What "Everyone" Is Doing

One of the persistent practices of children and of others also is to justify what they want to do by saying that “everyone” is doing it. Parents are familiar with these phrases: “All the others are doing it.” “All the other mothers are letting their children do it.” “If my friend’s mother will let him go, may I go?” Sometimes it becomes quite a conspiracy, as everyone’s children accuse everyone’s parents of not letting anyone do what “everyone” is doing. Children, it seems, have an inherent mastery of salesmanship and psychology before they know the meaning of the words, and if mothers don’t get together, they may be singly persuaded to let their children go places and do things which all of them together wouldn’t do if all of them knew what the others were doing. Such things, no doubt, have happened from the immemorable past and will continue to happen into the unforeseeable future so long as children are children and parents are parents. But much deeper in its import than children’s persuasion of parents is the fallacious practice of justifying things that shouldn’t be done because “everyone” allegedly is doing them. This follows from the insidiously false philosophy that what becomes popular or prevalent in practice becomes right or permissible in principle, that what “everyone” is said to be doing must be all right for everyone to do. The ultimate implication is that if everyone is cheating, if everyone is lying, it is all right to cheat and lie; if everyone is immoral, it is all right to be immoral; if everyone is lazy, if everyone is unwilling to work, if everyone had his hand out for something unearned, it is all right to reach for what is unearned; if everyone is untrue to trust, it is all right to be untrue to trust. If prevalent malpractice were to become the criterion of moral right or wrong, we should be lost, as others have been lost before us. History starkly records that there have been individuals and empires, societies and civilizations whose sad swan song could well have been, and, indeed was, that “Everyone is doing it.” The whole matter could be substantially summed up by saying that if this false philosophy were permitted to prevail, soon everyone would be doing what no one should do, and we should be far along the road to ruin.