How mob mentality takes over
Why do people lose their individual mindsets and join the flow of a mob? Have they been swayed by tribal momentum to do things they otherwise would not do? It’s as old as human history.
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Transcript
Listen to this quote: “We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”
This is from Charles MacKay, who published “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” in 1841, a book that, 180 years later, is as poignant as ever. MacKay talks about times in history in which people seemed to go rather mad, collectively, following a trend or a social phenomenon with blind fervency. In MacKay’s time, these were events such as Tulipmania in 1636, in which investors began to madly purchase tulips, pushing their prices to unprecedented highs. The average price of a single flower exceeded the annual income of a skilled worker and cost more than some houses at the time. As prices drastically collapsed over the course of a week, many tulip holders instantly went bankrupt.[1]
The South Sea Bubble, which happened between 1711 and 1720 was another example of speculation mania in which investors got caught up in the hype of the South Sea Company which had been founded in 1711 to trade with Spanish America, on the collective belief that everyone would make a huge profit.
There have been many of these events over the centuries, and one can think of more recent ones including the dotcom bubble, housing bubbles, and some cryptocurrency rallies as modern day examples.
MacKay was looking at a concept of crowd mania in which biases and fervor take the place of clear thinking. When it grows quickly, it – at some magic point – hits a tipping point which creates an often unstoppable momentum.
Group hoarding is a great example of this. During the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, shoppers descended en masse to their local supermarkets to stock up as much toilet paper as they possibly could. Some hadn’t even planned to do this when they set out to do the groceries, but when they arrived at the supermarket parking lot and saw others wheeling out mountains of two-ply tissue, it spurred a contagion of a different type – an echo chamber of panic that continued even after representatives from supermarkets and the paper companies tried to reassure them that manufacturing and delivery of tissue products had not been interrupted, and there was enough paper for all customers.
When someone sees a someone doing something unusual – a specific activity that triggers a panic response, they are likely to do the same thing. And so it magnifies into a mania.
The madness of crowds enjoyed a banner revival in the years leading up to 2020, culminating in the shocking takeover of the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. The perpetrators themselves may have been relatively small in number, but they represented many millions of people who, steadily over the past two decades, have slipped into a trance of collective ideology, and individual conviction in which beliefs and biases, many exceedingly bizarre, are magnified by specific branches of the media and social media, and which delivers to each person under their spell the ultimate permission to give up any form of critical thinking and fall into a pit of abject belief.
How can people fall into this pit? Well, for a start, believing is always easier that learning. Learning requires the capacity to question and demands energy – there is effort needed to look around and seek out confirmation from other sources. When you choose to believe, it becomes much easier. One can accept the facts as given. Once that happens, any people who hold other ideas are seen solely as the enemy to be disbelieved and eliminated.
Once a person has fallen under this spell, symbols appear everywhere. Like seeing the image of Christ on a piece of toast, the convert sees only what they wish to see, and among those things will be further confirmation of those beliefs. Stories become the only facts required. They satisfy a desire for the comfort of knowing without having to expend further effort or expose oneself to opposing viewpoints.
This, perhaps, is humanity’s greatest failing, because the madness of a crowds gives birth to its own self-justification – a belief that what is being done is right and is good because it supports the belief. This is a form of circular logic that actually lacks logic. Despite the fact that every one of us has access to all the knowledge of the world literally at our fingertips in our phones, many choose instead to follow abject belief to often violent ends, whether this is over the value of tulips four centuries ago, or the dangers of 5G technology or vaccinations today.
When MacKay and others label this behavior as madness, they use that word in part because along with the reflexive commitment to an icon, religion or belief comes the absolute hatred and persecution of anyone who opposes this thought. Often the activities of these mad crowd dwellers come wrapped in excessive symbology to act as a focal point. One may think of crowds in any country who literally wrap themselves in a flag and use that as the start and end of their arguments.
To seek an answer, to think critically, even to admit that an opponent or opposing idea may be right are concepts that a maddened crowd will not dare to accept. In fact those who try to inject such discourse into a social movement do so at great peril. They madness of crowds does not stop short in seeking to silence those who do not wholeheartedy agree.
In 1948, the writer Shirley Jackson wrote a short story called The Lottery. Spoiler alert here. The story is about a lottery that is held every year in a small rural American town which every person in the town draws a slip of paper from a hat, and the one who draws the slip with a black dot on it gets stoned to death, ostensibly to bring a good harvest. The story draws attention to the concept of mob mentality, in which people who might never have thought about committing violence upon another find themselves swept up in a crowd activity that defies logic. I always recommend this book to people who wish to see just how easy it is for the madness of crowd to spread, like a virus, to everyone around.
Yes. Just like the coronavirus that continues to wreak havoc on the world more than 12 months on, one individual can infect many others through close contact of ideas, especially when those ideas have a heavier emotional payload than a rational one.
This brings me to the concept of chauvinism.
Chauvinism is a term that today is almost exclusively affiliated with sexism or gender bias, specifically of men against women. But before it became the label of the misogynist, it had a wider ranging application. According to Wikipedia – and other sources – chauvinism per se is the belief in the superiority or dominance of one’s own group or people, who are seen as strong and virtuous, while others are considered weak or unworthy. It can be described as a form of extreme patriotism and nationalism, a fervent faith in national excellence and glory.
The origins of the word are attributed to the story of a French soldier who served under Napoleon and who maintained a fanatical Bonapartist belief in the messianic mission of Imperial France. His single-minded blind devotion to his cause, despite neglect by his military faction and harassment by its enemies, started the use of the term.
So, chauvinism, in its most generic term refers to fanatical devotion to a group or a cause, along with hostility toward outsiders or rival groups. Such actions are entirely evident in individuals and groups in any country, in which the connection with any concept has mutated into something that patently rejects an opposing view or balanced argument, out of fear of, and anger toward, that opposing view. Anti-vaxxers always come to mind first when I think of this. The chauvinism of this action on an individual level mutates into crowd madness based on the momentum of emotion and never on fair and balanced argument.
Science proves difficult for chauvinists to understand because science is not based on belief. The entire basis of the scientific method is that other scientists can independently prove something that another scientist has discovered. A scientist does not want to be believed in. The work of a scientist must be able to withstand rigorous testing from others. It is the polar opposite of faith.
When we look back at examples of the madness of crowds throughout history to the present day, there may be times when it is mere greed, rather than chauvinism, that draws crowds to act. The meteoric rise of the price of Bitcoin, for example, was a kind of bandwagon madness that everyone wanted to be a part of even if they didn’t really know what Bitcoin was. But chauvinism starts as an individual conviction that becomes an obsession, and when magnified and drawn together, through the unfiltered webs of social media, becomes fertile ground for mass madness.
I find it fascinating that human beings still do this after so many centuries of evolution and development.. In earlier, pre-literate ages, it was totally understandable that a group of people could be whipped into a mass frenzy through the passions of a charismatic leader or a religious authority, and a great many wars and oppressive acts stand testament to this. In those days, knowledge, information, and literacy were tightly controlled and available to only a very few, and that was highly effective in keeping the masses in line.
But as I said earlier, we now live in an era in which everyone of us literally has the knowledge of the world at our fingertips, through our phones, but rather than access it, many millions – in many countries and for all types of reasons – have chosen instead to use social media to magnify their belief rather than learn.
This brings me to the third of these related mysteries, that of willful blindness, in which people take risks despite being fully aware of the dangers. Or worse, perhaps, while remaining inexplicably unaware of such dangers. One simple example of this is car theft; cars that are stole solely due to the fact that people leave their spare coded key fob in plain sight, in the cupholder of their car. This means that thieves no longer have to learn how to hotwire ignition systems – a tough task these days – but simply need to break in and drive away. Decades of research into how to make cars less stealable by creating sophisticated coded keys, wiped out through simple laziness or ignorance.
Science has endured centuries of brutal oppression by established religions, who have used inquisitions and torture to kill and frighten those who sought to understand the world and the universe around us. Science gave human beings the ultimate power: the ability to stave off death from famine, and then from biological threats including polio, measles, and even coronavirus. And despite this these, achievements are regularly rejected or vandalized by those who “don’t believe in it” or who don’t want it to happen.
The same applies to cybersecurity, the branch of IT that is waging a constant war against criminals and hackers, and who still must contend with people who to use passwords such as 123456. These people should know better, but they remain willfully blind to the obvious risks. The owner of a small business may feel too small to be a target of a sophisticated cybercriminal and will choose to stay willfully blind to the fact that every business, large or small, is connected to every other business, and that the tools of cybercrime travel through these interconnected networks just like viruses travel through our shared air.
Again, it is easier to take the risk, stay willfully blind, to not trouble oneself with facts and the effort that such facts will demand. It is easier to dash into a convenience store, leaving the car’s engine running and a dog or kid in the back seat, than it is to undertake the effort of turning off and locking up. Emotion once again overrules the logic of the moment. The fear of the effort, or the mere fear of thinking about what bad could happen, is pushed aside. Too much effort. Too much pain.
The madness of crowds. Chauvinism. Willful blindness. These are all related concepts that drive people blindly forward, first individually, and then in larger and larger crowds, using the fuel of emotion and passion, usually from the side of anger and hate, into a place where nothing matters but the feeling. We have seen a great deal of this in the last couple of years, not just in the US, but all over the world. Anti-maskers, anti vaxxers, anti-5G, pro-Trump, pro-Brexit.
It serves as a reminder that as a species we have learned to change so much of our world, right down to the atom and the gene, but as a living organism, we remain captives of our emotions.
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Until next time, I’m Steve Prentice. Stay safe. Thanks for listening.
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[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tulipmania.asp
Tags/Keywords: mob mentality, January 6, bubble, mania, madness of crowds
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