The Importance Of Being Individual Just Like Everyone Else
Why people conform to trends while imagining they’re making a “personal” statement
To begin with the most obvious point: we humans are herd animals. Lacking an armored exoskeleton, lacking powerful muscles, lacking tearing claws and bone-crushing jaws, and being rather slow compared to a great many predators, we humans survive only as members of a group. Despite the endless Hollywood schlock about “loner” heroes, the truth is that for every moment of our history stretching back tens of millions of years to our primate ancestors, we’ve been utterly and completely dependent on group membership for our survival. Being part of a group means automatically conforming to group norms. Fail to conform and life becomes very unpleasant very rapidly.
For most of our history as a distinct species our ancestors lived in relatively small groups numbering no more than one hundred and fifty individuals. The reason for this was that there’s an optimal balance between the number of people a territory can support via natural means (hunting and gathering) and the size of the perimeter that must be defended against other groups of humans who could potentially encroach. With only stone tools and sharpened sticks available to be deployed in a fight, and with no means to cultivate food, the…
