I have a higher-than-typical degree of authenticated non-sheeplish tendencies. I’m often considered to be self-immersed, ridiculously convinced of my own brilliance and specialness, and out of touch with reality, not to mention pathetically lacking in a wide array of social skills – not so much of the “behaves boorishly” or “gets violent” variety, but more of the “cluelessly opaque to little signals” flavor, if you catch my drift.
And in establishing my credentials to speak on the issue, I’ve given you some of the answer that you seek, but I’ll elaborate on it now.
a) In our culture (especially), we are raised to think of ourselves as autonomous thinkers, people who reach their own conclusions, form their own opinions, and make their own independent choices. The truth is nearly (although NOT 100% and that’s important) at the opposite pole: as individuals we use the people around us as much as we use our own eyeballs and ears – to corroborate our conclusions, to provide words that we then embrace or reject as the good ones to use the next time WE voice “our” opinion, to give us our ongoing reality check. NO, we are not entirely passive puppets, but there IS a “mass mind” that we participate in, and what we think of as our thoughts is something like 98% mass mind and 2% individual deviation, and a large chunk of the 2% itself usually takes the form of selecting and choosing from something ELSE that some other people, somewhere, think and have put into words or otherwise expressed.
b) Don’t like being a sheeple? Raise that 2% figure to, let’s say, 8%, and you’ll experience a large shift in the people in your life who find you very difficult to be around. You do so much of your own thinking that things that everyone else takes for granted aren’t part of your mental landscape, and that makes you unpredictable, it makes your attitudes and rationales and priorities weird-to-incomprehensible to them, and you freak them out. Oh, and THEY aren’t very useful to YOU any more for corroborations and as sources for good words and phrases to use to express your sentiments and whatnot. You’re finding
THEM unpredictable, weird and incomprehensible a lot of the time – and although the fact that they are almost in unison in their weirdness cuts down on their unpredictability somewhat, it adds to the creepiness factor to be in a world where everyone else is not merely weird but weird in the same ways.
c) Want to be really free-thinking and even farther from being a sheeple? Scoot that figure up to 20%. Whoa! Your mind is now chock-full of thoughts for which no existing phrases will suffice, so you’re making them up, perhaps using individual already-existing words but stringing them into phrases to define notions and axioms and concepts and things that are absolutely foreign to everyone around you. IF and ONLY IF you were a designated expert in your field and regarded as a genius, you would find SOME people in your field who would be able to eventually follow you well enough to grasp what you’re trying to describe, but ONLY for the material that is, indeed, in your specialized field. You will have truths in your head and upon them, based on them as a starting point, you will reach new conclusions, more truths. Then you will build upon those as well. You will lose track of which of your various understandings are different from what the people around you have familiarity with, and even when you’re trying to be patient and explain things to these strange creatures who are of your own species, they are going to treat you as a babbling lunatic. Oh, and since you don’t get to use other people for corroboration you WILL build some really rickety and faulty mental structures. Sorry, but no one gets to be sane all by themselves. We really do need interactive verification and suffer from unsuffiicent reality-grounding without it. No disparagement of your brain itself, that’s just what alienation does. Yeah, you’re an alien, that’s exactly what I meant.