#mob behavior

Mobs and their hideous effects

I read with some interest last night about Twitter’s reaction – or Twitterverse’s reaction, as we now say – to an open letter about free expression. It’s interesting how rapidly the definition of disallowed speech has expanded over the last several years. Even the stage musical Hamilton, applauded by so many only five years ago, comes under attack this Fourth of July for its portrayal of the…

Horton Hears a ‘Why’…FINALLY!

And thus, another layer of the racism onion conundrum is peeled.

I have wondered for years, nay, decades why racists disavowed racism.  I just could not put it together.  It took me about half a century to realize that racism was a power game, and not about misunderstandings about levels of humanity, or competencies, or whatever.  Race and racism are social constructs, and the understanding of…

Shock value rocks frames of mind In large groups With simple words. Alerts About wrongdoing echo through the masses, Arming them with pitch forks and more info To spread the word.

They’ve found blood In charted seas of numbers, facts, and Disconnection; honing in on their prey, They tack on the message with tactless Prattle and names— Numbers and bosses, sins and damnation.

In most civilized communities public opinion condemns debauchery and drug addiction as being ethically wrong. And to moral disapproval is added fiscal discouragement and legal repression. Alcohol is heavily taxed, the sale of narcotics is everywhere prohibited and certain sexual practices are treated as crimes.

But when we pass from drug-taking and elementary sexuality to the third main avenue of downward self-transcendence, we find, on the part of moralists and legislators, a very different and much more indulgent attitude. This seems all the more surprising since crowd-delirium, as we may call it, is more immediately dangerous to social order, more dramatically a menace to that thin crust of decency, reasonableness and mutual tolerance which constitutes a civilization, than either drink or debauchery.

True, a generalized and long-continued habit of overindulgence in sexuality may result, as J. D. Unwin has argued,*( J. D. Unwin, Sex and Culture, London, 1934), in _lowering the energy level of an entire society, thereby rendering it incapable of reaching or maintaining a high degree of civilization_. Similarly drug addiction, if sufficiently widespread may lower the military, economic and political efficiency of the society in which it prevails.

When left to itself, a society generally manages to come to terms with its favorite poison. The drug is a parasite on the body politic, but a parasite which its host (to speak metaphorically) has strength and sense enough to keep under control. And the same applies to sexuality. No society which based its sexual practices upon the theories of the Marquis de Sade could possibly survive; and in fact no society has ever come near to doing such a thing. Even the most easygoing of the Polynesian paradises have their rules and regulations, their categorical imperatives and commandments. Against excessive sexuality, as against excessive drug-taking, societies seem to be able to protect themselves with some degree of success.

Their defense against crowd-delirium and its often disastrous consequences is, in all too many cases, far less adequate. The professional moralists who inveigh against drunkenness are strangely silent about the equally disgusting vice of herd-intoxication—of downward self-transcendence into subhumanity by the process of getting together in a mob.