|
Madness of Crowds
Paul Newman |
|
|||
|
Football hooliganism and mob violence are constantly hitting the headlines. Generally it is put down to ‘yob behaviour’ or pure vandalism. But such powerful, unpredictable outbursts are the stuff of history. Properly channelled, such outbursts may engender revolution and anarchy, and it is vital they are properly understood. Two teams meet in a foreign country for a football match – not two armies, mind you, but two footballs teams. One team wins; the other loses, as is bound to happen, unless it is a draw. As a result, cafes are smashed, cars are burnt, armed battles take place and ‘offenders’ are arrested or deported. The next day a flustered sports minister makes an official statement - not only has a noble game been brought into disrepute but the honour of the country has been stained. Spokesmen for the Football Association apologise. Most supporters, they explain, are clean-living decent folk but there is this small thuggish element that spoils it for the majority, and if only they could be rooted out or identified, the good name of football would be restored. Not Cricket Surprisingly the equivalent violence seems rarely – or never – to occur in a cricket match. Is this why cricket is a gentleman’s game? It is ‘not cricket’, they say - certainly football hooliganism is not cricket! In cricket the action is neat, ritualistic and contained? There is no dashing, rallying and passing. Co-ordination is almost mathematical. One gets the impression that watching a top batsman hit a six does not set the heart beating and the mind glowing in the same way as a soccer hero scoring a goal or taking a penalty. Cricket makes one focus one’s attention on a single player while the speed and thrust of football is inclined to create surges of enthusiasm. We do not quite know how to define ‘enthusiasm’ but generally we look upon it as a kind of positive energy that may help one do a job well or embark on a new project with vigour and optimism. But we also talk of ‘enthusiasm getting out of hand’ and, when this happens, damage may occur on a spectacular scale. Enjoy Going Crazy Those who sympathise with the fans simply see them as over-enthusiastic. All that surplus energy overboils and breakage results. As for the beleaguered town or city, after the streets have been swept of lager cans and plateglass windows replaced, a reporter might stop a stray reveller and ask him why exactly he did it. Usually he (seldom do you find a female rampager) will look a bit sheepish and mumble something half-coherent. If pressed further, he might say, "I don’t know." Why can’t he give an honest reply? It must be painfully difficult. You are addressing him rationally, and that is almost a humiliation, like asking a small boy why he suddenly he made an idiotic noise or flapped his arms like a penguin in the doctor’s surgery. The irrational finds itself caught out on the hop by any enquiry as to motivation. After we have totally let go, there is nothing worse than a serious-looking official in spectacles asking, "And what precise social statement were you making when you took off all your clothes in the square at midnight and proclaimed, "Cockadoodledoo!" The football hooligan’s only honest answer would be, "I enjoy getting pissed and going crazy after a match!" On hearing this, many would comment, "The man’s a moron – he should be locked up." Well, yes, one can see the reason for the knee-jerk reaction but one has to acknowledge the impulse "to lose oneself" is in all – or most – of us. Generally, if we are considerate, we lose ourselves in a controlled fashion, so that no one will get hurt. But the number of fatalities from recreational drug taking, or from alcohol indulgence, tells us that this does not always work. Yet still we seek release from being over-sensible, in drink, in drugs, in sex, in sports and gala days. Many of us do not like our jobs. In fact, we work only to gain the pleasure of relaxing and letting ourselves go at the end of the day. Poles of Personality But of course we must allow for contrasting reactions – for the opposite poles of the personality. To demonstrate this, an anecdote will serve. Many years ago, I was returning to England from France on the Channel ferry. My companions were a genial geology lecturer called Derek and an equally genial politics lecturer called Bob. The three of us were standing on the deck drinking beer when Derek, abruptly draining his glass, grinned broadly and tossed it overboard. At this gesture Bob frowned: "Why did you do that, Derek?" There was nothing accusative or censorious in the question. Bob was genuinely puzzled. Surely a grown man of decent character like Derek should calmly return his glass to the bar rather than flippantly consign it to the waves. (It is perhaps of incidental interest that Derek is presently still a geology lecturer while Bob has risen to the heights of a conservative MP) I think most of us fall in the category between Derek than Bob. We accept that people need to do stupid things or be moderately anarchic about public property or over-fussy laws but generally we conduct ourselves well. We may enjoy Derek’s lawlessness but know that the Bobs of the world are necessary if only to apply the clamps and restraints when something dangerous may be brewing. Thousands of years ago, in a welter of an angry Jewish crowd, it may well have been the historic equivalent to Bob who stepped forward and said, "Let’s cool down and think more deeply about whether we should really stone this poor woman for having intercourse with an angel?" In other words, we need the Bobs to exert order and control and the Dereks to teach us to properly enjoy ourselves. Big Spenders However, if we do let ourselves go, it is usually in a cautious way. We leave extravagant risk-taking to our pop idols. Think of performers like Jim Morrison or Jimmy Hendrix or Janice Joplin whose name quivers with a kind of 'frontier lawlessness'. During their brief lives, they popped too many pills, gobbled too many rich meals, had sex with too many partners and burnt themselves out at an age when many would be thinking of starting a family. In some ways, we admire their fearlessness, their refusal to be sensible, their offstage rages and childish tantrums. They are the big emotional spenders of life who dream our dreams and die our deaths. They burn candles at both ends while we leaf through insurance brochures. We strive to preserve ourselves as they gallop towards extinction like Dick Turpin bearing down on a stagecoach. Psychotic Scientists! So we don’t object to pop stars going a little crazy, nor football supporters, nor actors or playboys. But how about army personnel or those concerned with military matters? While we enjoy hearing stories of absent-minded professors stepping into lingerie shops and asking for a wad of their favourite pipe tobacco, we are definitely wary about psychotic scientists. In fact, one of the major anxieties of the age is that a hitherto responsible technician at a defence establishment will, after a serious argument with his girlfriend, make matters worse by spitefully bashing a button and effacing all living things. Yes, I am fully aware of the chains of safety checks that have to be cleared before missiles are released, but every day somewhere an ‘impossible’ accident occurs. Sedation and Malleability It is a fact that politicians – at least those of a non-revolutionary kind - do not like diverse expressions of ‘enthusiasm’ in society. So far as they are concerned, a cause or a craze makes the population less malleable - that is why they dislike massive pop concerts or gatherings of New Age Travellers. Furthermore it is also liable to stretch police funding and create a flurry in the press. Although relatively speaking, we enjoy a high degree of freedom in the West, we tend not to channel it into pressure groups. Why is this? One answer is because we are ‘sedated’ by the quantity of entertainment and distraction available. That is why, the argument goes, politicians do not mind an enormous free market in pornography, cheap videos and sleazy computer games because they serve as effective mind tranquillisers. They keep audiences goggling but stop them thinking. If you can divert the greater part of the population with images of naked women and the desperate jokes of second-rate comedians, they are not going to notice crucial legislation or self-serving policies rushed through parliament. But there is a danger in keeping a population in a passive state. If one thinks that, for hundreds of thousands of years, man was a hunter-gatherer, expending vast quantities of energy covering miles and miles on foot and generating brain chemicals relating to excitement and tension, inevitably problems arise from too much control and confinement. The brain is still producing the same proteins but the physical conditions are no longer appropriate. Hence the latent, youthful energy, which once found expression in the chase, is kept simmering. Sometimes it just froths over the top of the pan, scalding and alarming those better adapted to order and routine. Appearing Serious But seldom do these outbreaks of violence have a ‘political’ content. They are not complaints against welfare policies or demands for lower taxes. In fact, it appears we are casual about our country’s internal policies. We assume that politicians are paid to do our thinking for us. Yet we would be angry if someone accused us of having no clear-cut opinions or intellectual tastes. But we may not be as strong characters as we think. Television pollsters used to stop people in the street and ask questions like: "Would you like better news coverage? Would you like to see more programmes dealing with current affairs? Would you like to see a fuller coverage of recent scientific developments?" Inevitably men and women replied to these questions in the affirmative; they all wanted less trivia and more serious programmes. The interviewees projected themselves as thoughtful and serious-minded, but is doubtful whether they were telling the whole truth, for statistics suggest, whenever information-intensive programmes are broadcast, the ratings drop as the audience switches over to channels featuring comedy or musical shows. Triplicate Obviously politicians have picked up on what television presenters know. Our ministers and MPs are cannily aware that too much message – too complex a message – is liable to give the public a headache. TV stars and celebrities are constantly being ushered into political gatherings to assure people that all this voting business is essentially cheerful and mindless. All you do is log your vote in the direction of the smiling rosette - from that point all your important decisions will be borne on another’s shoulders. To make understanding easier, whenever we listen to a politician, he whittles down his message to an idiotic triplicate. "There are three things I want to achieve: a progressive government, an efficient civil service and a nation of united happy people. The third point, inevitably, is the ‘cheer’ trigger. History and Hooliganism A sedated, well-behaved population of TV addicts is unlikely to press for revolution or reform – the type of dramatic event that enlivens the pages of history books. Now each one of us has sat inside a history class and been bored rigid, particularly if the teacher is droning on about issues like Tudor enclosures or factory reform bills of the 19th century. It all seems too sane and prosaic, and for this reason many of us seldom look at a history book. If we like any of it, we prefer ‘mad’ history or accounts of what took place during brutal wars or reigns of terror. Put crudely, the mass movements of history are largely about hooliganism or the harnessing of mob enthusiasm for political purposes. An aroused mob is not easy to control. It may swerve completely off track, running over innocent women and children, like a truck operated by a drunken driver. Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychologist, suggested that, once a whole nation is stirred in such a way, it cannot be brought to heel. Such behaviour is hard-wired into the national psyche. The mind is responding to an ‘archetype’ or an entrenched pattern of behaviour. In a memorable passage, he compared archetypes to riverbeds or old watercourses in which deep gullies have been cut. Sometimes they dry up, are left abandoned, but when the energies of the nation-state are aroused or thwarted, the pressure builds up and rolls forward, carrying destruction in its wake. Things are smashed aside. The flood rolls forward, and the individual is a mere branch, a leaf, a feather, drawn along by an unstoppable, seething mass. Wotan and Nationalism Jung used this analogy in an essay called Wotan (1936) in which he tried to account for the alarming militant tendencies in Nazi Germany. Wotan, incidentally, is another name for Odin or the Nordic god of magic, inspiration and battle. This god had a special group of warriors assigned to him called the Beserks. The Beserks would invite the fury of Odin to possess them. They would whip themselves into a state of mindless ferocity and attack the enemy. Anyone in their path they would hack down. Discrimination and intelligence – the pausing, intellectual qualities – were subsumed in the blind heat of conflict. As Tennyson put it There’s not to reason why There’s but to do and dieThe Beserks were not so very different from the modern rampage killer, high on drugs, who rushes down the main street firing a repeater rifle willy nilly. They are men who have deliberately abandoned mind for the self-intoxication of pure violence. The implications of this state are terrifying. Of course, a dictator like Adolf Hitler was all too aware of the force he was arousing and directing like a conductor. He had never read Jung but was probably familiar with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as this observation from Mein Kampf suggests: "All great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses." Holy Wars In other words, if you channel people’s unrest, distress or surplus energy in the right way, you can achieve any goal you want. Your political manifesto may be pure nonsense or arrant bigotry - but this will not matter. We are moving beyond the sphere of moral accountability. For instance, one can explain a phenomenon like the crusades, the so-called ‘Holy Wars’ of the Middle Ages, in terms of political allegiance, religious intolerance, power politics and xenophobia, but these blanket words do not penetrate the confusion. Names, dates and documentary evidence may appear to stopper gaps yet fail to tell us why men - not invariably pious, god-fearing men – were so fired by a vision that they were prepared to leave home, ride for months over harsh, inhospitable landscapes, endure flu, dysentery and scorching heat, and finally plunge into an orgy of killing, butchering and burning. The objects of their wrath were ‘infidels’ with whom formerly they’d enjoyed little or no contact, nor had any reason to hate. "War is like that," one might say. But we have to go further and acknowledge that history is a process that attempts to find a rationale, sometimes without first acknowledging that humans are profoundly irrational or driven by startling and disturbing pathologies of the spirit. In other words, the language of history, whether drawn from primary or secondary sources, pays exaggerated attention to the official accounts by which men conceal their hidden, chaotic urges. Thoreau observed that ‘most men live lives of quiet desperation’ hinting that, at any single period, collective dissatisfactions are brewing which may one day and erupt and take the guise of revolution or reform. Tulipomania The broad theme of this article was first explored by a popular Victorian journalist and songwriter called Charles Mackay. In 1852, he produced volume of over 700 pages entitled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It contained little depth psychology or analysis but it was an eloquent and enjoyable work with examples both tragic and hilarious: witch hunts, haunted houses, financial follies like the South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi Scheme. Tulipomania in Holland was one of the most extraordinary crazes. Starting in the city markets in the early 1600s, speculation ran amok as the bulbs began to command astronomical prices. Exotic, prestigious species were cultivated for wealthy customers. The craze swept the land so quickly that returning travellers were caught off guard. One sailor, coming back after a long voyage, told a rich Amsterdam merchant of the recent arrival of some merchandise from the Levant. The merchant, delighted to be forewarned, rewarded the sailor with a red herring. The sailor thanked him and started inspecting the bales of valuable goods strewn around the counting house. Eventually he noticed a solitary onion-like bulb among the silks and velvets. Thinking it rather out of place amid those fineries, he slyly took it away as a relish, not realising that it was an extremely precious tulip bulb. He was found munching it in a tavern along with the herring, oblivious to the fact that his breakfast was valued at 3,000 Florins. The ‘onion’ as he thought it was would have fed his ship’s crew for a year or, as the angry merchant put it, "might have sumptuously feasted the Prince of Orange and the whole court of the Stadholder." The sailor was thrown into prison where he lingered several months. This unfortunate – if not unfunny - incident took place at the height of tulipomania, but around the year 1636, the manic investment in precious bulbs subsided, the bottom fell out of the market, and those who had acquired enormous stockpiles of tulips faced ruin and bankruptcy. Desperate discussion took place in the Dutch parliament on how to revive the market. There was talk of compensating the formerly wealthy traders, but nothing was finally done and tulips once again became treasured as flowers and not a fabulously costly objets d’art. Seasons of Excitement Tulipomania, unlike some of the other examples, was basically harmless and might be placed under the title ‘fashionable follies’. Mackay intended to write a much thicker volume, piling folly on folly, but he never actually finished the project – one gets the impression that the enormity of the task overwhelmed him. It is probably no great loss, for a longer volume could not have encapsulated the theme more vividly than the statement on the first page: "In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their mind upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another is suddenly become crazed upon a religious scruple; and neither of them recovering its sense until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity." No One Is Immune Since Mackay wrote those prophetic words, nearly 150 years ago, mankind has continued the honourable tradition of crowd madness. It has plunged itself into two horrific world wars and has been beset by fevers, plagues and swirling panics. The 20th century has proven a repository of mob violence, racial holocausts, mass bigotry and collective suicides. More recently, we have had startling UFO rumours, food scares and waves of satanic abuse allegations. Many of these manifestations have surged through societies like forest fires and have just as inexplicably vanished – as though the whole thing had never taken place. As this article has, I hope, demonstrated, no one is immune from crowd madness. It can strike any nation, profession or cultural underclass. The first step in dealing with the phenomenon is to recognise its existence, and the second is to suppress any headstrong urge and think long and hard about an issue before embracing or rejecting it. NOTE: Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds has been reprinted as a bargain-priced Wordsworth paperback.
|
||||
