{"id":24637,"date":"2026-10-27T17:16:37","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T17:16:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordswomenmyths.co.uk\/?p=24637"},"modified":"2026-10-27T17:25:30","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T17:25:30","slug":"i-am-afraid-of-sheep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordswomenmyths.co.uk\/?p=24637","title":{"rendered":"I am Afraid of Sheep"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Has Your Mother Ever Asked You \u201cWould you jump off a bridge if your best friend did?\u201d Well, You Are : On Herd Mentality<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.\u201d A quote commonly attributed to Alexander the Great, although its origins are disputed, and one I find myself coming back to when I think about our world today – because I am increasingly afraid of sheep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Humans, we have an ability to convince ourselves that something is right simply because everyone around us seems to think so. We are creatures of imitation – inheriting our politics, our prejudices, our fears, our ideas of morality. Mimesis.
We absorb the atmosphere we grow up in and mistake it for the natural truth. The issue with this sort of \u201cindoctrination\u201d is that it rarely feels like indoctrination when you are inside it. You feel informed, reinforced by the validation of external agreement, you feel sensible. And it is only when something cracks that certainty, when you encounter an idea that does not fit neatly into the world you have constructed, that you might begin to wonder how much of yourself you have actually chosen. Of course, it is not as simple as telling people to wake up. Our beliefs are tangled up in our families, our communities, our identities, and our need to belong to a collective thing. Sometimes the flock is all we have ever known.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes, too, it is comfortable to remain a sheep because the grass is greener on your side of the fence, and why would you question a system that keeps feeding you? But somewhere, beyond your little patch of grass, someone else is starving.<\/p>\n\n\n

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If you are reading this, think about whether you have became too comfortable? Have you ever stopped to ask where you are being led?  We are quick to condemn cruelty when it is directed towards us and remarkably talented at explaining it away when it benefits us. We learn to look past the suffering that inconveniences our worldview, to make exceptions for the people we agree with, to call something necessary when challenging it would require a sacrifice. And I include myself in this, because it is much easier to write about resisting conformity than to confront all the little ways in which I conform myself<\/em>. I want to be someone who speaks up, who questions, who refuses to accept things simply because they have always been this way, but I also desire to be liked. I want people to think I am interesting, not embarrassing; intelligent, not obnoxious; passionate, but never so passionate that I make anyone uncomfortable. There is a rather humiliating contradiction in wanting to change the world while worrying about looking a bit stupid on Instagram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I write about my political views on my page and through this blog, and I still find myself worrying about what people think of me for it. I am young, and I have not yet managed to shed that peculiar fear of being perceived, of someone stumbling across my words and deciding I am trying too hard, that I take myself too seriously, that having a blog about the things I care about is, frankly, a bit cringe. So maybe you could say, I am a sheep too. But there is something worth examining in a culture who think it is safer to be ironic than sincere, safer to laugh at the person who stands up than to be the person standing. I do not want to spend my life making myself smaller so that other people can remain comfortable with the size of my convictions. Do not follow the lion out of fear. Do not surrender your judgement for the sake of fitting in. The frightening thing is not being the black sheep; it is discovering that you were so afraid of standing apart that you followed the flock somewhere you never wanted to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Besides, what is a lion without its sheep… Strip away the followers, the obedience, the people willing to uphold its authority, and how much power remains? We have a habit of looking at powerful people as though their power is an inherent quality, something they possess by virtue of being louder, richer, more charismatic, or more ruthless than the rest of us. We forget how much of it is given to them. Every system, however immovable it appears, depends upon people continuing to participate in it. Which means that the individual is never quite as powerless as they have been led to believe. One sheep might not change much, but a flock that turns around is a different proposition. There is a reason those in power have so much to gain from keeping people divided, disillusioned and convinced that nothing they do will make a difference. Collective action is inconvenient. Solidarity is inconvenient. People discovering that their neighbours, their strangers, their fellow human beings are just as angry and just as unwilling to accept things as they are is where something can happen. Protest, resistance, revolution all begin when someone decides that obedience is no longer the price they are willing to pay for belonging.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Extending this from strictly a political reading, I find myself exploring my own spirituality. I have been questioning what I believe about the universe, about whether there is something connecting us that we have not quite learnt how to understand. I have found myself drawn to pantheism, to the possibility that the divine is not some distant figure above us but something inseparable from the universe itself, present in the natural world and, in you and I. I have been entertaining ideas about manifestation, energy and frequency, and I am still figuring out what to make of any of it. Sometimes, when I try to talk about these things, I can practically hear how it sounds. A bit kookoo. A bit of spiritual woo-woo. And in a world that so often demands that everything be epistemological, explainable and materially useful, it can feel rather lonely to admit that I am curious about things I cannot confidently explain. I find myself wanting to retreat, to keep these thoughts to myself, to avoid being the black sheep in yet another room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But to humble my whole point here, I wonder whether this, too, is a kind of conformity on my end: the assumption that anything beyond the accepted boundaries of thought must be foolish, that curiosity is something to be embarrassed about unless it arrives with all the correct credentials. This is not to say that every belief is true simply because it is unconventional, or that questioning the prevailing worldview means abandoning reason. I think it means allowing ourselves to ask questions without being so terrified of where they might lead. And if there is anything I am beginning to take from my spiritual exploration, it is the possibility that we are less separate than we imagine ourselves to be. That our lives are entangled with one another, with the natural world, with something much larger than our individual little existences. If there is truth in that, then perhaps refusing to look away from another person\u2019s suffering is a spiritual act, too. The way we treat one another is inseparable from the kind of world we are collectively creating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I see glimpses of that world in people protesting, in strangers showing up for one another, in the stubborn insistence that cruelty, a lion, does not have to be accepted as inevitable. I see people trying, even when they are frightened, even when hope feels rather foolish, even when the future gives us plenty of reasons to despair. And perhaps this is what I keep returning to in that quote: not the lion, not the sheep, but the moment the sheep realise they have a choice. We are never going to agree on everything, nor should we. But we can question what we have inherited, challenge what we have normalised, and refuse to confuse the comfort of the familiar with the goodness of the just.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would rather be a black sheep who thinks for herself than spend my life mistaking the safety of the flock for freedom. Because the lion was never the only thing we needed to be afraid of. Sometimes, it is the part of ourselves that knows something is wrong and follows anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n




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Has Your Mother Ever Asked You \u201cWould you jump off a bridge if your best friend did?\u201d Well, You Are : On Herd Mentality \u201cI am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.\u201d A quote commonly attributed to Alexander […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24639,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"saved_in_kubio":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-awareness","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordswomenmyths.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordswomenmyths.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordswomenmyths.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordswomenmyths.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordswomenmyths.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24637"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/wordswomenmyths.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24649,"href":"https:\/\/wordswomenmyths.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24637\/revisions\/24649"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordswomenmyths.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordswomenmyths.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordswomenmyths.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordswomenmyths.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}