* [Redo in progress. I'm redoing this essay over the next two days. I wrote the first draft in a hurry at the end of the semester with very little time, and I'm not happy with it. In the past I've done my work on a word processor and then imported it into the wiki all at once. This time I'm going to try working mostly on the wiki, so it may look a little ragged.]

The Key to All Mythologies

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

The Dream

I’ve been chasing a dream for the last few years. I've been obsessed with how mobs work. Think of the power I would have if I could get my hands on that piece of knowledge! There must be some way to understand the feedback loop between individuals and the large groups of people that somehow produces collective desires -- something like a practical understanding of Freud's super-ego, that institution that is at once an intensely personal and collective. I've been fascinated by the May 1968 strikes in France, where then Prime-Minister Pompidou broke up an coalition of worker's unions and bourgeois students by dissolving the representative assembly, which reminded the members of the coalition of their differences as they were forced to chose representatives. Now there's someone who knew how collectives behaved and how to control them! On a slower and more omnipresent plane, there's the entertainment industry that creates and profits from collective desires through movies and music.

I understand that there is are a number of differences between these two examples, but nevertheless they are both comprised of two elements: 1) There is a spontaneous desire by a large group of people. Its hard to get more specific than "desire", because in each case the what the crowd wants is a nebulous constellation of things. In the case of 1968, no-one knew what the strikers wanted. They wouldn't return to work and school after the government gave into what it thought their demands were. For example, one piece of graffiti read: "We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy." In the case of the entertainment industry, take Michael Jackson. Millions and millions of people came to his memorial service on the 7th, and new channels spend all day reminding us that he's still dead. I'm not sure what to call this other than a "movement" -- a mass of people that see or hear something that they desire in Michael Jackson, and are moved by him for whatever reason. 2) There are people or organizations that can't create the mass movement, but they can destroy it or shape it so that it becomes profitable for them. They use the undetermined nature of the desire to their advantage -- 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 in the case of Pepsi or MTV. If I could understand how this process worked, then I would be a super-ant in Arnold's anthill. I could change the world and usher in a new age where people's desires where no longer exploited or destroyed.

Black Holes

In looking for the mechanism that would explain this phenomenon, I've searched for authors that I thought attempted to create what George Eliot would call "The Key to all Mythologies" -- grand-unified theories of everything. I've 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?" -- kind of a really big version of What's the Matter with Kansas?. But after slogging through Anti-Oedipus and studying parts of Thousand Plateaus, as the authors recommend, and reading more understandable commentators and scholars, I must confess that I'm none the wiser, at least as far as having a clear and practical sense of how collective movements work. I've studied Spinoza's Ethics, which promises that there is a rational explanation for everything, and that to get to the bottom of something intellectually is discover your own power to act. So if I could get to the bottom of this problem, then I would know what I needed to do in order to change the world! And yet, here I am and I don't feel that my power to act has increased to the level that would 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 that lever that will allow me to move the world with minimal effort. The assumption was that I could understand masses of people like Newton understood gravity, and that this knowledge would both free me from the grasp of collective desires and those that exploit them, and allow me to act. I'm embarrassed to say that this implicit theory is a version of a naive belief that I've held for years. When I was younger, I thought that it stood to reason that: 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 if I look at what this theory actually does in the world, rather than what it says it could do, then I see that all grand-unified theories that attempt to grasp one fundamental aspect of the world – 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 that suck up intellectual energy that could be used for more modest projects.

Thought and Other People

Linked to the grand-unified theory mentality is the requirement that I change the world. The idea that I have to “change the world” 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. And yet the world still needs to be changed in many respects.

When I remove the desire for a grand-unified-theory and the commandment that I change the world by myself, I'm left with a more child-like world where the unexpected can happen again, and where it's OK to desire without worrying about what evil forces are creating or exploiting that desire. There are things that I do not know, and that's OK. There's a freedom to try things without completely understanding them yet. And most importantly, there are other people. If there are things in the world that are going to be changed, then they will only be changed by a lot of people. Barack Obama rode into office on the collective desire of a lot of people -- not his Columbia or Harvard degree or even his status as President of the Harvard Law Review.

So where does thought fit into this? What does intelligence look like when its not in the service of a Grand-Unified Theory? Well, to take the example of GUT thought that I started with -- the problem of collective desires -- instead of trying to master it with knowledge, we need to do it. The result of such thought wouldn't be a book that explained everything once and for all, but rather an unending discussion among people that engages collective desires rather than seeking to explain them away or study them "objectively". This is just a speculation right now.

--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