or the group-building power of cycling in the rain
The experience is so fresh that the mud on my bike is barely dry: last week, with the biggest sporting bluff of my life, I climbed a mountain in the Dolomites that, with my preparation – or rather the lack of it – was considered disrespectful to even start, but one rarely gets out on a bike to a place where even the sight of asphalt makes one salivate, so I didn’t think twice about it – as they say elegantly: it’s easier to apologise afterwards than ask for permission beforehand.
We’re not on Facebook, so it didn’t occur to me to mention this private story here until I got to the part in Jay Van Bavel and Dominic J. Packer’s brilliant book The Power of Us where they write about how we create our reality by belonging to different groups.
When we take up a hobby, adopt a particular political stance or are loyal followers of a nutritional movement, we do nothing more than identify with the community of people with whom we share that interest. And, as the book beautifully puts it, the more we identify with a group, the more we strive to exemplify its norms in our own behaviour. And when we act as members of that community, we align ourselves on a value basis.
It’s very interesting now, in the light of what I’ve read, to observe for myself how much I’ve embraced the values of the guys/girls who “got me into” the world of road cycling. The words that my coach, the one and only Nelli Szántó (runelli), has given me as feedback over the years (e.g. after a gruelling training session, when I complained that the scarf in front of my nose was preventing me from breathing, she reassured me with the words “Hey Moni, oxygen is only a refuge for the weak”) have become so much part of my identity that when I was fighting for my life on the way up last week I didn’t notice that it was raining or that it was 11 degrees, I just kept fighting because that’s what the group I belong to does. That makes us us and them them.
Normative influence is what makes you, once you consider yourself to belong to a particular group, not to question its belief system, and it is this value-based existence that sets us apart from other living beings (of course it is also true that it can take destructive, even self-destructive forms in quite a few cases).
None of us can navigate the world alone, because the knowledge we need is something we share with the communities to which we belong. We (also) have a responsibility to examine from time to time the values that our chosen groups represent, because a misstep can have a huge human – and often financial – cost.
Newton said that ‘if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants’. Now, to drag the subject back down to earth a little, I not only couldn’t see further than others when I reached the top, I couldn’t even see as far as my nose, because there was a milky mist. But I didn’t mind a bit, because if I paraphrase my coach’s sentence according to the group norm, it goes something like this: ‘Panorama is the motivator of the weak’. The attached picture might as well be our logo:).
