Self-respect, integrity, and being your own person are important for self-esteem and living your life, not a dim reflection of everyone else's.
“People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out.”
– Warren Bennis
Ancient stories have a way of proving their value more and more as the world grows older. I think this story, which I’m sure you’ll know, speaks to our time like never before.
Once, a vain emperor obsessed with his appearance wanted even more public approval. He hired two tailors to create the finest suit and cloak ever seen.
Unbeknownst to him, these ‘tailors’ were swindlers. They smoothly explained to the king that their fabric was so exquisite it would be invisible to anyone foolish or unfit for their position. Only the wisest and best people would be able to see the fabric they were about to produce for the emperor’s new clothes!
The emperor, unable, of course, to see the non-existent clothes, pretended to admire them, as did his ministers and all the king’s other advisors. After all, who wanted to admit he couldn’t see them!
Soon, word spread of the emperor’s upcoming parade in his “magnificent” attire. Word also spread that only the worthy would be able to see these magical clothes.
Fearful of being seen as unworthy, the townspeople praised the invisible garments. As the emperor proudly strutted past, completely naked, everyone admired him, afraid to admit the truth.
Then a child blurted out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!” Silence fell, then gasps, then murmurs of agreement. Reality dawned.
Humiliated but stubborn, the emperor continued his procession, unwilling to admit his folly.
Eventually even the proud and self-deceptive emperor realized his mistake, but by that time the villains were long gone with their gold, on their way to con other kings and queens who were too wrapped up with what they imagined they were and what other people might think of them to see what truly was.
It’s a familiar story, but one we see played out every day.
The little child is, I think, the part of the mind that is unafraid, the part of us that perceives clearly, unrestrained by the mental accretions of living in our world.
The ‘crowd’, blinded by fear and desperation for respect and status, can easily shout down the simple child. If we let it.
Prefer to watch instead?
“I’m not!”
In the Monty Python comedy film Life of Brian, Brian, the reluctant messiah, shouts exasperatedly down to his throngs of followers, “You must think for yourselves!”
To this they all slavishly respond (in unison!), “We must think for ourselves!”
Brian then shouts to them, “You are all individuals!”
Again, the masses collectively and robotically echo his words: “We are all individuals!”
But a tiny voice pipes up from the crowd: “I’m not!”
Absurd and funny as this may seem, it neatly matches what psychologists have discovered about much of human (group) nature.
We believe we are thinking and acting from an individual perspective when really we are merely enacting our societal or group conditioning.
Conform or be cast out!
Actually, the story of the emperor’s new clothes is a very old illustration of an important piece of human psychology which is becoming more and more vital for us all to understand. It might seem like just a story… until we remember the Asch conformity experiments.
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The Asch experiments tested how social pressure influences individual judgment. Solomon Asch had participants in a group compare illustrated line lengths. Some were clearly the same length and others weren’t.
Each research subject was placed in a group of seven other people, all of whom appeared to be participants but were in fact actors, confederates of the researchers. They were all shown a series of images of four lines, and for each set they were asked to identify which two lines were the same length. The answers were obvious, but occasionally the actors would identify two lines that were clearly of differing lengths.
The idea was to see if the person being studied would go along with the crowd or state the truth of their own senses. Would they be the brave child in the crowd or the townsfolk wanting to fit in? Was their priority proof or conformity?
The results showed that about 75% of people conformed at least once with the wrong answer to fit in with what the other people in the group were saying, despite the correct answer being obvious. This demonstrated that people conform to fit in, even against clear evidence.
This desire to prize conformity over evident truth may hark back to an atavistic fear of being ‘cast out’ from the tribe and therefore facing life alone in a hostile environment.
And yet sometimes it seems life is asking us:
Are you going to be your own person or not?
On casting off secondhand thinking
Beliefs are interesting. It’s easy to take a position and stick to it, even if things shift in a way that makes our position less stable. We seek out information that confirms our position and disregard feedback that threatens to contradict it.
One sure way to know if a person has arrived at a belief through indoctrination rather than, say, calm observation and repeating patterns of experience, is to see whether they become highly emotional when they feel their belief is threatened. People who have been indoctrinated are territorial about their belief, and yet truth cannot be ‘owned’ by anyone.
Indoctrinated belief, unlike knowledge gained through experience, may initially have been implanted through the whipping up of emotion, and ever after (or until the conditioning fades) be re-enacted through the state of high emotion.
This, of course, doesn’t mean the belief is necessarily wrong – but it might mean the belief wasn’t arrived at through objective observation of the truth. For the emperor and his advisers, it was emotional arousal (through greed and fear) that induced them to believe the absurd. The child in the crowd looked for themselves.
Sometimes a person has never calmly examined their cherished beliefs. And some cherished beliefs can be wicked.
When truth becomes more important than being right
In the 1930s, Alfred Reynolds, originally from Hungary, was living in England. When World War II broke out, he was enlisted into Army Intelligence and eventually given the seemingly impossible task of ‘de-Nazifying’ young captured Nazi officers.
So how was he to do this?
Rather than berating them, blaming them, telling them how awful their antisemitic ideology of hate was and lecturing them on the general evils of Nazism, Reynolds did something different. And it was highly effective.
All Reynolds did was ask questions. He got the young Nazis to calmly examine and explain their beliefs. He got them into a ‘child in the crowd’ position.
He used, it seemed, a form of Socratic questioning, which can be so effective in the treatment of ‘emotional ideologies‘ such as depression. Socratic questioning helps people arrive at truth not by being told but by being given a chance to think about it in response to calm questioning from another person.
Anyway, Alfred Reynolds described how, upon entering a room with a captured Nazi he’d invariably be met with chillingly cold hostility.1
The way he responded to this was simply to ask them to help him understand. He enquired as to what they understood by the term ‘national socialism’. Once they were convinced he really wanted to know, they started to talk.
He listened quietly, asked more questions, and occasionally suggested contradictions which, because they were calmly examining the ideologies together, could be accepted. Within days they were no longer nearly so attached to the Nazi ideology – which, after all, was mainly if not entirely secondhand thinking.
We can never convince anyone to examine their beliefs, destructive or otherwise, by simply arguing with them or ‘putting them right’. At best they’ll just swap one package of secondhand thoughts and ideas for another, and at worst they’ll cling to their destructive ideology ever more tightly.
If someone tries to pull you out of a tree by yanking you, you may feel compelled to hang onto the branches more tightly. But anyone can be eventually coaxed and talked down once they are given space to do so.
We all know that hurling contradictory praise at someone labouring under the emotional ideology of low self-esteem may cause them simply to distrust you more, to cling to their ‘tree’ ever more tightly.
When we go from indoctrination to individual truth searching,we become, in effect, more real. It’s the part of the mind aligned with the child in the crowd that is engaged with direct reality, rather than entrenched within the theatre of the imagination.
We need to look after the inner truth seeker.
Nurturing the ‘child in the crowd’
We like to think of ourselves as ‘individuals’, but a surprising amount of what we do and think is really prompted by group-action and groupthink. We let others do our thinking for us; when a certain type of thinking becomes group consensus we simply accept it.
And yet it’s a wonderful development for a human being to reconnect with something that came intuitively as a young child: the capacity to see directly. To become a truth seeker, not just a ‘right’ thinker.
To do this we need to be calm, to see without undue prejudice. To examine our own beliefs with the wide, sweeping wisdom to recognize how our perceptions may have been shaped by those around us (not to mention big-tech algorithms!).
Secondhand thinking can work a lot of the time. But when it doesn’t work, it can have terrible consequences.
Groupthink is powerful and stops the conscious mind from even questioning some so-called ‘truths’. Knowledge that we are not immune to groupthink, and awareness of when it is operating within us, can help us towards more genuine individuality.
Of course, there are costs and benefits to thinking for yourself, or at least acting on what you – as a unique individual, not just a tribe member – see in the world.
Costs and benefits
Sometimes it may be sensible to go along with the crowd. After all, sticking your neck out and going against popular opinion even when it’s clearly a bit nuts might lose you your job or even, if you live under a dictatorship, your freedom or life!
It wouldn’t always be sensible to be that voice of truth in the crowd, so we might need to pick our moments not to automatically go along with groupthink.
But there are dangers to not speaking the truth when you clearly see it. There are costs to not speaking up for the truth.
Self-respect, integrity, and being your own person are important for self-esteem and living your life, not a dim reflection of everyone else’s.
The child cried out the truth which, deep down, everyone knew, and only then could other people acknowledge and voice their own true perception – that the strutting emperor was, in fact, sans clothes. Nude. Butt naked!
Sometimes it takes just one person to say “But this is madness!” to prevent a juggernaut from steadfastly plummeting over a cliff.
The part of us that can see straight is wise – and this has nothing to do with learning more ‘stuff’ or accumulating decades. It is wise because it is young and fresh, unfettered by the beliefs or dogmas of others.
Forever young?
May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the light surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young
– Bob Dylan, “Forever Young”
When you say what you see and think a bit more, you develop more self-respect. You actually become more fearless because you’re exercising the fearlessness ‘muscle’, so to speak.
And then a strange thing happens. Other people in the crowd also start to see what you see (that’s right, the emperor is naked!). You discover that your views and perspectives are shared by others too; they were just too frightened to voice them.
There’s only ever going to be one of me, you, and everyone else.
We need to be able to express our own take on things to avoid losing ourselves within life’s echo chambers and being totally deafened to reality.
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About Mark Tyrrell
Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.
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Notes:
- See: Wilson, C. (1984). A criminal history of mankind (p. 96). Putnam Pub Group.
