You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (18 page)

Dunbar’s number isn’t fixed. It can be increased or decreased depending on the environment and tools you have available. You most likely have a much smaller group of friends than 150 people, but when you are incentivized to connect to more people than you would naturally associate with—like at your job or in a school—150 is the point where your neocortex cries uncle. With better tools—like telephones, Facebook, e-mail,
World of Warcraft
guilds, and so on—you become slightly more efficient at maintaining relationships, so the number can be larger, but not much larger. Dunbar’s most recent research suggests even power-users of Facebook with 1,000 or more friends still communicate regularly with only around 150 people, and of that 150 they strongly communicate with a group of less than 20.

The social Web is revolutionizing the way institutions operate, and the way people communicate, but in the end it might not have much of an effect on the core social group you depend on for true friendship. You can maintain a giant number of weak ties to people on Facebook, Twitter, and whatever comes next, much like you can in a giant company. Strong ties, however, require constant grooming. People who use the number of friends they have on Facebook as a metric of their social standing are fooling themselves. You can share videos of fainting goats with hundreds of acquaintances and thousands of followers, but you can trust a secret only with a handful of true friends.

Beatniks, hippies, punk rockers, grunge rats, metal heads, goth kids, hipsters—see a pattern forming here?

Whether you lived through Freedom Summer or
Jem and the Holograms,
somewhere in your youth you started to realize who was in control, and you rebelled. You needed to self-actualize, to find your own way, and you sought out something real, something with meaning. You waved your hand at popular music, popular movies, and popular television. You dug deeper and disparaged all those mindless sheeple who gobbled up pop culture.

Yet you still listened to music and bought shirts and went to see movies. Someone was appealing to you despite your dissent. If you think you can buy your way to individuality, well, you are not so smart.

Since the 1940s, when capitalism and marketing married psychology and public relations, the Man has been getting much better and more efficient at offering you something to purchase no matter your taste.

Think about an archetypal punk rocker with chains and spikes, gaudy pants and a leather jacket. Yeah, he bought all of those clothes. Someone is making money off of his revolt. That’s the paradox of consumer rebellion—everything is part of the system. We all sell out, because we all buy things. Every niche opened by rebellion against the mainstream is immediately filled by entrepreneurs who figure out how to make a buck off those who are trying to avoid what the majority of people are buying.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were many stabs at trying to thwart this through artistic filmmaking—
Fight Club
,
American Beauty
,
Fast Food Nation
,
The Corporation
, etc. The creators of these works may have had the best intentions, but their work still became a product designed for profit. Their cries against consumption were consumed.

Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Kurt Cobain, Andy Kaufman—they may have been solely concerned with creating art or illustrating academic principles, but once their output fell into the marketplace, it found its audience, and that audience made them wealthy.

Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, both philosophers, wrote a book about this in 2004 called
The Rebel Sell
. It’s available in the United States as
Nation of Rebels
. The central theme of the book is you can’t rage against the machine through rebellious consumption.

Here’s the conventional thinking most countercultures are founded upon:

All the interconnected institutions in the marketplace need everyone to conform in order to sell the most products to the most people. The media, through press releases, advertising, entertainment, and so on, works to bring everyone into homogeneity by altering desires. To escape consumerism and conformity, you must turn your back and ignore the mainstream culture. The shackles will then fall away, the machines will grind to a halt, the filters will dissolve, and you will see the world for what it really is. The illusory nature of existence will end and we will all, finally, be
real
.

The problem, say Heath and Potter, is the system doesn’t give a shit about conformity. In fact, it loves diversity and needs people like hipsters and music snobs so it can thrive.

For example, say there is this awesome band no one knows about except you and a few others. They don’t have a record contract or an album. They just go out there and play, and they are great. You tell everyone about them as they build a decent fan base. They make an album that sells enough copies to allow them to quit their day jobs. That album gets them more gigs and more fans. Soon they have a huge fan base and get a record contract and get on the radio and play on
The Tonight Show
. Now they’ve sold out. So you hate them. You abandon the band and go looking for someone more authentic, and it all starts over again. This is the pump by which artists rise from the depths into the mainstream. It never stops, and over time it gets faster and more efficient.

Unknown bands are a special sort of commodity. Living in a loft in a dodgy part of town, wearing clothes from the thrift store, watching the independent film no one has heard of—these provide a special social status that can’t be bought as easily as the things offered to the mainstream.

In the 1960s, it took months before someone figured out they could sell tie-dyed shirts and bell bottoms to anyone who wanted to rebel. In the 1990s, it took weeks to start selling flannel shirts and Doc Martens to people in the Deep South. Now people are hired by corporations to go to bars and clubs and observe what the counterculture is into and have it on the shelves in the mall stores right as it becomes popular.

The counterculture, the indie fans, and the underground stars—they are the driving force behind capitalism. They are the engine.

This brings us to the point: Competition among consumers is the turbine of capitalism.

Everyone who lives above the poverty line but isn’t wealthy pretty much has no choice but to work for a living doing something that rewards them with survival tokens. Working as a telemarketer, for example, allows you to have food, clothing, and shelter, but doesn’t put you directly in charge of creating, growing, or killing those things you need for sustenance. Instead, you trade in tokens for those things. As a result, you have a lot of free time and some leftover tokens.

Back before mass production, people were often defined by their work, by their output. The things they owned usually either were things they hand made or were things other people made by hand. There was a weight, an infusion of soul, in everything a person owned, used, and lived in.

Today everyone is a consumer and has to pick from the same selection of goods as everyone else; and because of this people now define their personalities by how good their taste is, or how clever, or how obscure, or how ironic their choices are.

As Christian Lander, author of
Stuff White People Like
, pointed out in an interview with NPR, you compete with your peers by one-upping them. You attain status by having better taste in movies and music, by owning more authentic furniture and clothing. There are 100 million versions of every item or intellectual property you can own, so you reveal your unique character through how you consume.

Having a dissenting opinion on movies, music, or clothes, or owning clever or obscure possessions, is the way middle-class people fight one another for status. They can’t out-consume one another because they can’t afford it, but they can out-taste one another.

Since everything is mass-produced, and often for a mass audience, finding and consuming things that appeal to your desire for authenticity is what moves these items and artists and services and goods up from the bottom to the top—where they can be mass-consumed.

Hipsters, then, are the direct result of this cycle of indie, authentic, obscure, ironic, clever consumerism. Which, in itself, is ironic—but not like a trucker hat or Pabst Blue Ribbon. It is ironic in the sense the very act of trying to run counter to the culture is what creates the next wave of culture people will in turn attempt to counter.

Wait long enough, and what was once mainstream will fall into obscurity. When that happens, it will become valuable again to those looking for authenticity or irony or cleverness. The value, then, is not intrinsic. The thing itself doesn’t have as much value as the perception of how it was obtained or why it is possessed. Once enough people join in, like with oversized glasses frames or slap bracelets, the status gained from owning the item or being a fan of the band is lost, and the search begins again.

You would compete like this no matter how society was constructed. Competition for status is built into the human experience at the biological level. Poor people compete with resources. The middle class competes with selection. The wealthy compete with possessions.

You sold out long ago in one way or another. The specifics of who you sell to and how much you make—those are only details.

In the early days of psychology there was a prevailing belief among scientists. They thought just about everyone had low self-esteem, inferiority complexes, and a cluster of self-loathing neuroses. Those old beliefs are still reverberating in the public consciousness, but they were mostly wrong. The research conducted over the last fifty years has revealed the complete opposite to be true. Day to day, you think you are awesome, or at least far more awesome than you are.

This is good. Self-esteem is mostly self-delusion, but it serves a purpose. You are biologically driven to think highly of yourself in order to avoid stagnation. If you were to stop and truly examine your faults and failures, you would become paralyzed by fear and doubt. Despite this, from time to time in your life, your personal hype machine sputters to a stop. You get depressed and anxious. You question yourself and your abilities. Usually, it passes as your psychological immune system fights off the negative attitudes. In some places, like the modern United States, this hype machine is reinforced by a culture of exceptionalism.

This tendency to see yourself as above average is also bad. If you never see how much you are screwing up your life, mistreating your friends, and being a complete douche bag, you can destroy yourself without realizing how bad things have become.

In the 1990s, there was a lot of research aimed at discovering just how deluded people were when it came to failure and success. The findings of these studies showed you tend to accept credit when you succeed, but blame bad luck, unfair rules, difficult instructors, bad bosses, cheaters, and so on when you fail. When you are doing well, you think you are to blame. When you are doing badly, you think the world is to blame. This behavior can be observed in board games and senate races, group projects and final exams. When things are going your way, you attribute everything to your amazing skills, but once the tide turns, you look for external factors that prevented your genius from shining through. This gets even weirder when you let some time pass. All the dumb things you did when you were younger, all those poor decisions, you see them as being made by your former self. According to research conducted by Anne Wilson and Michael Ross in 2001, you see the person you used to be as a foolish bumbler with poor taste but your current self as a badass who is worthy of at least three times the praise.

This sort of thinking also spreads to the way you compare yourself to others. The last thirty years’ worth of research shows just about all of us think we are more competent than our coworkers, more ethical than our friends, friendlier than the general public, more intelligent than our peers, more attractive than the average person, less prejudiced than people in our region, younger-looking than people the same age, better drivers than most people we know, better children than our siblings, and that we will live longer than the average lifespan. (As you just read that list, maybe you said to yourself, “No, I don’t think I’m better than everyone.” So you think you’re more honest with yourself than the average person? You are not so smart.) No one, it seems, believes he or she is part of the population contributing to the statistics generating averages. You don’t believe you are an average person, but you do believe everyone else is. This tendency, which springs from self-serving bias, is called the illusory superiority effect.

You are incredibly egocentric, just like everyone else. Your world is subjective by default, so it follows that most of your thoughts and behaviors are born of a subjective analysis of your personal world. The things affecting your daily life are always more significant than something happening far away or in the head of another person. When it comes to judging your abilities or your status, this egocentricity makes it difficult to see yourself as a number, an average. You find the idea repellent and search for a way to see yourself as unique. In 1999, Justin Kruger at the New York University Stern School of Business showed illusory superiority was more likely to manifest in the minds of subjects when they were told ahead of time a certain task was easy. When they rated their abilities after being primed to think the task was considered simple, people said they performed better than average. When he then told people they were about to perform a task that was difficult, they rated their performance as being below average even when it wasn’t. No matter the actual difficulty, just telling people ahead of time how hard the undertaking would be changed how they saw themselves in comparison to an imagined average. To defeat feelings of inadequacy, you first have to imagine a task as being simple and easy. If you can manage to do that, illusory superiority takes over.