Why We Ignore Reality
Spitting Back in the Face of Obvious Lies
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In the Early 1950’s at the small and idyllic Swarthmore College in Western Pennsylvania, an obscure Psychology professor, pioneering an equally obscure field of Psychology, conducted one of the most important studies you’ve never heard of.
In 1920, at the age of 13, Solomon Asch immigrated to the United States from Poland. In the aftermath of World War II, he developed a fascination with how otherwise ‘normal people’ could become willing participants, and catalysts, for the murder and eradication of entire groups of people.
What is it about human nature that compels us to bypass logic, compassion, morals, and even objective reality, in favor of ideology? Why do we conform to lies?
In order to answer this question, Asch created an experiment.
Participants were selected at random and told they were taking part in a “visual perception” task.
In reality, the goal of the study was to observe how the majority opinion of a group influences individual judgment.
Participants were placed in a group with several confederates (people in on the experiment) and were given two cards. One with a series of three lines, all of different lengths, and one card with one line.
Each member of the group was asked to say, individually, which line in the set of three matched the same length as the card with one line. The answer was obvious. The unknowing participant was strategically asked to answer the question last.
Asch had instructed the confederates to occasionally give the same wrong answer. So when it came to the participant’s turn, they had already been exposed to the majority’s wrong incorrect response before giving their own.
You’d imagine that if your family pointed to the sky and said it was green, you’d laugh and call them crazy.
However, the results of the Asch Conformity Experiment proved the opposite.
Asch found that approximately 75% of participants conformed to the majority’s blatantly wrong answer on at least one trial. And on average, participants conformed on about a third of the trials where a majority of confederates gave the incorrect answer.
If the majority of confederates gave the correct answer, the incorrect response rate of the participant fell to 1%.
In an anonymous setting, where the participants were allowed to write down their answers, conformity rates also plunged.
When Asch conducted post-experiment interviews, many of the participants expressed intense self-doubt. In a majority of cases, they knew that the answer they were giving was wrong, but they didn’t want to stand out from the rest of the group.
It was simply easier to conform.
Why We Conform
Asche’s experiment explains the ideological conformity we see every day in our lives.
If enough loud and angry people say that a man can actually be a woman, many of us accept their classification of reality and let them stake their flag.
If enough people say that the peasant girl at the edge of town is a witch, we accept it and carry out vigilante justice.
If enough people say that a race or ethnic group is inherently evil or impure, we discriminate, or worse, remove them from society.
After all, we are socially conscious beings, and conformity, in many cases, is easier on our psyche than rejecting the false, or illogical ideas of the larger group.
Just look at the last few years…
Dissent against majority opinion, and you become a modern-day heretic. Your employer gets inundated with proof of your “problematic” posts and opinions. Your family and friends ostracize you. Opportunities and dreams evaporate and the social fabric of your life becomes torn and disjointed.
Some of you reading this will have had these experiences. I know I have.
It is a majority lie that gives the conformist a blanket to quiet a thinking brain. It’s for this reason that challenging the conformist, whose opinion is structured only by the group in which they align, is almost always a waste of time. They cannot mount a defense because they haven’t thought of one. They have simply been given the information and told what to do with it.
Stranded with two others on a desert island, they might agree that they knew they were living and contributing to a lie, but within the larger group, they cannot help but act as cheerful house pets to the regime feeding them. They like it this way. And it makes sense why.
The conformist desires to be part of an acceptable opinion. This is how they climb ladders, make friends, structure their worldview, and assess their enemies. They are the opposite of free, though they could never understand that.
Spitting in the Face of a Lie. The Story of Zek.
Having only a strong conviction of truth, cannot sustain a true dissident. You must be willing to shed an old reality entirely. You must be willing to stare down the lie and be hurt for it.
This is the only way to break it.
In his Nobel Prize-winning work, “The Gulag Archipelago”, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn documented the system of lies that had built the foundation of the 20th-century Soviet state. In his detailed first-person account of the horror of the Gulag prison camps, he honors the individual acts of courage that confronted the lie through defiance of its reality.
One of these stories was about a man named “Zek”. The man who didn’t run.
In the Gulag, prisoners were forced to run: in the morning to the work site, back to the camp; and from the toilet to the inspection line.
Running was not mandated for efficiency, it was a method of dehumanization.
One day, during the cold Siberian Winter, Zek chose to walk. The guards shouted at him, commanding him to run like the others, but he kept walking, calmly and deliberately. When he reached his destination — he was almost beaten to death by the camp guards.
The next time prisoners were moved, he chose to walk again, enduring the punishment once more. The others watched his act of defiance. Here was a man, beaten and bloodied, yet resolute in his action against the lie. Soon, others began to walk, and this small act of defiance began to spread throughout the camp.
A small lie picks up momentum until it becomes something unknowable. Until it becomes stitched into reality.
When the group stares at you in the face and spits nonsense, have the courage to speak against it.
If you know something to be true, say it, embody it; refuse to live in someone else’s lie.
Imagine a world without men like Zek.
As always, thanks for reading.
-Joe
Thank you sir. I like to think that I am an independent thinker, but maybe I allow conformity to shape my thoughts more than I realize.