Those of us who are lucky/unlucky enough to be, by the standards of society, more than a little weird have often felt the wrath of the human instinct towards social conformity in a way that those higher up on the bell of the bell curve will never know. We often have very strong negative feelings about this urge towards social conformity, cursing people’s apparent inability to tolerate individuality and diversity when it comes to their precious little social worlds, and deriding their sheeplike stampeding all in the same direction and eagerly jumping for their master’s treats.

But rarely do we stop and simply ask… why? Why do people act like this? What so unsettles people about someone different that they react with hostility? Why do we have this urge?

In order to find the answer, we must begin with a simple but often overlooked fact : modern urban society is, from a mammalian biology or even primate behaviour standpoint, extremely unnatural.

By this, I mean that it is highly unusual for any species, no matter how social, to live in highly concentrated groups where simply to function, we must move amongst dozens or hundreds of total strangers without becoming either frightened of them or attacking them or both.

Nowhere in nature do you see socially grouped animals freely intermingling without even tension, let along conflict or violence. Even our closest cousins, the chimpanzees and the bonobos, who form close-knit communities much like our own tribes or villages, react to strangers of their own species with hostility and suspicion.

But we humans are intelligent, and adaptable, and so we learned/evolved to get along with those we do not know. A modern urban human can walk through a mall or a crowded subway station past hundreds of complete and total strangers and not even notice them, let alone have the kind of reactions our primate cousins have to anyone they do not know.

We would never have made it past the family/clan stage of civilization had we not developed this ability to get along with those we do not know. We would never have invented trade, protocol, commerce, and practically everything else that paved the road to the modern world as we now know it. We would have remained scattered nomadic hunter-gatherer groups, constantly at low-level war with each other.

Nevertheless, this innovation in human behaviour is relatively new. For the millions of years that lie between the dawn of homo sapiens and the rise of civilization, scattered hunter-gatherer groups was, indeed, all the we were. It is only in the last half million years or so that we even lived in caves, and only in the last thirty thousand of those that we have lived in anything like villages, let alone cities.

So this ability to not immediately attack and kill all strangers is a relatively new upgrade, and as such, it’s more in the software than the hardware. We have learned to act in such a way that it minimizes the still very present and active xenophobia in each human being’s psyche, and thus, we can get along with one another without freaking each other out.

Which brings us to conformity. It is by acting like one another, and most especially by acting in a way consistent with the expectations of one another, that we calm one another’s fear of strangers, and it is this predictability that allows civilization to exist. We don’t fear the strangers passing us on the street as we make our way through daily life because deep in our minds, in a place well below consciousness, we know that all the other people are likely to be members of the same civilization and hence fairly unlikely to club us over the head and take our food, women, and territory.

The security we used to get only by personally knowing (and hence, being able to predict) every single person who we were likely to encounter in a day we now get by having a more vague but flexible and broad sense that while we might not know that stranger, we know enough about them that we do not consider them a threat, or even worth noticing in some cases.

But this security is a delicate thing. The trust we have in strangers is fragile and unstable thing, balanced as it is on a tottering tower of unspoken and often unacknowledged assumptions we make about others, and seemingly trivial things can upset that delicate balance and cause the slender plank to sway and bring all this fear and distrust of strangers right back again.

Plus, everything takes place against whatever the background level of conformity is in a given situation or group. What may seem like outright insanity in a time or group where conformity is extremely high might go without notice against a background of broader standards. This, by the way, is what leads to the impression that small town people get that big cities are full of “crazies and freaks”.

And along come us strange types, who for whatever reason don’t quite pick up all the conformity signals that the others are obeying without even thinking about it. We, in our innocence, can’t understand why we are treated badly by people to whom we pose no apparent threat. They, in their innocence, can’t explain why they treat you because they don’t know why your weirdness upsets them so much. They just know that you frighten and anger them.

Turns out, strange ones like myself are upsetting the very delicate balance which allows human beings to live in groups larger than the number of people we can know personally despite being less than a million way from attacking and killing strangers on sight. In order to become the modern city-dwelling ape, we exchanged fear of the stranger for fear of the strange, and the more strange you are, the greater the fear.

This does not, of course, condone the abuse of those who are different. It merely explains it. It is my hope, in fact, that through understanding the nature and causes for this reaction, we can develop ways to bridge the gap and help both sides understand one another, and make everyone much happier and more secure.

Perhaps, in the future, if we open our minds to the true understand of what is going on, and open our hearts to the possibility of things being better, we can make a future where everyone is included and understood, and nobody is pushed to the margins at all.