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July 2020  
  
One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and
aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system
whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to
independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at
the bottom to aggressive at the top. The resulting four quadrants define four
types of people. Starting in the upper left and going counter-clockwise:
aggressively conventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passively
independent-minded, and aggressively independent-minded.  
  
I think that you'll find all four types in most societies, and that which
quadrant people fall into depends more on their own personality than the
beliefs prevalent in their society.   
  
Young children offer some of the best evidence for both points. Anyone who's
been to primary school has seen the four types, and the fact that school rules
are so arbitrary is strong evidence that which quadrant people fall into
depends more on them than the rules.  
  
The kids in the upper left quadrant, the aggressively conventional-minded
ones, are the tattletales. They believe not only that rules must be obeyed,
but that those who disobey them must be punished.  
  
The kids in the lower left quadrant, the passively conventional-minded, are
the sheep. They're careful to obey the rules, but when other kids break them,
their impulse is to worry that those kids will be punished, not to ensure that
they will.  
  
The kids in the lower right quadrant, the passively independent-minded, are
the dreamy ones. They don't care much about rules and probably aren't 100%
sure what the rules even are.  
  
And the kids in the upper right quadrant, the aggressively independent-minded,
are the naughty ones. When they see a rule, their first impulse is to question
it. Merely being told what to do makes them inclined to do the opposite.  
  
When measuring conformism, of course, you have to say with respect to what,
and this changes as kids get older. For younger kids it's the rules set by
adults. But as kids get older, the source of rules becomes their peers. So a
pack of teenagers who all flout school rules in the same way are not
independent-minded; rather the opposite.  
  
In adulthood we can recognize the four types by their distinctive calls, much
as you could recognize four species of birds. The call of the aggressively
conventional-minded is "Crush <outgroup>!" (It's rather alarming to see an
exclamation point after a variable, but that's the whole problem with the
aggressively conventional-minded.) The call of the passively conventional-
minded is "What will the neighbors think?" The call of the passively
independent-minded is "To each his own." And the call of the aggressively
independent-minded is "Eppur si muove."  
  
The four types are not equally common. There are more passive people than
aggressive ones, and far more conventional-minded people than independent-
minded ones. So the passively conventional-minded are the largest group, and
the aggressively independent-minded the smallest.  
  
Since one's quadrant depends more on one's personality than the nature of the
rules, most people would occupy the same quadrant even if they'd grown up in a
quite different society.  
  
Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote:

> I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had
> they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They
> all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out
> against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.

He's too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn't. And indeed, our
default assumption should not merely be that his students would, on average,
have behaved the same way people did at the time, but that the ones who are
aggressively conventional-minded today would have been aggressively
conventional-minded then too. In other words, that they'd not only not have
fought against slavery, but that they'd have been among its staunchest
defenders.  
  
I'm biased, I admit, but it seems to me that aggressively conventional-minded
people are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the trouble in the
world, and that a lot of the customs we've evolved since the Enlightenment
have been designed to protect the rest of us from them. In particular, the
retirement of the concept of heresy and its replacement by the principle of
freely debating all sorts of different ideas, even ones that are currently
considered unacceptable, without any punishment for those who try them out to
see if they work.   
  
Why do the independent-minded need to be protected, though? Because they have
all the new ideas. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough
just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong.
Conventional-minded people can't do that. For similar reasons, all successful
startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so. So it's
no coincidence that societies prosper only to the extent that they have
customs for keeping the conventional-minded at bay.   
  
In the last few years, many of us have noticed that the customs protecting
free inquiry have been weakened. Some say we're overreacting  that they
haven't been weakened very much, or that they've been weakened in the service
of a greater good. The latter I'll dispose of immediately. When the
conventional-minded get the upper hand, they always say it's in the service of
a greater good. It just happens to be a different, incompatible greater good
each time.  
  
As for the former worry, that the independent-minded are being oversensitive,
and that free inquiry hasn't been shut down that much, you can't judge that
unless you are yourself independent-minded. You can't know how much of the
space of ideas is being lopped off unless you have them, and only the
independent-minded have the ones at the edges. Precisely because of this, they
tend to be very sensitive to changes in how freely one can explore ideas.
They're the canaries in this coalmine.  
  
The conventional-minded say, as they always do, that they don't want to shut
down the discussion of all ideas, just the bad ones.  
  
You'd think it would be obvious just from that sentence what a dangerous game
they're playing. But I'll spell it out. There are two reasons why we need to
be able to discuss even "bad" ideas.  
  
The first is that any process for deciding which ideas to ban is bound to make
mistakes. All the more so because no one intelligent wants to undertake that
kind of work, so it ends up being done by the stupid. And when a process makes
a lot of mistakes, you need to leave a margin for error. Which in this case
means you need to ban fewer ideas than you'd like to. But that's hard for the
aggressively conventional-minded to do, partly because they enjoy seeing
people punished, as they have since they were children, and partly because
they compete with one another. Enforcers of orthodoxy can't allow a borderline
idea to exist, because that gives other enforcers an opportunity to one-up
them in the moral purity department, and perhaps even to turn enforcer upon
them. So instead of getting the margin for error we need, we get the opposite:
a race to the bottom in which any idea that seems at all bannable ends up
being banned.   
  
The second reason it's dangerous to ban the discussion of ideas is that ideas
are more closely related than they look. Which means if you restrict the
discussion of some topics, it doesn't only affect those topics. The
restrictions propagate back into any topic that yields implications in the
forbidden ones. And that is not an edge case. The best ideas do exactly that:
they have consequences in fields far removed from their origins. Having ideas
in a world where some ideas are banned is like playing soccer on a pitch that
has a minefield in one corner. You don't just play the same game you would
have, but on a different shaped pitch. You play a much more subdued game even
on the ground that's safe.  
  
In the past, the way the independent-minded protected themselves was to
congregate in a handful of places  first in courts, and later in universities
 where they could to some extent make their own rules. Places where people
work with ideas tend to have customs protecting free inquiry, for the same
reason wafer fabs have powerful air filters, or recording studios good sound
insulation. For the last couple centuries at least, when the aggressively
conventional-minded were on the rampage for whatever reason, universities were
the safest places to be.  
  
That may not work this time though, due to the unfortunate fact that the
latest wave of intolerance began in universities. It began in the mid 1980s,
and by 2000 seemed to have died down, but it has recently flared up again with
the arrival of social media. This seems, unfortunately, to have been an own
goal by Silicon Valley. Though the people who run Silicon Valley are almost
all independent-minded, they've handed the aggressively conventional-minded a
tool such as they could only have dreamed of.  
  
On the other hand, perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within
universities is as much the symptom of the departure of the independent-minded
as the cause. People who would have become professors 50 years ago have other
options now. Now they can become quants or start startups. You have to be
independent-minded to succeed at either of those. If these people had been
professors, they'd have put up a stiffer resistance on behalf of academic
freedom. So perhaps the picture of the independent-minded fleeing declining
universities is too gloomy. Perhaps the universities are declining because so
many have already left.   
  
Though I've spent a lot of time thinking about this situation, I can't predict
how it plays out. Could some universities reverse the current trend and remain
places where the independent-minded want to congregate? Or will the
independent-minded gradually abandon them? I worry a lot about what we might
lose if that happened.  
  
But I'm hopeful long term. The independent-minded are good at protecting
themselves. If existing institutions are compromised, they'll create new ones.
That may require some imagination. But imagination is, after all, their
specialty.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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