Well In MY Opinion…

The question of whether or not peer pressure is always a bad thing was raised in my lit for adolescents class last Monday. My initial thought was, Well it depends on what you’re being pressured to do. That led to thinking about the two situations that could come about, being pressured to do good and pressured to do bad. My mind quickly skipped to the conclusion that regardless of good or bad outcomes, to do something just for the sake of conformity probably isn’t the best motivation.

It’s been on my mind since Monday though, popping up here and there. The question of why someone or a group would pressure someone else into bad needed answering. The phrase “Misery loves company” came to mind, and helped me to articulate a possible explanation. When you look at most of what we consider “moral” or “right,” it tends to have a close relationship with popular behavior. Most people don’t run around murdering and looting. This is the norm in the big picture of the human race. To kill or steal is to go against the grain, to stand out, and regardless of what people say most of them don’t want that.

What I think people are doing in peer pressure is creating their own little population of decision makers, and stacking the deck in their favor. Get enough people together doing the wrong thing, somehow separated from the rest of humanity, and it becomes the new norm. The separation doesn’t have to be physical, but is usually cultural, something that makes you part of “that” group, and not the other. Within this secession from the general population is where you can mold right and wrong by majority much more easily than trying to shift the paradigm of western civilization to look upon your wrongdoing with favorable eyes.

On the other hand we have people doing good just to go with the flow. It seems that while this may have a positive outcome initially, given the previous circumstance, you’re just waiting around for the majority to shift to something else. You’ve found yourself afloat in the murky waters of moral relativism without having consciously signed over to it. Is this all too obvious to mention?