Why Many People Don't Think for Themselves

Now I understand why Peterson became a phenomenon. He's an exceptional teacher with superb insight into human psychology. 

In one of his lectures, he explains a human trait that, I admit, perplexes me: the desire to be one of the crowd and to go along to get along. It explains, I think, why so many people will simply repeat whatever is expected of them by their social circle, regardless of how insane that something is, such as "that man over there is a woman and should be allowed to masturbate in front of children in a locker room."

Human beings are herd animals, and like herds (or schools of fish), they are happy to zig or zag or even run over a cliff as long as they are doing so with everybody else around them. 

They will defer to "experts," repeat what Dana Bash says, nod along as everybody says that Biden is sharp as a tack, and burn women as witches as long as everybody around them is doing so. 

Jordan Peterson explains why:

Obviously, not everybody has this trait to the same extent. Men are certainly more likely to be confrontational than women, for instance. The overlap in the Bell Curves of agreeableness is large between the sexes, but men are probably one standard deviation away from agreeableness than women, which means that you will find quite a lot more outliers who are competitive, surly, cynical, and assertive men than women. 

You need to stand out to get to the top, but you are much more likely to fail and "get eaten" on the way up there. It's not safe to stand out either. 

Which gets me to the COVID madness we saw, where to many of us what was being said was just so obviously wrong that it drove us absolutely nuts to deal with people who seemed willing to swallow the most absurd claims without questioning them. And no amount of evidence would move people away from the herd. 

People were particularly susceptible to idiocy because they were scared, and scared people run to the herd. You and I saw that the herd was running toward a cliff, but when we tried to warn people so many of us just got trampled. We became the enemy, not the prophets. 

We were Cassandras. Cassandra, you will remember, was doomed because she would tell people truths they didn't want to hear, so she was never believed. No warning she would give was believed; she was the crazy one. Eventually it led to her own death and the deaths of those around her. 

This explains the "madness of crowds." One on one, people can be rational; put people into crowds, and most people will go along with the crowd no matter how insane its actions. 

Many people have awakened from the COVID madness, although they find excuses for why they were not actually mad, but just mistaken. Their leaders, like Fauci, were not evil, but just "doing their best." They still cannot face the fact that we were right and they were wrong because they would have to accept responsibility for being accomplices to evil. 

They would have to feel shame. And, since they went with the flow, why should they? At least that is the excuse. 

It's why people who believed (or pretended to believe) the claim that Biden was "sharp as a tack" still trust the media and come up with wild excuses to explain that they were still more right than we were. It's why they still are angry at Republicans for telling the truth, and excuse the media for lying. 

They still want to be part of the herd. Standing out is dangerous. So until the herd changes direction, they just go along with it, even if they have personal doubts about the wisdom of following the direction they are on. 

Literal, self-admitted communists are all over the Democratic party now, and old-fashioned liberals like Bill Maher are noticing. pic.twitter.com/2fgVbI87p1

— Larry Sanger (@lsanger) August 3, 2026

Unfortunately, this is why it is so important that figures like Bill Maher, who has often led the herd, break with the accepted wisdom. He can say things and break through in a way that we cannot. For all his flaws, when Bill Maher is hit on the head with an obvious fact, he changes his mind, and that signals to at least some of the herd that they can break off and follow him. 

As you know, you are very much in the minority, just by virtue of reading Hot Air. I don't say that as a compliment, but rather as a statement of the obvious. You are curious about what dissenters from the consensus believe and why, not because you are certain that what we say is true (you shouldn't be, since we are all fallible), but because we are disagreeable in the sense what we don't move with the crowd. 

What's striking to me is how agreeableness has become a trait necessary for scientists to thrive in the real world, despite the foundation of real science being a willingness to be disagreeable and challenge the conventional wisdom. 

Science is now a profession with a bureaucracy, funding streams, a hierarchy, and is a microcosm of the larger society. Scientists used to become great through disagreeableness; now, to become successful, you need to go along to get along or there are no jobs and no funding. 

They have become zebras.