31. GOING ALONG TO GET ALONG
I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.
- Bruce Lee
When the Taliban came to Malala Yousafzai’s village of Mingora, Pakistan, when they began bombing schools and beheading police officers and whipping people in public, few spoke up against them1. There was a feeling that the Taliban were there to stay, and that survival meant being silent. Those willing to speak out, like Malala’s father, were even pressured by others in their community to stop because of the risk of retaliation.
See, as a group, people are strong. The Taliban knew this, which is why they spent so much effort to prevent the people of Mingora and other villages from coming together to oppose them. Working together, people can split atoms, reshape the earth, or walk on the moon. Working together, with the good of others in mind, we can face the crisis of climate change, as many people and organizations have already shown.
But there are tradeoffs to being in a group.
In a group, we have to fit in. We have to conform to rules and norms about how group members should behave, like research which has shown that adults who see no point in recycling will foster this apathy in their children2, or that one’s circle of friends and peers can influence the likelihood of buying sustainable products3. When those norms aren’t followed, the group will pass judgement4 because groups are social systems that are themselves resistant to change5. The way it works is when one person in a group attempts to change, the other people in that group will interpret that change through a personal lens. They will consider what that change means for them, and, if they feel threatened by what they see, they’ll pressure that person to conform, like the attempts to silence Malala’s father.
History has many examples where disasters occurred because people failed to go against the larger group. In 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger launched despite known flaws in the O-ring seals of the right solid rocket booster6, largely because NASA’s culture pressured people to stay on schedule even if that meant violating safety guidelines7. The result, painted in the sky over the Florida coast, was that the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after take-off.
We might like to tell ourselves we’d stay strong in the face of group peer pressure, but that’s often not the case. A group has many tools to pressure us to conform, like guilt trips, accusations, or causing us to doubt ourselves. Group members can create drama and chaos, pirating our precious time and energy so that we’re drained of motivation. We could lose friends, family, support networks, or status, and even risk being an outcast8.
When I halted my military career progression, there were those I’d worked with for years who called me disloyal to our country, who said I’d betrayed the uniform. Those words, as much as they were about me, weren’t even necessarily for me, but rather meant as a message for others that what I’d done did not live up to the expectations of the group. So, believe me when I say that challenging a group takes courage. When it comes to embracing service to others as a means of helping society face climate change, when it comes to resisting external pressure for us to conform, courage will be needed, along with an unflinching belief that what we’re doing is right.
Because ultimately, it’s like Steve Rogers said, “When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world – ‘No, YOU move9.’”
Malala Yousafzai and Lamb, Christina, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban, New York, Little Brown and Company: 2013.
Busteed, M., Palkhiwala, K., Roma, M., Shah, B. Recycling Attitudes and Behaviors of Students at Carlos Pascua Zúñiga High School. Research Project Report. Carlos Pascua Zuniga High School, Worcester, MA, Worcester Polytechnic Institute: 2009.
Helen Arce Salazar, Leon Oerlemans, and Saskia van Stroe-Biezen, ‘Social influence on sustainable consumption: Evidence from a behavioral experiment,’ International Journal of Consumer Studies, vol. 37 (2), March 2013, p. 172-180.
James E. Alcock, D.W. Carment, and S.W. Sadava, A Textbook of Social Psychology, 2nd Edition, P. 502.(1991).
Melissa De Witte, “Who you don’t know: Stanford economist examines how a weak social network can explain inequality, social immobility,” Stanford News, March 6 2019, https://news.stanford.edu/2019/03/06/human-networks-drive-inequality-social-immobility/, retrieved 6 Apr 2020.
Rogers Commission, “Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Chapter VI: An Accident Rooted in History,” June 6, 1986 https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v1ch6.htm, accessed 4 Jun 2023.
Diane Vaughan, “The Trickle-Down Effect: Policy Decisions, Risky Work, and the Challenger Tragedy,” California Management Review, Vol 39(2), Jan 1997, 80 – 102.
James E. Alcock, D.W. Carment, and S.W. Sadava, A Textbook of Social Psychology, 2nd Edition, P. 502.(1991).
J. Michael Straczynski (w), Ron Garney (p) and Scott Hanna (i), ‘Civil War,’ Amazing Spider-Man, no 537, January 3, 2007, Marvel Comics.
Always enjoy your perspective, and you are a talented writer.