Ah yes, fashion. I've mentioned this several times in previous scribblings but have yet to get round to giving it a proper looking at. So here goes.
Now when I say "fashion" I am not simply referring to the latest dress length or this season's must-wear colour (it's purple, by the way. Or is it mauve? Is there a difference?) No, I'm referring to human behaviour generally, that need we seem to have to conform to what everyone else is doing or, if not everyone, that section of society with which we wish to be associated. My hypotheses are that it's a bit weird that we are so influenced by what other people do and that this can lead to bad outcomes all round. I'm not a psychologist and I'm aware that many books and learned papers will have been written on this subject so any psychologists reading this can gang up and start a fashion trend for denouncing my amateur scribblings as boll*cks!
Where to start? How about tattoos? A few years ago, only sailors had such things, plus perhaps a few other horny-handed sons of toil but certainly no women. But now, it seems that if you're a woman without a tattoo, you will be pointed at in the street and thought "odd" (or maybe it seems that way to me because I shop at ASDA.) This is bizarre. Why do so many people, otherwise apparently sane, want to pay someone to do something painful to their bodies, in the knowledge that one day they will probably regret it? Because it's the fashion. It didn't use to be but fashions change. What happens when the tattoo fashion ends though? But the force of fashion is a remarkably powerful thing.
You may ask why this matters. If I don't want a tattoo (and I don't, thanks all the same), I am perfectly at liberty not to have one so why should I resent others having them? Well in the case of tattoos, it doesn't much matter (although having to look at the things does rather offend my aesthetic sensibilities, especially when it comes to footballers and especially bloody David Beckham, who's probably to blame for the whole thing.) Well it matters a lot in other areas. Here's a couple of examples.
Take the euro. There was no economic imperative for this thing, it was a political fashion. Indeed, there were well-known economic reasons for not doing it but the desire to sign up to this trendy new thing was so strong that that the economists were ignored. Well done Gordon Brown, much maligned elsewhere in this blog, for keeping the UK out of this mess.
Then there's climate change. The science behind this is very complicated and hardly likely to be well-understood by politicians who have more stuff to worry about than their struggling brains can cope with. But despite this, huge numbers of them worldwide are signed up to the idea that they can save the planet by sticking up windmills. There are so many reasons why this is bonkers that it's hard to know where to start: the cost, the inefficiency, the increase in carbon emissions in developing countries which dwarfs anything any other country can do, etc., etc. And never mind the fact that there's no proof that man-made carbon emissions are damaging the planet. Crazy! But the force of fashion is so strong that you will look hard to find politicians prepared to speak out against the ineluctable spread of "renewables". One day, I believe we are going to wake up and the likelihood is that in say 20 years' time, the fashion will have changed as dramatically as it did for the humble tattoo. Get into the windmill recycling business now!
Finally, the bankers. Nowhere is the force of fashion so powerful and so likely to lead to disaster. Here's a little bit of history for you youngsters. When I took out my first mortgage (in 1981 I think) the interest rate you paid went up proportionately to the size of your mortgage. This meant that even on my small flat I was paying more than the normal rate, which was about 15% (hard to believe eh? It'll happen again.) Not only that, but getting a mortgage at all was not straightforward (see what I mean?) Roll on a few years and bankers everywhere were desperate to lend money to anyone at lower rates and rates which would come down for large loans, rather than go up.Why? Fashion. If one bank was doing it, then every other one had to.
So it came to pass that the desire (or should that be the pressure of the herd instinct) to lend was so strong that bankers lent money to people who just a few years before, they wouldn't have touched with the proverbial. Of course not only was it fashionable to lend money but that goes hand in hand with it being fashionable to borrow money. And so it was that banks (and governments and individuals of course) borrowed vast amounts, in a way that would have horrified their predecessors. Sadly, Gordon Brown had not vanquished "boom and bust" (not even in the UK, never mind the rest of the world which he seemed to think he controlled too) and we all know what happened next.
The problem is that people, particularly bankers, are benchmarked against their competitors rather than against some more objective and absolute measure of performance. So when your pension fund goes down in value, the fund manager tells you that's OK because so have all the others. Great! Of course he still gets paid a healthy salary in return for losing your money.
But the main problem is that if people are constrained by the force of fashion, they will not think or act or say anything "outside the box". Without such free thinkers, we might still be thinking the earth is flat and is the centre of the universe. There are no doubt many other examples of human progress which would not have happened without some pig-headed scientist being determined to kick against fashion and to pursue what he believed to be right. Some of these people are struggling now to shake off the tag of "flat earthers" (how appropriate) that applies to those prepared to question the prevailing climate change fashion.
If everyone else is falling off a cliff, it is not clever to join in simply because it's the in thing to do (watch out for those who appear to espouse the "eat sh*t, a billion flies can't be wrong!" school of thought). Be an individual: don't follow the herd if you can see it's heading for a cliff; don't feel you have to wear purple and for God's sake don't get a tattoo!
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