Boekverslag : - Peer Pressure
Ingezonden Door: Bert Dobbelaere
De taal ervan is Engels en het aantal woorden bedraagt 652 woorden.
De taal ervan is Engels en het aantal woorden bedraagt 652 woorden.
Throughout history man has proven to be a social creature. Given the fact that our species has't any nature trumps except for our superior intellect, it is perfectly understandable that we constantly seek protection as well as amusement in small or large groups. From the primitive hunting alliances to the modern United Nations and even the more trivial student groups people have understood that it is better to belong in a group than face the cruel world by yourself.
While it is true that the group demands a certain degree of sacrifice, the positive sides eventually outweigh the negative ones. Anyone saying that he or she is not dependant on a group is a liar, though mostly out of ignorance. While it is true that some persons are more introvert, everybody alive today knows some sort of language. Thus proving that he or she does in fact communicate with other individuals, why else would you learn a language? The development of speech is - to me, of course - one of the key arguments that humans and other animals are meant to cooperate. You should give it some thought: Where would you be without any family, without friends or municipality or anyone else to support you? Not even when times get tough! Obviously you wouldn't have learned any language at all, but all the same for hygiene or basic instructions on how to survive. Even if you would figure out the solution to this problem by yourself you probably wouldn't have lived to attend your thirtiest birthday! Without some degree of group support all hope for the human race would be lost, every individual would be left to be devoured by some wild animal, or when less lucky by isolation and loneliness.
Now that we have figured out that every single human being is in fact dependant of some group or another, whatever it may be, we should place a nuance. Influence from a group is in fact a scale, not a category: meaning that you can either say farewell to group life and most likely not survive it, indulge completely and lose all identity, or preferably something in between! Some people follow the latest trends and fashions in search for eternal bliss, while other focus less on the materialistic ideals and follow their individual self and goal for a less easy, not-fast-food lifestyle. I don't mean to pass judgement on any of those, I am in no position to do so and the background information I posess just isn't sufficient to preach about this. Having said this I would like stress that peer pressure is just an inavoidable concequence, and my guess is that everybody gives in to it at some point or another, to a certain degree of course. Sacrificing a part of your identity is a very small price to pay for all the advantages you get out of a group, even more so when you know that you probably wouldn't even have been able to evolve to the modern stage of selfconciousness without a group. After all, what use is the possibility to fully explore yourself without fearing judgement of other when you're not even capable of thinking about it.
How I personally experience peer pressure? Well, I don't believe to be sufficiently objective to judge that matter. After all, I'm myself and the picture I have of me might be wholly different from that of a random classmate. What I do know is that I'm no go-with-the-flow person. Hereby I don't mean that I constantly walk around in my underwear because I love being different, no, I mean that I feel most comfortable when in an intellectual opposition. This would lead me to believe that I am resistant to a good deal of peer pressure, put into perspective of course. Eventually everybody needs somebody to rely and fall back on, and that could be seen as peer pressure too...
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