Distributed to #Psychology

Why We Follow The Worst People

Nearly 10 years in the daycare business have explained everything.

Erin King is the author of “How To Be Wise AF” on Amazon now.

We all have an inborn instinct to follow the worst person in the room.

I haven’t read a bunch of studies or taken sociology or psychology degrees — I work with toddlers.

I’ve had a home daycare for the last eight years. For these eight years,10 hours a day, five days a week, I observe the inception and development of human behavior.

Every day I watch five little animals struggle to become human. Every day is a battle between their basest animal instincts and the necessary evolution into human society.

One of the instincts I see surface continually is the impulse to follow the worst person in the room.

No matter the child — angel, or renegade — every group of toddlers repeats the same pattern, without exception. They always gravitate to the worst behavior in the room.

Whether we’re at the lunch table or getting ready to go outside, whenever the toddlers see someone acting up, they immediately do what the offender is doing. Their automatic reaction is to join in.

They never instinctively follow the best-behaved child, they always follow the troublemaker.

I think it’s because they know that’s the person who will get the most attention. Toddlers don’t care if it’s good or bad attention, the only thing that registers is that something is working.

If I have them at the lunch table and one person is banging their plate, they’ll all start doing it. Only the most self-controlled child can resist. And even that child will only abstain if they think I’m not watching. If they think I’m too busy to notice, or if I’ve popped upstairs to grab something even that child will join in most times.

Toddlers don’t think about getting in trouble. They don’t care about how you feel. Before they learn that actions have consequences, they don’t have the experience to temper their urges. That part of their consciousness hasn’t kicked in yet.

They only care about getting the most attention they can get.

It’s been bred into them: Attention = Survival. Period.

We’re born sociopaths I know this 100% from my observations. We learn to respect others and care about them.

Toddlers go through a really aggressive stage that can last from 3 to 8 months and longer if not culled, where they just want to push, pummel, and dominate everyone around them.

We evolved in a brutal environment, as animals, and so our survival instinct is to eliminate the competition.

If they see someone as a competitor, they’ll stop at nothing to crush them.

That’s why toddlers have such a hard time with hitting and pushing.

It’s not their fault; it’s their innate survival mechanism kicking in.

Obsolete? Yes, but inherent nonetheless and why many adults have a hard time resisting the call of evil, especially in groups.

Many people live in a state of arrested development because this tendency wasn’t completely socialized out of them.

When parents allow themselves to be bullied, when they spoil and refuse to give consequences, they feed the instinct rather than starve it so it lingers. If no deterrent is planted in the developing mind for it to internalize, this key element of socialization is lost.

But because we all need to learn to function in polite society, the impulse gets repressed and goes dormant rather than dying off, laying in wait for an opportunity to reanimate itself.

Aggression is a strong impulse, difficult to resist. In the toddler, it’s an innocent, impulsive reaction. In the adult, it morphs into contempt or worse.

You need to look no farther than the trolls of your Twitter or Facebook feed for proof of this. When people think there are no consequences, the unregulated child in them comes unhinged.

People who have been correctly and lovingly socialized lose this urge and are kind and generous towards others. These are the people for whom it surfaces at appropriate times because subconsciously they can fight for what’s right because they’re no longer fighting for attention.

They also don’t feel selfishly entitled to have the world revolve around them because that sociopathic nature has evolved into empathy and conscience.

Well-socialized people are able to look at the bigger picture and understand what makes sense rather than buying into manipulation that preys on their worst instincts and underdeveloped maturity.

Cruelty has no appeal for them, neither does propaganda because neither ring true. They don’t need to hurt other people to feel powerful, and they don’t need attention to feel safe.

But people who haven’t been appropriately socialized constantly struggle to keep their primal urges under control.

They have to because the laws of society force them to.

These people aren’t necessarily murderous psychopaths, the ones who blatantly destroy and kill. These are everyday people, the quiet sociopaths who spend their energy holding it together so they can fit in.

Unfortunately, when a terrible leader, corrupt and unkind, comes to power, these people get so much relief from not having to regulate their inner toddler anymore that they eagerly eat up messages of hate and violence.

They’re easily manipulated by propaganda and misinformation because those things prey on that underdeveloped sense of maturity and appeal to the toddler itching to act out.

These people look like adults but subconsciously they’re just children who know if they have a tantrum, mommy and daddy will give them what they want — attention and they’ll feel momentarily safe. If they were also raised without consequences, or with overly punitive consequences that didn’t make sense, then they’ll also be entitled and angry.

Stuck in this cycle of arrested development, mature, responsible, rational adult behavior has no payoff for them, no appeal. Without an internalized feeling of security, they spend their lives compensating with anger and violence.

This is the dangerous subconscious cocktail that propaganda ministers look to exploit because they know that these people can never feel safe. They live their lives in denial, compensating for their frightened inner child and the angrier they get, the safer they feel. The more they take this anger out on others, the more it feels like the dynamic between them and mommy and daddy, the primordial relationship they live to subconsciously recreate.

They want to go back to mommy and daddy because only they can offer safety. So this anger and attention-seeking is a way to relieve the stress of being constantly, deeply, and endlessly afraid.

It’s relief, nothing more or less, and a continuation of the cycle of pain avoidance.

This is why your friends and neighbors buy into bad politics in shockingly banal ways. Why people can be so easily duped. Why people will go to such great lengths to believe the unbelievable and hang onto misinformation in spite of the consequences and the math and science that proves them wrong.

It’s because the people in charge of propaganda know that there is a huge pool of people who feel unloved and afraid, and that entitlement is epidemic in the modern world and if they can just reach that frightened inner toddler that craves attention at any cost and make them feel like mommy and daddy are still watching, they’ll have hit the jackpot.

The fuel of every cruel regime is regular people who turn a blind eye until it’s acceptable for them to join in because if they just hang on a little bit their inner toddler will get to act out and if they find something that fuels their anger they’ll finally feel safe.

These are the ordinary people who believe anything they're told and follow the worst person in the room like frightened toddlers starving for attention.

Thanks for reading!

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