The world and humans for students and their parents

Majority and minority

From the book by Andrey Sokolov and Tatiana Sokolova "The world and humans for students and their parents".

Majority and minority

What stops a person from doing things, from being “not like everyone else”?

It stops the fear of being in the minority, of being opposed to this majority and public opinion.

And this fear is based on the myth of the existence of the "majority." Because the "majority" does not exist. There are only a huge number of "minorities" who sometimes, driven by the same fear of "public opinion" and squeezed into the framework of traditions and patterns, unite, creating the illusion of a "majority".

Let's look at an example. Hairdressers are a minority among all professionals. Fat people are a minority, among all people. Doctors are clearly in the minority relative to the rest of society.

Women, who seem to be the majority relative to men on Earth, but at the same time they are in the minority, among the bosses or parliamentarians. And male teachers are in the minority relative to female teachers.

Older women are in the minority relative to other population groups. Schoolchildren are a minority relative to adults. And adults, breaking up into many diverse sex, professional, cultural and intellectual groups, now and then find themselves in the minority, relative to some other groups or associations.

Frightened by the shadows of the "majority", people begin to shy away from side to side and, in the end, lose sight of their own path, which they once chose or could have chosen. And as a result, they begin to wander in circles in the gloomy thicket of myths about the "majority" and "public opinion."

And from personalities they turn into faceless "like everyone else."