When you come into the world, you are bound to encounter a plethora of tips and advice along the way.

Tips about life, about relationships, about how to fit in society, even about the universe (for those who believe in those sorts of things).

Those tips can be good, bad or irrelevant.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

The crazy part about those tips is that the less thought-out the advice is, the more popular it will probably be.

It could be as dangerous as “Tap your home equity to buy a flat screen TV” or as harmless as “Just be yourself”.

“Be yourself” they say.

Why? Are you never planning on improving?

I mean the guy clearly wants to change his situation and knows he has room for improvement, and you’re telling him to just remain the same?

He has been himself for fourteen years and nothing has changed. He comes to you to give him another perspective from the outside, stuff he might not be aware of.

He could not be aware of physical boundaries or personal hygiene or maybe no one told him he should stop approaching women and ask them if they wanna get Jiggy with it.

After all, you can’t blame him. He has been himself all this time, it's just that people stopped saying that stuff 14 years ago.

So maybe, just maybe “just be yourself” isn’t as effective as we thought.

At best, it would only encourage the issue to remain unsolved.

Surprisingly, it’s super viral, and I mean Bubonic plague viral… And it’s just one example of many.

This is not exclusive to life advice by the way. Whether it’s relationship advice, political affiliation, societal stereotyping… The more simplistic and unelaborate the slogan is, the more popular and convincing it will sound to people.

― Why would you throw your life away like this, and destroy the lives of others?

― I’m doing for the flag.

― I don’t know, man… Pretty sure flags doesn’t speak human language.

The example above is obviously an exaggeration, but the point stands.

Are we really doing it for the flag here? How about the prison industrial complex? Maybe that too. Big oil? Probably more.

How about the department of Offense? Ok, now we’re talking.

At the end of the day, are we really doing it for the flag? Gee, I don’t know… I kinda never seen a talking flag before.

So we’re faced with two choices here, either to accept that a piece of fabric can magically gain consciousness if placed on a pole, and shortly after it begins to ask people to do unspeakable things to each other.

Either that, or there's something that we’re missing here, a neutralizing agent that attacks critical thinking and manufactures consent.

That's our subject today: The neutralizing agent.

You figure it's all a scam, huh? All them folks? They just wrong?

Rustin Cohle: Oh yeah! Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey, "He said for you to give me your fucking share." ― True Detective.

The Conformity Experiments

In 1951, Solomon Asch devised what is is now considered as one of the most important experiments in social psychology.

The experiment were formed by groups of eight college students who were in the 'inside', mainly operating as actors, and there was another test subject who didn't know that the eight actors were given exact answers before the test have even started.

The experiment contained some simple questions that were very obvious and extremely easy to answer correctly. But regardless of that, the test subjects always seemed to repeat the same answers as the rest of the group who unbeknownst them were plain actors that were given specifically wrong answers.

The test subjects completed a total 18 trials. After that, Dr. Asch conducted a last experiment in which the participants were tested alone with only the experimenter in the room.

What's mind-blowing about all this, is that the subjects had in fact the ability to answer those questions correctly, but if the rest of the group answered the wrong way, no matter how ridiculous, then the subjects would always, always change their opinion to follow the others.

No matter how obvious the answer was.

An important lesson here - or scary lesson - is that sadly, for many people the facts means nothing at all, they just want to follow other people.

They will swap their beliefs in a heart beat if they see a critical mass doing the same.

There are more engineers and scientists alive today than there have been in all of the rest of human history combined. Most of them seek major breakthroughs solving actual problems and want to part of the next life changing technology.

Some of them have them have succeed in building a critical mass around their idea, standing in huge contrast with historical geniuses that were more often than not ostracized by society. And that's the next subject that we'll dive in shortly.

To be Continued...

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