Chapter 1Be AloneFace the discomfort and fear.1Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn could easily be the patron saint of dissidents. The Soviet writer was a prisoner of the Gulag for nearly a decade until Stalin’s death in 1953. After he was released, he eventually published a two-thousand-page tome that exposed not just the vast penal system he had known but every aspect of his society that was endemically deceitful, corrupt, and cruel. In his prophetic prime, with his long wispy beard and mournful eyes, each word he uttered clanged with total moral certainty. He was austere and demanding. His parting advice to his fellow Soviet citizens when he was exiled in 1974 was as simple as it was impossible to follow: Don’t ever lie.
So I was surprised to discover that this same man was once considered a candidate for recruitment by the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB. He had no desire to sit apart. In his twenties, he rose to the rank of captain in the Red Army and led troops into battle in World War II. “We loved marches,” he wrote. When he entered the army as an officer, he felt the “happiness of simplification,” of being “a military man and not having to think things through; the happiness of being immersed in the life everyone else lived.”
What he’s expressing is shocking to hear only because it’s coming from one of the twentieth century’s most famous and uncompromising dissidents: He wanted to conform and was happy when he was able to.
This is where we need to start.
2This desire to conform sits deep in the psyche. Just how deep can be seen in the troubled sleep of liberal-minded Germans in the 1930s. A journalist named Charlotte Beradt wrote down the dreams of her friends and neighbors in Berlin as the Nazis consolidated power, and if I thought my own nightmare was alarming, it is child’s play compared to these surreal visions. A bedside lamp listens in on conversations. A stove speaks, disclosing secrets. A man holds a Hitler salute until his spine literally snaps.
But the most telling of the dreams in her collection are those that express not so much the pressures of the new, oppressive reality as the comfort that could come from bending to it. These were fantasies of conformity.
A business school student dreams she’s on a train where a group of passengers are singing political songs. Annoyed, she keeps moving seats. But then she has a thought: “Maybe if you’re singing along it isn’t so silly, so I sang along.” An older man dreams he is at the movies when Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command, shows up wearing a brown leather vest and firing arrows from a crossbow. At first, the man laughs at the ridiculous get-up. But then he looks down and sees he’s wearing the same outfit. A housewife dreams that she is kicked out of her friend’s home for criticizing people who perform the Hitler salute. When she boards a bus to leave, she faces the silently staring passengers, extends her arm, and says, “Heil Hitler!”
One of Beradt’s subjects offered just a single sentence: “I dreamed I said: ‘I don’t
have to always say No anymore.’ ”
These people are not Nazi supporters. Even in their sleep they start off mocking the salutes, the songs, the uniforms, all of it. But a deeper wish reveals itself, to be released from responsibility. Analyzing these dreams led Beradt to one, unsettling conclusion: “Freedom is a burden, unfreedom comes as a relief.”
3The question of why the chanting, goose-stepping, flag-waving crowd exerted so great a pull on millions of Germans became a kind of obsession for the intellectual class in the two decades that immediately followed World War II. The philosophers of the Frankfurt School even developed what they called an “F-scale” to measure a person’s fascistic tendencies, as if this could be determined as easily as sticking a thermometer in someone’s mouth. In 1961, a now-famous experiment got people to deliver electric shocks to strangers just by ordering them to do so. Ten years later, another study turned college students into sadistic prison guards overnight.
Much of this postwar theorizing about human nature was, unsurprisingly, carried out by European Jews like Hannah Arendt, who, having just barely escaped with their lives, were desperate to understand what the hell had happened to their societies. But after all the experiments and the thinking, could it actually all boil down to what Beradt discerned in those dreams?
Conformity comes very naturally to humans. This is how our species has survived for so long, because we tend to work well together. Within our tribes, we know how to tamp down objections and nagging questions. Conforming may sound like a pejorative way to put it, but it’s what’s required if a society is to find some level of stability and well-being.
Our lemming-like mentality is more than a subtle tendency. It’s pretty extreme. The psychologist Solomon Asch performed the classic experiment on conformity in the early 1950s. A group of people were shown a page with a line, and then three other lines. They were asked which of the three matched the length of the original one. The answer was blindingly obvious, and at first everyone responded correctly. But then a majority of the group—who were actually actors secretly planted by Asch—changed their answer to a wrong one. Immediately, a third of the unsuspecting real participants changed their answers as well, disregarding what their own eyes told them (“I didn’t want to look stupid,” one of them said afterward—someone whose parents apparently had never demanded to know what he would do if all his friends jumped off a bridge). This experiment has been replicated many times over the decades and always produces the same result: 33 to 38 percent of people are willing to abandon their sense of reality in order to align with others. One version in 2023 even offered money as an incentive for sticking with the correct answer; it made little difference.
Neuroscientists, also curious about the conforming brain, carried out the same test with people in MRI machines. They found that in those who changed their answers, the spatial awareness areas of their brains lit up, suggesting they were straining to see (or unsee, or re-see) the world in a way that would allow them to easily fit in with the majority. And, even more startling, in the brains of the resisters—those who stuck with their original answers—an entirely different region started to glow: the amygdala, normally triggered by anxiety and emotional conflict. The brain, it seems, wants what it wants, which is to conform.
4At an instinctual level, we get this. In his 1960 book
Crowds and Power, the writer Elias Canetti points to an intriguing paradox. People generally do not like to be touched by a stranger—a vestige, perhaps, of early human existence, when being surprised by an animal or an enemy was often bad news. But in a crowd, he writes, “man can become free of this fear.” The observation is unusual, but it, too, rings true. Canetti points out that in a crowd, all the distinctions and hierarchies collapse. You are equal with everyone else and your individuality evaporates. “In that density, where there is scarcely any space between, and body presses against body, each man is as near the other as he is to himself; and an immense feeling of relief ensues,” he writes. “It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.”
Personally, I’ve always felt both entranced and repulsed by crowds, and it’s hard for me to tell when I’ll have one reaction or another, which itself mystifies me. If you’ve ever been at a mass protest, you might know what I mean, the way it can transform from the ecstasy of people chanting together—what the sociologist Émile Durkheim called “collective effervescence”—to suddenly feeling like you’re drowning. This must be what happens when you are standing right on the border between two strong competing impulses: the overwhelming human desire to become one with others and the need to assert yourself in all your individuality. In those moments, what I feel is panic. I start searching for a side street, a way to escape, even if I don’t quite know where I’m going yet.
Copyright © 2026 by Gal Beckerman. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
