If Billy Jumped Off a Cliff

If Billy jumped off a cliff, would you?

I remember when I was a wee lad in school that I thought that I could reduce my culpability by blaming my behavior on someone else’s advice:

TEACHER:  Why’d you do that Sven? [I just ate a booger.]

YOUNG SVEN:  Because Billy told me to.

TEACHER:  If he told you to jump off a cliff, would you?

YOUNG SVEN:  Probably.

Actually at that point I would blush and feel sorry for myself that I didn’t meet my teacher’s standards.  I probably cried.  But it does give us a glimpse into the power of peer pressure.

But it wasn’t just advice like “eat your boogers,” but also other’s behavior gave license to do stupid stuff as well:

TEACHER:  Why’d you do that Sven?  [I just grabbed my crotch.]

YOUNG SVEN:  I saw Michael Jackson do it.

TEACHER:  If Michael Jackson jumped off a cliff, would you?

YOUNG SVEN:  I dunno – probably.

OK, so now I want to actually dig in and think about that question:  if someone jumped off a cliff, would you?  As kids we found it comical.  Of course no one would jump off a cliff, that’s just silly.  Or if we were more serious-minded, we would determine that it would not be in our best interest to be a blood stain at the bottom of a cliff.  We saw the action for what it was – death.

But, as we get older, I think it is harder for us to see that action.  I think there is a reason that we don’t say that as adults anymore, because I don’t know if we really know what it means to jump off a cliff.  We’ve had years of training to tell us to follow the pack, don’t rock the boat, keep our head down, and do as we are told.  If we dare to have a thought outside of what our superiors tell us, woe be to us.

BOSS:  Why’d you pick that number?  [I just gave my boss an actuarial projection of a “number.”]

SVEN:  Because it makes the most sense in context of [insert mathematical/actuarial mumbo-jumbo here].  I believe that this is the right number because the technique that Bernschweizer showed in his paper accounts for this very problem.

BOSS:  It’s wrong.  Make the answer this number.

SVEN:  *Deep breath*…OK

Notice he didn’t ask me if Bernschweizer jumped off a cliff, would I join him.  The fact is somewhere along the way we lost the real sense of that nonsensical rhetoric.

Consider this picture – you are in a sea of people.  People you like are nearby so that you don’t want to claw your way out of the crowd.  Next, the crowd as a whole starts walking in a direction.  You can look up if you want – can you see anything?  Maybe glimpses of what lies ahead, but not much more.  You really only see the folks around you and the ground you walk.  “Everyone is going this way, so maybe I should too,” you say to yourself.  So, that’s just what you do.

As time passes, that becomes most of what you know.  You wonder whether you should keep walking, but you can’t just stop – the people behind you would get ahead.  Or get annoyed at you.  Or worse – you get trampled because the crowd is now at a light jog.  So you ponder on it, but don’t do anything.  You keep jogging.

After a couple of hours, you start to wonder if there might be something else besides getting to where everyone is going.  At this point you all are running.  You must be getting close to wherever it is.  You still don’t know what it is, but it would be a pity to not reap the rewards of all of this running, all of this hard work.

After a while, twilight falls, and you are deep within the crowd at a full on sprint.  You should be there soon; this has got to be it.  Your legs are tired and you have no other thoughts except for the job at hand.  You push your legs as hard as you can until they miss the ground.  You feel nothing but air.  You now notice that the ground is missing below you and feel weightlessness as you fall over the cliff.  Only then do you begin to wonder - was it worth it?

God bless,

Sven