There needs to a term for the sense in every member of society for how normal something (an idea, a fashion choice, a behaviour) is. This N-factor has a very powerful effect on people’s behaviour, and yet I have never seen or heard of it being directly acknowledged. And different people definitely have different N-variance tolerances. One person might be highly cautious and conformist, so that anything outside say one N-point of their exact situation would seem too strange, too risky, too “weird” or “crazy” for them and they would shun it, and quite possibly condemn it in others. Another might have quite a wide tolerance band, but only for themselves, and a narrower one for others.
Or, like a lot of nerds like me, you might be relatively N-insensitive. You follow your mind and your ideas and intellectual interests and largely ignore or completely fail to even sense the potential N-value of anything. This leads to people who are quite tolerant of a lot of N-variance within the very loose parameters of their subculture. But it also leads to a people who seem extremely strange and even crazy to people outside the group, and as many of us nerds know, the culture as a whole has many ways to punish people for blithely wandering far from the herd.
Another interesting aspect of this N-value concept would be how relatively… well, relative it would be. A person’s N-variance tolerance does not have any definable relationship with their own N-value in society as a whole. A person might be incapable of relating to someone outside a very small subgroup and find anyone outside that subgroup to be strange or crazy, and yet their own N-value and that of their subgroup is far, far off the mean. To people outside said subgroup, they are quite weird people and not the sort of people you want to mix with socially. But within the subgroup, that their N = 0, their “normal”.
On the other hand, you might have a person who seems quite normal, and yet their own N-variance tolerance is extremely wide. This would be the sort of person who has friends and associates at all levels of society, and is often the “most normal one in the room” at quite surprising social events.
N-value would also be useful in tracking how someone fits into the rough “herd” model of society I have been slowly developing over time. Imagine a set of concentric circles. In the middle is the “center of the herd”, the place of highest conformity and safety. Despite being the smallest in terms of general N-variance tolerance, it is the circle with the highest population. The “center of the herd” sheep take comfort in this, because they are motivated by the desire to be with the largest population and hence have the greatest safety in numbers. They are also the safest because, being the dead center of the herd, they have the maximum possible number of other layers of sheep between them and exposure to the outside world, and hence share a common unspoken and sometimes illusory feeling that this fact alone protects them from a great deal of the potential harm of the world. Hence the understandable but logically unsupportable statements of “we never thought that sort of thing could happen here” after some terrible crime is occurred in a sleepy suburb or backwoods old fashioned small town.
What did these people think kept those things at bay? Answer : being at the center of the herd.
On the outside layer of society, you have the edge of the herd types. They might have chosen the edge because of a natural inclination towards exploration and discovery that is simply impossible to truly satisfy from deeper within the herd, or they might have been driven their either because their own natures caused the others of the herd to push them their, or because their inclination is the exact opposite of that of the center of the herders, and they feel safest with the fewest feasible number of sheep around them. They see their fellow sheep as more of a threat than exposure to the outside world.
And being on the edge of the herd might lack the protection of layers of other sheep around you, but it also allows greater autonomy of action because the other sheep are not always pressing around you.
And, despite their sometimes antisocial natures, the edge of the herd sheep are the only ones with the unobstructed view of the outside world necessary to see danger coming for the herd. They are, therefore, naturally the scouts and explorers and, in some senses, leaders of the herd. They act as the herd’s external senses, and in this role, they might well find themselves turning back to the herd which rejected them and trying desperately to convince them to change course before heading over the cliff.
Thus, the relationship between the center of the herd and its extremities is often paradoxical. From the center of the herd, it is easy to remain completely ignorant of the role the people at the edge of the herd perform and think they are simply ill sheep who have been consigned to the outer darkness for being defective. From the edge of the herd, it is easy to think the same thing if you did not go there by choice, or to develop a similar arrogance about those soft, flabby conformists in the center.
But the truth is, all the layers have their functions. The layers in between the center and the edge represent different balance points between the desire for safety from the outside and the desire for individual autonomy. The layer right outside the center, for instance, would be filled with people who are largely conformist and safety-seeking, but because they define themselves relative to the center and not relative to the edge, they take comfort that they are better than those oh so comfortable sorts in the center.
Similarly, the layer just inside the actual edge would be filled with people who desire a great deal of autonomy and individuality, but not quite enough to go all the way to the edge. They might well define themselves as well by their distance from the center, saying “look at how far from the center I am. Look at all those sheep between me and it. I am pretty brave, relative to them. ”
Of course, most people fall somewhere in between. The center has the largest population, but not the majority, despite what the center herd sheep might themselves think. Hence, in a free society, the forces of conformity can never truly get the upper hard. Too many of us outside the center have common cause to fight them if they get out of control.
And in a democracy, the majority wins.
as an ecologist, your pov of events in this biological world is not just intriguing, but makes sense.
the caveat in your picture is the quantity and quality of what you call a ‘free society.’
first, there is no such thing as a free anything, but i know what you are trying to say. second, you have to allow for either providence, or chance, or luck, or evolution to produce continual variants to the conformist center without the presence of so-called freedom. i am not suggesting that this is either mathematical or somehow formulaic, but perhaps there are other languages that can at least give the snake some lines.
Thank you for reading my article!
Of course, “free” from an ecologist’s point of view does not exist. Everything comes from somewhere and to be animal life is to live at the expense of other life. But I think you get what I mean. Free in the sense that the members of the society have enough autonomy to move to a place in that society which matches their own preference for autonomy versus conformity.
And you are right, my model as described does not take the march of generations or changes in life circumstances into account. It is a static model in that sense. One of the things that creates constant “churn” in society is that people do not stay in the same circle their whole lives. They are more tolerant of change and moving when they are younger, more tolerant of N-variance as well, and then grow more conservative and resistant as they grow older.
Add in random factors like major illnesses, political and social changes, psychological and spiritual development in individuals…. people’s N level and N-variance tolerance varies over their lives by a fair bit. It is a variable, not a constant.
But, intriguingly, the laws of statistics state that we could perhaps predict the overall trends in N-factor with a sufficiently large sample size.
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at this point in time, one of the biggest problems, as i see it, to this self-protective mechanism you have described (staying close to the middle with layers of more adventurous and yet more tolerant folk in the outer rings) is that, regardless of the population size of this center, the presence of extra-societal deviants (narcissists to sociopathic perverts) begins to exert tremendous pressure on this group relative to its size. perhaps this has always been the case, but it seems to me that the strength of these deviants has increased exponentially within this center due to both factors of concentration and the use of powerful influence mechanisms, mostly in IT communications.
and, due to the enormous size of the human population with this center area and perhaps several neighboring rings, the ecological impacts have begun to stress the entire lifeform system, regardless of where they are located.
hence, it is no longer very possible to just ‘get away’ to find some peace, or find a niche that provides more than temporary security, or even breathing space.
even though it appears these deviants may exist to manipulate the central populations and their behaviors, i suspect that they are actually a function of the underlying uncertainty that accompanies conformity.
if this is so, the size of the biotic populations in relation to the size of the arable planet (limiting factors) are creating an imperative that pits logical chaos against illogical and biologically new and dangerous realities that ask more from dna than it is capable of delivering (at least human dna).
as a biologist, i dont necessarily see this as a bad thing, but rather a good thing.
but for those of us who have some recognition of our many lives on this planet, it is of little solace when we observe and feel, on a true psychic level, the pain and terror felt by benign beings who have evolved without the complete madness that seems to accompany the bipolarity of the human brain. it is also quite difficult to be in human form and experience this madness.
Hmmm. I agree that it is increasingly difficult to “get away”, what with all the electronic tethers we tote around now. When you can get a cell phone signal in the middle of the Amazon rain forest…. just where is “away” any more?
And certainly, when human activity is stressing the entire global ecosystem, there is no place on Earth which is safe. Ask the Australians…. they are the canaries inthe coal mine of global climate catastrophe. 🙁
I am intrigued by your comment about the inherent uncertainly of conformity. That is an interesting angle to this question which I had not yet considered. Part of the price of conformity is the need to constantly monitor the rest of the herd, and the greater the conformity, the greater the resulting stress. Hence the classic “worrying what the neighbours think” that accompanies the middle class.
One might say, in fact, that conformism gets its feeling of physical safety at the cost of constant social peril.