Ask any one who has lived up to 70, many of them say all that they ever think about are the things they did not do in their life. If you ask them, why they didn’t do something ? More often than not the answer will be “for the fear of herd”.
Herd — A large group of animals, that live, feed, or migrate together or are kept together. At some point in our human existence some of the clever folks of our species discovered that there are immense benefits in making the fellow human beings into herds. The smallest unit of the herd is family and the largest one in our modern time is a Country. But the most dangerous one ever invented is religion. There has never been any concrete proof of the heaven that every religion promises but many living hells have been created in its name.
Almost all of the human progress for better and worse has been achieved by this lie. The reason why we took to exploration is to escape the group that we did not like or to expand one group’s numbers to achieve dominance of others. The New World was literally found due to this.
They group us into numbers by various benchmarks and make us statistics. You know why ? because its easier to sell stuff to a group than every single individual. Be it a car or toilet paper or a religion, its always easier to sell to a group set in its ways than to an individual. Remember this, any one who addresses you by the ‘group’ and not as ‘one’ is trying to sell you something. Doing something because every one else is doing it, is the worst crime that we can commit on our self.
Conformism and using numbers to strengthen that argument in support of it is the thing that effectively kills the true human spirit. In most parts of the world even an iota of non-conformism is hounded out.
We are asked to take solace in the numbers and we do. We are sold a lie that it is a safe choice to go with the group because a group has collectively more wisdom than a individual. Does it ? It is never a safe choice, the outcome is always in doubt, but still the group says we have better odds for some reason. We are told at each and every step of the life to believe in what the group or herd or pack that you supposedly belong to is doing and follow that. Some groups enroll you birth, some by profession or geography or some other artificial boundary. In effect creating a market for some one who wants to sell thing. The thing is no body who has ever followed the preset rules has ever amount to anything great. Yes, they have become a faceless mass of 40 somethings who are more or less comfortable but resenting every bit of their living. Yet, we will never learn the truth, the truth of the illusion that we have been living in, because the other side scares us.
Thankfully, now and then the true human spirit prevails and someone breaks out. But the herd eventually prevails through the the jungle way, the break out one is either adapted in or killed off.