When I  read Chapter 2 of Schwalbe’s “The Sociologically Examined Life” one point which he brought up and which resonated with me was the idea that shared belief holds power. When discussing this, he compares two scenarios, one in which a teacher says you should attack your classmate because they’re evil, and another in which the President says the people of Oceania are evil. In the first, nobody would randomly attack their classmate, but when one country is pitted against another, war becomes a reality through shared belief. When I read this, I thought of a term called Herd Mentality. This is essentially where people become emotionally influenced by their peers instead of by rationality. I felt a dramatic similarity between Schwalbe’s “shared belief” and the herd influence, and began to question the validity of societal rules. If societal standards were not a shared belief, would they be indeed rational? This comes to mind when thinking of previous societies in which long held standards were not in fact rational. For example, during the Salem Witch Trials, a society went to ruin through raw emotion of fear sans reason. It further brings to mind the concept that society is man-made. It also makes me much more keenly aware of the fact that outliers in society are not necessarily incorrect in their viewpoints or ideas. Often, it takes someone willing to break the norm to discover new technology, and it is important to not become subject to the herd mentality or to fully trust shared beliefs.