E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.
It’s not the crowd’s fault at all, because there was no way you could even move, it was just like a mass loss of control.
The Travis Scott concert was sold out. He had a reputation for whipping up a crowd. The crowd surged toward the stage. When one person moved, the people around them had to move.
 |
| Concert crowd, before the stampede |
Trump had a reputation for whipping up crowds and getting people to chant. "Lock her up. Lock her up." and "Stop the steal. Stop the steal." He told supporters to come to D.C. "It will be wild," he tweeted, and it was.
We have known from earliest history that crowds are different from individuals. They are capable of mass panic or world-conquering power, depending on whether the crowd maintains leadership and cohesion. When shields were locked together and men operated as a group they were unstoppable. Each shield protected the soldier and the one to his left.
Modern armies understand that drilling as a unit is essential to maintaining cohesion.
I have been in dangerous crowds. The beginnings of marathon races are dangerous. I was a slow runner, so I lined up near the back, but there were others, even slower, behind me. When the starting gun fires, the crowd of runners--20,000 in Rome, 30,000 in Paris--starts moving toward the starting line. The street underfoot is littered with discarded clothes: Trip hazards. The people behind me cannot stop or move to the side if I were to stumble. We are warned to go slowly but we are all excited in the moment. It is starting! We are here! Go. Go. Go. The crowd shuffles too fast. The crowd is an undisciplined unit.
The end of the race it is entirely different. People have spread out and I am nearly alone among the laggards.
We are affected by people crowded around us. It is not an illusion and it isn't subtle. We take cues and the response is emotional, not rational. Laughter is contagious. Panic is contagious. Rhythm and repetition have power. People respond to drumming, and chanting is a form of group drumming. The woman chanting here at a New Hampshire Democratic convention in 2015 energized her Hillary supporters.
Each clip below is just a few seconds.
Greg Walden faced an unhappy crowd in Medford in 2017. The crowd got affirmation from one another. We aren't merely right, we were righteous--damned right!
Many of the January 6 rioters are explaining their actions as having been part of a crowd. An Ohio defendant said:
I one hundred percent know better than to do what I did that day. . . . I do apologize for my individual actions that day. I did get caught up in the moment.
An ongoing theme of this blog is that humans are not as rational as we think we are. We make political decisions with our guts, then justify them with rationalizations. Being in the presence of crowds that are excited and acting in unison exacerbates this effect, thereby better exposing it. I have observed it. I have felt it.
I have mentioned to others the danger of being in the midst of a marathon starting lineup, and people have asked me a sensible question. Since my running time is based on a chip attached to my shoe and there is no disadvantage whatever to lining up safely, at the back, why don't I?
The answer is irrational but very real. When I am in the middle of that group of runners, ready for the adventure of the run, I get caught up in the moment. It is exhilarating. I feel extraordinarily alive.
[To get daily delivery of this blog by email, go to: https://petersage.substack.com and fill in your email address. The blog is free and always will be.]
13 comments:
CNN posts today that R congressman Paul Gosar posted a meme encouraging violence against AOC and Pres. Biden.
Today’s post from Peter reminds us of how much more dangerous Trump could have been, with his ability to whip up a crowd.
The implicit racism that I saw in his messaging was insidious. Imagine had he invited his crowds to March into minority neighborhoods or LGBTQ urban areas.
The pograms of pre Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, and the race riots of the Jim Crow era remind us of how close we came to murderous civil unrest.
Playing on people’s fears and bigotry is an incredibly effective political tool, and extremely dangerous.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/09/politics/gosar-anime-video-violence-ocasio-cortez-biden/index.html
Interesting topic. I would differentiate between the crowds you describe.
The runners are lined up in preparation for movement in a specific direction. It's orderly and unlikely to cause anyone harm.
The concert was arguably a poorly planned event that had potential for trouble; rap, drugs, lax crowd control all combined for a potential tragedy waiting to happen.
Trump's was a mob..."a large crowd of people, especially one that is disorderly and intent on causing trouble or violence."
There's a difference.
Intent.
Grateful Dead concerts were a highly conscious version of this phenomenon. I wrote about it on my web site:
One of the main points of those concerts for me
was how we would all sync on the music
and merge into one thing,
at which point the music wasn’t really music anymore,
it was something more like
the EEG waves that keep a nervous system in sync.
And then these huge, amazing higher level “thoughts”
would come rolling through that group mind,
and all of us “neurons” would get to experience them.
Obviously, we need to be selective about the crowds we join.
As Peter says, “Trump had a reputation for whipping up crowds.” So did Hitler.
“Laughter is contagious. Panic is contagious.” So is madness. That’s why a seditious maniac remains leader of the Republican Party.
Interesting subject and interesting comparison/contrasts too, including in the comments. Mr. Sage's cool Rome pics and descriptions jogged my memory of a relevant entry I have, nearer to the 1/6 end of the spectrum.
I left Brussels quite early the morning of the European/UEFA Cup final in 1983. Already the stores and street level offices were heavily boarded over. Some barricades had small holes through which to conduct business.
Italian fans can be rowdy in their way, but the city was dreading the arrival not of Juventus fans but twenty or thirty thousand young men in Liverpool red.
Imagine law enforcement much less citizenry realizing they simply could not control concerted action from surprisingly cohesive drunks who communicated by chant.
I reached my destination in England well in time to watch the now-infamous match on TV. Liverpool fans pressed their rivals into solid stadium walls, killing 39.
With Obama, I wanted to be part of a dream for a better and more noble idea of America. I joined the crowd 80 thousand plus in Waterfront Park. I never felt let down in the years that followed. I was surprised that the rest of America couldn't see the vision and possibility. The January 6th riot and siege of the United States Capitol was a crowd willing to be lead by the Big Lie. Trumpers still believe and that is with us now. We're sucked into a deeper and darker space of human instinct to be brutal to our own countrymen and women. The question is now, how to you get MAGA red shirts the tear off the t-shirts and how away their MAGA hats in disgust of the outright falsehoods they've been fed?
John F,
You would have to establish trust with the MAGA people first. Otherwise, there is no way they will listen to you.
A good way for the Democrats to start establishing trust would be to stop calling the MAGA folks racists. And then reverse policies that shipped most of their jobs overseas. And then adopt climate policies that won't lead to shipping the rest of their jobs overseas. And maybe drop advocacy of extreme left-wing cultural ideologies that only appeal to a small college-educated/indoctrinated segment of the population.
Or, if that's too painful, learn to accept the electoral losses that are going to accompany the continuation of this behavior.
Mr. Trigoboff—
Tough to say it any better than you just did. Reach out. Really. Leaders on the traditional left not so long ago did NOT want to come off as self-referential, sanctimonious prigs and prats. Anything but. That’s precisely who and what they rejected. Now they simply assert that they are the new and proper arbiters of monolithic moral judgment, while confusing politicized social scientism for science. Meet the new boss….
LD,
Thanks.
At least the previous elites, exploitive as they may have been, actually needed the working class and were not inclined to heedlessly and carelessly eradicate them.
Meet the new boss,
Worse than the old boss...
MAGA folks aren't racists. They're just people who formed a personality cult around the biggest blowhard in the birther movement. Nothing racist about that.
Trump spent four years spewing bold-faced lies while his MAGA hatters cheered him on. We're talking about people who still claim he won the election. How do you establish trust with those who wage war on truth, not to mention our democracy?
Peter, and commenters here like Art, still obsess about the specter of the pathetic Jan. 6 riot and their what-ifs about Trump mobs roaming the land slaughtering their enemies. Quite reminiscent of the Curry County Sheriff etc. spreading baseless rumors about "busloads of Antifa" barreling down their rural highways to loot their impoverished small towns.
While you invoke Soviet pogroms and the like, you misdirect public attention while the real looting of the country by the top 10% corporate rentier class continues unabated. Limousine liberals like Peter Sage are conveniently served by distracting us from a direct assault against the rigged taxation system that protects his class' wealth while leaving future generations of workers (of all races, sexualities and so on) to suffer as impoverished landless peasants. Pelosi and her ilk care more about their daily insider trading and getting the SALT deduction for their cronies than they do about dental and vision care for Medicare/Medicaid recipients and a proper livable minimum wage for their servant class.
But hey, at least a Navy vessel is named after Harvey Milk.
Mike,
When every other political power center has nothing but scorn for you, you will be attracted to someone who at least does not overtly scorn you. That's the appeal that Trump has for his followers.
How do you establish trust with them? Pay attention to the ongoing abuse that led them to their current position. Stop the abuse. Actually care about them.
Even if the abusers take my advice, it will take time for it to work. But it's the only way. There's a reason why the following saying is a joke: "The beatings will stop as soon as morale improves." The joke is that morale will actually never improve under those circumstances.
The abuse is going to have to stop first.
Michael T:
Have you ever listened to Trump and his chumps? They are the ones hurling the abuse. Meanwhile, Democrats finally passed infrastructure legislation that will benefit all of us, including them. Do you suppose that will pacify them? I doubt it.
Post a Comment