Do the Right Thing

“Those who follow the crowd usually get lost in it.” Anonymous

“Make yourselves sheep and the wolves will eat you.” Benjamin Franklin

“Most people might be doing the same thing, but that doesn’t mean that it is the right thing to do. Aren’t most people in this world unhappy and unsuccessful?” Edmond Mbiaka

“It’s better to walk alone than with a crowd going in the wrong direction.” Diane Grant

Some people need others to join in before doing something, even though it may be the right thing. We want to remember that our jinn wants us to walk in the wrong direction. The direction away from worshipping GOD alone.

So, what makes people choose based on what others think? Author Malcom Gladwell and sociologist Mark Granovetter feel that it has something to do with thresholds.

“Why do otherwise law-abiding citizens suddenly throw rocks through windows? Before Granovetter came along, sociologists tried to explain that kind of puzzling behavior in terms of beliefs.

So, the thinking went—you and I have a set of beliefs. But when you throw the rock through the window, something powerful must have happened in the moment to change your beliefs. Something about the crowd transforms the way you think … that when people got into a crowd their independent judgment went out the window, and that they somehow became creatures of the crowd, and that there was some kind of miasma of irrationality that would settle over people. And they would act in ways that they would never act if they were by themselves or they weren’t influenced by the mob mentality.”

He doesn’t think that being part of the mob casts some kind of spell that makes everyone irrational. He says it’s all about thresholds. What does Granovetter mean by “threshold”? A belief is an internal thing. It’s a position we’ve taken in our head or in our heart. But unlike beliefs, thresholds are external. They’re about peer pressure. Your threshold is the number of people who have to do something before you join in.

Granovetter makes two crucial arguments. The first is that thresholds and beliefs sometimes overlap. But a lot of the time, they don’t.

When a teenager is driving 100 miles an hour at midnight with three of his friends in a Toyota Camry, it’s not because he believes that driving 100 miles per hour is a good idea. In that moment, his beliefs are irrelevant. His behavior is guided by his threshold. That person has a really, really low threshold. It doesn’t take a lot of encouragement to get him to do something stupid.

Granovetter’s second point is just as important. Everyone’s threshold is different. There are plenty of radicals and troublemakers who might need only slight encouragement to throw that rock. Their threshold is really low. But think about your grandmother. She might well need her sister, her grandchildren, her neighbors, her good friends, all of them to be throwing rocks before she would even dream of joining in. She’s got a high threshold. The riot has to be going on for a very long time and has to involve a whole lot of people before grandma will join in.

How does this relate to Submission and the worship of GOD alone? Are submitters apt to throw rocks through windows? No, it’s more about not following the mob mentality. We should not join the bandwagon if the mob is disobeying God. Neither should we wait to do the

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