Mindless Sheep

I have been a sheep caretaker for like two days and already I'm like. Wow. I get it. I get why these were some of the earliest mammals to ever be domesticated. They look up to humans with this sort of dumb but all at once innocent and pure trusting expression.

— zooophagous, this Tumblr post

Sheep are extremely docile, live together in flocks, and always follow the directions of a leader, either their shepherd or another sheep in the flock. Because of those traits, fictional sheep tend to mindlessly follow the orders of a leader or crowd, unable or unwilling to think for themselves (there's a reason "sheep" is used as an insult toward people who don't question authority and base their decisions on whatever other people say). Sometimes this extends to ostracizing those who don't conform, and stick out from the flock too much.

Related tropes:

• Blind Obedience: A character or group that obeys their superior unquestioningly.
• Good Shepherd: A benevolent religious leader who looks out for his flock's best interests.
• Hive Mind: One mind, many bodies.
• Suicidal Lemmings: Another animal known for herd mentality.
• Sweet Sheep: Sheep are portrayed as gentle and docile, which can easily overlap with them being obedient followers.

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Examples:

Comic Strips

• There's a The Far Side cartoon where a sheep stands up in the middle of a herd of other sheep and shouts "Wait! We don't have to be just sheep!" The other sheep don't listen and continue grazing.
• In this political cartoon, a wolf is running for president with the slogan, "I am going to eat you." The sheep decide to vote for him, with one's rationale being, "He tells it like it is." This is a metaphor for people who vote for a political candidate whose policies may not be in their best interest.

Fan Works

• Pack Street: Becomes a point of embarrassment for the ram Remmy. At a meeting he gathered with residents of Pack Street to educate them on facts about sheep, he admits he mostly pulled facts off the same website without really checking them over. This leads him at one point to read a fact that claims sheep are natural followers, good at doing what they're told without asking questions. He quickly tries to move on from this, but several other facts reinforce similar negative stereotypes about his species.

Films — Live-Action

• Babe: Zig-zagged. The dogs wholeheartedly believe in this trope and that aggressively berating and wrangling the sheep is the only way to get them to do anything, but Babe discovers that the sheep are merely Kindhearted Simpletons who are bad at listening unless spooked, and that Babe actually can get them to listen to his polite requests by using their secret Trust Password.
• Charlotte's Web: Most of the sheep are copycats, mimicking everyone they see. However one of them, Samuel, refuses to copy like his friends since he considers that "following", which he refuses to do just because he's a sheep.

Literature

• In John Updike's short story "A&P", Sammy mentally refers to the two girls following behind Queenie as sheep, since she seems to be the leader of them.
• Animal Farm: The sheep mindlessly conform to the rules enforced by Napoleon and the other pigs. In contrast to the other animals, they never question what is going on, and never think for themselves. Like everything else in the book, they are an allegory for the blind proletarian followers of Stalinism who weren't educated enough to question it and as such were extremely malleable to the Party's will and susceptible to Doublethink.
• Discworld:
  • Used as a metaphor in Small Gods to explain the unfortunate state of the Church of Om, which could be described as Dark Shepherds at best and more accurately as totalitarian fundamentalists.
    The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different.
    For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.
  • In the first book of the Tiffany Aching series, Tiffany is a shepherd from a long line of shepherds. As she comes into her own as a witch, she draws off of this life experience; she will protect her flock and defend them against intruders. Later books emphasize that Tiffany works with foolish, thoughtless, ungrateful people, but the work needs to be done, and done with genuine care.
• Gargantua And Pantagruel: Panurge buys a single sheep from a merchant who massively overcharges him. Panurge gets back at him by throwing his one sheep into the water to its death, and all of the merchant's sheep blindly follow.
• How the Marquis Got His Coat Back: A sequel of sorts to Neverwhere, the Marquis, having been restored to life, is on a quest to find and retrieve his rather stylish and signature coat. His quest takes him to Shepherd's Bush, where he falls under the thrall of the Shepherds. There he and his fellow "sheep" do some sort of unsavory work that is only alluded to in terms of removing hair, separating limbs, and turning the fat to tallow. It's implied that the bodies they're working on are their own fellow "sheep". Fortunately, when the Marquis sees that the head Shepherd is wearing his coat, it snaps him out of the spell and he quickly devises a plan to remove the coat and himself from Shepherd's Bush.
• In Myth Alliances, the Wuhses (natives of the dimension Wuh) are self-conscious, timid pushovers temperamentally incapable of saying "No" to anything. They have woolly hair, thick hooflike nails, and sheep's eyes.
• The Sheep Look Up. In this dystopian novel by John Brunner, the Green Aesop is how the world is doomed unless the "sheep" start paying attention to environmental issues.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Maesters are the doctors and scholars of Westeros, but their order is not really interested in pursuing new knowledge or improving technology, only immersing themselves in what knowledge already exists. They also firmly believe that magic does not exist and are implied to be involved in a conspiracy to suppress all knowledge of it. Archmaester Marwyn, one of the few people who believes in magic and studies it extensively, calls them "the grey sheep."
• In the fourth Thursday Next novel, Mycroft's mysterious 'Ovinator' invention is named after the term "ovine", meaning "sheep-like". It turns out to be a mind control device, which is being used by the Goliath Corporation in an attempt to control the British population during an election year.

Live-Action TV

• In Grimm, the first introduction we get to a species of sheep-like Wesen known as Seelengut (German for "kindhearted" or "good soul") seemingly involves them being manipulated by a Sinister Minister into covering up embezzlement from his church... however, it's Zig-Zagged, as it turns out that a pair of Seelenguter acted independently after being spurned by said minister, and stole from him with the help of the Victim of the Week; the episode ends with the two of them on a beach in the Caribbean with their ill-gotten gains.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: One sketch in the first series features a businessman (played by Terry Jones) meeting a shepherd (played by Graham Chapman) and observing the unusual behaviour of his sheep — some of them are nesting in trees, some of them are travelling the field by hopping on two legs, and some of them are trying to fly from tree to tree — and, being sheep, miserably failing and plummeting to the ground instead. The shepherd reveals that the sheep think they're birds, and even the ewes are trying — unsuccessfully — to teach their lambs to fly.
  Shepherd: Talk about The Blind Leading the Blind. [...] Trouble is, sheep are very dim, and once they get an idea in their heads, there's no shifting it.
  Businessman: Well, where did they get the idea from?
  Shepherd: From Harold. He's that most dangerous of animals, a clever sheep. He's the ringleader. He has realized that a sheep's life consists of standing around for a few months, and then being eaten. And that's a depressing concept for an ambitious sheep. He has hit upon the idea of escape.
  Businessman: Well, why don't you just get rid of Harold?
  Shepherd: Because of the enormous commercial possibilities should he succeed.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: In the episode "Reptilicus", Crow makes a bunch of Tom Servo clones but makes sure to program them with a "Sheep Mode" which, when active, makes them all obey him without question. This mostly comes up when Crow gets bored with the clones and melts them all down to scrap: they literally bleat like sheep as they walk off-screen to their deaths.
  Crow: Servos! Sheep Mode!
  Servos: YES CREATOR. BAAA. BAAA.
  Crow: Time to get melted back into 3D print cable!

Music

• "Counting Sheep" by The Crane Wives is about living as a Stepford Smiler in a totalitarian society and compares those who show Blind Obedience to the totalitarian leaders to sheep.
  When the wool is off your eyes
  You'll stop counting sheep at night
  'Cause you'll get your fill of them
  During the daytime
• The album Animals by Pink Floyd uses sheep as an Animal Motif for people who are unable to think for themselves. However, in the song "Sheep", it becomes a case of The Sheep Bites Back as they overthrow their oppressors.

Myths & Religion

• In the Torah and The Bible, Isaiah 53 and Psalm 44 use the metaphor of "sheep to the slaughter", making this trope Older Than Dirt. The exact meaning of these verses is a subject of debate, both within Judaism and Christianity, and between the two.
• In The Four Gospels, we read that when Jesus "saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd" (Matthew 9:36). This correlates to Jesus' own self-identification as "the Good Shepherd".
• "It is better to live one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep" is an oft-quoted Tibetan proverb, with tiger sometimes change to lion, and with different lengths of time.

Tabletop Games

• Played with in Laboozled!, an award-winning media literacy game set in the fictional sheep town of Green Meadows, where the player must prevent the sheep citizens from being mindless sheep in the face of manipulative news.
• Smash Up: The Sheep faction is mechanically themed around moving to bases that other minions move to, and repeating other minions' actions.

Video Games

• Bioshock 2: This seems to be the logic behind Dr. Sofia Lamb's Meaningful Name. A Totalitarian Utilitarian to the extreme, Dr. Lamb is a diehard collectivist whose main goal is to eliminate all forms of individuality and free will on the genetic level with the aid of DNA splicing. In the meantime, she builds up a cult whose members surrender entirely to her and follow her orders without thinking, making them "lambs"—or sheep—themselves.
• BitLife: In the Cult expansion, opportunities related to your loyal followers are marked with a sheep emoji.
• Cult of the Lamb:
  • Inverted. The titular Lamb starts a cult and has to imprint and reinforce conformist beliefs in all of his followers. He is also doing this all on the direct orders of an Eldritch Abomination which at the end of the game, you can choose to stay faithful to, or betray at the last second.
  • The Naturally Obedient trait is represented by an icon of a sheep. Recruiting a Worshiper with this trait gets you 10 Faith.
• For Honor: The main antagonist of the campaign, the warlord Apollyon, plans to start a war between the three factions in the game. While she admires the three factions, she is disgusted that they have chosen to cease fighting one another in favor of peace. She views those who are willing to fight as wolves and those who will not as sheep waiting to be slaughtered.
• Overlord: The first level brings you to a flock of sheep, to serve as the tutorial for collecting lifeforce and recruiting more minions. Your advisor, Gnarl, has a few disparaging comments:
  Gnarl: These fluffy creatures barely know they're alive, but you can still harvest lifeforce from them. [...] All they do is chew grass until something kills them! [...] Stupid, pointless creatures!
• Them's Fightin' Herds: Sheep are Extreme Doormats. Pom got volunteered as the Champion of the Meadow because she was the only sheep brave enough to have an opinion.
• World's End Club: The Big Bad's plan is to strip away emotions from humanity so they will never be a threat to Earth, effectively turning them all into "sheep". They want the Go-Getters Club to be humanity's "Shepards" to guide humanity in the event something happens to them. The alternative is killing humanity if the Go-Getters Club refuses to be the "Shepards".

Webcomics

• xkcd:
  • In "Sheeple", five people sharing a subway car have the same thought: "Look at these people. Glassy-eyed automatons going about their daily lives, never stopping to look around and think! I'm the only conscious human in a world of sheep."
  • This backfires in "Wake Up, Sheeple", when a Slogan-Yelling Megaphone Guy calls on the "sheeple" to wake up. It turns out that this phrase awakens the actual "sheeple," a horrifying race of underground sheep-man monsters, who vow judgment on humanity when they find out we coined such phrases as "like lambs to the slaughter."

Websites

• Neopets: In one of the April Fool's pranks, Nick Neopia refers to people who reject his conspiracy theories as "Babaas" (a sheep-like Petpet) to imply they're close-minded.

Western Animation

• The Berenstain Bears: In "The Double Dare", Brother Bear keeps getting dared to do bad things like stealing by Too-Tall, Scuzz, and Smirk, with the bullies saying, "What are you, chicken?" when he refuses. Farmer Ben tells Brother Bear that he doesn't need to follow the bad dares to prove he's not chicken, because "following along like a sheep" is just as bad. In the book version of the episode, he even calls them a "buncha sheep".
  Brother Bear: I'm not chicken! But I'm not a sheep either!
• Big City Greens: In "Animal Farm", rebellious rooster Cogburn complains that he should lead the farm animals instead of Phoenix the dog, calling them all sheep, "especially the sheep!"
• Bob's Burgers: In "Mother Daughter Laser Razor", Tina becomes self-conscious about her leg hairs and gets them waxed when she hears two girls mocking someone else for having hairy legs. She later comes to regret it and calls herself a "hairless sheep".
• Codename: Kids Next Door: During "Operation: G.R.A.D.U.A.T.E.S.", when the Delightful Children from Down the Lane fall victim to the Animalization Ray, they get turned into a flock of sheep, symbolizing how they follow Father's orders without protest and rarely, if ever, actually think for themselves. It later turns out that they were once operatives of the Kids Next Door, who were permanently brainwashed into becoming "delightful."
• Futurama: In "Future Stock", when '80s-style CEO Steve Castle takes over Planet Express, he starts out by separating the company into "sheep" and "sharks" — insisting that, "Sharks are winners, and they don't look back, 'cause they don't have necks. Necks are for sheep." He threatens to fire anybody who's a "sheep," and Zoidberg asks, "Which is the one people like to hug?" which prompts Steve to declare Zoidberg a shark (despite Zoidberg continuing to act like a total mindless bootlicker towards his new boss).
  Steve: I am proud to be the shepherd of this herd of sharks.
• Milo Murphy's Law: Played for Laughs in the episode "A Clockwork Origin". After Victor Verliezer is caught referring to people as "sheep" while ranting about how easy it is to control them, a few disgruntled stockholders see the Engineered Public Confession and decide to sell their V-Co stock, with one proclaiming "Yeah, I'm not a sheep. I'm going to do exactly what she was doing." Another stockholder starts baa-ing like a sheep before clarifying that he was trying to say "We have a baaaad connection", and promptly decides to sell his V-Co stock as well.
• Total Drama: For most of the first season, Lindsay is a Kindhearted Simpleton who does whatever Heather tells her to. In the confessional, Heather makes her opinion of Lindsay's intelligence clear.
  Heather: Who cares about friends? In this world, there are shepherds, and there are sheep. And Lindsay is a major sheep. [holds up her fingers near her head like sheep horns] Baaaaaaaah!

Real Life

• A popular anti-religious slogan: "The Lord is not my shepherd, because I am not a sheep."
• Sheep are a flock animal who will follow whoever they perceive as the leader of the flock to look for food, and unlike other grazing flock mammals like gazelles and deer, do not make any effort to defend territory. This made them easy candidates for domestication by humans, as sheep can see members of other species as a leader. They also require protection from shepherds and sheepdogs, as they are vulnerable to being preyed on by predators like wolves and coyotes, and have no way to defend themselves unless they're rams with big horns (note that most other farm animals don't require the same constant protection), which may have contributed to the concept of "sheep are dumb, mindless followers".
  
  Another contributing factor is the tendency sheep have to get themselves into a "circular stampede": when a sheep sees another sheep start to run, it will instinctively run after it, and then the sheep that see that sheep running will run after it. This continues as long as there are sheep that see another sheep in front of them running, and under the right circumstance it can lead to the sheep circling around a large object until the ones in front wind up seeing the ones in the back and start following them, at which point if they're not interrupted by something they will simply keep chasing after each other to the point of exhaustion.
• The standard Conspiracy Theorist jibe at the rest of the human race, all those of us who are outside the loop and either refuse to accept The Truth or else are content to graze on the grass They provide, is Sheeple. (Adjectives like "mindless" are optional.)

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