…..nor fact of communicating excommunication of smallpox of a secrets of power to get the cause by words the heard the instincts of the crowd organism I’ve been thinking about this here and there a little but especially in the last couple of months and it occurs to me the problem with society what is it what is it about what’s happening in society that just seems so ugly and of itself you know and I realized that it’s not a problem of individuals it’s not that as individuals were stupid it’s not that there’s too many stupid people you know there’s actually a lot of pretty smart people out there and you know a few who are not like Jimmy did do the thing we our our society has courtesy and respect for those people special considerations for what their situation might be and and by and large I think we have a very informed and literate and capable society a lot of people in society have these positive tendencies right especially compared to the way society was but nonetheless you know it’s well known that the individual person can think rationally they can respond to rational discussion rational thought they can think things through if they choose to and maybe even some small units families groups of friends maybe even a board of directors can still think rationally and approach things in a thought-out sort of way but with just a few more people that becomes in many ways no longer possible once you get to the point of having a crowd well thinking is out the window there’s nothing rational at all happening in a crowd and a crowd it’s all swept away and if it’s driven by anything its emotions there’s almost an inability to think not of the individual peep in that crowd they remain just as intelligent and capable as they otherwise were but in their participation with that group in that crowd energy it’s something else altogether and no matter how many intelligent individual thoughtful people you have in that crowd that is not what’s driving decisions there’s almost an inability to think at all as a crowd organism there’s no chance of individual person swaying thought making decisions you know appealing to the crowd the crowd is a beast in of itself and it’s it just doesn’t work that way we’re reduced in that beast crowd organism and we have to sort of succumb to its energy or get away from it this crowd you know it’s instinctual it’s carnal and has animal appetites it’s impulsive and in a very clinical scientific laboratory sort of way it’s easily stimulated and satiated and directed and misled now some time ago I was reading just a little bit of W trotters instinct of the herd during times of war and peace which he had been writing in like the 1909 ish kind of era but which he published during World War one because it could be really utilized at that time it was a time of experimental thoughts about group behavior and a time when science really first began to be industrially organized in our current civilization by the government by the big heavy handed players you know it really started to come together and there’s a deep probing into the psychology of the individual and of the individual as part of a group and it really started to be looked at in a major way so I did read a little bit from that book and I never got around to doing a report in part really because a lot of the language felt kind of antiquated and it wasn’t easy to follow it wasn’t really nothing jumped out I kind of got the overall picture but I really didn’t dig a whole lot further into it for that reason but it generally confirmed of things I had already learned about and suspected of crowds and the organizations that might study or manipulate those crowds I walked away in conjunction thinking about some other facts and I research cybernetics especially and it occurred to me that in a herd of animals and a herd of people you could have one individual animal standing apart from the crowd you know but within earshot of them maybe in an advantageous position on top of a hill and shout at them and try to appeal to them and yet they might never be heard by them much less listened to and the idea started to occur to me that with the sinking of the signal that takes place electromagnetically and otherwise you know there was a real tendency to get in sync with the rest of the crowd and sort of yield and submit to the desires of the mass assembly of things there’s like a natural tendency to do that that I think plays out in extremely direct and obvious way and animal herds especially when they migrate and everything but a little bit more subtly in most cases in our human civilization but it again becomes very evident at major crowd events when in a different life people went to sporting events and downtown to witness major happenings end of Wars and and big appearances and things you really can see that kind of energy come out of the crowds and there really can be a direct sense of like needing to go along with the crowd and all things being equal the concept of entropy and information theory concept in entropy tells us that in a world of chaos you know it’s overall somewhat unexpected to see things carefully organized that fall into place but once they tend towards that direction a sort of negative and entropy where you get repeated common possibilities where things settle into greater and greater levels of organization and things get very typical and expected you know things that are not spontaneous get kind of reduced and it’s like a redundant bit of him for me and it’s just one more brick in the wall and perhaps in a communication sense you know these repeated messages so many of the same they get very boring and and in theory something new something eccentric a free radical of information if you will floating around and refusing to be conformed to put it into place might be or seems like it should be something that really stands out and would naturally grab people’s attention because it’s different and atypical and in that way something unusual something that really hasn’t been explored yet hasn’t been said yet kind of has a natural value it’s a treasure after a while when so many things become typical and redundant and known you know something new is valuable if classes and classes for generation of people learn the same facts about science and English and history and whatnot and each year somebody learns those facts new and masters the course and they can now tell you the same story that everyone else learned well that’s not usually very interesting to people because it’s just a regurgitation it’s just a repeating of something they were already told to think right but a new idea that hasn’t been taught something that might shake things up you know that naturally should have an appeal but in heard behavior I’m not sure you see this kind of concept of entropy where odd unique information has that sort of inherent value and the sort of crowd behavior heard behavior it seems to me that there’s a sort of disinterest in the voice of the information of the outlier the outlier the standout is the last voice that adherence to the group would hear out and stand around and listen to in fact the people in the crowd might not be able to hear them at all and as such these outlying voices was such a different and in congruous signal from the dominant sort of sync I’ve it’s almost like they’re not they’re all there’s that loud humming from the reinforced center of this crowd that begins to establish itself and create its own sort of gravitational energy that pulls people more and more in to the redundancy of that message had the expense of anything unique and interesting to say and as more and more sort of huddle around that signal and the outlying signal is drowned out in spite of its merits but besides noise there are other factors which can keep the information from reaching its destination in attack know something is lost and destroyed not the merits of that conversation but of the crowds ability to consider background and conditioning of their seating apparatus may so differ from that of the transmitter that it may be impossible for the receiver to pick up the signals without distarch such an idea from an outlier would be very very difficult for a well-attended crowd machine to hear much less listen to almost at all I mean metaphorically but almost maybe literally with the way the electromagnetic signals work the current flows it ceases to flow it flows as flowing as the human movements may seem they are actually the product of these countless yes no decisions communicated with great speed to and from all parts of the body the channel is the nervous system at any rate more recently when I started thinking about doing this as a report I was flipping through Gustav Laban’s the crowd a study of the popular mind and as published in 1895 which makes it even a little bit older than the Joseph Trotter Hurd book from the early 1900’s but the language at least to me felt a lot more modern and direct and on point here and so I kind of started putting down the Trotter book and picking up the crowd book Gustav Lebon because it’s so relatable and this book really speaks directly to the idea what’s happening here the crowd problem that we have even as it has been recombined and showed in new forms digitally and been transformed through technology and with respect to the media the central idea to the crowd I think is that it is an organism its own organism that forms and is sustained in my opinion at least under a media signal [Music] within the spectrum and the broadband of a media signal when we watch them turning and Wieland how often have we wondered what holds such birds together in their flight communication is that which links any organism together it is communication that keeps a society together and though these people seem unaware of each other’s existence neither looking nor speaking one group meets and filters through the other with hardly two individuals coming in contact so constant is the flow of information and so complex the web of communication that keeps them apart and holds them together I feel like that’s where the crowd lives and under this media signal is issued somewhat regularly supposedly authoritative ideas what exactly makes the crowd listen to those ideas rather than others you can sort of sort that out for yourself but once an authoritative idea is established I think a crowd begins to gather there but it doesn’t begin to gather for reasons that have merit that are true that are right you know they began together because of the strength of the signal on the person putting out that signal and drawing that crowd in if so if you allow yourself to sort of think of it as the spectrum beam the thing if it is being broadcast at a certain string is somehow almost guaranteed to form this crowd it draws bugs to it like a light so everybody’s a little bit here and there and everywhere in the larger plantation of things but when that signal is turned on when the night light goes in you know bugs are just drawn to it and they congregate and then there’s a mass there and they start to feed off the same energy and well that’s the crowd thing that I’m talking about at any rate Joe Joseph from the freedom link he was the one who originally recommended to me Gustave Laban’s the crowd and with good reason so here’s just a couple passages from that and the point in the book is reiterated over and over and over again so you’re gonna get the point and I don’t think I have to read a huge volume of it to get that across it applies differently maybe to different points of time and different situations but you can recognize it in the context of the present if that’s where your focus is applied so coming in from chapter one book one the mind of crowds he opens with what he identifies as general characteristics of crowds psychological law and their mental unity what constitutes a crowd from the psychological point of view a numerically strong agglomeration of individuals does not suffice to form a crowd special characteristics of psychological crowds the turning in a fixed direction of the ideas and the sentiments of individuals composing such a crowd and the disappearance of their personality the crowd is always dominated by considerations of which it is unconscious the disappearance of brain activity and the predominance of modular activity the lowering of the intelligence of the complete transformation of the sentiments the transformed sentiments may be better or worse than those of the individuals of which the Crouse composed a crowd is as easily heroic as criminal but the point is that there’s a disappearance of their individual personalities that’s a synopsis of chapter one he talks about on page 24 the disappearance of conscious personality the bond says the disappearance of conscious personality and the turning of feelings and thoughts in a different direction in which they are the primary characteristics of a crowd about to become organized do not always involve the simultaneous presence of a number of individuals on one particular spot thousands of isolated individuals may acquire at certain moments or under the influence of certain violent emotions for example as a great national event the characteristic of a psychological crowd so it can happen even when you’re home alone depending on what you’re reacting to it will be sufficient in that case that a mere chance should bring them together for their acts to at once assume the characteristics peculiar to the acts of the crowd at a certain moment half a dozen men might constitute a psychological crowd which may not happen in the case of hundreds of men gathered together by accident page 25 [Music] page 27 the most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following whoever be the individuals that could pose it however like or unlike their modes of life occupations character intelligence the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel think and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel think and act where he in a state of isolation there are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being or do not transform themselves and acts except in the case of individuals forming a crowd the psychological crowd is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements which for a moment are combined exactly as the cells which constitute a living body that are formed by the reunion of a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed of each of the cells singly so they’re saying the crowd comes together exactly like a body page 29 is precisely these general qualities of character governed by forces which we are unconscious and possessed by the majority of normal individuals is precisely these qualities I say that in crowds become common property in the collective mind the intellectual aptitudes of the individuals and in consequence their individuality are weakened the unconscious qualities obtain the upper hand this is all sort of the consequences that play out from the carl jung collective unconscious situation this very fact that crowds possess in common ordinary qualities explains why they can never accomplish acts demanding a higher degree of intelligence the decisions affecting matters of general interests come to by an assembly of men of distinction but as specialists in different walks of life are not sensibly superior to the decisions that would be adopted by a gathering of imbeciles so in other words a crowd of very intelligent highly informed people wouldn’t necessarily do any better off than a gathering of imbeciles people who couldn’t seem to understand anything you know because the crowd takes over their individual qualities it doesn’t necessarily combine them the truth is they can only bring to bear and comment on the work and hand the mediocre qualities which are the birthright of every average individual and crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated is not all the world is so often repeated that has more wit than Voltaire but assuredly Voltaire that has more wit than all the world if by all the world crowds are to be understood page 30 and a crowd every sentiment in every act is contagious and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrificed as his personal interest to the collective interest then there’s the issue of suggest ability to understand this phenomenon it’s necessary to bear in mind certain recent physiological discoveries page 31 we know today that by various processes an individual may be brought into such a condition and having entirely lost his conscious personality he obeys all the suggestions of the operator who is deprived him of it and commits acts an utter contradiction with his character and habits the most careful observation seem to prove that an individual emerged for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself either in the consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which were ignorant in a special state which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the Hypnotizer the activity of the brain being paralysed in the case of the hypnotized subject the latter becomes the slave of all the unconscious activities of his spinal cord which the Hypnotizer directs at will the conscious personality has entirely vanished will and discernment are lost all feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the Hypnotizer such also is approximately the state of the individual forming part of a psychological crowd again it’s a psychological crowd you could be part of that crowd from home from millions of miles away even without the interaction of technology it’s a state of identification in think page 32 the individuality is in the crowd who might possess a personality sufficiently strong to resist the suggestion are to a few a number to struggle against the current again I think it’s an electromagnetic current that carries the crowd and while they’re at their height when they’re in the middle of stampeding you could not shout loudly enough to get virtually any of them to listen to a rational point that you might be trying to make all you could do in a stampede is run with it or get out of the way so you’re not trampled page 32 we see then that the disappearance of the conscious personality the predominance of the unconscious personality the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction the tendency immediately to transform the suggestion ideas into X these we see are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd he is no longer himself but has become an otamatone who has ceased to be guided by his will isolated he may be a cultivated individual and a crowd he’s a barbarian that is a creature acting by instinct an individual in the crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand which the wind stirs up at will even before he has entirely lost his independence his ideas of feelings have undergone a transformation the transformation is so profound as to change the miser into a spendthrift a skeptic into a believer the honest man into a criminal etc the conclusion to be drawn from what proceeds is the crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual but again the crowd essentially cannot hear the isolated individual no matter how loudly they shout and no matter how good their points are starting in Chapter two Lebon talks about the sentiments and morality of crowds and he brings up as bullet points impulsiveness mobility and irritability of crowds the crowd is at the mercy of all exterior exciting causes and reflects their incessant variations the impulses was the crowd obeys are so imperious as to annihilate the feeling of personal interest premeditation is absent from crowds and crowds are credulous and readily influenced by suggestion it says the obedience of crowds to suggestions the images of vocht in the mind of crowds are accepted by them as realities the crowd beast is comprised of various individuals in cell form but which are in obedience to that beast emotional sway and tendencies the images of vocht in the mind of crowds are accepted by them as realities they take whatever they’re told as emotionally true and respond crowds do not admit doubt or uncertainty and always go to extremes their sentiments are always excessive he also notes the servile nature the sir bility of crowds in the face of a strong Authority the momentary revolutionary instincts of the crowd does not prevent them for being extremely conservative crowds instinctively are hostile to changes in progress he says on page 40 in consequence a crowd perpetually hovering on borderland of unconsciousness readily yielding to all suggestions having all the violence of feeling particularly to beings who cannot appeal to the influence of Reason deprived of all critical faculty cannot otherwise be an excessively credulous the improbable does not exist for a crowd and it is necessary to bear this circumstance well in mind to understand how people are so out of their minds I mean to understand the facility of which are created and propagated the most improbable legends and stories how do people believe the stuff that they are told and react to it the way that they do the creation of legends which so easily obtain circulation and crowds is not solely the consequence of their extreme credulity it is also the result of the prodigious perversions that events undergo in the imagination of a throng the simplest event that comes under the observation of a crowd is soon totally transformed a crowd thinks in images and the image itself immediately calls up a series of other images having no logical connection with the first we can easily conceive this state by thinking of the fantastic succession of ideas - which are sometimes led by calling up in our minds any fact our reason shows us the incoherence that there is in these images but a crowd is almost blind to this truth and confuses with the real event what the deforming action of its imagination has superimposed thereon a crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective it accepts as the real the images evoked in its mind and they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed fact so that’s in a nutshell how you can get a group of fairly intelligent people educated literate etc living in the real world to some degree having a decent sense of judgment nevertheless succumb to a crowd and believe something that really doesn’t make any sense logically that is even provably false or unlikely and yet believe it as if it’s fact and as if it is the most prime directive of the group that must be respond - they could take a mythical but exciting event and with the slightest suggestion of a reaction to it and its importance they can go all the way they can make that first and foremost in their mind and the crowd will take action dangerously it accepts as real the images invoked in its mind I mean that’s really the problem right there but the crowd beast is most dangerous because it lives under illusions it operates in that subconscious suggestible state and doesn’t even have access to reality facts rational thinking as the individual does it’s dangerous because it will react to the illusions as if they’re true no matter how farcical and unlikely I mean you’ve seen it and Gustave Lebon you had some other famous quotes I looked up the masses have never thirsted after truth whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim and that’s the other side of it these people caught up in a crowd these people who feel belonging to a society because of the myth that is being sold they will turn on anyone who tries to dissent against it and who tries to destroy their illusion or undermine it or point out how flimsy it is that person becomes their victim they turn on that person however literally the masses have never thirsted after truth and whoever could supply them with illusions is easily their master that’s an unsettling thought crowds are influenced mainly by images produced by the judicious employment of words and formulas there are social engineers creating these images that the crowd lives and dies by and we’ve got to pierce through that restriction and understand it for what it is men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it says Gustav Lebon one of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance the stronger the belief that this is what you have to do you have to stand this many feet away you have to wear this the greater it’s intolerance you didn’t wear it men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it accepts as real the images evoked in its mind there’s a love of adherence to policies and so many things that are no more bona fide than that they are broadcast they’re not proven or vetted out or understood to be good ideas they’re just things that are said and broadcast and accepted by the crowd as truth they’re images and illusions that are sold to the wrong people for the wrong reasons but it’s that sense of belonging the blind participation in that crowd has come so much in this modern world to have its own draw its own magnetic pull and a dangerous one you could tell in the public mind you could see it wash across the faces of half-conscious people wearing masquerade disguises everywhere moving their legs left before right and then repeat waiting in lines everywhere dutifully standing and moving to the square that they’re told to move to you could see how people are being shaped and molded into something through this and that getting used to those reactions is part of the shaping this news hasn’t been easy to deal with I know a lot of people have been taking it hard you know I’ve had a few hard days over it the news is all bad I saw that they coined the word doom scrolling and the solutions not immediately apparent you know I understand feeling depressed about it but I don’t think it is completely total it maybe doesn’t feel like we can individually turn things around but who’s to say that’s really true I think there’s a real strength and individually standing for something especially if it’s to say no in the face of everyone else automatically saying yes or at least saying hold on I don’t know stay well out there and stay independent but there are also many examples of times when the message has been conceived and the signal sent long in advance of understanding or acceptance of the code employed in the case of Galileo or Socrates it did not in time matter that the receivers of their time were not tuned to receive their signal the ultimate transmission of such a message represents communication of a very complex art