Mass Formation Behavior in Homo Sapiens Is Chronic
There’s nothing like narcissistic, unrestrained hunter-gatherer-like behavior to perpetuate chronic and acute destruction
Introduction
A very recent grundvilk post provided a summary explanation of an especially topical human group behavior: mass formation. The source for this explanation of mass formation and its various social effects was obtained from a recent video interview of Dr. Mattias Desmet, a Belgian university professor and clinical psychologist who works at the University of Ghent, Belgium.
According to Dr. Desmet, the generally bizarre totalitarian-type social behavior1 being exhibited by a significant fraction of the global population during the current ‘time of the COVID’ is fueled by a prior long buildup of very strong psychological unease in this portion of humanity. Dr. Desmet in addition believes that the group social behavior, mass formation, generated by the nearly frenzied projection of this psychological unease onto ‘the COVID’ is actually more dangerous to the health and welfare of man than is the physical threat of this clade of airborne viruses. The danger is greater because totalitarian behavior based on group action after mass formation has historically always been extremely destructive, not constructive, for the host human culture or society. He cites as the most prominent early 20th century iconic examples of the destructive nature of mass formation and consequent totalitarian social behavior, Nazism and Stalinism.
In his own words,
“Even if you succeed in waking up the masses now [about their mistaken beliefs], they will fall prey to a different story in a few years and they would be hypnotized again if we do not succeed in solving the real problem of this crisis; namely, why did we as a society get in the state that a large part of the population feels anxious, depressed, feels a lack of sensemaking, feels emotionally isolated? That’s the real problem. If we do not succeed in finding out where this problem comes from, then the masses will always be susceptible to leaders who try to lure them into a mass formation. So, I think the real question in this crisis is what is there on our view of man and our world, and on the way in which we look on life, that makes us experience a lack of sensemaking. In my opinion, I think we must conclude it is something in our materialistic, mechanistic view of man and the world that leads up to radical destruction of the real social structures and social bonds and the feeling that life makes sense. If you believe that human beings are biological machines, then this implies, by definition, that life is senseless.
What would be the sense of a life that is reduced for a human being of [being only] a little mechanistic part of a larger universe? If you look at a human being like that, I am afraid you end up concluding that life is meaningless, that you don’t really have to invest energy in meaningful social relations, that you don’t have to follow ethical principles, and in this way you destroy your psychological energy and your connectedness and end up in free-floating anxiety and so on.
Totalitarianism and mass formation always have one main characteristic – they are always self-destructive. In one way or another, the masses and the totalitarian systems are only capable of destruction, never for construction. So, it was very striking no matter what totalitarian leaders such as Stalin or Hitler did, it always ended up a failure and it only ended up in destruction. So, that’s for me, that’s one of the very dangerous things in this situation.”
Are Episodes of Mass Formation and Totalitarianism New Developments like Desmet Suggests, or Are They Just an Extreme Variation of An Already Established Cultural Trait?
Dr. Desmet remarks during his interview that mass formation and its consequent creation of destructive totalitarian group behavior only arose in the 20th century. However, in view of the existence of like mass events in 18th century revolutionary France, for example, this seems to be a qualifiable assertion, a point of view perhaps only incidentally created by early academic focus on the actions of crowds of people acting with the structured managerial help of formal government institutions, and not on ad hoc, more informally organized group movements like those seen during the French Revolution.
In any case, the most salient and consistent attributes of mass formation and consequent formal or informal totalitarian behavior are:
1. “Tunneling” – attention fixation on a single factor to the point that all other events and problems in the environment are not perceived or responded to;
2. Unreflective and unhesitating acceptance of the tenets, representations and purveyors of a single dominant narrative; and,
3. Repression, censorship, and marked aggression by members of the mass formation towards dissenters.
If this individual and group propensity and process is not only modern, but historically longstanding and culturally penetrating, then it can be said to be yet another basic condition (grundvilk) facing homo sapiens.
Wendell Berry and The Unsettling of America
Very interestingly, in his difficult book,2 The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977), Wendell Berry -- a writer and university professor (and also a farmer) – observes that mass formation and totalitarianism are permanent characteristics of human culture. Using the term “orthodoxy” instead of mass formation and totalitarianism, Dr. Berry remarks:
Our history forbids us to be surprised that an orthodoxy of thought should become narrow, rigid, mercenary, morally corrupt, and vengeful against dissenters. This has happened over and over again. It might be thought to be the maturity of orthodoxy; it is what finally happens to a mind once it has consented to be orthodox. But one may be permitted a little amusement, if not surprise, that this should have befallen a modern science [agricultural science], which was set up, as it never tires of advertising, to pursue truth, not protect it.
But since what we have now in agriculture – as in several other “objective” disciplines – is a modern scientific orthodoxy as purblind, self-righteous, cocksure, and ill-humored as Cotton Mather’s,3 our history also forbids it to change from within itself. Like many another orthodoxy, it would rather die than change, and may change only by dying. This determination is enforced both from within and from without. It is enforced from within simply by prosperity: the professors, experts, and executives of the agrifaith do not want agricultural policy to change because they are eating very well off of it as it is. From without, it is enforced by the mistaken conviction of millions of believers that it is the only true way, that they have no choice but to accept the agribusiness philosophy or starve. But it is also enforced by the very nature of orthodoxy: one who presumes to know the truth does not look for it.
If change is to come, then, it will have to come from the outside. It will have to come from the margins. As an orthodoxy loses its standards, becomes unable to measure itself by what it ought to be, it comes to be measured by what it is not. The margins begin to close in on it, to break down the confidence that supports it, to set up standards clarified by a broadened sense of purpose and necessity, and to demonstrate better possibilities. Though it does not necessarily or always work for the better — though indeed this swing from the center to the margins and back again may be in itself a condemnation — this sort of change is a dominant theme of our tradition, whose “central” figures have often worked their way inward from the margins. It was the desert, not the temple, that gave us the prophets; the colonies, not the motherland, that gave us Adams and Jefferson.
Note that the last paragraph indicates that orthodoxy is, when all is said and done, absolutely dependent on dissent from the margins for its long run viability. Go figure. It is certainly the way that science and technology have incrementally developed.
The pattern of orthodoxy in religion, because it is well known, gives us a[nother] useful paradigm. The encrusted religious structure is not changed by its institutional dependents — they are part of the crust. It is changed by one who goes alone to the wilderness, where he fasts and prays, and returns with cleansed vision. In going alone, he goes independent of institutions, forswearing orthodoxy (“right opinion”). In going to the wilderness he goes to the margin, where he is surrounded by the possibilities — by no means all good — that orthodoxy has excluded. By fasting he disengages his thoughts from the immediate issues of livelihood; his willing hunger takes his mind off the payroll, so to speak. And by praying he acknowledges ignorance; the orthodox presume to know, whereas the marginal person is trying to find out. He returns to the community, not necessarily with new truth, but with a new vision of the truth; he sees it more whole than before.4
In applying this pattern to agriculture, one is startled to realize that this is the first time it has been necessary, or possible, to do so. Not until recently have we had a widespread orthodoxy of agriculture in the same sense that we have had widespread orthodoxies of religion — an agriculture, that is to say, which is nearly uniform in technology and in its general assumptions and ambitions over a whole continent, and which, like many religions, aspires to become “universal” by means of a sort of evangelism, proclaiming that “Other countries would do well to copy it.”
Sound very familiar? ‘Vaccines’ and lockdowns anyone?
The Source of that General Unease Feeding Mass Formation and Totalitarianism: The Dominant Human Sense of Reality is a Shambles
As you were reminded in the introduction, Dr. Desmet ends his video interview presentation regarding mass formation and the subsequent development of totalitarianism by defining what he sees as the single major problem currently threatening homo sapiens. This problem, he maintains, is identifying and then somehow removing the cause or causes of the psychological unease that feeds both mass formation and totalitarianism.
In its essence, Berry’s 1977 Unsettling provides a credible working hypothesis as to the identity of the basic cause of the problematic psychological unease that now worries Desmet. Berry’s entire book is spent comparing and contrasting the attitudes and actions of traditional farm or pastoral families practicing careful and cautious husbandry, with those characteristically narcissistic,5 older hunter-gatherer-type minds of humanity that view the entire outer world (including the person’s own human body) merely as resources to be carelessly exploited and consumed. Berry’s ultimate view is that America, as an example, is culturally unsettled (and prone to the dangers of blind adherence to orthodoxy) because of the continuing disruptive dominance of self-serving attitudes and careless actions that are very similar to those of our much more naive, innocent, and far less numerous hunter-gatherer forebears. From Berry’s Chapter 5:
“And so at the same time that they “discovered” America, these men invented the modern condition of being away from home. On the new shores the old orders of domesticity, respect, deference, humility fell away from them; they arrived contemptuous of whatever existed before their own coming, disdainful beyond contempt of native creatures or values or orders, ravenous for their own success. They began the era of absolute human sovereignty — which is to say the era of absolute human presumption. They invented us: the flag of Ferdinand and Isabella in the hand of Columbus on the shores of the Indies becomes Old Glory in the hand of Neil Armstrong on the moon. An infinitely greedy sovereign is afoot in the universe, staking his claims.
But our experience of sovereignty suggests that it becomes dangerous when it defines itself exclusively in terms of what is inferior to it, neglecting or ignoring what is superior to it. That is to say that sovereignty is a safe concept only when its place is symmetrically defined. Thus, once, the place of humans was thought to be above the animals and below the angels — between the natural and the divine. Then, by understanding and accepting that human place in the order of things, people could see that their privileges were limited and safeguarded by certain responsibilities. They could see, moreover, that only evil could be the result of the transgression of these limits: one could not escape the human condition except sinfully, by pride or by degradation.
The growth of what is called the Modern World has been, by turns, both the cause and the effect of the destruction of that old sense of universal order. The most characteristically modern behavior, or misbehavior, was made possible by a redefinition of humanity which allowed it to claim, not the sovereignty of its place, neither godly nor beastly, in the order of things, but rather an absolute sovereignty, placing the human will in charge of itself and of the universe.
And having thus usurped the whole Chain of Being, conceiving itself, in effect, both creature and creator, humanity set itself a goal that in those circumstances was fairly predictable: it would make an Earthly Paradise. This projected Paradise was no longer that of legend: the lost garden that might be rediscovered by some explorer or navigator. This new Paradise was to be invented and built by human intelligence and industry. And by machines. For the agent of our escape from our place in the order of Creation, and of our godlike ambition to make a Paradise, was the machine — not only as instrument, but even more powerfully as metaphor. Once, the governing human metaphor was pastoral or agricultural, and it clarified, and so preserved in human care, the natural cycles of birth, growth, death, and decay. But modern humanity’s governing metaphor is that of the machine. Having placed ourselves in charge of Creation, we began to mechanize both the Creation itself and our conception of it. We began to see the whole Creation merely as raw material, to be transformed by machines into a manufactured Paradise.
And so the machine did away with mystery on the one hand and multiplicity on the other. The Modern World would respect the Creation only insofar as it could be used by humans. Henceforth, by definition, by principle, we would be unable to leave anything as it was. The usable would be used; the useless would be sacrificed in the use of something else. By means of the machine metaphor we have eliminated any fear or awe or reverence or humility or delight or joy that might have restrained us in our use of the world. We have indeed learned to act as if our sovereignty were unlimited and as if our intelligence were equal to the universe. Our “success” is a catastrophic demonstration of our failure. The industrial Paradise is a fantasy in the minds of the privileged and the powerful; the reality is a shambles.
Of course, recent events including human actions have very clearly reaffirmed that our intelligence is not “equal to the universe”. Indeed, this continuing, very thin pretense that human intelligence is “equal to the universe” naturally does tend to cause appreciable psychological unease and consequent arbitrary totalitarian ‘acting out’ by mankind towards self, others, and nature.
For a description of a prior generation’s more attenuated attitude and behavior during a generally similar viral pandemic, see https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/niall-ferguson-how-ikes-1950s-america-beat-asian-flu-science-common-sense?.
Abstracting the meaning of The Unsettling of America is much like coming to grips with the geology of a very large new mining district. The entire book, like Creation itself, constitutes a very complex terrain.
This descriptive passage could perhaps be also appropriately applied to Dr. Fauci, his CDC, mainstream scientists and medical organizations, mainstream media, and Big Tech internet-based corporations seconding and protecting current CDC (and political) medical orthodoxy.
Here is some later (2010) writing from Harvard that looks like it directly borrowed this basic concept from Berry’s earlier work – “Marginality and problem-solving effectiveness in broadcast search”. This paper can be downloaded for free from https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3351241/Jeppesen_Marginality.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder. From that entry: “People with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) are characterized by the personality traits of persistent grandiosity, an excessive need for admiration and recognition, and a personal disdain and lack of empathy for other people. As such, the person with NPD usually displays arrogance and a distorted sense of personal superiority, and seeks to establish abusive power and control over others. Self-confidence (a strong sense of self) is a personality trait different from the traits of NPD; thus, people with NPD typically value themselves over others, to the extent of openly disregarding the wishes and feelings of anyone else, and expect to be treated as superior, regardless of their actual status or achievements. Socially, the person with NPD usually exhibits a fragile ego (self-concept), intolerance of criticism, and a tendency to belittle other people, in order to validate their own feelings of superiority.” Berry would add “nature” to the category of “other people” in order to make the point that all of Creation is subject to exploitation by most modern homo sapiens.