The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

14
Resist the Downward Pull of the
Group
The Law of Conformity
e have a side to our character that we are generally unaware of
—our social personality, the different person we become when
we operate in groups of people. In the group setting, we
unconsciously imitate what others are saying and doing. We think
differently, more concerned with fitting in and believing what others
believe. We feel different emotions, infected by the group mood. We
are more prone to taking risks, to acting irrationally, because
everyone else is. This social personality can come to dominate who we
are. Listening so much to others and conforming our behavior to
them, we slowly lose a sense of our uniqueness and the ability to think
for ourselves. The only solution is to develop self-awareness and a
superior understanding of the changes that occur in us in groups.
With such intelligence, we can become superior social actors, able to
outwardly fit in and cooperate with others on a high level, while
retaining our independence and rationality.
An Experiment in Human Nature
As a young boy growing up in communist China, Gao Jianhua (b. 1952)
dreamed of becoming a great writer. He loved literature, and his
teachers commended him for his essays and poems. In 1964 he gained
admittance to the Yizhen Middle School (YMS), not far from where his
family lived. Located in the town of Yizhen, several hundred miles
north of Beijing, YMS was labeled a “key school”—over 90 percent of
its students went on to college. It was difficult to get into and quite
prestigious. At YMS, Jianhua was a quiet and studious boy; he had

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ambitions of graduating in six years with a top record, good enough to
get into Beijing University, from where he would launch the writing
career he dreamed about.
Students at YMS lived on campus, and life there could be rather
dull, since the Communist Party regulated almost every aspect of life in
China, including education. There were daily military drills,
propaganda classes, manual labor duty, and regular classes, which
could be rigorous.
At YMS, Jianhua developed a close friendship with a classmate
named Fangpu, perhaps the most zealous communist at school. Pale
and thin and wearing glasses, Fangpu looked the type of the
intellectual revolutionary. He was four years older than Jianhua, but
they had bonded over their common love of literature and their desire
to become writers. They had their differences—Fangpu’s poetry
centered on political issues; he worshipped Chairman Mao Zedong and
wanted to emulate not only his writings but also his revolutionary
career. Jianhua, on the other hand, had little interest in politics, even
though his father was a respected communist war veteran and
government official. But they enjoyed their literary discussions, and
Fangpu treated Jianhua like a younger brother.
In May of 1966, as Jianhua was engrossed in his studies, preparing
for the final exams to end his second year, Fangpu paid him a visit, and
he seemed unusually animated. He had been scouring the Beijing
newspapers to keep up with trends in the capital, and recently he had
read of a literary debate started by several renowned intellectuals that
he had to share with Jianhua.
These intellectuals had accused well-known, respected writers of
hiding counterrevolutionary messages in their plays, films, and
magazine articles. They based these accusations on careful readings of
certain passages in the writers’ work that could be seen as veiled
criticisms of Mao himself. “Certain people are using art and literature
to attack the party and socialism,” said Fangpu. This debate is about
the future of the revolution, he said, and Mao must be behind it all. To
Jianhua it all seemed a bit tedious and academic, but he trusted his
older friend’s instincts, and he promised to follow the events in the
newspaper.
Fangpu’s words proved prophetic: within a week, papers
throughout China had picked up the story of the raging debate.

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Teachers at YMS began to talk about some of the newspaper articles in
their classes. One day the school’s Communist Party secretary, a
paunchy man named Ding Yi, called for an assembly and gave a speech
recounting almost verbatim an editorial against the
counterrevolutionary writers. Something was definitely in the air. The
students now had to devote so many hours every day to discussing the
latest turns in the debate.
Throughout Beijing, posters with large headlines had appeared
everywhere attacking the “antiparty black line,” meaning those who
were secretly trying to put the brakes on the communist revolution.
Ding supplied the students with materials for making their own
posters, and the students happily threw themselves into the task. They
largely copied the posters from Beijing; Jianhua’s friend Zongwei, a
talented artist, made the most attractive posters of all, with his elegant
calligraphy. Within days, almost all of the walls of the school were
covered with posters, and Secretary Ding roamed around the campus
reading them, smiling and approving of the work. To Jianhua it was all
quite novel and exciting, and he loved the new look of the campus
walls.
The campaign in Beijing focused on local intellectuals everyone
knew, but in Yizhen this seemed rather distant. If China was being
infiltrated by all kinds of counterrevolutionaries, that meant that they
had also probably infiltrated the school itself, and the only logical place
for the students to look for such class enemies was among their
teachers and school officials. They began to scrutinize their lectures
and lessons for hidden messages, much as the intellectuals had done
with the work of famous writers.
The geography teacher Liu always talked about the beautiful
landscapes of China but hardly ever mentioned the inspiring words of
Mao. Could that mean something? The physics teacher Feng had an
American father who had served in the U.S. Navy; was he secretly an
imperialist? Li, the teacher of Chinese, had fought initially on the side
of the nationalists against the communists during the revolution, but
in the last year had switched sides. The students had always trusted his
version of events, and he was Jianhua’s favorite teacher because he
had such a flair for telling stories. But in retrospect he seemed a bit
old-fashioned and bourgeois. Could he still be a counterrevolutionary
nationalist at heart? Soon a few posters appeared that questioned the
fervor of some of these teachers. Secretary Ding found this a trivial

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application of the debate, and he ordered a ban on all posters attacking
teachers.
By June the movement sweeping Beijing, and soon all of China, had
acquired a name—the Great Socialist Cultural Revolution. It was
indeed Mao himself who had instigated it all by setting up the
newspaper articles, and he was to be the ongoing leader of the new
movement. He feared that China had been slipping back into its feudal
past. Old ways of thinking and acting had returned. Bureaucracies had
become breeding grounds for a new type of elite. Peasants remained
relatively powerless.
He wanted a wake-up call to revive the revolutionary spirit. He
wanted the younger generation to experience revolution firsthand by
making it themselves. He proclaimed to young people that it was “right
to rebel,” but the word he used in Chinese for this was zao fan, which
literally means to turn everything upside down. It was young people’s
duty, he said, to question authority. Those who secretly worked to pull
China back into its past he called “revisionists,” and he implored
students to help him uncover the revisionists and root them out of the
new revolutionary China.
Taking these pronouncements of Mao as a call to action, Fangpu
created the most audacious poster anyone had yet seen—it was a direct
attack on Secretary Ding himself. Ding was not only the school’s party
secretary but also a veteran of the revolution and a highly respected
figure. According to Fangpu, however, his prohibition on criticizing
teachers proved he was a revisionist, bent on suppressing the
questioning spirit Mao had encouraged. This created quite a stir. The
students had been reared to unquestioningly obey those in authority,