Lemmings

Remember when you were a kid and your mom asked you "if Billy goes and jumps off a cliff are you going to go and jump too"? All those years ago mom was trying to do a little more than defend our earlier bedtime and keep us from supplementing our diets with live goldfish.

In a world of political parties and religious denominations it is becoming more and more difficult to find free thinkers - people with their own ideas, forged on an anvil of knowledge with a hammer of curiosity. So I asked a friend the other day why people are so willing to become lemmings - as in the small arctic rodents that allegedly commit mass suicide during migration. The truth is, they don't. Even they are smarter than that. So why are people so willing to follow others off a cliff simply because they somehow identify with them?

Thomas Jefferson once said that he had "sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man". Obviously this included the Crown of Great Britain. But I don't think Jefferson stopped there in his thinking. He founded the University of Virginia, which was an accomplishment held in higher esteem by him than his presidency. Educating the minds of young people was more important to his hostility than policy. His authorship of The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (also favored above his presidency) was to ensure that people could not be told by the government how they can and cannot worship God. Religious freedom was more important to him than policy.

Jefferson was not the only one to espouse such ideas. I chose him because of his passion in the quote above. (Well, that and the fact that he is the greatest political mind in the history of the united States, but back to the point.)

In America, and many other places, there is no one forcing you to have any particular point of view. No bullets being launched at dissenters. The heads that spout opposing voices never roll. Yet, the Tiananmen Square incident happened where bullets are launched and heads do roll. And in America, where there is no serious threat, our personal belief system can be boxed up in the statement "yeah, what he said". Our religious beliefs are along the same lines. Why is it that in a nation built on rugged individualism, we have become several colonies of lemmings, ready to follow strangers off a cliff? Are we still disregarding mom's voice after all these years? You're smarter than a rat.