You Run Because Everyone Else Runs. Do You Know Where?

Lemmings do not commit mass suicide. That is a myth, and it comes from an old nature documentary in which the animals were driven off a cliff in front of the camera, not by their own will. What lemmings actually do is far more ordinary, and far less dramatic: when the population grows too large, they migrate in a mass, looking for new living space, and during the migration each individual follows the one running ahead of it. Not because it has checked that the direction is right. But because everyone else is running that way too.

No lemming feels like it is running blindly. Each of them runs because running looks like the right direction at that very moment, in the middle of others who are running the same way.

Did you just read that and think: thank goodness I'm not a lemming?

Stop at that thought. It is exactly the thought that every creature running in a herd would think, if it could think. Nobody believes they are running blindly while they are running. Blindness does not feel like blindness from the inside. It feels like certainty.

Three questions with no easy answers

Let's not ask in general terms whether you believe in manipulation or propaganda. Of course you don't. Let's ask more precisely, and let's ask it of yourself:

When did you last change your mind about something important to you because someone made a counterargument you couldn't refute, and not because your own group, role model or favourite changed direction first?

How many of your current firm opinions would survive you saying them out loud to the very group you most want to belong to, if the opinion differed from what the group thinks? If the answer is "I don't know, I've never tried," how do you know the opinion is yours and not borrowed?

When did you last feel a physical, warm sense of relief because "our side" won something, an argument, a vote, a dispute, as opposed to the feeling of the truth coming out? Can you even tell those two feelings apart anymore?

If any of these felt uncomfortable to read, that is not a sign that something went wrong with the text. It is a sign that the text touched something real.

There is one thing, though, worth keeping in mind right now, before you go on: stopping is not just a duty or a way of beating yourself up. It actually works. A person who checks their own thinking before running makes, on average, better decisions than one who never checks. They are harder to mislead, because they do not lean on what others say but on what they have worked through themselves. And they keep something that many lose without noticing: the ability to change their mind when the facts demand it, without it feeling like a defeat. This is not a consolation. It is a tool, and it is already available to you.

There is no lemming and non-lemming

Here is a thought you can't get around: there is no type of person who is permanently a lemming, and another type who is permanently something else, more independent and more precise. There are only moments. Moments when you stopped and checked the direction yourself, and moments when you ran because others were running, and didn't even notice the difference.

Nobody remembers the moments when they ran with the herd without checking. They don't stay in memory as mistakes, because they don't feel like mistakes while you are running. They stay in memory, if at all, only later, when the herd has already stopped and someone looks back and asks: why did we actually run there?

You have run with a herd. Maybe not yesterday, maybe not on the issue you are sure about right now, but somewhere, sometime, you have too. The question is not whether you have ever been a lemming. The question is whether you recognise the moment when it is happening right now, or only afterwards, when someone else points it out to you and it is already too late to avoid being embarrassed.

The question that stays open

This text does not give you an answer to whether you, right now, in this moment, on some question that matters to you, are the one who is running or the one who stopped. Nobody outside can answer that for you, and this text does not try.

But if you have read this far and a particular example has already come to your mind, some other person, some other group, some other dispute where they are the ones running blindly, stop at that thought one more time.

The question was never about them.

When did you last check for yourself, or did you just run because everyone else was running?

If you want to put this question to someone else, a researcher, a teacher, or yourself in public, you can do it on Cores.Media.