The philosophy of "Circle"

Most people don't have a real point of view, even for the things they often talk about, they don't think it through. However, if you ask people to take a stand, he will definitely say "I think Biden will be elected president" or "the vaccine of new coronavirus will be produced in January 2020", and he has a strong "view". Where do these people who don't think come from? The infection from the crowd, from the edification, from the "culture".

Never underestimate the influence of a group of people on one person. You may often observe a lot of "bad teenagers" in your life, especially young people, who don't listen to their parents and teachers. They feel rebellious and full of edges and corners. Are these people cool and amazing? In fact, they are not thinking independently.

In the 1970s, Paul Willis, a scholar at the University of Birmingham, UK, made a follow-up study on a group of middle school students. These students are the children of workers in an ordinary middle school in a town in England. Willis's research object is mainly male students. He goes deep into the students, talks with them and understands their behavior. At first glance, these students are very rebellious young people. They don't listen to the teacher and look down on him. They don't have a good class during the day and they wander around in the evening. They despise the rules of the school, smoke and drink, fight, they laugh at those obedient love to learn "nerds".

They formed a culture of their own. Willis said the most obvious feature of this culture is its resistance to authority. But please note that the so-called resistance here is only against the school. In addition to the formal school organization, students have an informal "organization". They don't fight in that organization.

If you are a middle school boy, you don't want to be alone after class. You may want to join a group of people who smoke together on the playground. Being rejected by this organization is a terrible treatment, and as a member of the organization, you have to abide by some default rules.

The organization has an event you have to attend. For example, wandering out has formed a sense of ceremony, and the brothers must go out for a drink at lunch time every day. From the outside, sometimes there are fights in the organization, which seems to be very chaotic; from the perspective of the organization, the fighting is actually very orderly. The usual rule is that only high-ranking people can start a fight. It's dangerous to fight. People in low status usually stay honest. From the outside, these people are bragging about their chaotic sexual experience all day long; however, they have high requirements for their "official girlfriend" loyalty, and insiders will not touch each other's formal girlfriend. The circle has its own set of characteristic language, and every time we chat, it is the same words. The circle usually doesn't have many groups, but it discriminates against outsiders, especially foreigners, such as those students from Pakistan.

The culture in the circle has shaped those middle school students into the same people. They think they know everything. If you talk to them about things they don't know - like universities, modern technology and so on - they scoff and think it's not worth knowing.

And this attitude is actually rational. School education does not mean much to these students. They are destined to follow their parents and go to factories as manual workers. In fact, the culture is prepared for their life. They know enough life experience.

Where is rebellion?

What we are talking about here is not the problem of middle school students' education or class solidification. What we are concerned about is people's cognition. The truth is that everyone is eager to join a small circle and obey its culture.

Once, I met a civil servant and got chatting by chance. I found that whenever he talked about his views on something, he repeatedly said to me, "this is what people in our unit think.". I thought at first that he was saying this to show that there are so many people who think so, so as to better prove the idea is right - later I realized that it is not. He doesn't care what people outside their unit think. The reason why he always says that the people in his unit think so is because the people in his unit are the source of his ideas. He doesn't have a mind of his own.

I didn't have a point of view, but I would try my best to defend the viewpoint of my "circle", which is reasonable.

In his book "thinking is flat", Nick chatter lists several experiments. He says that if you add an idea to a person who has no opinion by clever design, and makes him believe that this is his point of view, he will defend the view. It is like that once the wave function in quantum mechanics collapses, it changes from the original uncertainty to the absolute certainty.

So you don't see a lot of people clamoring to defend a point of view, the origin of their opinion may be a trivial matter at all. In the book heart of justice, Jonathan Haite puts forward that our judgment on moral issues in society always comes from intuition. Intuition determines your attitude first, and then you use rationality to find reasons for this attitude.

So reason serves emotion. Where does the emotion come from? According to Haite, people's emotion on public affairs judgment mainly depends on the perception of new things: if you like new things, you are easy to become a liberal; If you don't like new things, you can easily become a conservative.

But Haite's statement is not complete enough. Where does my perception of new things come from?

However, C.S. Lewis, an English children's writer and author of Narnia legend, has long made a conclusion. Lewis believes that a lot of people's original ideas come from small circles - what Lewis calls "inner ring.". It may be your family, the group you used to play with when you were a teenager, or the people in your "unit". You will have a small informal circle with the most sense of belonging in your heart. At first, because of very accidental reasons, most people in this circle have this view on this social issue. As a result, gradually, everyone has this view.

This has something to do with the "group thinking" and "group pressure" that psychologists have studied many times. People always want to agree with their own group views. But Lewis's insight is what people care about most or what the circle with the most sense of belonging thinks.

Because the people you care about most think so, so do you. Not only do you give up independent thinking in silence, but you are also uneasy because you are afraid that you can't keep up with the opinions of those people.

This is intellectual corruption.

Are intellectuals all alone? Don't scientific thinkers have friends? Of course not. Compared to "circle", as a scientific thinker, you want to join another group. Maybe we can call it "Lewis community".

Everyone in the circle is the same, everyone in the group is different.

The simplest combination is the family of each of us. Parents, brothers and sisters, wives and children, everyone has his own unique position, no two people can replace each other, everyone is a link in the structure.

In a group, your teammates don't force you to change. The combination allows you to retain your personality, perspective and style of doing things, and only in this way can everyone make a unique contribution to the combination. Everyone has his own characteristics, but everyone has one thing in common. For example, in the Harry Potter trio, three people have different personalities, but they are all brave people.

Do you want to have a relationship like this? Is the relationship that you try hard to integrate into and be afraid of being excluded? Is it a circle or a combination?

British scholar Alan Jacobs commented on the kind of circle Lewis said that the biggest characteristic of the circle was its attitude to "thinking". Circles don't make you think. You can't ask questions that make the circle uncomfortable, people think it affects unity.

So I think the circle and the information cocoon room are two different things. Some people think that people will only see the news that can prove their opinions when they read the news on the Internet, but Hugo Messier doesn't think so in the book "do you think I'm easy to cheat?". In fact, people don't care much about the voice on the Internet - but they care about the opinions of their circle.

It's a rational choice because you don't want to be excluded from the circle. The sense of belonging given by the circle can keep you alive at the critical moment. Some studies have found that those who eventually survived in Nazi concentration camps were members of a very close group: Communists, monks in same church, or in same ethnic minorities.

"Circle " culture will require your loyalty and obedience. But the people in the "circle" are loyal to that "circle' and the members of the "circle" don't trust each other very much. You have to find a way to prove that you are "in the circle".The circle also has a "convert effect", that is, new members always have a stronger sense of circle identity than old members and they will take the actions of the circle as sacred things. People in the circle will stare at each other to prevent people from breaking the rules.

The only thing that doesn't change in this world is the changing environment..Smart people have to build their own teams and find their own "circle".