple. 🐑💩
Interesting article. The problem with independent thinking today, of course, is the anti-vaxxers in the US. Science is built on concensus, and we have to know when to listen to others who have more knowledge about a subject than we do. Read Isaac Asimov's famous quote about the cult of ignorance in the US and about people thinking 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge".
If it's science, it ain't consensus. If it's consensus, it ain't science. ~ Michael Crichton
It is possibly a good thing that the article centers more around morality and absolute truth, you are right, science requires a certain degree of empirical evidence building that may not need independent assessment in each instance. But someone who first proposed what we see as the wonders of science today did take that first step in questioning what was the popular narrative
Ewe are exactly the sort of weak minded gullible stooge the article addresses! Think harder. Think. Actual vaccines impart immunity. NONE of the Rona jabs do! Think! IF after receiving the jabs you can still contract the disease and spread it, then Ewe are Not immune and the jabs are Not a vaccine.
Also, no vaccine in history has ever been developed in just a few weeks or even months! The fastest any actual vaccine has been developed was 7 YEARS, not weeks or months. Even then, it takes years to conduct proper tests of safety and efficacy. You simply cannot expedite longitudinal studies. Think dammit!
Dr. Fauxci is a psychopathic mass murderer who should've been fired in the 1980s following his HIV-AIDS debacle. The jackass promised a vaccine then, too, but 40+ years later there's still no vaccine! Dr. Mengele would be jealous, and Ewe have the memory capacity of an impaired gnat.
PS. Be sure you're up to date on all your jabbies and boosties, clown! 🤡🐑💩
This is a similar reason why I stopped voting. I learned in college during the Obama era, while running a business, that the group often goes for shinny things. The elagent toung or the great reputation or just what sounds different from everything else. This for sure will bring the correct changes we need as a nation. However, none of this ever happens in the long run. Hindsight is 20/20, and the long term takes years to see the group got dupped again.
We shuffle back and forth from Democrats to Republicans instead of meeting in the middle and just accepting what is right is often what our reps won't get extra money for or any incentive for their personal accounts. At the end of it all the parties and the laws always have a mysterious way of making their way to the highest bidder.
This, however, is where the problem lies. No one ever wants to meet in the middle and compromise on a moral level of what is fair if their isn't something extra in it for them. Money is and has always been the bottom line, and we as the people are prone to the same illusion of power. We only want what is going to help our pockets at the end of it all.
I can't judge a rep or a neighbor for doing what I myself have done, but I'm willing to give something up for the greater good. Perhaps extra money that could go to schools or healthcare or even road work.
Well said. The tyranny of greed is our undoing.
“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. “ –Mark Twain
Fek compromise! What is this mythical "center" you claim to cling to? People prattle vapidly about "extremes" but dont bother to define what they mean. What is the "middle ground" between liberty and tyranny, freedom and slavery, life and death? You need to think longer and harder, and give those naïve childish notions of "compromise" a desperately needed courtesy flush.
Democrats are Communists masquerading as Socialists only because most of them still find the C word unpalatable... for now. Many of them behave like Nazis, actual Fascists, as they accuse their political opposition of atrocities they themselves are committing (just as Karl Marx instructed them to do).
Know this: Rights either exist or they do not. Speech is either free or it is not. Rights cannot be compromised! Rights that can be regulated or restricted, licensed or limited, are not rights at all, but rather government owned permissions that can be revoked at the tyrant's whim. eg: All gun laws are infringements one way or another and therefore unconstitutional, illegal, crimes against the supreme law of the land. All Democrats are guilty AF.
Please consider: Income taxes are abhorrent. Criminal. Before 1913 income taxes were illegal, Americans kept what they earned. That all changed with the 16th Amendment. And since passage of the Federal Reserve Act (also in 1913) the US dollar has lost 96% of its value. Fact. Democrat Woodrow Wilson enacted that wholly unconstitutional crap, and our governments have been gang raping Americans ever since.
Most everything that people think they know is wrong, and the dimmest among us defend it. Government is malevolent insatiable unsustainable bloated overreaching oppressive and toxic shite.
“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
--Barry Goldwater
It's time to start voting again in the U.S., btw
I love our three branch system of checks and balances and our constitution. I just don't trust people who are elected to represent our interests, we the people, because we are not the highest bidder.
This is radical but those who we elect should not be considered a member of we the people or allowed to have outside investments or income other than what tax dollars pay for. They live in DC outside the borders of the U.S. as it's own district just for government affairs as the Constitution intended.
Good article. My personal experience is that traditional indigenous societies, although ruling by consensus, have more freedom of thought and expression than either of our more modern hierarchical secular/religious societies.
I'd say that my personal experience (actually in-depth practical, academic and historical knowledge) with some religious societies indicates that they have more freedom of thought and expression than the current and emerging social consensus believes about them.
Maybe the next chapter of this essay is about consensus and over-simplification (covered to a certain degree by Laura's comments on the perceived necessity of having an opinion even if one has no knowledgeable basis for it.)
Yep, needs to be addressed on a case-by-case basis. It's a long slippery slope.
I worry more about part I - the fear of disagreeing with perceived consensus - than II - exposure to different ideas. We’re very exposed to different ideas, they’re just dramatic media friendly extremes.
But it’s so important to confidently believe and see the ways that this is not a country of cruelty, that the majority of us do not agree with the short sighted, anti institution actions being taken.
Call out the longer line!!!
Interesting piece, but it's mostly diagnostic without offering much of a roadmap forward. And I'm not sure it fully captures how different things are now.
Asch's experiment assumed one majority to conform to. Today we've got dozens of competing groups, each with their own conformity pressures and loyalty tests. You can be a rebel in one space and a perfect conformist in another. The whole framework doesn't really scale when different groups are looking at completely different lines and insisting theirs is the only truth.
What really stands out to me is how these aren't just social groups anymore — they're identity bunkers. People aren't going along to be polite; their entire sense of self is wrapped up in staying aligned. It's emotional, not always factual. The stakes feel existential, even for things that won't matter in six months.
I keep waiting for someone to talk about solutions, but mostly we just get more articles explaining the problem.
You’re right ma’am, susceptibility to conforming is however a bit of an abstract problem (outside of the era and experiment referenced). Solutions will present themselves contextually but all solutions can only come when we initiate the process of questioning - being curious isn’t an end state but only the beginning of where we start to find solutions - You possibly are further along the process and hence your need to see action. 😊
But as you’d appreciate, coming up with a solution isn’t always easy, my belief is that with more people encouraging the need to question what’s accepted we make a more conscious shift toward the solution or a roadmap to a solution than being paralysed by needing to decide.
Ma’am, the article encourages independent thought in parts and although it isn’t a solution to anything, there wasn’t a clear cut problem to start with…only a couple of thought provoking reflections. That you’re questioning the state of things (in looking for a solution) already is a win! We must all be curious and that really is where solutions are to be found.
I appreciate the response, though I'd push back on the idea that there wasn't a clear problem to start with. The article opens with conformity under McCarthy-era pressure, references Asch's experiments on group dynamics, and discusses Mill's concerns about tyranny of opinion—those aren't abstract reflections, they're identifying a specific problem: our susceptibility to conforming against our own judgment.
Curiosity is necessary, but it's not sufficient. Being curious about a broken system doesn't fix it. At some point, thinking about the problem becomes a way of avoiding the harder work of proposing what to actually do about it. I'd argue we've had enough thought-provoking pieces. What we're short on is roadmaps.
That's not a criticism of the author—it's a gap in the broader conversation. But calling the gap a 'win' feels like settling for diagnosis when we need prescription.
Consensus and peer group pressure are two entirely different things as I see it.
Consensus used to be a good thing among indigenous cultures, but then everyone was on the same page. Nowadays our "environment" includes the whole world, rather than just issues immediately in front of us, and it's quite impossible to achieve any level of clear understanding about what's going on outside of one's immediate circle (read: bubble).
I disagree with everything in this article. Every. Single. Word.
That’s great! If you have time to share more about why, please do. I’m writing another article in response to valuable criticism I’ve received on this one, so any more is welcome.
Just doing my part to fight consensus.
The defining conflict of our era runs deeper than parties, nations, ideologies, or social classes. It is a psychological struggle between two states of mind: one conditioned into authoritarian submission and system-justifying beliefs, and another—still emerging—that sees concentrated, unaccountable power for what it is and refuses to grant it legitimacy.
The UDHR can be read as a shared floor for civilization: a minimum below which no person, anywhere, may be pushed if rule is to count as legitimate at all. It encodes basic protections for food, housing, healthcare, education, social security, freedom from torture and degrading treatment, freedom from arbitrary detention and disappearance, and protection from targeted persecution in the name of growth, security, development, or national interest.
It also sets a limit on self-enrichment. No individual, corporation, or state can credibly claim legitimacy for wealth or power built on practices that systematically push people below that floor—through war, debt, ecological devastation, or economic policy.
The UDHR is therefore a measuring device for aligning local and global action around that floor and evaluating institutions, laws, and fortunes against it. It links civil and political rights to economic and social rights as a single operating system for keeping human life above the baseline threshold.
Some thought-provoking considerations. Thank you for sharing!
The article concludes humans are hard-wired to trust the "map" of consensus, over the "territory" of reality to avoid social isolation.
This dichotomy is something I am quite interested in, and I believe the experiment provides confirmation of a micro-level psychological contributor to the macro-level structural failures I've been analyzing.
Specifically, I am writing about how our organizational structures are selecting to extract value from this gap. I have three published works, making the "systems thinking" as approachable as I can.
If you enjoyed this article, I believe you'll find these posts interesting, if a bit cynical.
https://bargainbinseldon.substack.com/p/the-fractal-stalemate-a-guide-to
https://bargainbinseldon.substack.com/p/ancient-engine-of-extraction
https://bargainbinseldon.substack.com/p/cold-deliveries-hot-profits
That
Conformity is a societal survival instinct which probably allowed man to call on the power of the collective when we weren’t the dominant species. But we’ve been at the top of the food chain for centuries now and any progress we’ve achieved has been at great cost by those who dared to question the majority narrative. Your article poses very interesting questions…about conformity, bias, community weight and individual expression!
This is precisely the effect I find when confronting atheists with known science that demolishes the foundation of their faith. Academics running science fear the God of the Bible so much they got even Christians to believe in unseeable dark matter and undetectable dark energy. Much worse that information has no meaning and life emerged from wet rocks taking us all back to the old theory of worms emerging from muddy pools of water.
Yes indeed, a good truthful commentary on one of the weaknesses of humankind (that is, "subject to peer pressure")
However, when one accepts Christ** as his Personal Savior and receives the Holy Spirit***, he then becomes independent-minded, gains substantial wisdom, inherits better discernment between good and evil, and gains a better understanding of humankind and its politics throughout world history. Of course Christians understand my latter assertion; non-Christians reject it (1 Cor. 2:14). Ergo, the latter is one of humankind's strengths; that is, Free Will (to choose).
** The Second Person of the Holy Trinity (Triune) Godhead.
*** At our conception, God granted the quantum multi-dimensional entities of both the mortal human- and immortal soul-spirits. The Holy-spirit is an additional quantum multi-dimensional entity that God grants we humans when Christ is accepted as One's Savior (of one's immortal soul-spirit). It's the Holy-spirit than opens our minds to the good and evil ways of the world and/or humankind.
The Obamination is a bigoted fraud who was elected based on the color of his skin despite the content of his character... He is not "eloquent" and cannot speak without a teleprompter, and the ideas the POS spouted were Communist to their core. MLK Jr. would've spat on him. Everyone with an ounce of integrity should. Democrats are a sick twisted gullible cult of obedient sheeple. 🐑💩