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The Witnessing Mass Mentality

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In the last ten years I have radically transformed my connection with books. From an avid reader devouring dozens of pages a day, I ended up struggling to finish reading a single book in more than a month. I blame everything on social media, youtube, useless chats, and of course Steem :-). I simply find it hard to concentrate anymore on reading and that's an issue. Reading is fun to mental, as Eddie Griffin used to say.

The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert B Cialdini, is the current treadmill that I'm running on right now, when it comes to reading, and hope to finish it, before it finishes me. It's a clever book about the psychology of manipulation, with tons of examples, a guide of what that really means, it's also a manual on how to avoid getting trapped in sneaky manipulative techniques and more.

I remember reading in one of the chapters about the witnessing mentality, of the crowds, and how that can affect us all, at some point in time. The case was about a young lady in America, that got murdered at the beginning of the 80's right on the streets of New York, in plain sight, being stabbed multiple times by a sick criminal, while thirty people were watching all this nightmare from their windows.

The man chased her for almost half an hour and killed her in a brutal way, but nobody called the police, or done anything about it. Not one single finger was moved to at least try and save her life. Why? Because they all expected someone else doing that, but who's that someone else, when all were in the same position. That was the result of the police department investigations after interviewing all of those witnesses.

Not all of them should have called the police to at least try and save a life, but only one could do that, and that young lady could have been saved. They didn't, and unfortunately this type of mentality is spread among almost all of us, regardless of the city we currently live in, or culture. It's not hard to be a hero though...

This type of mentality has left its marks on myself as well, and I'll tell you how and why. I'm done with narrating about murders so you can continue reading. It's about Steem and the multiple initiatives that were conducted to list it on as many exchanges as possible. There are tens of polls on twitter and proposal initiatives and I have participated to neither of them. I am using #posh and have shared tens of Steem posts on twitter, but nothing more.

I was expecting others to get there and vote for Steem, and I was quite a few times thinking that, with or without an extra vote, wouldn't make too much difference. It actually does, because when the pair of scales is already in balance that one small push can easily incline it towards the desired direction. It sometimes seems that only the first pushes and hard efforts, matter the most, but in reality they all matter. It's just that every one of them has it's meaning and place in time.

The witness mentality can be seen almost everywhere you look. In families allowing children to eat McDonalds, although most of them are aware of the bad effects that that type of food has on one's health, in our own perception on how much social media can damage, but continue to use it, and last but not least in allowing bad leaders in simply screwing nations and people.

Same thing happened to abusers on Steem as well, when quite many of us were expecting just the whales to fight them, when actually we could have all worked together and clean the platform. So what if some bastard would turn around and bite my ass or yours, he can't bite all of us at the same time, and at some point would get exhausted. Again, the witness mentality, held back many of us from taking action.

Now Steem seems to be doing pretty well in that regard, and I promise to vote any listing proposals from now on, but that's just a grain of dust on a city mall. We really need to take individuality in our hands and put it to work along with the rest of us, in many areas of our daily lives. We accept too much and we expect too much action from the rest of us. Look at 5G, how many are asking for research in regards of its side effects on our health?

Too few I would say. We don't know for sure if it's gonna burn our brains or not, but it might, and we all know for years now that it will become a reality almost everywhere, but too few are asking questions. The rest are at the cinema, at McDonalds and on Netflix. Why do you think they invented all of these? To make us more active and more creative? I doubt that... Now's time for reading so hope you have a great day and Steem on!

Images courtesy of pixabay and free to use.

Thanks for attention, Adrian

Posted via Steemleo