This is an edited extract from the chapter ‘Be the first to speak up’ from the new book Free Your Mind: The new world of manipulation and how to resist it by Laura Dodsworth and Patrick Fagan, out July 20th.
‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ is a tale that raises questions about self-deception, conformity and obedience to authority. Like all good fairy tales, it conveys a charter for human behaviour – learning to speak first, like the boy, is good practice and will help you develop psychological resilience to mindless conformity.
And yet for most of us it is hard to speak up first. We often like the safety of the crowd.
Human beings are very social animals, having evolved in tribes. It makes evolutionary sense to follow the crowd: we don’t have the time or the energy to think through every decision in detail, and if everyone else is doing something, it’s probably correct. If everyone is screaming and running away, you probably ought to as well.
We look to others whom we perceive as better informed, and we like to stay on the right side of people. Conformity has its upsides. Feeling identified with the group can feel safer and even be literally safer in a physical sense – we don’t eat the berries from the bush that everyone else avoids. We rely on social cooperation. You could even say that our most basic foundational need is to belong.
But there are dangers.
Groupthink can stifle independent thinking. Gustave Le Bon put forward one of the earliest and most influential theories of group mind theory in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. He believed individuals can lose their sense of self in a group and become both anonymous and more powerful at the same time. Once an individual is submerged in a group, ideas and sentiment are contagious; think of individual fish moving as a shoal. Our powerful tendency to conform is supported by reams of scientific experiments – and it is mercilessly exploited by manipulators.
There are examples of using conformity and ‘social proof’ throughout advertising (‘eight out of 10 cats prefer Whiskas’) online shopping (the ubiquitous ‘customers who bought this item also bought…’) to Government communications (most people pay their taxes on time) to propaganda (one study claimed 99% consensus among academics about human-caused climate change). The theory of ‘nudge’ – used in advertising, social media, public health, Government, basically everywhere – is heavily predicated upon conformity.
Crowds can be dangerously weaponised. Aldous Huxley wrote about how Hitler assembled people by the thousands to make them form mass-like, lose their personal identity and become excitable. Huxley called it herd-poisoning. We see ‘us vs them’ exploited by politicians and in partisan media on a weekly basis.
There are many examples of history proving the group was wrong, while the lone voice, the ‘boy who spoke up’, was right. Galileo was right about the Earth moving around the Sun, not vice versa, but was judged to be a heretic and put under house arrest for the rest of his life. As Steve Jobs said, the misfit, rebels and troublemakers are the ones who change things and push the human race forward. Yet since then, we have come to prize homogeneity and conformity.
So how do we observe our own conformity, separate ourselves from the crowd and speak up first?
Whistleblowers are the vanguard. Lee was a volunteer cop, what’s known as a ‘special constable’. He reported fraudulent behaviour to senior officers within his own police force. They didn’t take this report seriously, so he then subsequently reported this to the Home Office who did. He was suspended and investigated for allegations of gross misconduct. Ultimately, after a long investigation, none of these allegations against him were proven to be true. However, the investigation team later went on to make a further accusation of racism and gross misconduct.
He joined the police to help people and protect them from criminals. He was shocked to discover corruption at a senior level. It was a difficult experience: “When I was suspended I was gutted. When I was found guilty [of the subsequent allegation] it was published in the media. You have no idea what that feels like. It feels like the world is coming to an end.”
Nevertheless, he stands by his experience of whistle-blowing and is proud of his actions. Interestingly, it seems that previous out-group experience may have prepared him to take a stand:
I think that because I was born overseas and am openly gay, I don’t seem to fit. That’s part of who I am. I think it is part of the reason they closed ranks on me. I joined the police force as a gay man in the 90s. If I had come out as gay they would have found ways to get rid of me then. I saw that first hand with colleagues who came out. I was also surprised how racist the force was at the time then. I have to say that fortunately this has changed a lot now. But being an outsider and doing things differently has given me the psychological resilience to be a whistleblower.
When Socrates was on trial, in his defence he pointed out that dissent, like a gadfly biting and annoying the horse of public opinion, was easy to swat, but the cost to society of silencing individuals could be very high: “If you kill a man like me, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me.”
Indeed, it is these gadflies, the people who score lower on agreeableness – the non-cooperative, the distrusting, the confrontational – who are less compliant, according to research.
Even if it’s not as dramatic as blowing the whistle, you might want to put forward a novel idea, defend an unpopular position, stand up for a minority, or promote an unusual creation.
You can choose to be an outlier and practise it. Mindfully observe any uncomfortable emotions in relation to speaking up or deviating from the group. Notice the discomfort and fear. Pause and collect, or push through. Although you might initially face social disapproval, the benefit is authenticity and growth, being true to yourself and having principles. As Joost Meerloo said in The Rape of the Mind: “Whether or not we are aware of it, there is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves, and there is nothing that gives us greater pride and happiness than to think, to feel, and to say what is ours.”
Now, what of the Emperor? The fairy tale doesn’t tell us what happened in the town afterwards. Was his authority punctured? The Emperor fell for the lie, and then through his authority he implicitly compelled the people around him to take part in the lie. He could have set an entirely different example. How often are our leaders weak, lacking in courage, conviction and intelligence? Enough, it would seem, that they justify timeless fairy tales and daily political cartoons lampooning their absurdities.
Often manipulators draw power from the illusion of power: they can control us paradoxically just because we think they can. Once we realise their power is a deception, it evaporates. The mighty Wizard of Oz is just a small man behind a curtain. Manipulators often try to portray themselves as all-knowing and all-powerful. You tend to comply if you think ‘Big Brother is watching you’. In psychology it’s known as ‘the watching eyes effect’ – display a poster of a pair of eyes and people are more likely to wash their hands, and less likely to steal a bike. The principle first emerged as a tool of social control from the concept of the panopticon (meaning ‘see everything’): prisoners behaved themselves if a guard tower was placed in the middle of the prison, such that they felt like they were always being watched, even if they weren’t.
During the Covid lockdowns, every new authoritarian diktat was accompanied by stories of people being caught and punished for infringements. The impression was that there was no escape from the all-seeing eye of the state; resistance was futile. In reality, the likelihood of penalty was very slim. Only 5% of burglaries and robberies get solved in the U.K., for instance.
In both World Wars, inflatable tanks were used as decoys to create an illusion of strength. The key to disempowering manipulators is to deflate their illusory power as if popping these inflatable tanks. Like Charlie Chaplin’s parody of Hitler, the Wizard of Oz must be revealed as nothing more than a small man. We must point and laugh at his inadequacy.
Free Your Mind: The new world of manipulation and how to resist it by Laura Dodsworth and Patrick Fagan, £22, Harper Collins (currently reduced to £17.99 on Amazon) is published on Thursday and available from all good book stores. Also available internationally, including Amazon.com.
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