I don’t think many realise just how powerful social conformity is, and how it explains human behaviour. Covid…

I don’t think many realise just how powerful social conformity is, and how it explains human behaviour. Covid is a great example. The in some ways misleadingly called ‘desire lines’ - self-generated footpaths - are a great way to see it. /1 https://t.co/oGO3nERCKB

A desire line is a pathway generated by people all choosing a particular pathway, even if it’s a deviation from the existing path. Often a short-cut, a faster route. A ‘desire line’ because it’s created by the desire of people, in this case to get somewhere faster. /2 https://t.co/kspMv4CuD1

I say the term is misleading, because one of the things urban planners who study desire lines or paths discover is that the ‘desire’ in question is not always healthy. Sometimes the short-cuts are dangerous. Or are inappropriate for the old or the very young. Etc. /3 https://t.co/imYwb1jXrr

More generally though, it ignores something fundamental. I’m going to call a desire line any emergent unplanned social behaviour. What desire line research sometimes ignores is that the main reason people follow a ‘path’ others follow, is conformity. /4 https://t.co/wLEdLFsh4I

Human’s *deepest* desire is to conform. To imitate others, and to make that imitation into a rivalry. To form teams, in other words. Desire line research is making the mistake we make with our ideas about democracy. That ‘the people’ know the best way. /5

But all groups, of every size, are led. By about 5% of the people in them. The other 95% conform with what the 5% do. The ‘influencers’, in modern terms. The cow in the herd (there’s always one, ask a farmer) who leads the herd behaviour. /6

And this isn’t ‘sheep’ behaviour, it’s sensible. We can’t all know how to do everything, we follow others we think know better, on particular things. So, Covid? /7

When our leaders decided to cease acting against the pandemic, it gave the rest of us - the 95% - permission to do the same. So we did. We stopped acting. (And yes, not every single one of us did, I’ll come to that.) /8

BUT, and it’s a HUGE but, don’t think this means the ‘desire line’ of the wider community was to do nothing about Covid. Their desire line was to conform, with the people around them. Doing nothing. /9

Politicians will tell you ‘the community have vaccine fatigue’, or ‘people have had enough of Covid action’. No they haven’t. The community is simply following the lead of their leaders. And the leaders know that most of that is done via social conformity. /10

They know most of the work of compliance is to set up a common behaviour, and then let social conformity sustain it. Most of those non-masking ‘living with Covid’ happy types are very scared of Covid. You can find that fear in all sorts of ways. /11

I’ve seen ‘living with Covid’ types saturate a room with Glen-20 when a person who tested positive for Covid leaves the workplace. Or people in great fear of getting sick, but paralysed by the much stronger fear of non-conformance with the ‘living with’ charade. /12

Politicians are very good at what they do. Beneath their slogans about freedom, they absolutely target conformity. They know that mechanism will do all of the work for them, if they can trigger it. /13

And the most common way they do that is to make the conformity competitive. To make a binary, and set up opposing teams. To turn any issue into a game of public football. Humans find that scenario irresistible. It’s their deepest desire line. /14

To set the ‘Zero Covids’ against the ‘living with Covids’. The maskers against the anti-maskers. The ventilators against the anti-ventilators. People will literally fight to the death, rather than rupture the conformity of their chosen team. /15

Or as I sometimes say, people would rather die than stand out from the crowd. That fear of non-conformity is visceral. Once you know it’s there, you can’t unsee it. In what we think, feel, wear, drive, eat, choose as a travel destination. Everything. /16

There are of course a minority who resist. But sooo often they just generate another team, thinking that’s resistance. It’s not. It just turns it into a Premier League, rather than a fixture. We have a Premier League of pandemic teams. /17

True resistance is to reject the whole League. To tackle conformity itself, head-on. And also, history shows us something here. That only the entire League collapsing in a catastrophic way creates actual social change. The nuclear fission of conformity. /18

That’s what wars are. Team sports generate no real change, so eventually the team sport becomes a war. Our modern peaceful and prosperous democracies are only the intermission between catastrophes. /19

Brought into existence by the catastrophes of two world wars and an earlier pandemic. Catastrophes that finally broke the team sports social hierarchies. Allowing a re-build focused on collective good. The invention of ‘the public’ as a concept. /20

But those catastrophes are too long ago now. Add enough generations of people who never experienced them, and the lessons are forgotten. So now we’re heading towards the next catastrophes that might reshape our social hierarchies. /end