Sheeple vs Enlightened
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This is something that I've been saving for a long time. I think it's very relevant to the community around here. Personally, I think it's a tad myopic to think 99% of the world's asleep. Maybe, just maybe, that's really the case. But this is probably the exact same thing that some violent sects of world elites think - that others are mindless sheeples, so they treat the lives of others as being cheap. While I'm not putting enlightened folks / new agers / truthseekers in the same vein as those that will commit violence, it's this assumption and mental ascension of the self over others that's causing further divide.
I understand this as I've lost a few good relationships in the past, being a bit of an overzealous, militant atheist back then.
This is the writeup that I found back in 2015 and it resonated very well with me. Taken entirely from: http://everything2.com/user/Chord/writeups/sheeple
The "sheeple versus enlightened" framework has a few flaws.
For one thing, asking people to be individualistic plays into the consumerist culture that people are trying to rebel against. That is because individualism has, for the past 40 or so years, been realized mostly by purchasing differently than everyone else. Buying your way into coolness, in other words. As a result, there has been a massive increase in demand for choice of products, and companies have reaped greater profits by catering to individualistic tastes. There was a time, and some of you are old enough to remember, when companies were associated with conservatism and conformity. The 1970s movie Rollerball has, as villains, a group of Corporate Conservative Conformists.
There was a time when Conformity was not merely a social pressure, but actively endorsed. It's been a few decades since that ended. Individualism worked. It won. In large enough numbers, Special Snowflakes can be an avalanche.
And yet, consumerism remains. We still buy too much stuff and throw too much stuff away throw too much food away and use too much energy.
And if you think "well, I'll just be thrifty with my food and buy less and use less energy", well, that's the second problem. I don't really care what YOU do. You alone are not enough to heal the world. That's the whole trouble with individualism, it leads people to believe that their individual choices can change the world for the better in the absence of organised effort.
After all, it takes more than one person to build an institution. One person can destroy something, oh, that's easy. All you have to do is hit it in just the right place. But if you want to build, you need other people involved. You need other people to invest their energy and their time and and their love so that it keeps going after you're gone. You need a community to be invested.
As much as the Three Cups of Tea guy turned out to be a fraud, he got one thing right: the schools that a community helped build were ones they were willing to defend. People don't like to abandon the things they build.Teach a man to fish, and he fishes for life. That kind of thing.
And we need to build communities, because as it stands, right now we're kind of scattered on the wind. We young folk of each generation say things like "my single vote doesn't matter" and "what can I do." We think of effectiveness as our individual choices, and not as collective action. We need collective action. That's how shit gets done. That's how things get built. That's how communities are protected. By the work of many. The idea that a single, super human can fix everything is so far off the mark that even BATMAN is willing to delegate his duties now.
And people who are committed to changing their world for the better understand this. There's been movements toward that end for the past few decades. Before the Marriage Equality movement, there was ACT UP and the organised pressure to find a treatment for HIV. There was the Environmental movement. The second wave of feminism. And so on. All of these movements were championed by people who lived in the midst of an individualistic culture. It did not prevent them from finding common ground on matters of national importance.
My worry about the word "Sheeple" is that it represents a mindset that prevents YOU from finding common ground with anyone. Because it prevents you from looking for ways to connect with people. As the message at the bottom of this node says, "yeah, yeah, you think you're high and mightier than everyone." How are you going to find common ground if you think you're at the peak?
The idea that everyone is stupid and half-asleep, that everything will go right if we all just Wake Up And Smell The Coffee, is something that has pervaded American thought for the last 240 years. Ever since the Great Awakening, we've had this idea that someday we'll all get smarter all at once, we''ll all become more moral at once, Jesus will descend and everything will be made right again. In the massive cultural upheaval that was the 1950s White Flight To the Suburbs, this idea lost its Christian mooring and began to be expressed in whatever promising new spiritualism people found. Psychedelics and Eastern Mysticism were supposed to all awaken us to a state of higher consciousness and we were all supposed to see Reality, and finally realize the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
The word "Sheeple", implying a kind of sleepy conformity, is a degraded version of this cultural movement.
Meanwhile, the people who were perfectly willing to get on the level of other people were able to band together and achieve real change, and that's why the first anti-retroviral drugs came out in the 1990s instead of 2000, and that's why marriage equality was achieved this year instead of ten years from now. And that's why cultural attitudes changed in time for my own mother to be able to open her own goddamn credit account in the formative years of her adulthood. Change of this nature doesn't happen automatically, especially when lots of powerful people have a financial interest in keeping things the way they are.
It's tempting to think that good change would happen automatically, if everyone just Woke Up. But human behaviour doesn't work that way. Smart people come to different conclusions. Intelligent people argue a lot. Just look at the scientific papers coming out of universities.
I don't like it when people compare other people to sheep, because it implies that they're just a bunch of dumb conformists. Maybe they aren't! Maybe they're all as smart as you are, and still don't want to change anything, because everything is satisfactory for them. Maybe they understand how the world works and are looking to manipulate it for themselves. Maybe they're not as learned as you, but they're proud and determined and well worth having in any group of people dedicated to change. How are you going to know unless you get down off your mountaintop and ask them?
And if you find a group of people all willing to work together, who knows what you all can accomplish?
The people in elected positions do. That's why they don't want you to vote in the first place. They understand the power of collective action, and they fear it. They try to undermine it. They gerrymander your collective voting power into oblivion, and they make you pay poll taxes, and they ask for IDs when you vote, in full knowledge that you're too poor to get one. And they look the other way when companies do everything they can to prevent workers from organising. They fear the power of organized people.
The documentary Sir No Sir outlines how just a handful of people can overturn something as big as a war. It doesn't take organizing, it doesn't take a mass of people to all yell the same slogan for their leader or even for their idealizations, it takes a handful of enlisted/deserters to do real change, and sometimes in certain organizations like the officers it only takes a couple, all else is susceptible to manipulation and controlled opposition. Let me utter some phrases that make the sheeple moniker very understandable:
heard mentality, group think, occupy wallstreet.
Mob mentality has been studied for a very long time. The question is: can you adapt that to work on a handful of people, strangers even that are all in the same situation and have the conviction to say "No thank you, I'd rather die behind the chemical sheds" look at the GI movement and how many it took to "support" those few individuals, it wasn't the herd that made it happen, it wasn't the masses dropping flyers and putting themselves into the shepards hands to be portrayed as senseless masses, it was the handful of Eve's saying No, I won't, in spite of the multitudes people who had no skin in the game.
Real conviction isn't found in a group, in a group you find identification through compromise of your convictions, you lose your identity in order to conform, you sell your self for the approval of everyone, and so then real change happens from within, hence why the axiom of change yourself first, physicians heal yourself first is still true and will never be overturned into "conform". Why is that a point, that conformity was sold to the public, why not mention this along side
Why not mention how classism was never the problem in independence times america, why the people were all happy to band behind "no more kings" but not behind "no more hierarchy ". Even wallstreet failed at addressing the timeless war of class and focused entirely on the perceived controllers, but not on the structures that allow these controllers to manifest in the first place.
Yes, grouping people is polarizing and generalizing, and ultimately alienating the individuals from joining you on the same ground,yes ok, thats one point, but that doesn't mean that groups are what creates change, groups are always stupid, indifferent, us vs them, easy to control, easy to spook and impress, endlessly more predictable and susceptible to the tactics which have been explored for a long time.
How easy is it to force/coerce a handful of individuals as opposed to a multitude? One gets spooked all get spooked, but real change comes from conviction and that leads to connection to actual real solidarity, it starts in your family, in your friends and even your coworkers, not in your neighborhood, not in your town halls, there you are targets of the mechanism of peers, of "we are all for this, we are all against this".
The problem is we've had organized efforts and those end up devolving into people trying to control others, and when they can't they resort to trying to coerce them by making them believe unless they conform and act as they are told, then they are causing the problem for everyone else.
We can't agree on a problem, how are we going to agree to the same solution?
This is the whole sentence. Like what you've said, I guess this is the reality of the collective. Which is why big governments are not a good idea. Although I'm not big on the idea of nations, something like Switzerland's arrangement with decentralisation in pockets of municipals is actually pretty decent.
This is really true and a big problem in any collective action, across the political spectrum. I quite like a particular approach of ad hoc or "pop up" organization. A benefit of this is that it's easier to form cross cultural / political / whatever groups because you don't have to stick around with them too long to get pissed at them and start trying to retain power.
And in fact, I think this might be a good replacement for government, but that's another story.
I think we can agree on a problem, but not what the entire problem of the world is.
It seems to me these days more than ever we are divided in every possible was. Referring to people as 'sheeple' is just another way to divide us. Even music and art, which in the 60's was uniting people to create change and challenge the status quo, is as divisive as race, class, and nationality.
Yes, smart people argue a lot, but so do ignorant people who argue about issues highlighted in the media by those institutions that profit from the way things currently are and fear the power of organized people. Keeping us fighting about things of no real consequence has been a very effective distraction historically and as obvious as their tactics seem to many, there are still those who seem oblivious. Sheeple, if you will. They shouldn't be discounted though and are needed to create a new future.
Fair enough, I've never thought that woodstock etc has also created division all that, makes sense. Once I was chatting with a gay friend about lgbt stuff getting more mainstream acceptance, and he was like "Dude, I couldn't care less about that, that's not the real issue people are facing".
nice.
I'd been stuck in the conspiracy theory camp for a long time, where such talk of "sheeple" run rampant - just another offshoot of the "awakened," "truthers," "conscious," etc. At the end of the day, all that was merely stated is self-righteousness. Glad to have disassociated myself from such views since, as for all the noble intentions there might be in those sub-cultures, the approach is flawed.
Great share.
oh man i was just thinking about you this morning when your rapper professor friend from bali started his first post :)
Hopefully I am in another group of non-sheeple who get lumped in with sheeple. I marched for racial equality in the late 60s, I worked for sexual equality (the pre-feminism term) in the early 70s, I worked in health food co-ops, grew my own organic food and started a worker owned business or three. I organized against the huge corporations, voted and supported libertarian politicians, advocated for distributed food and energy production, and buttonholed people about the unelected state.
But then I retired. That fight is for the young. I brought it from the 60s to the 90s and now it's someone else's turn. I passed it on, taught when there was a student, and still conform my life to the principles, but I'm doing something else now.
I do occasionally write a scathing reply or a sarcastic comment on current affairs, and sometimes I will lecture a kid on the city bus, but for the most part I am done. My individual efforts, as you point out, are unnecessary and ineffective, while the young folks can organize much more effectively without me. It's time for me to sit down and rest, but damn, it burns when someone calls me a sheeple. I was woke before their daddy rolled over and went to sleep.
Very interesting past you have over there. How different is it back then compared to protestations that are going on now? (assuming that you've been into any recently)
Unless you're dressed like this.. then no, you're not a sheeple lol xD
The main difference in four words? Four Dead in Ohio.
What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?
The terrible, "militarized" police state of today actually stands guard over the protestors to protect them from counter-protesters. That's really what they usually do. It's because "they" know such protest can be manipulated in the media to have any desired effect, but we would have loved to have that in 1970.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
One of the problems here is that about half the world's population is demonstrably, measurably imbecile. Organization of the unintelligent is so difficult, it almost always degenerates to the level of manipulation.
I have tried, and continue to try, to interest intelligent people in education of themselves and others about the ways to improve the capabilities of the less intelligent, through diet, sanitation, and learning systematic methods to approach problem solving. It is the best I've been able to achieve, so far, to interest a handful of people in considering the idea of the Trivium for a moment, and then it's off to the news cycle again. There appears to be no hope for it, and I'm beginning to understand why people who wish to govern invariably turn to manipulation of the masses. Some fear the power of organized people. I fear the power of ignorant and unintelligent organized people. If we can somehow solve the intellectual capacity problem, the rest, I think, will solve itself.
Fair enough, I've been through that plenty of times, but I've always thought it's more of a communication / information problem. It's like multiple camps thinking of each other as idiots, and it's hard to resolve.
I used to have a friend, (seemingly) highly-intelligent, while also arrogant (he said it's a trait of very smart people). He went on studying about the global elites, rothchilds, etc (you know). And he said there's a depopulation plan which he hopes will happen because all the unintelligent people should be offed and not bother the rest of society from progressing. But i think the failing point of that thought is there's no real way to measure all of these, and it's pretty much by chance. No one has any say where they want to born, who they wanna be etc. But all said, despite all of his "smartness", I found out that he has been a conman and has been cheating my money (and confidence) all along lol.
I used to believe that I was no different than the majority, and I beat my head against the communication / information problem for years, thinking that if I could just find the right words, I could begin to have conversations of a higher complexity with almost anyone. In the process I learned to assess the intellect of people I encountered every day. Finally, I was forced to realize that the conversations I wanted were possible with only a tiny percentage of people.
This can be altered. Most takes generations, but some things can be done to alter functional intelligence even after maturity. There are many things impeding the potential of the genetic capacity of almost everyone alive. I am not looking for a justification to division, things like that tear us all down. I think that everyone has a unique contribution if we can find a way to allow them to express it. In order to succeed in this, we need to begin to get past the idea that the subject of individual intelligence is only a road to insult, and begin to understand the reality of the differences, and the things that can be improved.
Very well put. Some say that life is all about finding the connection between onself and society.
I agree. 🆙 💯 The term lacks compassion and makes the mistake of presuming the opposition is stupid.
Best part:
I read this in a recent post:
I would adjust to
The older I get, the truer this is 👴🏻
Lol wow, although I'm not that old, this is generally what I've gained to accept as I got older :)
😎
Supposed to be denied payment, sorry
The problem is that there are only two kinds of people in the world: Those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and everyone else. ;)
Now that I've gotten that joke out of the way, I have to admit that I've "classified" the fellow of your writeup into a class that has not as yet given up what Larken Rose calls "The myth of authority." I am fully in agreement with his premise that we must form communities to effect massive change. I fear the underlying implication that such communities must force such change on others. That is the form of "sheeple mentality" that frightens me, the sheep that go along with a group to coerce me.
I will continue to strive to do "individual good" in the world. I will gladly participate in communities with which I resonate. Just don't ever try, individually or corporately, to force me to do anything as long as I am not harming you. 😄😇😄
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