♫Baa Baa Black Sheep♫…. Screw You And Everything You Stand For?

Strange conversations happen in hotel pools. I went to Chicago over fall break in my second year of college, and to save money, we spent the first night in a budget hotel outside the city. All the rooms were accessed from the outside, and you had to walk across the cold, eerie parking lot to get to the pool room. Enter Mark. Inside the pool is an older gentleman who appears to spend all of his time in the pool, by the pool, or outside smoking a cigar. Mark liked to talk. He told us all about the planes that fly over his house, different eras he’d lived through, and how “so many people are just sheep” and “it’s hard to find free thinkers nowadays”. By the time I got back to my hotel room, I still wasn’t sure what he meant, and found myself having more questions than answers: “What makes someone a sheep? Why is “sheep” as an insult? How is it so compelling, and what the heck does it even mean?”

By definition, “sheep” means exactly what you think it means: a sheep. The white fluffy things, and all of their relatives. At this point, a traditional dictionary both starts and stops being helpful. Thankfully, Urban Dictionary exists, “a crowdsourced english-language online dictionary for slang words and phrases”. It’s vulgar, straight-to-the-point, and uncensored; anyone can write any definition for any word. Yes, anything. It’s problematic in nature, and it’s amazing - where else can you learn those newfangled words the youngins are using. (I am 20, and I am already so lost). So, what do the masses say about the word “sheep”? One definition says a sheep is “One who conforms without questioning ideals[, n]amed so because when one sheep is led off to the slaughter... they all follow.” Another continues: “A group of people who lack the capacity for careful consideration, imagination, or individual thought, who thusly go with group and allow god awful trends and events to unfold and make us all miserable.” The most popular definition, and the first one shown, boldly proclaims: “someone who mindlessly follows and emulates anything and everything in the name of fame/recognition, a waste of flesh and brain cells.” How kind! These definitions will be familiar to most, because they represent the definition of “sheep” we most frequently encounter in real life. They speak for themselves. Looking at how the definition is written, however, it appears that defining the word “sheep” is backed with a certain kind of intensity - hostility, even. “Slaughter”, “god awful”, “miserable”... “waste of flesh and brain cells”... there’s a lot of emotion there. But why? What about the idea of being a sheep makes us so emotional?

To start answering that question, let’s run a simple experiment. Open your favorite text-post-based social-media app (I use Threads), and type the word “sheep” into the search bar. The first thing I see is a video of some joyful white bovine happily enjoying a meal, spotting a landscape, and being generally unbothered. Nice. One quick swipe, however, and I’m fully entrenched in a nameless, faceless pit of rage-baiting accusations and vile comments. “You're a sheep.” “No, you’re a sheep!”. Man, humans can be the worst. “Classic answer of a brainwashed sheep” says one user. “Baaaa like a sheep little girl” says another. It doesn’t stop there. Similar posts, and their replies, dissolve into racism, harassment, sometimes stalking, sometimes blatant threats. It just escalates and escalates - with no ceiling in sight. Being called a sheep doesn’t just drive us to emotion, but pushes us to violence. And for what? Seriously, what does it achieve?

The answer lies in our very nature. Humans - and other animals, for that matter - often resort to violence to protect themselves. We get emotional about what matters to us, and what matters to us matters, on some historic level, to our survival. And if social media is any example, the whole sheep thing seems to really matter to a lot of us. 

Anthropological Biology offers an explanation. I took a class on the subject in my first year of college, where we learned that, in short, humans are not inherently nice to each other. (Shocker.) From what I remember, there are two major pathways to winning another’s favor: reputation and perceived likeness. Reputation is pretty simple: if you have a good reputation, others are more likely to do things for you, often because they feel the favor may be returned. Perceived likeness, on the other hand, has to do with reproduction. We share a lot of our genes with our siblings, so their successes (which, historically, was surviving long enough to bear and raise children) are, in some way, also our successes, because most of our genes are still being passed down. Over time, “success” became more complicated, so the same principal evolved into, more or less: The Success of People Who Seem Similar to Me is Good. When you treat someone “like you” well, your brain feeds you this chemical called Oxytocin, which gives you warm, fuzzy feelings in response. However, this do-good chemical also has a dark side: it makes us feel hostile towards people not like us.

In the context of social media, this makes a lot of sense to me. When someone is called a “sheep”, others that share the ideology of the insultee feel attacked and compelled to protect the reputation of that person. With no personal identifiers or connection to the insulter, they view them as completely “other”. The perceived anonymity of social media makes us feel like there are no consequences for what we say. Because we don’t perceive the person on the other end, we don’t think it can affect our reputation. Thus begins the vicious cycle: someone says something with no perceived consequences, someone else feels attacked by it, people “like” them come to their defense, nothing the “outgroup” says can be valid, hostility ensues as a self-defensive reaction, someone says something with no perceived consequences… it goes on. Outside of social media, we still call each other “sheep”, just not usually to each other’s faces (gotta save the reputation!). The emotion and energy behind these encounters make sense, but why “sheep”? What about the word is so effective in fueling division?

Surprisingly, historical context suggests that our modern selves are far from the first to accuse our neighbors, or ourselves, of being “sheep”. The Oxford English Dictionary shows that the word “sheep” has been used since biblical times to describe, figuratively, “the sheep's timidity, defencelessness, inoffensiveness, tendency to stray and get lost”, and therefore, “a person who is as stupid, timid, or poor-spirited as a sheep.” A witty saying from all the way back in classical antiquity (think Ancient Greece), says, “those persons, who were simply poor souls, were even then, by a common proverb, called sheep's heads, or sheep.”, referring to their foolishness and lack of individuality. An Old English saying from 1275 says “As the grim wolf, that he wishes to work harm upon the sheep.” It goes way back. As it appears, so does the dichotomy of the sheep and the wolf. For almost as long as we’ve been using “sheep” as an insult, we’ve been asserting the “wolf” as superior, which leaves me to believe: 

Being called a “sheep” doesn’t just refer to being a blind follower, it asserts that you are inferior to the predators that will come out on top. 

So there you have it. Calling someone a “sheep” diminishes their strength and threatens their safety by saying, “You are easily dominated”. That’s why it works so well as an insult: “You are weak and the wolves will eat you and the wolves are me!!”

In other words, it doesn’t matter what your in-group thinks of you if someone else can exploit you and get away with it. Humans have always been trying to strike this balance between exploiting others and being liked. Exploiting others gets better results than working with them, but you’ll get a bad reputation. With a bad reputation, you won’t have anyone left to exploit or work with. So being a sheep and cooperating with your herd is great, but the wolves will always get better results in the short term. So, being a wolf is better, right? 

We tend to do that, don’t we? We grow up being taught to treat others kindly, but in the long run, we judge each other on our ability to benefit from mistreating each other. You might be surprised to hear that, in the world of animal behavior, sheep aren’t stupid. They’re actually quite intelligent. They have a great memory, form deep emotional connections, and have individual personalities. When they move in a herd, they do so to protect themselves and each other, as a well-developed survival instinct, rather than blindly following. Being called a “sheep” feels threatening, not due to the nature of the sheep themselves, but because of the hostility of predators and exploiters, i.e. The Wolf. The wolf is not inherently better. Wolves are intelligent because they hunt. Sheep are intelligent because they think. One may begin to wonder if the wolf, feared and alone, became jealous of the sheep’s herd and began to tell others that the sheep does not think.

What it really comes down to is, when someone insults you by calling you a “sheep” as an insult, it’s likely for one of three reasons:  

1. They feel attacked, and want to fight back by hurting your reputation

2. They want to assert themselves as “superior” by suggesting that you are weak in comparison

3. You might just be really, really dumb

Personally, I don’t buy the whole “lone wolf” mentality. I wouldn’t choose a life spent alone with nothing to show except for the feeble claim of “I’m better! I’m better!”... If I had to choose, I’d rather be a sheep - minding my business, eating some grass, and caring for my own.