Amerika

If people are unstable, they will probably form large groups based on mutual non-noticing of their instability. So everyone gets together, no one points out the neurosis that’s the elephant in the room, and oddly, this bonds them together.

Eventually, they decide to go kill the people who are smart and take their stuff. That’s either the intrusion of the ghetto to the suburbs, a Revolution, or what happens when you have an incompetent HR department, depending on who you talk to.

Here’s another example:

Gail Trimble, the girl with the planet-sized brain who scored 825 of the 1,235 points amassed by Corpus Christi, Oxford, on the road to last night’s final of University Challenge, which they won – has become the new public pariah.

Across the country, bitter bloggers have sniped at a woman who knows about everything from Rudyard Kipling to Kazakhstan banknotes, from Homer to human genetics.

‘Smug’, ‘brain-rupturingly irritating’, ‘vicious bitch’, ‘a horse-toothed snob’. . . With every insult there emerges a new member of the growing ranks of a nasty, insecure tribe who need to be comforted in their own dumbness, rather than impressed by another’s brilliance.

I have nothing against Jade Goody: it would be odd to feel anything other than sympathy for any mother dying so young. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that she has achieved little of lasting merit in her short life.

That shortcoming is, in fact, exactly what she has been celebrated for. The reason why she became so famous is precisely because, unlike Miss Trimble, she knows so little.

If you know nothing, and see someone getting rich and famous precisely for that reason, you are instantly validated. You, too, could become the next poster girl for ignorance.

How comforting, too, if the moment an awesomely intelligent woman does come along, you’re allowed to attack her for being smug and snobbish.

The Daily Mail

The Crowd sees themselves in their chosen heroes. For that reason, they don’t want too smart or too healthy or too beautiful; they want someone like them, a true champion of the people, a lowest common denominator done right!

People would rather see someone who is broken, flawed, a wreck, one of life’s victims. That’s because they themselves feel like that.

Anyone who is not, and who is successful, brings home to them just what they are lacking. So they blame such people for being arrogant, toffee-nosed or holier-than-thou.

It’s like a giant national inferiority complex that makes people lash out at those who are not just successful but wholesome – precisely because they are wholesome. Only Victims of Life can be national icons.

The Daily Mail

It could even explain why Americans elected a corrupt do-nothing on a platform of “hope!” and “change!”

Tags: cognitive dissonance, crowdism, self-deception