The Sleepwalkers
Today, on a Sunday, I only wanted to buy a few yogurts.
Instead, I found myself watching a small experiment in human nature.
A few weeks ago, the first 24-hour Migros supermarket in Switzerland opened in my village. There are no cashiers, no staff standing around to help. You scan your loyalty card or a QR code to enter, pick up your groceries, pay at the self-checkout, and leave. It is a system so simple that it could be explained to almost anyone in half a minute.
When I arrived, about ten people were standing outside the entrance.
They were not talking much. They were simply waiting.
Some held their phones against the scanner. Others tried their loyalty cards from different angles. They looked at the machine, looked at each other, then tried again. The bright afternoon sun had apparently made the scanner unreliable.
Customers were leaving the supermarket every few moments.
The entrance was literally opening in front of them.
I waited until somebody walked out, the door slid open, and I stepped inside.
Nobody followed.
They continued standing there, as though an invisible barrier separated them from a shop they could clearly see.
At that moment I stopped thinking about technology.
I started thinking about conformity.
Inside, the performance continued.
Around twenty people had formed a queue behind a man who appeared to be fighting a desperate battle with six bottles of mineral water. Directly beside him stood a second self-checkout.
Empty.
Unused.
Apparently broken.
At least that was what someone had said.
No one questioned it.
No one pressed a button.
No one touched the screen.
No one even performed the most elementary act of curiosity.
Twenty adults had accepted a rumour as physical reality.
When my turn finally came, I walked over, pressed a few buttons, and the machine immediately woke up.
Nothing had been wrong with it.
Someone before us had simply started a transaction and walked away before completing it.
That was enough to paralyse an entire queue.
While waiting, I noticed a small child tearing open several plastic packages. Assuming the parents were elsewhere, I quietly said, "You don't need to open those."
The child stopped immediately.
Only then did the parents turn around.
They had been standing only a few steps away the entire time.
I apologised at once. I had made the wrong assumption.
But in retrospect, I realised I had not been mistaken about the most interesting part of the situation.
The child was not the one who fascinated me.
The adults were.
The longer I observed them, the less it felt as though I was watching people shopping.
It felt as though I was watching people outsource their own judgment.
The scanner doesn't work.
So we wait.
The checkout is broken.
So we don't test it.
Everyone else is standing still.
So standing still becomes the correct behaviour.
No authority had ordered anyone to do any of this.
There were no security guards.
No barriers.
No rules preventing anyone from entering or trying the second checkout.
The prison existed entirely inside their own minds.
When I left the shop, the same group was still outside.
The door was still opening every few seconds as customers left.
I finally called out, "Just walk in!"
Almost immediately, they did.
That moment has stayed with me.
Not because they entered.
But because they entered only after someone else gave them permission.
We flatter ourselves by believing that independent thought is common.
It is not.
Most people do not test reality directly. They test whether their behaviour matches the behaviour of the people around them. Consensus becomes evidence. Hesitation becomes proof. If enough people stand still, standing still begins to feel rational.
Civilisation depends on trust, but it also depends on individuals who occasionally distrust the crowd enough to verify things for themselves. Progress has rarely begun with a committee. More often, it begins with one inconvenient person asking a simple question.
"Is this actually true?"
Perhaps The Sleepwalkers is an unfair title.
I am sure the people I saw have lives every bit as complicated as my own. Put them in familiar surroundings and they probably function quite well.
That is precisely what makes the episode unsettling.
If ordinary, intelligent people can become so passive in the face of something as trivial as an automatic door or a checkout screen, what happens when the questions are political? Medical? Technological? Moral?
How often do we mistake social proof for reality?
How often do we stop investigating simply because everyone else has already stopped?
Perhaps the greatest threat to independent thought is not censorship.
It is the quiet temptation to let other people do the thinking first.
Sometimes the first act of freedom is almost embarrassingly simple.
You stop waiting for permission.
You press the button yourself.
Or, when the door is already open,
you simply walk in.