Short Take: How To Be Totally Unpopular With This One Cool Trick

Think for yourself.

In today’s climate, it’s all-too-easy to allow your views and outlook to be shaped by dominant opinion on your campus or in the broader academic culture. The danger any student — or faculty member — faces today is falling into the vice of conformism, yielding to groupthink. At many colleges and universities what John Stuart Mill called “the tyranny of public opinion” does more than merely discourage students from dissenting from prevailing views on moral, political, and other types of questions. It leads them to suppose that dominant views are so obviously correct that only a bigot or a crank could question them. Since no one wants to be, or be thought of as, a bigot or a crank, the easy, lazy way to proceed is simply by falling into line with campus orthodoxies.

Try it and you’ll never have to worry about being invited to the social justice sleepover party.

Thinking is hard and unpleasant, but once you get the hang of it, it’s not so bad. Heck, you might even like it.

20 thoughts on “Short Take: How To Be Totally Unpopular With This One Cool Trick

  1. Robert

    I don’t know what to think about that article, because your commentary about it was so short. Elaborate more on what I should think about it, please.

    1. Patrick Maupin

      Why are you bothering someone who clearly doesn’t want to tell you what to think, when there are a gazillion pundits out there who are more than happy to control your thoughts?

  2. Robert

    I don’t know what to think about that article. Your commentary about it was too scanty. Elaborate more about what I should think about it, please.

      1. SHG Post author

        And I thought it was so good it deserve to be posted twice (though the scanty was the better of the two).

  3. Wrongway

    Every time I hear that song, I remember my Lil Brother throwing up in the back of my Mom’s 1970 Torino GT .. He was 4yrs old, & she lost her mind, but the 8-track just kept playing.. ahh the good old days when there were no seat belts on those bench seats, & the puke would just run everywhere..
    Lets just say, … She never stopped at Dairy Queen again..

  4. Jake

    “Try it and you’ll never have to worry about being invited to the social justice sleepover party.”

    Given the typical reaction to avoiding groupthink around this campus, it seems I’m not going to get invited to the Simple Justice sleepover party either.

  5. PseudonymousKid

    Translation for millennials reading and not understanding: “You are thinking WRONG, think something else and we hope it ends up being what we think too.”

    You can’t declare which parts of the status quo are inviolable while at the same time praising the virtue of thinking differently. They/we don’t believe in free speech principles as much. Uh oh. That could be a problem, but things do change. Saying they are just conforming says more about the authors’ views of the prevailing notions than it does about what the students actually think and why.

    Hey, at least we’ll get legal pot in the bargain of millennials getting older. Gotta try to see the silver lining.

    Back on topic. Students be crazy.

      1. PseudonymousKid

        If a bunch of people think a way you don’t like they must be mindlessly conforming. I get it. Neither you nor the professors actually want students thinking for themselves unless they get back in the box.

        And yea, look at me, I’m so popular I get invited to everything. I didn’t even know the sjws had slumber parties. Everyone rejects me. Worms for breakfast I guess. I’m such a victim.

          1. PseudonymousKid

            You’re right. Everything ought to get challenged and shot down when found lacking. That should be sacred at least. My comments are proof. My bad about the contrarian bs.

            1. SHG Post author

              It has nothing to do with being contrarian. It has to do with being simplistic. If “think for yourself” is too difficult a concept for you to grasp, then perhaps you’ve overstayed your welcome and need to head over to reddit for some love.

            2. PseudonymousKid

              Alright. This is the start of the Antipa, if I can appropriate that awesome name. Banishment to Reddit is a bridge too far.

              That said, this isn’t the hill I’d like to die on, nope.

        1. el purrp

          “Neither you nor the professors actually want students thinking for themselves unless they get back in the box.”

          So people who encourage a wide variety of viewpoints and tell students to think for themselves are “the box,” and the people who are treating disagreement as a form of oppression and who push back when students are told to think for themselves are on the outside of the box. This qualifies as Orwellian.

    1. maz

      That’s funny: I read the letter in context of *my* college years and thought, “damn, the frats would be up in arms over this.” Crisis of conformity, indeed.

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