What "Everyone" Is Doing

One of the persistent traits of children – and of others also – is to justify what they want to do by sating 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 single 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 far past and will continue to happen into the unforeseeable future so long as children are children and parents are parents. But besides children’s persuasion of parents, there is the fallacious practice of grown people justifying things that shouldn’t be done because “everyone” supposedly is doing them. This follows from the false philosophy that whatever 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. But the ultimate implication is this: 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 lay, if everyone is unwilling to work, it is all right to be unwilling to work, if everyone is untrue to trust, it is all right to be untrue to trust. If a prevalent immoral practice were to become the criterion of moral right or wrong, we should be lost, as others have been lost before us. History sadly 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 summed up by sating 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.