Bellwether

“What’s going on?” I whispered to Gina.

“Management is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt they don’t have enough to do,” she murmured back. “So they’ve invented a new acronym.”

You shouldn’t be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that’s what science is all about.

“My physics teacher used to say Diogenes shouldn’t have wasted his time looking for an honest man,” Shirl said, “he should have been looking for somebody who thought for himself.”

Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?

Management’ll never go for it. First, it’s live-animal research, which is controversial. Management hates controversy. Second, it’s something innovative, which means Management will hate it on principle.

Management cares about only one thing. Paperwork. They will forgive almost anything else—cost overruns, gross incompetence, criminal indictments—as long as the paperwork’s filled out properly. And in on time.

Therein lay the secret to all fads: the herd instinct. People wanted to look like everybody else. That was why they bought white bucks and pedal pushers and bikinis. But someone had to be the first one to wear platform shoes, to bob their hair, and that took the opposite of herd instinct.

Barbie’s one of those fads whose popularity makes you lose all faith in the human race.

There are moments when rather than reforming the human race I’d like to abandon it altogether and go become, say, one of Dr. O’Reilly’s macaques, which have to have more sense.