2005: Spain legalizes same-sex marriage
People are weird.
This is my favorite story about the ‘scene‘
It doesn’t matter what scene it is or who is in it or what it’s about. It could be mac users ragging on PC users or star wars geeks ragging on star trek nerds or punk rokkers ragging on emo kidz. The bottom line is that everyone wants to be part of the in-group. It’s a mentality that– in general– helps cultures survive… it’s also pathetically stupid.
I’ll give you this story, which I’ve told people before, though I cannot remember who or where:
Three of my cousins (aged 12, 13, 15) live next door to me. One week, three other cousins (10, 12, 14) came to visit with their family. I am far older (20 when this happened). Nevertheless, I was the ‘cool’ older kid and they asked me to hang out with them.
Not being a jerk, I capitulated. I went into their room and watched them play Dragon Ball Z on the Playstation. They asked if I wanted to play and I said, “sure, why not?”
The problem with Dragon Ball Z on the Playstation is that it’s the kind of game that requires skill. I, having not played video games since high school, had no such skill. Thus, I’d get beaten senseless in every match.
At about the fifteenth-straight loss to my 12-year-old cousin, I started losing respect in their eyes. However, instead of giving up and laughing it off, I redoubled my effort to prove I had more ‘skillz’ than they did.
I failed miserably. But I did learn a valuable lesson that day: somehow, because everyone around me had warped values as to what was important, I started to think that it was important too. It suddenly made the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment make much more sense.
It also taught me to question everything I care about and ask why I care about it so. More than that, it taught me to avoid those situations and that I, too, was vulnerable. Heck, if anyone told me right now to shock anyone to death, I’d do it… it doesn’t even have to be an authority figure, just a guy in a white lab coat.
… and it doesn’t even have to be really white. It could be gray… and not a coat… lead me?
People are weird. This is my favorite story about the ‘scene‘ It doesn’t matter what scene it is or who is in it or what it’s about. It could be mac users ragging on PC users or star wars geeks ragging on star trek nerds or punk rokkers ragging on emo kidz. The bottom line…
I realize I speak from the benefit of hindsight, but it is from knowledge available to all who bother to question what they are seeing and do the research. With all the information available about human nature, it amazes me that people are ignorant enough, or misinformed enough to be surprised at findings like these. Our hierarchical society takes advantage of some very deep-seated triggers that instruct us to conform. When Quinn the Eskimo, or the 800-pound Alpha gorilla takes over a room, survival mechanisms kick in that put the rest of the crowd in follower mode. This reaction is exploited at every church service. There is an “eager to please” quality one finds in the willing or resigned Beta. When one takes on a subordinate role, like prison guard, one becomes a walking caricature of that person’s idea of an ideal prison guard. It’s something akin to the dis-inhibiting effect of a Halloween costume. The person is subsumed into the role due to an overwhelming survival instruction to perform to the satisfaction of the master. In this case, the designer of the experiment and acknowledged controller of the (artificial) environment.
I know now that what you’re saying is true and I probably knew then, too. The thing was that I’d always known intellectually that it happened, I just never realized that it could happen to me.
The emotional realization that you can sometimes fit into roles that you otherwise wouldn’t care much for is a shocking one albeit one I should have been able to predict. 😕