Follow The Leader

It's interesting what senseless and stupid things people will do. I don't exclude myself from that. Well-educated, seemingly reasonable people will do some dumb things, and their rationale will sometimes sound like how a dog or a goldfish would explain itself if given the cognition and speech. My hope is that at the very least those people would realize how foolish their story sounds, even if they would never admit to it.

A good example is how people will just shut down their analytical powers if they get the idea that someone else has already exercised theirs towards the same end. Some time ago, I was standing in line at the ATM. There were two machines outside the bank, but people in line ahead of me kept going to one and not to the other. There was no sign on it. It just was idle. Each one of us just assumed that others had already found it to be broken, so we waited for the one people were using.

A couple who came along right after I did finally asked the question of whether it was broken. None of us who had already been there could answer. We had all assumed, and were just following the lead of the strangers in front of us. We were like ants following a faulty chemical trail. The couple, like the boy who saw that the Emperor wore no clothes, disrupted the whole thing, and shamed us all. It was an instructive moment.

I thought about that just a bit ago at the grocery store. I saw no one using the automated checkout machines, which appeared functional and not off-limits, although the store does regularly shut them down overnight in a 24 hour location. I didn't bother to check if they were available. I just went for the regular checkout lane manned by a person like everyone else. I truly have not learned a thing from the prior experience. I consider myself intelligent and well-educated, but I failed to respond to experience in a way that a wild dog would not have.