Amerika

The Right-wing trope of the week appears to be “mass formation” as expressed by Dr. Robert [[[ Malone ]]] related to the COVAIDS-19 panicdemic:

Furthermore, the overlords that own them — Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street, whatever — these large massive funds that are completely decoupled from nation-states have no moral core or moral purpose. Their only purpose is the return on investment. That is the core problem here, and the fact that we as a society have become grossly fragmented…

When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in the sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it. And then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis. They literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.

And one of the aspects of that phenomenon is the people they identify as their leaders, who come in and recognize their pain and say “I alone can fix this for you,” they will follow that person through hell…

Anybody who questions that narrative is immediately attacked. This is what has happened. We have all those conditions.

In other words, mass fear leads to a state of panic which in turn leads to illogical action en masse by the herd.

Fortunately for the Right, we at Amerika have been covering this for decades. The rest of them are just catching up.

However, none of them have identified the real root, which is individualism, or a fatalism that believes nothing in the world is worth experiencing and therefore, the individual must come first before all else:

It made more sense to call out the pathology — like a panic, fad, trend, stampede, dancing sickness, or mass delusion — for what it was, namely a form of individualism turned into collectivism through socializing and peer pressure:

The belief, whether known in language to its bearer or not, that the individual should predominate over all other concerns is Crowdism. We name it according to the crowd because crowds are the fastest to defend individual autonomy; if any of its members are singled out, and doubt thrown upon their activities or intentions, the crowd is fragmented and loses its power. What makes crowds strong is an inability of any to criticize their members, or to suggest any kind of goal that unites people, because what makes for the best crowds is a lack of goal. Without a higher vision or ideal, crowds rapidly degenerate into raiding parties, although of a passive nature. They argue for greater “freedom.” They want more wealth. Anything they see they feel should be divided up among the crowd.

Crowdism strikes anyone who values individual comfort and wealth more than doing what is right. People of a higher mindset leave situations in a higher state of order than when they were found. This requires that people form an abstraction describing how organization works, and create in themselves the moral will to do right, and thus embark on a path that is not accessible to everyone: the smarter and more clearsighted one is, the greater likelihood exists that one is realizing things that an audience of average people have not yet comprehended. For this reason, Crowdists hate people who leave situations in a higher state of order than when they were found. These people threaten to rise above the crowd, and thus fragment the crowd by revealing individual deficiencies again, and that steals the only method of power the crowd has: superior numbers and the illusion that everyone in the crowd is in agreement as to what must be done.

In short, a crowd does not exist except where underconfidence unites people who, being unable to lead on their own, find solace in the leadership and power of others. They want to be in control, but they are afraid to lead, and thus each person in the crowd delegates his authority to others. The crowd therefore moves not by choices, but by lowest common denominator, assessing each decision in terms of what all people in the crowd have in common. Predictably, this makes its decisions of such a base nature they can be guessed in advance. A crowd derives its momentum from the need of its members coupled with their fear of their own judgment.

Few understand Crowdism because they insist that since it acts as a collective, its impulse must be toward a collective, like altruism or ideology. In reality, a Crowd is formed from those who lack any direction and are unhappy, aimless, and looking for something or someone to blame.

In support of this, I pointed to a few specifics that I picked up in middle school or high school as anomalous events in European history that, if slowed down and made into background context, would explain the normal conditions of low performance by high intelligence groups:

In the sixteenth century, people became afflicted with pathology of dancing until collapse:

In July 1518, residents of the city of Strasbourg (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) were struck by a sudden and seemingly uncontrollable urge to dance. The hysteria kicked off when a woman known as Frau Troffea stepped into the street and began to silently twist, twirl and shake. She kept up her solo dance-a-thon for nearly a week, and before long, some three-dozen other Strasbourgeois had joined in. By August, the dancing epidemic had claimed as many as 400 victims.

The Strasbourg dancing plague might sound like the stuff of legend, but it’s well documented in 16th century historical records. It’s also not the only known incident of its kind. Similar manias took place in Switzerland, Germany and Holland, though few were as large — or deadly — as the one triggered in 1518.

According to historian John Waller, the explanation most likely concerns St. Vitus, a Catholic saint who pious 16th century Europeans believed had the power to curse people with a dancing plague. When combined with the horrors of disease and famine, both of which were tearing through Strasbourg in 1518, the St. Vitus superstition may have triggered a stress-induced hysteria that took hold of much of the city.

This introduces us to one aspect of human herd behavior, the mania. This type of trend combines panic and a desire to be accepted by the herd, so people emulate others even to the point of self-destruction. They become caught up in what the herd is doing and surrender their own autonomy in order to be accepted.

We might point to other manias that are slower and less obvious, like the panic over alcohol that led to Prohibition in America, or even the investment fad that caused the stock crash that led to the Great Depression. We could even be in the grips of a longer-term one spanning centuries with egalitarianism, which people find difficult to reject.

I named a few others, which I made fun of on my radio show back in the 1990s, as well to provide examples of mass trend behavior:

Now of course I know: people in dying civilizations simply go insane as a group. Like the tulip mania, dancing sickness, Okinawans walking into the sea, witch trials, Satanic Panic, and peasant revolts, a trend becomes a mass obsession as people emulate each other and reality becomes far distant.

This means that unlike the far-Right, which targets symptoms like diversity and big government, the root of our problem arises with a symbol, equality, that is itself part of and prone to induce a mass mania, at which point everyone goes insane as a group and rushes off the cliff of unrealism.

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Fred Nietzsche wrote the above, having looked into the hard determinism of Schopenhauer and crossed it with the analysis of the Greeks, which inspected inner motivations instead of external material solutions.

All of these go back to my initial observation, which was that groups lose goals and become individualistic, and from this a collective mutually compelled by fear arises.

It just took a couple of decades for everyone else to catch up. One wonders how long before they tune in to what I’m writing now.

Tags: crowdism, dancing sickness, fads, manias, mass formation, mass hysteria, mass panic, mass psychosis, trends, tulip mania