The Key to All Mythologies -- A Confession of Delusions of Grandeur

"You don't have to change the world." -- Eben during one of our last classes

The Dream

For the past few years I've been interested in mobs. I've been fascinated by the May 1968 strikes in France, a spontaneous movement that ended then Prime Minister Georges Pompidou broke up the unlikely coalition of worker's unions and students. He dissolved the National Assembly, an action calculated to expose the divisions in the strikers' ranks by forcing them to chose new representatives. Now there's someone who knew how groups behaved and how to control them! May 1968 was a dramatic movement by a group of people, but more mundane examples exist. Take the substance of the entertainment industry, exemplified by the life and death of Michael Jackson. In both these examples its unclear what the mob wants. In 1968 no-one knew what the strikers wanted. They wouldn't call off the strike after the government and the union representatives agreed to a %25 increase in the minimum wage and a %10 increase in average salary. One piece of graffiti read: "We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy." Millions and millions of people watched Michael Jackson's memorial service on the 7th, and new channels still spend all day reminding us that he's still dead. These people see or hear something that they desire in Michael Jackson. They're moved by him, but it would be hard to explain why.

In each of these examples there are other people that, while they don't participate in collective desires, know how to control them. They destroy them if they become dangerous, or shape them so that they become profitable. They exploit the undetermined nature of the desire to their advantage -- either forcing it to define itself within a pre-existing political structure and thus diffusing the movement (in the case of May 1968), or adding their own content to the desire and profiting from the association (Pepsi or MTV in the case of Michael Jackson).

Think of the power I would have if I could understand how mobs worked! There must be some way to understand the feedback loop between individuals and the large groups of people that somehow produces collective desires and inhibitions -- something like a practical understanding of Freud's super-ego, that institution that is at once intensely personal and collective. If I could understand how this process worked, then I could change the world.

Black Holes

Something basic to human nature is happening here -- some herd-mentality that lies dormant in everyone. In searching for the mechanism to explain collective desire, I've been drawn to what George Eliot would call "The Key to all Mythologies" -- grand-unified theories of everything. I tried to read Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the result of a collaboration between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari that promises to answer the question "why do people most desire their own repression?". I studied Spinoza's Ethics, which promises a rational explanation for everything, and assures me that when I get to the bottom of something I will discover my own power to act. The idea is that since this herd-behavior is so fundamental, I simply need to get a handle on it and then the steps I need to take to harness it will fall into place naturally. And yet, I still don't know how to change the world.

I can't blame my failure on these authors. The fault lies in the way I've been reading. I've been looking for a lever and a place to stand that will allow me to move the world with minimal effort. I've assumed that I could understand masses of people like Newton understood gravity, and that this knowledge would teach me how to act. Now I'm embarrassed to say that his theory is a variation of an old theory I adopted in high-school: 1) the world is made up of matter organized into particles; 2) there must be some smallest particle; 3) there must be some laws that govern this particle's movement. Therefore, if I knew what the smallest particle was and how it moved, then I could reconstruct and completely understand the world. I could master the entire world through knowledge.

But looking at what these theories actually do, rather than what they say they could do (if only I knew the secret formula!), it becomes clear that Grand-Unified-Theories that try to reduce the world to one fundamental process, be it the movement of an elementary particle, or the relationship between a group and the individuals that make it up – easily become black holes whose main function is to suck up intellectual energy that could be used for more modest projects.

Other People

The desire to change the world, all by myself that is, is a intellectual and spiritual heat-sink as well. As a practical matter, the weight of the way-things-are is just too great for me to lift by myself, no matter how much history or philosophy or law I absorb.

So how to think without trying to find a theory of everything? And what does it mean to not have to change the world all on your own? Let me start by rethinking the phenomenon I was trying to understand in the first place. The spontaneous desire formed in crowds is first of all a desire to be with other people and to feel that other people exist. It is also the desire to feel the inherent power that is present in a mass of people. So I don't have to change the world, but the world still needs to be changed -- and it is only going to be changed by a lot of people. The task then, is to participate in a movement, rather than to control one.

--PatrickCronin

Patrick - I just read this paper for the first time. I really think you're onto something, and I look forward to reading and discussing your final version. Like you, I have been thinking a lot about "mob thinking" or group mentality over the last few years, and I agree that understanding this better is the key to a lot of societal problems. In my third paper, I tried (but so far failed, will rewrite this weekend) to explore this issue as it relates to crime. What fascinates me about this is that a seemingly minor change in social norms has the power to trigger a surge in mob thinking. Our personal code of ethics is flexible and changes depending on our environment. I recently read the book "Machete Season," which is a fascinating exploration of the Rwandan genocide from the eyes of the killers - mostly farmers who were somehow "mobbed" into hacking their neighbors to pieces with machetes. How is it that most people tend to lose their capacity for independent decision making when swept up in a collective movement? How can we, as individual members of a collective society, maintain our ability to act intelligently?

--AnjaHavedal, 8 July 2009

Patrick - I too think that there is much to learn here. I think that the turn away from 'grand theories of everything' is very productive. A rejection of grand unifying theories is one of the underpinnings of the Pragmatism movement itself, which formed the foundation of much of the early reading this semester. If you are looking for curious pieces on group thinking and how it gets manipulated, I would recommend Bill Wasik's article describing how and why he invented flash mobs. There is a link here but Harpers charges for content so I would go to a library and get the March 2006 issue; the article is short. The world is changed by small courageous acts, not by grand unified theories.

--AndrewCase, 8 July 2009

Thanks for the support. Anja, I'm not sure how we can maintain our ability to act intelligently in groups. There's probably not a simply answer. But I don't think the answer is to completely forgo group thinking. I just don't think that that is something we can do. I think that we are inevitably part of a social body, and if we cut ourselves off from it in the name of reason or intelligence we will die. So the answer must lie within the group itself. Perhaps the distinction is between good and bad group thinking. I wonder what kind of horrible but subtle change in the way those farmers communicated caused them to kill their neighbors.

Andrew, I'll take a look at that article. Just looked at Wikipedia on Flash Mobs. Looks interesting.

--PatrickCronin, 8 July 2009