The history of the crimes committed by crowds illustrates what precedes.
The murder of M. de Launay, the governor of the Bastille, may be cited as a typical example. After the taking of the fortress the governor, surrounded by a very excited crowd, was dealt blows from every direction. It was proposed to hang him, to cut off his head, to tie him to a horse's tail. While struggling, he accidently kicked one of those present. Some one proposed, and his suggestion was at once received with acclamation by the crowd, that the individual who had been kicked should cut the governor's throat.
"The individual in question, a cook out of work, whose chief reason for being at the Bastille was idle curiosity as to what was going on, esteems, that since such is the general opinion, the action is patriotic and even believes he deserves a medal for having destroyed a monster. With a sword that is lent him he strikes the bared neck, but the weapon being somewhat blunt and not cutting, he takes from his pocket a small black-handled knife and (in his capacity of cook he would be experienced in cutting up meat) successfully effects the operation."
Making it personal is how some of you get lost in your own emotions.
Le Bon, Gustave wrote:
"Public opinion no longer knows anything but extreme sentiment or profound indifference. It is terribly feminine, and like a woman, has no control over its reflect movements."
There is a difference between thinking emotionally and expressing one's self passionately.
The difference is temporal.
In an rational, more masculine, thinker thinking precedes the engagement of emotions, whereas in an emotional "thinker, emoter, emotion precedes reasoning and only presents itself in a cold, manner to convince itself and the other that it, and its positions, are based no cold indifferent reasoning.
In the video the crowd, the masses, is caught up in its anger. It is made senseless and this senselessness is exacerbated by the multiplying effect of sharing.
Most can only think of this multiplying effect when it comes to love or compassion and such wonderfully romantic ideas but they fail to see it in this anger or hatred because then the common thread of madness becomes unavoidable.
Mass worshiping is just as irrational as mass hating.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
Machiavelli: Listen to me and judge for yourself. Today, it is less a question of doing violence to men than disarming them, of repressing their political passions than effacing them, of combating their instincts than deceiving them, of proscribing their ideas than changing them by appropriating them.
Montesquieu: And how? I do not understand this language.
Machiavelli: Permit me. Here is the moral part of politics; in a little while we will come to the applications. The principal secret of government consists in weakening the public spirit to the point of completely disinteresting the people in the ideas and principles with which one makes revolution these days. In all eras, peoples -- like individual men -- are paid with words. Appearances are almost always sufficient for them; they do not demand more. Thus, one can establish artificial institutions that respond to a language and ideas that are equally artificial; one must have the talent of snatching from the parties the liberal phraseology with which they arm themselves against the government. One must saturate the people to the point of exhaustion, to the point of disgust. Today, one often speaks of the power of public opinion; I will show to you that one can make it express what one wants when one knows the hidden springs of power. But before dreaming of directing it, one must stun it, strike it with uncertainty by astonishing contradictions, work incessant diversions upon it, dazzle it by all sorts of diverse movements, imperceptibly lead it astray from its routes. One of the great secrets of the day is knowing how to seize hold of popular prejudices and passions so as to introduce into them a confusion of principles that render all understanding impossible among those who speak the same language and have the same interests." - Maurice Joly, Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Crowds act like swarms of insects. It's difficult to define the drive behind the actions, as they move in any direction that happens to gather momentum. They're... stochastic. I read a book on swarm intelligence a while back. Intriguing stuff.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"The very fact of the concentration acts as an exceptionally powerful stimulant. When they are once come together, a sort of electricity is formed by their collecting which quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation. Every sentiment expressed finds a place without resistance in all the minds, which are very open to outside impressions; each re-echoes the others, and is re-echoed by the others. The initial impulse thus proceeds, growing as it goes, as an avalanche grows in its advance. And as such active passions so free from all control could not fail to burst out, on every side one sees nothing but violent gestures, cries, veritable howls, and deafening noises of every sort, which aid in intensifying still more the state of mind which they manifest." [Durkheim, 1912: 215–216, Eng. edn.]
"An assembly or an association, a crowd or a sect, has no other idea than the one that is blown into it, and this idea, this more or less intelligible trace of an aim to pursue, a means to employ, may well diffuse from one’s brain to the brains of all, remains the same; he who blows the idea is therefore accountable of its direct effects. But the emotion that comes with this idea and diffuses with it, does not remain the same, rather it intensifies through a sort of mathematical progression, so that what was moderate desire or hesitant opinion in the mind of the author of such propagation, for instance the first inspirer of a suspicion about a certain category of citizens, swiftly turns into passion and belief, hate and fanaticism, in the fermentable mass where such germ is brought. Besides the distinction between two basic types of multiplicity, crowds and packs, Tarde also introduces a further distinction that can help us grasp the complexity of the phenomena of multiplicity. It is the distinction between natural and artificial crowds. Through such a distinction, Tarde reduces part of the ambiguity that the term ‘crowd’ had in Le Bon. An insight from Canetti might help us understand the rationale for this distinc- tion. Canetti insists, as no other author before, on the boundless nature of the crowd. In its original configuration, the crowd is the incommensurable alternative to organization: it is the anti-organization par excellence. As such, the original crowd does not lend itself to being governed: As soon as it exists at all, it wants to consist of more people: the urge to grow is the first and supreme attribute of the crowd. It wants to seize everyone within reach; anything shaped like a human being can join it. This original crowd Canetti calls the open crowd, whose only tension is towards unlimited growth.The crowd appears the moment in which a gravitational, intensive social field is created and people surrender to it, overcoming the fear of being touched. But infinite expansion would eventually prove fatally exhaustive in terms of resources: the open crowd risks and in fact tends towards its own dissipation. Turning expansion in space and number into duration through time is what transforms an open crowd into something else. It is the strategy undertaken by what Tarde calls ‘artificial crowds’, or corporations, as opposed to ‘natural crowds’. Canetti interprets Tarde’s artificial crowds as closed crowds, crowds that have absorbed some organizational features in order to last. They have traded space for time." [Tarde, 1901: 165–166, French edn.] [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
- - -
"Gustave Le Bon and his school, in their discussions of the psychology of crowds, have put forward the doctrine that the individual man, cheek by jowl with the multitude, drops down an intellectual peg or two, and so tends to show the mental and emotional reactions of his inferiors. It is thus that they explain the well-known violence and imbecility of crowds. The crowd, as a crowd, performs acts that many of its members, as individuals, would never be guilty of. Its average intelligence is very low; it is inflammatory, vicious, idiotic, almost simian. Crowds, properly worked up by skilful demagogues, are ready to believe anything, and to do anything.
Le Bon, I daresay, is partly right, but also partly wrong. His theory is probably too flattering to the average numskull. He accounts for the extravagance of crowds on the assumption that the numskull, along with the superior man, is knocked out of his wits by suggestion— that he, too, does things in association that he would never think of doing singly. The fact may be accepted, but the reasoning raises a doubt. The numskull runs amuck in a crowd, not because he has been inoculated with new rascality by the mysterious crowd influence, but because his habitual rascality now has its only chance to function safely. In other words, the numskull is vicious, but a poltroon. He refrains from all attempts at lynching a cappella, not because it takes suggestion to make him desire to lynch, but because it takes the protection of a crowd to make him brave enough to try it.
What happens when a crowd cuts loose is not quite what Le Bon and his followers describe. The few superior men in it are not straightway reduced to the level of the underlying stoneheads. On the contrary, they usually keep their heads, and often make efforts to combat the crowd action. But the stoneheads are too many for them; the fence is torn down or the blackamoor is lynched. And why? Not because the stoneheads, normally virtuous, are suddenly criminally insane. Nay, but because they are suddenly conscious of the power lying in their numbers— because they suddenly realize that their natural viciousness and insanity may be safely permitted to function.
In other words, the particular swinishness of a crowd is permanently resident in the majority of its members—in all those members, that is, who are naturally ignorant and vicious—perhaps 95 per cent. All studies of mob psychology are defective in that they underestimate this viciousness. They are poisoned by the prevailing delusion that the lower orders of men are angels. This is nonsense. The lower orders of men are incurable rascals, either individually or collectively. Decency, self-restraint, the sense of justice, courage—these virtues belong only to a small minority of men. This minority never runs amuck. Its most distinguishing character, in truth, is its resistance to all running amuck. The third-rate man, though he may wear the false whiskers of a first-rate man, may always be detected by his inability to keep his head in the face of an appeal to his emotions. A whoop strips off his disguise." [Mencken, on The Crowd]
I don't what this please just what to be loved and be my self.
K. Michelle - Sweetest Love Lyrics | MetroLyrics
Do NOT post generic "uplifting" or "it get's better", "I love you" messages. ... I repeat just to emphasize, I don't want to kill myself, I just want to die ...
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
I don't what this please just what to be loved and be my self.
K. Michelle - Sweetest Love Lyrics | MetroLyrics
Do NOT post generic "uplifting" or "it get's better", "I love you" messages. ... I repeat just to emphasize, I don't want to kill myself, I just want to die ...
Sober up aleboy; if you want to live, stop posting spam, cuz if you're red, you're dead boy.
Making it personal is how some of you get lost in your own emotions.
Le Bon, Gustave wrote:
"Public opinion no longer knows anything but extreme sentiment or profound indifference. It is terribly feminine, and like a woman, has no control over its reflect movements."
There is a difference between thinking emotionally and expressing one's self passionately.
The difference is temporal.
In an rational, more masculine, thinker thinking precedes the engagement of emotions, whereas in an emotional "thinker, emoter, emotion precedes reasoning and only presents itself in a cold, manner to convince itself and the other that it, and its positions, are based no cold indifferent reasoning.
In the video the crowd, the masses, is caught up in its anger. It is made senseless and this senselessness is exacerbated by the multiplying effect of sharing.
Most can only think of this multiplying effect when it comes to love or compassion and such wonderfully romantic ideas but they fail to see it in this anger or hatred because then the common thread of madness becomes unavoidable.
Mass worshiping is just as irrational as mass hating.
