The Herd Mentality

By Akhilesh at 12 March, 2010, 7:04 am

Erich Fromm, a German – American psychologist and Humanistic philosopher once quoted, “The Danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.” I believe the psychologist is talking about the heavy dependence of technology that human beings are used to nowadays. Though I think technology does not have the power to convert human beings into Robots.

The only “thing” that has the power to do it, is the human mind. I do not know what I should call the mind. Is it a substance, a thing, a flux? Whatever it is (though I have not found a perfect definition), it is the most dangerous as well as most friendly entity as it lives in both the extremes. The weakness of the human mind (the extreme towards the negative) creates human robots everyday. We have a very novel, yet clichéd term for that called, “The Herd Mentality”. We all are suffering from this mental disease. This in another manner is called social conditioning. Our social conditioning makes us take our lives in the direction where every one is moving and our makes us feel “safe and secure” about it. Is it not about the program we have been fed and are supposed to run accordingly without questioning?

According to me this “Without Questioning” is a recipe for disaster for the evolution of self. Also when we question we challenge our physical reality. We challenge the pretexts that are being followed blindly. It is akin to Copernicus challenging the Church with Earth being a spherical object and not a flat one. Well how his eyes pierced through the Illusion is a question I am baffled to ask myself.

Even though we are surrounded by technological miracles (proof based scientific works), things seem to be no different than the Dark ages. Majority of the population is living the lives just as ordered by the society. We have to live a certain way, get married, follow moral codes of conduct. Just follow whatever is rightly announced by the society and not think much. Certainly not thinking, because thinking will lead to questioning and that is one thing that “society” does not want you to get into. The programmers of our lives are governments, financial institutions, our parents and families. The media helps this program to get injected into our minds very efficiently and swiftly. We do not even come to know and we are programmed for life to follow a certain pattern. In fact this is what Robots do. They are programmed and they follow. The jingoism of media is calling every one common and everyone believes themselves to be common. Listening to within the self is far more important that listening to the gibberish outside. This is an irony of these present times that even being surrounded by amazingly innovative knowledge we follow a pattern set for us by some one else (Very similar to the Dark Ages in the West).

I plead my fellow human beings my brothers and sisters since eternity, to question. Questioning alone can solve the problems that we surround ourselves with in daily routine. It takes a lot of conviction and belief in actually putting into practice what you think and believe needs to be done. Sometimes it means to really defy the norms the society is following. It also means that you may have to live life like a hermit in answers of the questions. It can mean sometimes to walk the path alone like Buddha. May be this is what “Striving” means.

This generation has a lot of work at their hands. The challenge is stiff and we need to overcome obstacles that have never been even thought of being conquered. This is like Wright brothers dreaming of flying when aero plane did not exist. Your actions may seem crazy to everyone but steadfastness to your belief system ultimately will conquer. This kind of determination can definitely keep us humans and save us from being under hypnosis of Social Conditioning.

Have been often my blog, Why don't you subscribe to our RSS feed.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed! Hope to see you again

Categories : Politics & Society