The Devil is a Conformist

 

Most people seem to equate morality with going along with the crowd; and even see departing from the herd as somehow immoral. This means, unfortunately, that most people are going to hell.

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. (Matthew 7: 13-4)

I was recently teaching a grad student how to avoid the dreaded “death by Powerpoint,” warning her not to put text on her slides that simply repeated points in her presentation, but to use the slides for illustration and example. After a full lesson on this, she came back saying with some agitation that she has seen the other presentations, and they all used bullet points. So she was going to go with bullet points.

The very fact that all the other presentations were using bullet points was actually an additional strong argument not to use them. All the more boring. But she simply could not seem to grasp the concept that the majority could be doing it wrong.

The essence of genius, or of true morality, is to realize that the majority is doing it wrong. No human progress can be made without this starting assumption; and no moral choice. For if you simply go along with the crowd, you are avoiding making moral choices.

The more the majority is aware of doing wrong, the more they will insist on conformity and uniformity; the more they will condemn “individualism,” and grow tribal or clannish. The herd instinct is their best protection against conscience and taking responsibility for wrongs. “Everyone is doing it!” “I was only following orders!”

We see this in our current downward spiral into “cancel culture.” 

In just this way, the sexual libertinage of Weimar Germany led to the radical conformity of Nazism.

It looks as though history is repeating itself.