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Sheeple

Entry 2412, on 2025-09-24 at 17:12:31 (Rating 4, Comments)

If there's one thing which annoys me most about people, it's their inability to think for themselves. To be clear, there is not just one thing which annoys me, but let's just say in theory there might be! Anyway, when I debate people, or even just talk to them informally, I tend to hear some very weak arguments I have heard a hundred times before, and they seem to be very superficial and (I think) show that the person has not really thought through their ideas very thoroughly.

For example, when I debate controversial social issues I hear the same old things repeated over and over. Sure, it could be that those ideas have a lot of merit and are worthy of being used commonly, but that seems unlikely given the response I get when I challenge them. And the same thing happens with politics, religion, and just about any other area where there is significant disagreement between the different sides.

Commonly, people follow particular views which rise and fall in popularity over time. For example, at one time DEI (diversity, equality, inclusion) and the closely related affirmative action were what "everyone" considered to be the "right thing to do" but now there is considerably more doubt. The same applies to climate change action: at one time if you didn't support that you were on the fringe, but now there is increasing acceptance of alternative views (note that I am talking about the response to climate change, not the phenomenon itself).

Now, in an ideal world we might expect that the change in what is considered "real" or "good" by the majority of "right-thinking people" would be linked to the facts currently understood, but I don't think so. I think these things are more likely to be driven by fashion rather than fact.

There is a classic experiment in psychology which was carried out by Solomon Asch in
the 1950s, which investigated how social pressure from a majority might influence individual belief and behavior. The idea was to ask the subjects to evaluate something for which there was an obviously correct answer, but have other people, who were pretending to be fellow subjects but were really working with the experimenter, give the wrong answer and test if the real subject would follow their lead.

So the subjects were asked to look at the length of a drawn line and say which of another set of lines it matched in length. There was one line obviously too small, another too large, and one the same length. If the fake subjects all gave the same wrong answer the real subject would often go along with that, even though it was clearly wrong.

In the original experiment, about 40% of participants went along with the incorrect majority answer at least once, but in a control group, where there was no pressure from others, less than 1% gave the incorrect answer.

This result has been replicated in similar experiments more recently, and other experiments testing conformity, including my favourite, the infamous Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures, confirms these findings.

Remember that the wrong answer in these experiments was obviously wrong, so we might expect that when the right or wrong answer is more subtle then people would be even easier to mislead.

Can you see where this is going? In modern society, there appears to be a set of beliefs which are considered "morally right", yet when any reasonable amount of analysis is applied to these it is obvious that the truth is far from certain, and that alternative views are quite viable.

So let's look at some examples...

Climate change. If we want to be on "the right side of history" (an extremely problematic phrase which should set off alarm bells immediately) then we should be doing all we can to reach "net zero", right? Well, maybe. If we could rely on everyone doing the same thing then this claim might have some merit, but while some countries do a lot and others continue to burn more and more coal then I have to ask is this genuinely the best option? It only takes a little bit of unbiased thought to make the "consensus view" seem very questionable.

What about the Israel-Palestine war? Again, this is a difficult question with no obvious answer, but many people act as if the answer is simple: that Israel is committing genocide and needs to stop the war immediately. But ask yourself this: should the Allies have stopped World War II in 1944 and left Hitler in power? There were over a million German civilian casualties in that war; does that mean that the Allies were committing genocide? Again, the answer is not obvious, and the simplistic "consensus view" is far from indisputable.

Finally, let's look at LGBT politics. We are constantly told that trans women (who some might say are men who are pretending to be women) are real women, and that any deviation from this view is transphobic and hateful. But again, this idea does not hold up to much scrutiny. I understand that sex and gender can be seen as two different things, but even if we accept this (which is itself questionable) then surely biological sex is more important than social gender, especially in situations like women's sport and use of female-only spaces. It seems to me that the "consensus view" has many defects.

You might have noticed that I used the words "consensus view" in quotes three times above, because it is far from certain that the view which we hear from the "loudest" members of society is the genuine consensus. For example, a large majority of British people do not agree that Palestine should be recognised as a country, even though their (idiot) prime minister has just indicated that is that country's official position.

In conclusion, all I say is that people should ask themselves, are they the victim of a massive gaslighting effort from a noisy minority. Are they being told that something that is obviously false is true. Are they succumbing to fake news, misinformation, and propaganda. Are they really just sheeple?

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