Too damn close to the madding crowd
Have we unwittingly perfected The Best Totalitarianism Generator ever?
Image: Shutterstock
Over recent days I have been pondering two things in particular: Human Consciousness and Crowds. So, nothing too broad or abstract there! It started out as part of ongoing ponderings about Business and Customer Behavior, but seems to have widened to encompass, as near as damn it, Life, the Universe and Everything.
Let me try to explain. Fairly briefly, I promise. And I’m going to put the caveat up front that I am not an academic. Far from it, in fact. My only claim to fame is that I have thus far managed to stay moderately sane (at least in my own opinion) for nigh on eight decades.
Human Consciousness
In earlier posts I have referenced the work of sociologist and philosopher Niklas Luhmann (1927-1988). For example, here. Central to Luhmann’s thinking was the point that humans do not communicate. Directly, that is. We do not communicate brain to brain. Rather, it is our communications that communicate.
That may sound a bit ‘So what?’ but, if you think about it, it’s quite important because it applies to ‘communications’ in the broadest sense, which ultimately means that the view that each of us forms of the world is a composite interpretation of what our senses tell us is out there - the brain’s best guess in any and every situation.
I won’t expand on this here beyond suggesting that, if it’s of interest to you, I strongly recommend you take a look at a book titled Being You, by professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, Anil Seth (1972-), and quoting two brief extracts from it:
I can only understand what’s in your mind if I try to understand how you are perceiving the contents of my mind. It is in this way that we perceive ourselves refracted through the minds of others. This is what the social self is all about, and these socially nested predictive perceptions are an important part of the overall experience of being a human self.1
So, for any of us, the fact that we interact with others is a crucial factor in our existence. If it was possible for you to live in an entirely isolated state …
… there would be no need for your brain to predict the mental states of others, and therefore no need for it to infer that its own experiences and actions belong to any self at all.2
This whole challenge of The Self versus The Other is a core fact of human existence, right from conception. For the infant, the mother is normally the first Other and the mother’s face is, so to speak, ‘the pool’ in which the infant sees its own reflection. A central challenge of human life is to break away from this narcissistic position and find ones own space in the relationship with Others.
This can be easier said than done, and probably the hardest place of all to ‘find ones own space’ is in a crowd.
Crowds
In the 1950s Polish-American psychologist Solomon Asch (1907-1996) came up with his famous Conformity Line Experiment Study3.
Image: copyright https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html
In this experiment, groups of eight people were asked to say which of three lines (A, B, C) matched the length of a target line. The answer is obviously C. However, unknown to the one genuine participant in each group, the other seven were stooges, and the genuine participant went last.
The seven stooges all confidently asserted the answer to be B. In response to which, only 25 per cent of the genuine participants gave the right answer. The other 75 per cent conformed to ‘the crowd’.
If that happens in a small group, how much harder is it to do anything other than conform in a crowd? As long ago as 1895, Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), a French anthropologist, psychologist and sociologist, studied the behaviour of crowds, likening the mental state of crowd members to a light hypnotic trance. To be clear, the crowds I refer to are not simply ‘people in large numbers’. Here’s how Le Bon put it:
Under certain given circumstances … an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, what I will call an organised crowd, or, if the term is considered preferable, a psychological crowd. It forms a single being, and is subjected to the LAW OF THE MENTAL UNITY OF CROWDS.4 (Emphasis as per the author’s original)
This is just an initial glimpse of what is obviously a huge topic, and one that I hope to expand upon in future posts. But, here, let me just connect it to the present day …
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) based a 1921 monograph, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, directly on Le Bon’s work. This included the idea that ‘mass formation’ gives the individuals who constitute a crowd a sense of extraordinary power, a dismissal of conscious norms, a loosening of inhibitions, and a predisposition to be affected by the emotions generated within the mass. Is this not something tat we are seeing in today’s world?
One of Freud’s followers was his nephew, Edward Bernays (1891-1995), sometimes referred as ‘the father of public relations’. Bernays used and further developed the ‘mass formation’ concepts in his pioneering advertising and propaganda work. From there, of course, knowledge of the techniques went mainstream in the advertising sector and in all manner of commercial and political activity.
“Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife”
That’s the complete line from Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (published 1751) crafted by Thomas Gray and later borrowed by Thomas Hardy. It speaks of the surge in urban living at a momentous point in history - the run-up period to what I’ve termed GR2 - The Great Reset that introduced The Enlightenment or Age of Reason. But note those two words that are usually missed - ‘ignoble strife’.
The period when Gray wrote the poem was one of dizzying innovation. After 1750, in textiles alone, there was the flying shuttle, the spinning-jenny, the water frame, Crompton’s mule and Cartwright’s power loom.5 I’ve suggested that the development that could be termed the icon of this Great Reset was Watt and Boulton’s perfected steam engine (1776) that heralded the full arrival of the mechanical-industrial age. Indeed, Matthew Boulton boasted …
I sell Sir what all the world desires: POWER.
And, of course, the frenzy of activity that all this entailed led to a rapid emptying-out of the countryside and a resulting build-up of people en masse in urban centres.
People en masse! Was this a pre-condition for some of the key events of the twentieth century? Indeed, was it a necessary step for the emergence of the most frightening outcome we can envisage? I believe so. The scene was set for totalitarianism.
To be honest, until very recently, I thought this 18th century Reset wholly good and right. After all, who could argue against pure Reason? And, when all is said and done, this was the Reset that gave us the unprecedented improvements in health and wealth that the West - and, increasingly, the world - has experienced over the past two centuries. Not least, it enabled an eight-fold increase in the human population.
So, all good stuff, eh? Well … no … maybe not.
Now, I wonder whether our latest Great Reset, triggered by the digital technology of which the Internet is a central feature, may have put the finishing touches to what might be termed The Best Totalitarianism Generator ever - the most efficient and potent mass formation machine the world has ever known.
Despite the scariness of it all, I remain cautiously optimistic. Why? Because all technologies are actually morally neutral. As an example, a motor car can be used as a weapon but, thank heavens, the incidence of willful misuse is very infrequent.
So, surely, it must be with digital communications tools? BUT, to assure it, we urgently need to fathom the best way to operate them for peaceful and wholly productive outcomes.
More on this topic coming soon.
Seth, Anil. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (2021)
Seth, Anil. Ibid
https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html
Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd: Study of the Popular Mind (1895)
Porter, Roy. English Society in the Eighteenth Century (1982)