Escaping the Group Mind: The Hegemony of Homogeneity & the Cost of Autonomy
(Mirror Neurons, Autism, Soul Connections, & the Art of Language, Part 4 of 4)
“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.” —Anaïs Nin
There is a paradox to this written exploration, as there is a paradox to existence itself.
Only those who have managed to individuate from the collective, to establish their own boundaries and sense of a soul-self, can open to the soul’s transmission and empathically connect with others. For those who have not cleared out the programs of conditioning, empathy remains a drearily cognitive, “academic” affair: a signal for virtue where no virtue exists.
The soul connection that affective empathy entails is simply too threatening to the protective identity, for whom isolation and emotional disconnection is necessary to its psychic survival.
Paradoxically, again, the non-individuated being (the “NPC”) is an extension of the group mind, with little or no authentic, internal self moving it forward. From this lack of central psychic cohesion comes the fierce desire to protect what little sense of self the NPC does possess.
The French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau once said, “If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.” As Rene Girard never tired of asserting, until individuation occurs—or to the extent it is incomplete—our allegiance will remain with the mob, and we will always get it wrong (by siding with the persecutors).
The mob always gets it wrong because the mob does not have a genuine point of view.
Each member of a mob is being influenced and directed externally, by other members of the mob, raising the question as to who or what is really directing the mob.
The answer is—Legion.
Crowd Contagion
A crowd, by definition, is made up of many different points of view.
The crowd-viewpoint is that of the un-individuated psyche overrun by external influences, whether we call them “demons” or social conditioning. The crowd is a mind-mash-up in which the “lowest common denominator” rules.
The forms of individual creative and/or ritual expression which I’ve been exploring in this current series are designed—consciously or not—to dissolve this spell, by using a counter-spell: one intended to establish (or reclaim) an individual point of view. From an individual point of view comes autonomy, and vice versa. And autonomy is the means by which we move against, and away from, the herd.
When we are not anchored in an individual sense of self with an autonomous point of view, the contagion of the crowd inevitably takes us over, like the 1950s movie The Blob. Possession by the Blob is not merely common, it is by definition everywhere. And because it is everywhere, we don’t register its existence.
To maintain the illusion that the Blob is not everywhere—that we are separate from such “mass hysteria,” we like to cite extreme cases such as Nazism, Beatlemania, the mass formation of the 2020 “pandemic,” or Trump Derangement Syndrome (on both sides).
Were the teenage girls who got hysterical over the Beatles infected by a shared adoration of the Fab Four? Or were they infecting each other with their frenzied libidinal mind-virus? Or was there perhaps a third, hidden factor—whether Tavistock or Theodore Adorno or the LSE cultural engineering programs—covertly manufacturing a cultural phenomenon, with the aim of generating mass hysteria?
However it happened, the Beatlemania phenomenon demonstrated how one perspective is forged out of many, turning individual teenage Beatle-maniacs into a mob, or Blob, indistinguishable from one another. Yet factually speaking, those hysterical girls are all positioned at different points in space, so it is not really one perspective, at all, however uniformly they are behaving.
None of those girls would act in this manner if they were alone, or if no one around them was acting this way. But together, they feel “safe” to express their collective experience, and to release the libidinous energy bottled up inside them.
It’s likely that whatever interests were vested in creating Beatlemania actually hired young girls to act this way, knowing it would lead to mimetic contagion. In which case, the original mimetic models weren’t actually “mad” about the Beatles, at all, but only playing a role for money.
If Beatle-maniacs aren’t responding to the pop group, or even the music, so much as to each other, then the hysteria has little to do with the Beatles, and “Beatlemania”—as an apparently unified perspective—is non-existent. It takes the finger for the moon, the longing and hysteria for the object projected onto. A “group mind” is triggering all that energy, but not the Beatles (or even Tavistock); and once those feelings have been stirred, it may as well be the Monkees.
This is why parodies so often become what they parody.
Wisdom of Crowd vs Stupidity of Mob
What exactly is the group mind?
First, a dichotomy.
The lowest common denominator (dumbing down) that makes of a crowd a mindless Blob is contrasted by something called the “wisdom of the crowd.” This is the idea that the collective opinion of a diverse and independent group of individuals is said to provide a better judgement than that of a single person, no matter how “expert.”
Aristotle on crowd-wisdom in Politics:
It is possible that the many, though not individually good men, yet when they come together may be better, not individually but collectively, than those who are so, just as public dinners to which many contribute are better than those supplied at one man’s cost.
Trial by jury is an obvious example of trusting the wisdom of the crowd (as compared to bench trials which rely on one or two judges). At a 1906 country fair in Plymouth, 800 people participated in a contest to estimate the weight of a slaughtered ox. Statistician Francis Galton observed that the median guess, 1207 pounds, was accurate within 1% of the true weight (1198 pounds), suggesting that a crowd’s individual judgments could be modeled as a “probability distribution of responses” from which the truth could be calculated.
This principle has become the central strategy of information sites like Quora, Reddit, and Wikipedia (where I gathered most of this info)—all of which rely on collating human knowledge. It is also one element (though only one) in the Kubrickon thesis, about the harvesting and repurposing of human attention, emotion, and psychic energy into an “A.I” hyper-program, via the internet.
So when does mob mentality become crowd wisdom, and vice versa? One key seems to be (that buzz word of the millennium) diversity.
A crowd gets smarter—behaves in more intelligent, less Blob-like ways—when the individuals that constitute it think as individuals, i.e., have a unique personal perspective and some sort of autonomy. This means they have less in common with each other, rather than more.
This is the obvious problem with so-called cults: when people are brought together by a shared interest, as that shared interest gets amplified by the numbers, it takes over the group and becomes a kind of shared obsession that provides purpose and meaning to those individuals’ lives.
The very qualities that brought those people together (their uniqueness) then begin to be seen as obstacles to the smooth-functioning of the collective. “Groupthink” takes over, and autonomy becomes an increasingly undesirable quality.
As long as there are sufficiently distinct qualities and interests among members of a group, it is this diversity of perspectives that prevents the members from being taken over by the group mind. This is because we do not imitate people we perceive as different from ourselves. By the same token, the more the similarities are emphasized, the more imitation spreads, the more the group becomes homogeneous.
Homogeneity is essential to hegemony, which is why cult-like organizations flourish within society, and attain wide-reaching influence, as compared to those that allow for participant autonomy.
Personal Interlude
It is for this reason that I am at least partially reconciled to a seemingly utter incapacity to grow my “audience.”
Over thirty years creating online media and writing books, I still have roughly the same number of people paying attention, at any given time. People come and go but the size of the audience remains roughly the same. Of these few hundred, I am lucky if I can get ten together for an actual meeting.
Right now, my paying subscribers have been steadily decreasing since December, even while free subscribers continue to rise. (I have no explanation for this, and I welcome anyone’s theories or guesses about why it’s happening now.) I am well aware of the trap of chasing numbers, since it directly relates to the attempt to establish and increase “consensus,” uniformity, and homogeneity.
Yet, since this is my only means of earning, it is hard to separate the superfluous need for validation from the very practical need for income; and when the latter is in jeopardy, it adds an unfortunate element of stress to what is otherwise an enjoyable day-job.
So how to herd goats without turning them into sheep?
The stupidity of the crowd—mob/cult mentality—is when everyone agrees with each other, whether to wear the same red hats, use the same buzz words, listen to the same music, vote for the same candidate, cancel the same racist or transphobe, or lynch the same Negro.
A mob is formed from a gathering of people who are open to persuasion, who have been persuaded to gather in order to be persuaded. It is made up of people unconsciously seeking refuge in the (imaginary) safety of the group mind.
Of sleepers looking for a shared dream-state.
Of unformed fetuses seeking a psychic womb.
Every Matrix is made up of NPCs: people lacking a strong sense of reality or identity.
Such non-individuated beings (who by their nature will always make up the vast majority) do seem to experience themselves as distinct individuals, however, and—with supreme irony—band together to reaffirm their individuality (e.g., LGBTQ pink-haired clones).
A cult—e.g., human society—exists via the forming of a group identity that validates its reality for all who submit to its dictates, standards, and values, and who agree to become agent-cogs within it.
Invariably, this requires a focal point, whether it’s the Beatles, Trump, covid-19, or climate change. The focal point—and the agreement to prioritize it, whether as a positive image to venerate and promote or a negative one to denigrate and oppose—leaves no room for an objective voice to challenge the centrality of this image. A child to point at the Emperor’s wobblies.
Collectively, such a group has the power to shame, shout down, cancel, expel, or destroy anyone who questions the groupthink that maintains the illusion of the Emperor’s new clothes. It is this power that mobilizes a mob, and why every mob has a natural propensity towards violence of one kind or another, built into its momentum.
Personally, I have an ingrained distrust—and disgust—for anything I think smacks of groupthink. It has caused my ejection from at least two different spiritual groups (and more than once, from the second group). It makes sense, therefore, that I would, at an only partially conscious level, be pushing against any kind of uniformity in my output, or sustained consensus in my audience.
What has been most consistent in my work, you might say, is my stubborn lack of consistency.
Recently, in an interview with Leafbox (a regular attendant of the Manopticon online weekly men’s meeting), Leafbox asked what characterized my work over the decades. All I could reduce it to was “the quest for the truth,” followed by an itinerary of recurring subjects, and lens with which to examine them (conspiracy, occultism, movies, psychology, metaphysics, theology, confessional).
While it might seem to the casual observer that I keep changing hats, jumping from one subject to another and back again without apparent rhyme or reason, to me it is all consistent. I am not keeping to a path, or even an animal trail, so much as following scents that take me where they take me, regardless of whether there is any visible path to follow, or whether my own moves are consistent enough to create any sort of trail for others.
There isn’t much of a Horsley “party-line,” or a set of recurring themes, that readers and listeners can learn by rote, repeat as mantras, or return to regularly to brush up on, or get a fix of, after a time away (my idea of a “second matrix” is perhaps the closest to a recurring theme).
This doesn’t mean I don’t try to cater to readers, to bump my numbers and such; but I almost invariably fail because the spontaneous impulse to follow a new scent usually overrides the desire to create a recognizable brand, via consistency, repetition, and predictability.
Instinctively, I suppose, I am giving to others what I want for myself. Freedom.
The only leader who can be trusted to lead is one who doesn’t allow anyone to follow him.
For reasons outlined above, my desire for numbers is always going to be at odds with my aversion to groupthink. Ironic, then, that I am also trying so damned hard—and so consistently—to run online group meetings, and finding it almost impossible because there’s no unified idea among my audience of what I am doing (or why they are here in the first place).
And so I find myself periodically swinging between angry disgust with a passive, faceless audience, and delightful appreciation for the few individuals with the autonomy and chutzpah to emerge from the parasocial Blob of the “audience” and pass through the 4th wall (just past the Paywall), into an environment that, ironically, might most easily (though superficially) be compared to a “cult” (i.e., a weekly men’s meeting with an ostensible leader) .
What sees me though these never-ending and contradictory undulations of frustration and desire is a sustained and seemingly inexhaustible love of writing, speaking, and communicating (or communing) with others, regardless of who (or how many) are on the receiving end.
And, to return to the thread of this current series, even if there isn’t anyone there at all.
If the soul is the one true love I am serenading, the question is: who can mirror this?
Audio of first half (as gift to free subbers).
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