MOB RULES

Other people; mobs; rape; sexual assault; Criminal Anthropology; the Eurovision Song Contest

Social Psychology, in essence, is the study of other people and how they affect our behaviour. That’s why you see so many social psychologists in the media these days. Other people are everywhere lately. Other people just can’t believe their luck; they can’t credit the influence they’re having. Other people are probably just as surprised as we are.

The first social psychologist was a fellow named Gustave Le Bon[i]. His book, The Crowd, appeared as long ago as 1895. Other people were around even as long ago as that - and they were making just as much of a nuisance of themselves. Le Bon had been a witness to the Paris Commune of 1871. Perhaps the sight of marauding Parisians (historically, not that uncommon) was partly responsible for the direction his thoughts took later in life. I shall never forget my own Social Psychology lecturer doing an impersonation of Le Bon in research mode, nipping quickly to the window, twitching back the curtain, then dashing back to his quill and parchment to scribble down another batch of scandalised observations. You can imagine Le Bon’s thoughts: ‘Other people... Zut alors!’

Bring a large group of people together, Le Bon suspected, and you’re courting trouble. If three was a crowd, four meant a mob. Just as the accumulation of biological cells creates the human body, so does the accumulation of individuals create a new entity: one that’s complex enough to possesses its own unconscious. (Le Bon’s idea went on to influence Sigmund Freud, who is far too often credited with the invention of the word ‘unconscious’.) Individuals fall victim to a process akin that of contagion in medical science. Each member sinks swiftly into the morass of the group mind. Imagine, if you like, an elevator full of neat and tidy office-workers when the floor turns instantly to quicksand. The famous social psychologist, Philip Zimbardo, (he of the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment) coined the obvious term word for this. He called it ‘deindividuation’. It means that mob’s members simply lose their own values and their own beliefs. ‘Me’ becomes ‘we’.

Deindividuation implies anonymity, which is a dangerous gift. The mob is emotional and primitive. Freud might have said that it abandons its super-ego and surrenders to the impulses of the id. You may remember a previous newsletter in which I wrote about the ‘Explosively Violent Frontal Lobotomy’ suffered by a railroad construction worked named Phineas Gage. He, too, seemed to lose control over his behaviour. He could no longer restrain his own impulses. In Gage’s case, psychologists trace the cause to actual physical anatomy rather than Freud’s ‘structures of the mind’.

Atavistic. In the nineteenth century the word was far commoner than it is today. It means going back to an earlier stage of evolution. The idea was one of the main planks of Criminal Anthropology (also known as the ‘Italian School’ of criminology). Criminal Anthropologists thought that criminals had both the mental and the physical properties of ‘primitive human beings’ – in other words, they did not have the same evolutionary advantages that you and I enjoy. An anthropologist could distinguish criminals from modern Europeans not only by their lawlessness but also by their asymmetrical faces, eccentric ears, and left handedness.

According to Le Bon, crowds were atavistic in the same way as left-handed criminals. And the bad news didn’t stop there. Their leaders were ‘morbidly nervous excitable half-deranged persons who were bordering on madness’[ii].

You can tell already this newsletter is going to mention the Eurovision Song Contest, can’t you?

No social psychologist, scrolling through my X.com feed the other morning, could have failed to be filled with a sense of Le Bon-ian pessimism.

First came that viral video – no doubt you’ve seen it – from the Bronx. A man appeared to lasso his victim with a belt and drag her out of camera shot between some parked cars, where he’s said to have sexually assaulted her. Once police started to investigate, they discovered they’d already arrested Kashaan Parks five previous times. Now he is faced with charges of rape, assault, sexual abuse, and strangulation. This time, his mother appears to have convinced him to turn himself in[iii]. And then there was a second video apparently showing outraged Bronx residents confronting Parks. The mob in this second video seems to be trying to get Parks away from police. God knows what they might have done if they’d succeeded, but you can bet it would have been pretty atavistic. (I wrote ‘appeared’ above, since the truth of the matter still seems difficult to ascertain.)

Life advice from one user of X.com: ‘Find someone who protects you like the NYPD protects a convict (Kashaan Parks) who raped and choked out a woman in the Bronx’.

Immediately below the Kashaan Parks video was another…and another…and another, all of them from Malmö. This was the morning of the Eurovision Song Contest. For readers unfamiliar with it, I should explain that the Eurovision Song Contest is an annual celebration of glitter, vacuity, and tastelessness. Every year, a panel of judges plus far too many presumably rational citizens from across the continent pool their votes to award a prize to the most glittery, vacuous, and tasteless of what seems like about a hundred thousand entries. There appear to be more wannabe musicians deluded enough to enter the competition than there are spectators self-flagellating enough to watch it. You’d think every nation in Europe would try to lose - but no, they don’t. For reasons unknown to almost anyone, some of them seem to try to win. And when I say ‘every nation in Europe’, I also mean, um, Australia and Israel.

Israel…now there’s the rub. The beautiful main square of Malmö produced enough data in two days to allow Gustav Le Bon to write a sequel. Even Greta Thunberg put in a short cameo appearance before getting arrested. Whatever view you take of the Middle Eastern conflict (and let’s not get into that on Crime & Psychology, at least not yet) you’ll surely agree that death threats to a twenty year-old woman who turned up to sing a song appears, well, atavistic. Particularly upsetting was the sight of more than one hundred of Malmö’s finest brought in for no job other than to get Eden Golan to and from the competition safely. (I was going to write ‘in one piece’, but that usually facetious expression seemed a bit too literal in context. As one commentator remarked, ‘The crowd may claim to be anti-Zionist rather than anti-semitic, but what do you think would happen if you were to walk through Malmö wearing a Star of David?’)

Doubtless, no individual member of the mob, picked at random, would honestly wish any serious harm to come to Eden Golan. But bring a group of such individuals together and you have a whole other story.

I’ve always been of the opinion that we human beings are a pretty decent bunch on an individual basis, but you don’t want to run into more than three of us at a time.

Ken Kesey – author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, guru of LSD, guiding spirit of sixties counterculture– was once invited to an all-hippie march on the Oakland Army Terminal. The idea was to block shipments of army material that were bound for Vietnam. Organisers invited Kesey ‘on the assumption that the author of Cuckoo’s Nest had to believe the Vietnam War was folly. What the organisers of the march hadn’t foreseen, though, was that Kesey also thought that marches and speeches about seizing power were equally fallacious’[iv].

A few weeks earlier, Kesey had attended a Beatles concert at Cow Palace, San Francisco. It was no pleasant experience for him. As if their individual cells had joined together to create one large organism, the audience was screaming as one even before the Beatles hit the stage. As in Malmö, mob rule meant that music became a side-issue. Kesey collected his Merry Pranksters and lit out for the territories.

Now Kesey’s mind returned to Cow Palace. Different venue, different crowd, same mind-set. He took out his harmonica and played ‘Home on the Range’.

‘You’re playing their game,’ the famous novelist told the many-celled creature before him. ‘We’ve heard all this and seen all this before, but we keep doing it … I went to see the Beatles last month … and I heard 20 000 girls screaming together at the Beatles … and I couldn’t hear what they were screaming either … But you don’t have to … They’re screaming Me! Me! Me! I’m Me!’

That seems like the scream of the individual, but of course it’s not. It’s the scream of the mob. ‘Me’ becomes ‘We’.

Best just turn one’s back on it all, and, as Voltaire advised, tend one’s own garden. As any ex-hippie knows, that’s exactly what Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters ended up doing, far away from it all in a hidden bit of Oregon.

What did I do myself after I closed my X.com app? (It’s always a pleasure – isn’t it? - closing the app. Why do we keep opening them?) I turned to Spotify and a playlist of rock songs I’d made to remind me of being young. It picked up on the very Black Sabbath track that gives this newsletter its name. ‘If you listen to fools,’ Ronnie James Dio advised me, full of wisdom and bombast, well, you can predict the rhyme.

I took his point and spent the entire day not joining a mob.

Want to keep yourself clear, too, from too can hold yourself clear from the pernicious influence of the mob, the mafia, the monstrous, and the malevolent?  Simply bash the bright blue buttons below. Beat them like bongos. Every click helps keep this newsletter going.

Both pictures - Malmo & Ken Kesey - courtesy of WikiMedia Commons. References provided partly out of academic habit, but also so you can chase up anything you find particularly interesting.

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[i] OK, there’s some controversy about that. There always is. Let’s just go with it for a moment.

[ii] Le Bon, Gustave: The Crowd – a study of the popular mind (second edition), Dunwoody, Georgia, pp112-140 Available here: Gustave Le Bon: The Crowd: Book II: Chapter 3: The Leaders of Crowds and Their Means of Persuasion (brocku.ca)

[iii] NYC Rapist Turned In By Mom After Belt Choking Video Goes Viral (blackenterprise.com)

[iv] Stevens, Jay: Storming Heaven – LSD & the American dream, Paladin, London, 1989, p400