If Everyone Is Crazy, You'd Be Crazy To Be Sane

“If it’s just your belief, it’s autism. If it’s everyone’s belief,

it’s culture”

     Sheldon Solomon, Professor of Psychology, Skidmore College

 

It takes courage to challenge the prevailing culture. Indeed, the lesson many of us have learned is that when one finds out the Emperor has no clothes, it’s best to keep it to yourself or you’ll be thought of as crazy. In the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, a child cries out that the emperor is naked and the cry is taken up by all the townspeople. Adults know that’s not what happens in real life.

 

In real life, the whistleblower, the outlier (to use the title of Malcolm Gladwell’s book), the team member who objects, is often criticized and discounted. He is the “autistic” who disagrees with what everyone else “knows” to be true.

 

After all, when everyone is crazy you’d be crazy to be sane.

 

Even the term “whistleblower” suggests someone making a piercing, obnoxious noise and not someone simply disagreeing with what everyone else seems to agree with.

 

Yet it’s the failure to challenge cultural beliefs that can destroy a business (see Enron), a family (see Bernie Madoff) and, sometimes, even lives (see the story of Sally Ride and Roger Boisjoly below).  

 

Sally Ride died on July 22^nd of this year. You may remember that she was the first female astronaut, spending six days in space in 1983.

 

That was memorable enough to warrant a two-page obituary in the New York Times.

 

Just as memorable to me was that she hugged Roger Boisjoly when no one else would.  

 

When the Challenger shuttle blew up in 1986, Ms Ride was appointed to the panel investigating the reasons for the disaster.

 

Roger Boisjoly was an engineer who had worked for the company that made the shuttle’s rocket boosters. He had warned his bosses of problems with the rocket booster seals that, you may recall, turned out to be the reason for the explosion. Roger’s warnings had been ignored and, in fact, his colleagues shunned him when he reported to the panel that he had warned his bosses.

 

Sally’s hug, Roger recounted, “helped sustain (me) during a troubled time.” No one else on the panel offered Roger any support.

 

Think about that phrase, “a troubled time.” Why was it “trouble” for Roger and not for his bosses?

 

We often read of whistleblowers and “outliers” who are ostracized and thought of as pains in the ass. And they are pains in the ass to the prevailing culture. They are the ones telling us over and over again that it is insane to do the same thing over and over and over again and expect a different outcome.

 

As hard as it can be sometimes, it’s important to listen to those who disagree with us because they are our real teachers in life. Learning and growth are only possible in the presence of someone with a different point of view. By definition, learning requires a point of view that challenges our own.

 

And by that definition, we all have something to teach one another because we each have our own point of view.

 

After all, the prevailing culture is nothing more than what most people agree with and that culture may have some flaws. Perhaps those flaws won’t produce as tragic a result as with the Challenger shuttle explosion. But there’s no way to know if we ignore, ostracize and demean those who are imploring us to question what everyone “knows” to be true.