Power of the Mindless Masses
This post has been in my drafts since 2007, when I bumped into a study about this issue. Seems like today’s as good as any other day to actually get around to writing it, because the situation’s still the same. Something like this doesn’t change in two years; it probably doesn’t change in two millennia either. Most people have always been sheep, and sheep follow each other much more than they follow the shepherd.
This is much to any good shepherd’s advantage, because you have to put much less effort into keeping your flock heading in the desired direction if the natural tendency of most of its members is to stick together. This way, once you convince a part of them to go where you want them to go, a second group will tend to follow them, a third group will follow the second group and so on, simply because they tend to stick together. It might not tickle your ego if you’re the kind of person who wants to be recognized as the leader, but in that case I don’t have much to say to you either way. If you just want to make your flock go where you want it to, it’s a very useful mechanism, because the flock does a good part of the work for you without even meaning to.
Not that there’s any need for studies to reveal this. It’s obvious that humans are like this and those in positions of authority, or simply those who have done well for themselves, usually take full advantage of it. That’s how they usually end up where they are, after all. So it’s equally obvious that, if we are to create a major positive change, we’ll need to make full use of this mechanism as well. It might not appear ethical, but it’s the one way that works, so it has to be used. After all, if one person tries to persuade individual sheep that it’s better to go in a certain direction while another tries to simply herd the entire flock the other way, who do you think the sheep will follow?
But how do you herd bipedal sheep, seeing as the highly influenceable aren’t the kind of people who can be reasoned with? Well, the solution is to more or less do the same thing shepherds do: Make it easier for the sheep to follow the desired path than any other and, when needed, make it interesting to them as well. Bipedal sheep might not respond to exactly the same stimuli as their four-legged counterparts, but the basic principles are quite similar. You just have to see what works best and keep doing it until you get them where you want them to be, while at the same time being careful not to let too many of them stray, because in that case others will begin to follow those and break apart your flock.
But let’s move away from all those comparisons and get into specifics. How do you make a large number of influenceable people do something when you can’t exactly reason with them and make them understand that it’s the right thing to do? Quite simple, actually. If you have the means for it, you provide the necessary infrastructure and the required laws to make it easy for them to do what you want them to do and hard to do anything else. This is what those in positions of authority do, the best ones being so subtle that few realize what’s going on before it’s too late. If you’re not one of them, however, you have to resort to trends and the cool factor in order to make the highly influenceable actually want to do certain things.
Since those who already are in positions of authority have likely made full use of these principles to get there, I’ll say we should leave them aside and focus on the rest of us. If you’re not in a position of authority, you can still make a lot of people do something if you make them believe that it’s cool, that it’ll make them more interesting, or better than the rest, or happier somehow. Your claims don’t have to make much sense; those who’d think things through aren’t the ones who’d fall for such tactics anyway, they’re not the highly influenceable, so they’re not your targets. Those who actually are your targets, however, will fall for it once you manage to paint a nice enough picture and bombard them with it for some time. You shouldn’t try to reason with them and you shouldn’t try to lead them. You should just put this image out there, make it attractive enough to the unintelligent and superficial, who are usually the most influenceable, and let them chase it. Past that point, they’ll do most of the work for you.
Once your primary targets will become interested enough, they’ll create a certain amount of peer pressure, therefore enhancing the appeal of the trend in question and making the moderately influenceable desire to follow it as well. Naturally, this will create even more peer pressure, which will eventually lead the less influenceable individuals to start following suit as well. And once they do so, the staggering amount of pressure thus created could even play a part in making those who aren’t usually influenceable follow suit. If nothing else, so many people doing something tends to automatically create some of the necessary infrastructure, therefore making it easier to perform said action. Also, if most people end up desiring something, those in positions of authority might tend to appease them, which means that laws encouraging that particular behavior might eventually be passed. And even if this doesn’t happen, what people actually do is much more important than what laws say they should do if you mean to get something done.
Of course, the downside of this approach is that the rebels will automatically reject your idea, simply because everyone else seems to be embracing it. But they’re not your primary concern, seeing as they’re far fewer than the sheep. And there are ways to have them accept your idea as well. If we’re talking of the rebels without a cause, most of them tend to follow certain trends as well, so it could be possible, with some very careful planning, to create trends that appear to differ greatly from the ones you create for the highly influenceable but which actually generate the same results. The success rate would be significantly lower, but it could still work. On the other hand, if we’re talking about those who don’t rebel specifically because they want to be different but because they are actually thinking and realize that what the majority does is usually very wrong, you could reason with them and they could end up supporting your idea if it actually is a good one.
So how about we stop trying to persuade people that certain things are good and right and start using this power of the mindless masses? We’d only need to make certain things appear cool, and preferably also be easier to do them than to avoid doing so. I’m talking about such things as helping instead of harming the environment, treating other animals well, including fellow humans, informing yourself before casting your vote, being kind and helpful towards those who haven’t given you reason not to be and so on… The fact that these methods, when used by those who are currently in control, manage to keep human society on its current evil course well enough should mean that they’d be equally effective in steering it towards a new, better path.
