Nicely put Kevin - in every day life it is possible to see this. It is so much easier to go along with the crowd. I've seen cases where a manager in the office was openly derisive of one of his staff and the majority of the rest took his lead. Standing up to that is frightening, and there was no physical threat involved in those situations.

I was always on the outside because I wasn't interested in sport or the TV soaps and said so. That can occasionally be a lonely place and not too comfortable. Think how it would be in a situation such as a dictatorship or a fundamentalist society, where swimming against the stream could endanger your and your family's life.