WORK IN PROGRESS

This endless revision process feels like psychoanalysis -- there's something I want to write about and the last two versions of this paper have been more about barriers to writing about that subject than about the subject itself. I'm in the process of revising this paper a third time following my conversation with Anja at the bottom of the page. I'm trying to narrow my subject significantly. Once again, it'll look a little ragged for a while. I'm not sure what the schedule is for comments anymore (if there is such a schedule).

May 1968

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.

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."

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.

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,

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?".

--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

Patrick - While I really enjoyed reading this, and I think you've got some really interesting thoughts, I kind of feel like you have two essays going here - one on mob mentality, and another one on your realization that changing the world does not require you to first develop a theory to explain everything. In my opinion, you're not really doing either one justice. I think the connection is that your wish to understand the workings of collective desires has previously served your wish to change the world by yourself (right?) but this is not a self-evident connection. You lose me on the logical leap from mob mentality to theory of everything. Why does mob mentality have to explain everything? Is it not valuable to understand even if it only explains SOME workings of the world? At the end of your essay I am left a bit confused.

On a completely different note: I'm not sure that the Michael Jackson hysteria fits into your analysis - are you sure that this is an example of mob mentality, or is it rather just a bunch of individuals each mourning Michael Jackson because they feel like they have a personal relationship to him? (maybe you've read that study about how we care about celebrities because our brains are tricked to think that they are part of our "tribe")

I think exploring the "herd mentality that lies dormant in everyone" would be a valuable excercise. What brings it out? Under what circumstances does it spread? How do we prevent those who know how to manipulate it from using it for detrimental purposes (think Nazis or Pol Pot)?

Hope you're having a good summer!

--AnjaHavedal, 14 July 2009

Yea, I see what you mean Anja. Thanks for the honest criticism. I've been really struggling with narrowing down my topic in these 1,000 word assignments. I'm going to cut out the "theory of everything" stuff. Although it was cathartic to write, after looking at it for a week I agree with you that the only thing that ties it to the first topic is a perhaps idiosyncratic personal issue. I'm going to do some research on a particular example of the mob phenomenon. That should produce a more focused and substantial essay.

-- PatrickCronin? , 16 July 2009