On the Contrary...
a think piece on thinking for yourself
Sociologists tell us that we are more likely to agree with the general opinion because the primitive part of our brains is still wired to believe that if we do otherwise, we will be cast out of the herd and that is seen (or was seen) as a certain death. The reality is, agreement bought this easily isn’t truly agreement or alignment in values. It’s outsourcing.
What we don’t talk about enough is that the actual work, the real mental task we run from, isn’t disagreeing either. It’s the middle step, which isn’t glamorized: taking the data, processing it long enough, sitting with it, observing how it might pertain to our individual selves, and then deciding what you think about it. If after all this you end up with the popular opinion, that is still a win. Not conformity in disguise. Just you doing the mental work and arriving at the same venue where the crowd is at. The opinion is still yours, you birthed it. You just happen to be where the rest are.
But we shy away from that middle part, skipping from hearing the opinion or “take” to holding it as ours, and we call that short transition time conviction, when really it is convenience.
History has enough examples of people who we would tag “contrarian,” refusing to skip the essential step of processing data around them. Not necessarily as heroes, but proof that the mental task of thinking will, in fact, not kill you, and you will survive the discomfort even when you feel you won’t at the time.
Ignaz Semmelweis, an example close to home for me. In the 1840s, working in a Vienna maternity ward, he noticed that women delivered by doctors who’d come straight from autopsies were dying of “childbed fever” at far higher rates than women delivered by midwives who hadn’t touched a corpse within that period of time. His answer was that doctors should wash their hands. Sounds simple enough. The medical body did not receive this well. Germ theory as we understand it didn’t exist yet, and the suggestion that a gentleman physician’s hands could be the vector of death was taken as an insult rather than a hypothesis. Semmelweis was mocked, professionally exiled, and eventually died in an asylum, beaten by guards, only a few years before Louis Pasteur’s work vindicated almost everything he’d argued. He was right. But terrible timing, I suppose.
Galileo is the more famous version of the story, in a completely different genre. He looked through a telescope, did the math, and concluded that the Earth orbits the sun rather than the reverse, a position the Church treated as heresy rather than astronomy. He spent his final years under house arrest for it. The crowd, backed by considerable institutional power, was simply wrong, and it took the crowd the better part of two centuries to formally admit it. Too little too late for the stargazer. Emphasizing that vox populi might not always be vox Dei.
There was also Alfred Wegener, who proposed that the continents had once been joined and had since drifted apart, and geologists spent decades treating the idea as something closer to fantasy than science, partly because Wegener couldn’t explain the mechanism that would make it possible, and partly because it was easier to dismiss him than to reorganize an entire discipline around his observation. Plate tectonics eventually proved him correct, though not until well after his death, freezing on an expedition across the Greenland ice sheet. This is a bit comical if you’ve listened to “Pillow Talking” by Lil Dicky. But I digress.
And then there’s Barbara McClintock. In the 1940s and 50s, she described genes that could move around within a genome, what we now call transposons or “jumping genes.” Her fellow geneticists largely regarded this as either impossible or irrelevant, and she spent years working in relative isolation as a result. In 1983, three decades after she first proposed it, she won the Nobel Prize for exactly that discovery.
You might argue for or against how these folks are “contrarian.” I must put out this disclaimer at this point: it would be easy to read their stories as a simple lesson; disagree with everyone, and history will eventually prove you a genius. That too is easy, and it’s the same lazy outsourcing wearing a rebellious costume. None of them set out to be against the crowd. They set out to follow the evidence, wash the hands, read the telescope, measure the coastlines, look under the microscope, process the data a bit more, and the fact that this put them at odds with the prevailing opinion was a consequence, not a goal. The contrarianism was incidental. The rigor was exactly the point.
This is the distinction I think we lose most often, especially now, in a culture that has started to treat “going against the grain” as a personality trait you can put on rather than a conclusion you sometimes arrive at. There is a kind of person who has simply relocated their conformity, who has swapped agreeing with the mainstream for automatically disagreeing with it, and who feels exactly as little friction doing the second thing as the rest of us feel doing the first. That person hasn’t done the work either. They’ve just picked the opposite team and started cheering, started tweeting, which is the identical activity as the crowd they think they’ve escaped, wearing an opposing jersey.
So, is being a contrarian bad? I don’t think that’s quite the right question. The honest answer is that contrarianism, like agreement, is neutral until you know how someone arrived at it. A conclusion earned through genuine engagement with evidence is valuable whether it lands with the crowd or against it. A conclusion adopted because it lets you feel superior to the crowd is just vanity with better posture. The measure was never which side of the room you end up standing on. The measure is whether you actually walked there yourself, or whether you were carried — either by the current of consensus or by the equally strong current of wanting to be seen as someone who resists it.
Which leaves the parting question, the one I try to keep asking myself and keep finding uncomfortable in new ways each time: of the opinions you’re holding right now, the ones about your work, your faith, your politics, your relationships, your own worth, your (and that of others) tweets and posts online, how many of them did you actually build? And how many of them did you simply inherit, either from the room you grew up in or the room you’re currently trying very hard not to be kicked out of?
I don’t think there’s a clean way to answer that. I think you just have to keep asking it, the way Semmelweis kept washing his hands even after everyone told him he was wasting his time, even after it cost him everything, because the evidence, once he’d actually looked at it, wouldn’t let him do anything else.