A famous, simple perception test explains the herd instinct

Just came across this:

http://yournation.org/which-line-is-the-longest-find-out-why-so-many-got-this-question-wrong/
Which Line Is The Longest? Find Out Why So Many Got This Question Wrong

What a commentary on the nature of our species, supposedly the most intelligent and with-it on The Planet! It goes right along with this famously damning study

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology[1] and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.

If it seems at times I'm trying to condemn humanity wholesale, I'm really just trying to point out the basic realities about us that most people would rather not hear about. There can be no overcoming of these very bad traits without recognizing and facing them. But are people capable of learning from history, much less deep collective self-examination? More from the article:

The experiments began in July 1961, in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University,[3] three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the popular question at that particular time: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"[4] The experiments have been repeated many times in the following years with consistent results within differing societies, although not with the same percentages around the globe.

As you can see in our era just 26 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the answer is looking dismal -- the U.S. government is working overtime to revive and epitomize communism and the worst aspects of Nazism. They're killing millions of foreigners who haven't done us any harm (and never could) and killing our freedom and prosperity (there's that phrase again) in the name of saving these things, insanely and irrationally using the wars as their excuse.

Even as experiments in the Milgram mold continue, my reluctant judgment is to agree with H.L. Mencken's extremely jaundiced, disgusted view of people, ameriKans most of all. look him up online for some of the most devastating and even funniest assessments of it all!

My motto used to be "humor vincit omnia" -- "humor conquers all" in Latinglish. Not so much anymore......

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