16 August

Humans are social animals. The biggest outcome of that is what is ‘normal’ for humans is defined entirely by ‘what everybody else is doing’. Humans will do the most lethally stupid, toxic things, provided everybody else is doing it. Once something is normalised, it becomes reality. We define reality by ‘what everybody else thinks’ reality is. We can live entire lives with no meaningful connection to actual reality at all. All of this is driven by status, the way you have identity as a social animal. You are nobody as a social animal, without status. Status and conformity have to be understood as two sides of one coin.