“Corn-Pone Opinions” by Mark Twain (1901)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
However, I'd add an important corollary, and one that is perhaps a bit less cynical :). Even if it's mostly true that you can only feel fulfilled when your actions and opinions are approved by your peers, you still get to chose who your peers are, and whose opinion you value. That's true today more than ever, with the world's interconnectedness and the huge diversity of on- and offline communities.
Near the end of the article, Mark Twain says "Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently." If you take the time to choose the parties/communities you align yourself with carefully, you can live a very principled and self-determined life even accepting the inevitability of some degree of group conformity.
Is that any less influenced by self-approval, and the approval of others?
But "why people choose the communities they align with" doesn't seem much different than "why people have their opinions." Are we carefully choosing who we align ourselves with, any more than we're choosing our opinions?
I don't think there's any test for this, or any cure, other than making time to ruminate, meditate, and ponder. Alone. Free from distractions and other voices.
And if that's the case, isn't it at least possible that today it's both easier to switch communities, and less likely to be for any principled reason?
It sounds like an easy way out, but I found it hard in practice. Not only it may be dangerous (filter bubble), but it also seems to be very similar to self-mind-hacking - which I found not to work at all. As long as I know I'm trying to trick my mind into believing something, it will refuse to do so. If it works at all, it must be on such a long timescale that you forget that it was all fake.
Prominent examples:
1. Lower-middle class Southern whites in the U.S. (with whom Twain was intimately familiar) embrace right-wing rhetoric (devout opposition to a godless, liberal govt that rewards a free-loading underclass) while the Republican Party caves to the self-interest of the mega-corp oligarchy. These folks who would benefit from social reforms reject all such liberal notions because, well, they still believe anyone who's not white and Christian is out to take away what little they have. But regressive conservative tax policy is actually doing them harm. (tl;dr: see the success of Fox News, with its overwhelmingly white/old audience. http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/04/02/rat...)
2. Given the above in the U.S., is it any wonder radical Islam succeeds in less affluent, less educated areas of the world--where there's very little exposure to outside ideas. And there's certainly very little opportunity for social/intellectual/economic mobility.
Suggesting people are somehow foolish because they put ideas before take-home is a weak argument. I'm sure you have a point, but maybe you could come up with better examples.
>> These folks who would benefit from social reforms reject all such liberal notions because, well, they still believe anyone who's not white and Christian is out to take away what little they have.
In my experience, coming from fly over country, the real thought process could not be further removed. Where I came from, self reliance and self determination were prized. We might be poor as hell, heating our home with wood we cut, and eating food we grew and shot, but so was everyone else in our area, and there was nothing wrong with that. We weren't taking hand outs and getting along just fine (embellishing and paraphrasing try to make the point here). The idea being, everyone could do this, but were too lazy. We were poor, but not impoverished.
The gp's characterization is actually quite offensive to these people.
Both the preacher and Twain's philosophy are very independent thinking themselves.
So it's a matter of numbers. A huge proportion of society is easily manipulated by showing them a "manufactured consensus." (Chomsky dixit)
And for the rest, you just need to pander to their belief that they're immune to that sort of thing.
There's evidence that far from being social conventions, political biases are partly neurological. Whether the biases are due to nature or nurture, brain function can't usefully be reduced to superficial observations about creative thinking or self interest.
Twain should at least have noticed that voters reliably support people who take away their bread/corn instead of supplying it.
In fact humans are quite incredibly bad at calculating genuine self interest. We seem to be programmed to equate effective leadership with a certain kind of strutting acquisitive self-indulgence and macho mammal posturing. Being a follower of same can often be a terrible way to meet your bread needs - but a very good way to be treated as a disposable resource.
Actually I think it's the other way round. The force to conform doesn't come from seeking "approval and praise" but from avoiding the negative consequences of possibly being isolated and ostracised.
This is because where there's isolation there is disrespect and even violence from the peer group around the corner, apart from the negative effects it has on one's value on the "partnership market".
> Do you believe that a tenth part of the people, on either side, had any rational excuse for having an opinion about the matter at all? I studied that mighty question to the bottom -- came out empty. ... We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon.
This mistakes the value of expressing an opinion or having a vote. First, there's the personal benefit of investigating and thinking something through (even if you "came out empty"). Second, there's a public benefit to encouraging people to investigate and thinking something through on their own. Third, the 'wisdom of the crowd' might be right, show us new ideas, or offer insight and wisdom.
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This essay seems related to Paul Grahams "How to Do What You Love". He wrote that when deciding what to do, we should consider what's respected by our peers.
> What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know? [4]
> This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow, especially when you're young. [5] Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.
Are you saying that people are not aware that their opinions may not be as ironclad as they sometimes seem?
That's the impression I'm getting when talking with many of them. Or when browsing the more mainstream parts of the Internet.
The superficial aspects of how the point is expressed are very different and probably appeal to a disjoint audience. Every tribe has its own way realizing that the others are the victims of conformity and group think.
The problem with public opinion in our times is this idea that the crowd is always right. Something is true because the crowd says it is. The crowd saying it is, makes it true. Sane is not the same as true. Sane just means many people believe it. The person who believes something no one else does is considered insane. When the lone "insane" person is vindicated, great wealth and success seem to follow.
I must not have been paying attention. When did that ever happen?
PG, for example: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html . :-)
I think that there are two problems with this. (EDIT: 'Problems' is a bad word. I don't mean two things that make it wrong, but rather two things that require a careful reading to appreciate fully. I should have said 'subtleties'.)
First, and most importantly, I think that people think that being exceptional is a choice. Thus, someone says "ah, I shall be exceptional!", and sits back and waits to become so. Being exceptional is not a choice; becoming exceptional is, though it is a slow process, subject to setbacks, and not guaranteed of even eventual success (unless—as is perhaps uniquely appropriate here—one is willing to move the goalposts when necessary, and find success where one is).
Second, I take your explicit point to be the decision between being accepted and being exceptional, but I'll respond as if it were between being conformist and being exceptional (which I took to be the subtext). After the problem is surmounted of deciding just to be exceptional, and realising that one must become so, I think that sometimes people confuse blind non-conformity with reasoned non-conformity. That is, a decision not to conform just in order not to be part of the crowd is just as silly as a decision to conform to be part of the crowd. Rather, make your decisions as you will, regardless of the pressure of the crowds, with the idea that you will sometimes agree with and (probably) more often disagree with them, and become exceptional in that way.
I would separate the non-conformist whose conscience puts them at odds with a misguided but widespread popular opinion, from the contrarian. Being contrarian just for the sake of it can be silly sometimes. Although I still like those who consider that so much of their identity that they take contrarian positions even when unnecessary. If anything they are a non-yielding role model and we could use some of that, cause the scales are definately tipped in favor of conformity. It's drilled into us from a very young age.
I still think that this decision is one concerning becoming, rather than being, exceptional. That is, I think of being exceptional as the accumulated result of good decisions, rather than as a single (even lifelong) decision in its own right.
> I would separate the non-conformist whose conscience puts them at odds with a misguided but widespread popular opinion, from the contrarian.
Oh, I see; I was reading 'non-conformist' as essentially synonymous with 'contrarian'. Your clarifying the distinction addresses my second point.
> Although I still like those who consider that so much of their identity that they take contrarian positions even when unnecessary. If anything they are a non-yielding role model and we could use some of that, cause the scales are definately tipped in favor of conformity.
As a reflexive contrarian (I am so inclined to test positions by argument that, if it happens that I convince my interlocutor, then I sometimes unthinkingly argue against his or her new position, which I had been urging, and in favour of the original position), I am not sure that there is as much value to such a position as you suggest; but that is a minor point, and besides I could easily be wrong.
I'm a mathematician, not a software developer, but I think that both professions train their practitioners to believe that the way to get good tools (or theorems) is to try to break them, and to keep only those that survive—a 'confrontational' approach that it is (perhaps too) easy to carry over into the rest of life. I won't deny that there is probably some arrogance in my contrarianism, too.
It's a skill that few practice, but thinking for yourself is not actually difficult. Most people have the basic reasoning skills required, they just never care enough to "rock the boat". And that's the real cause of conformity: apathy.
Society generally doesn't reward you for thinking outside the box, or outside the "outside the box" box. It rewards you for following the same rules, norms and patterns as everyone else does. Meanwhile, you have your spouse and kids to feed, house to keep warm, lots of work to do for little pay and an abusive boss that keeps you on your toes. Most people don't have time to think for themselves, even if it was rewarded, and it isn't.
Considering the 6 stages of his blasphemy trials between Religious and Roman courtrooms (especially, the burdened denial of right and wrong between Herod and Pilate).
And contrasting that unfortunate crisis of conscience greeted by the reported mob justice with how many billion people today follow a religion borne of Christ's personality, it just reinforces one thing Mark Twain endeavored to deliver as important message in that essay:
"Think for yourself."
You have All The Money, and All The Respect amongst your large and powerful peer group. Given your considerable wealth, there's nothing anybody can do to negatively impact your life in any meaningful way. Yet you continue to bang the same drum you've been banging for a decade now, at least.
Time to tell us something we don't already know.
If you want to be outside of the herd in thought, it would aid you to be something alien to the majority.
edit: you're right.
keenly alive and exuberant : having or inducing high spirits <a bird's gay spring song>