7 December

Many think peer pressure somehow ends when we leave school. That’s not true, in fact it’s the main way all of life works, even more so with adults. The primary driver of what people do, is what everybody else does. The number 1 reason most people won’t wear a mask right now, for example, is that nobody else is wearing one, and they don’t want to stand out from the crowd. Somebody at work the other day had to wear a mask, and spent the whole day apologising to everybody for it. They knew they’d violated what peer pressure expected in that situation. Humans invented a way around this. It’s called regulation. Laws, rules. Laws and rules give people permission to behave in ways that go against the status quo. It’s why the bastards currently infecting us all with Covid got rid of the rules first, telling us they were impacting our ‘freedom’. But without rules you have LESS freedom, you’re trapped inside intense peer pressure.