Understanding the relation we humans have with these little rodents may be the most important thing you'll ever learn. Read on to learn how not to be a lemming.
Taxidermied Norway lemming (Lemmus lemmus)
source: Wikipedia
Lemmings are, for the few of you who may not yet know, little rodents that live in groups. They look adorable, as you can see in the picture, but they've been been the subject of one of the most widely spread misconceptions ever. I myself and almost everyone I know have for the longest time believed that these adorable creatures from time to time commit mass suicide by throwing themselves from cliffs into the cold arctic waters of their natural habitat. From ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA:
But there is one myth that has held on tenaciously: Every few years, herds of lemmings commit mass suicide by jumping off seaside cliffs. Instinct, it is said, drives them to kill themselves whenever their population becomes unsustainably large.
source: ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA
Lemmings do not commit suicide - source: ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA
I came to "know" about this suicidal behavior through the highly popular puzzle platform game Lemmings from the early 1990s. Their behavior was one of blindly following each other to their death, and in the game players could assign one of eight available abilities to individual lemmings as to guide a large enough percentage to a safe exit. There were 'Climbers', 'Floaters', 'Bombers', 'Blockers', 'Builders', 'Bashers', 'Miners' and 'Diggers'. If you saved enough of the little buggers, you advanced to the next level.
Computer Gaming World stated that "Not since Tetris has this reviewer been so addicted to, or completely fascinated with, a series of challenging puzzles ... follow the crowd and get Lemmings"
source: Wikipedia
Lemmings [PC] - Level 1: Just dig!
Note that in the game-review mentioned above, the reviewer directly appeals to our sheepish behavior of "following the crowd", a behavior so neatly reproduced in the highly addictive puzzle platformer. This game was published in 1991, when the misconception about the rodents' suicidal behavior was already deeply settled in our collective subconscious. There have been strange stories going around about these critters for centuries; once it was even believed that they fell out of the sky, spontaneously materializing somewhere above our heads. But the belief about their mass suicides was finally planted in our society by Disney.
But the biggest reason the myth endures? Deliberate fraud. For the 1958 Disney nature film White Wilderness, filmmakers eager for dramatic footage staged a lemming death plunge, pushing dozens of lemmings off a cliff while cameras were rolling. The images—shocking at the time for what they seemed to show about the cruelty of nature and shocking now for what they actually show about the cruelty of humans—convinced several generations of moviegoers that these little rodents do, in fact, possess a bizarre instinct to destroy themselves.
source: ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA
Imagine what was done to hundreds of innocent, adorable lemmings by this cold company; they were brutally murdered to make a buck. The documentary received several awards and was one of Disney's biggest hits at the time. Deliberate fraud indeed. And a demonstration of the power of media and our own lemming-like behavior of blindly following the crowd and blindly following voices we classify as "authorities" on assorted subjects. It's even come so far that there's a term called "The Lemming Effect":
This refers to a phenomenon wherein crowds of people, across various fields of life, exhibit a certain kind of behaviour for no reason other than the fact that a majority of their peers do so. Many psychologists even argue that human beings are conditioned by nature to follow the larger group instead of undertaking the risk of independent thought and action.
source: The Hindu
How deeply ingrained in the human psyche must something be, to actually become a term used in psychology..? A lie in this case. A lie predicating on the very behavior the lie promotes... We do have a tendency to blindly follow the crowd, that's a fact proven in many studies and research. That's not the issue here. The issue is that we're not just lemmings; we're sheep. Really. This case of the lemmings proves it: we're herded like sheep by powerful entities like Disney and the media owned by the 1%. This was deliberate fraud.
Image by Revolution_Ferg - source: Flickr
What I hope you take away from this remarkable tale of mass-deception by way of perceived mass-suicide, is that there's just no way to trust the guardians of the status-quo. The sad thing is that we can also not trust our peers blindly; it's equally stupid to follow the sheepherder, the sheep or the lemming. The only way out, the only way to beat this game of all games is to be or successfully identify those lemmings that guide us to the safe exit. The 'Climbers', 'Floaters', 'Bombers', 'Blockers', 'Builders', 'Bashers', 'Miners' and 'Diggers' among us shall lead the way.
To be one of the guides it takes but one skill: think for yourself. Compare sources. Don't get trapped in a corporate search-algorithm made confirmation-bubble. Think for yourself. I know, I know... It's difficult; I've been "lemminized" myself, heck I even believed in capitalism once ;-)
Thanks so much for following the masses to my blog (if only that were true..;-))! I will be back tomorrow and sincerely hope to see you back here also, dear reader. Until then!
Do Lemmings Really Commit Suicide?
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