Awaking from an unpleasant dream in which I was compelled to carry a plastic fast-food tray laden with food through a gauntlet of wheezing, jostling, and sneezing people it occurred to me what a mild sort of heroism to which my unconscious must aspire. Overcoming violent terrorists or bringing food to hungry refugees? Nope. All my unconscious dream realm could muster was a classic first-world problem of not getting my dinner quickly and safely to a plastic table.
Upon further reflection and as a student who minored in psychology, I realized that urban nuisances, challenges, and terrors provide fodder for further reckoning. This facing a mass, this sense of swimming upstream in a social realm, carries deeper connotations of how our egos implicitly assume an external and coercive culture which we must somehow navigate. We feel like privileged outsiders with a unique view on others of our ilk – simply by our minds being encased in a cranium all our own, with identities likewise individuated, the better to assure us that we exist and matter. Outsiders to any social scenario often note things that participants themselves, especially those deeply and emotionally involved in the proceedings, may fail to see. Or they think they do, such as when folks judge others for petty details while forgetting that we too can be judged for a myriad of foibles.
At the broader, societal, level my dream was about a landscape awash with strangers, with the public, and that realm in and of itself is taken almost for granted within industrial modernity. There’s people everywhere and we are part of this stirring stew of goals and discontents, pratfalls and fallings-out. Yet, the cultural tendency, in television commercials as in entertainment or social science classrooms, seems to be to assume that where there’s a lot of people gathered something progressive, or at least of interest, is afoot. The assumption that a mass movement has a notable meaning is by no means a foregone conclusion, however.
Throngs of celebrants or protesters generally gather their mental wares together with the conviction that there’s is something to say or celebrate. Yet, how often when adrift in a sea of humanity do we ever ponder where the mass is truly going? Philosophers have made much hay with this question; perhaps most famously, Jean Paul-Sartre went so far as to claim that “hell is other people.”
What’s certain is that a crowd can be anything but a merrier concatenation of conviviality. To begin with, in any crowd there’s the possibility of conflict – and then there’s the matter of what a given crowd is there for. A fast-food outlet’s issues are obvious: hungry people can be ornerier than an unfed sow on the family farm. More intellectually, wherever abides discursive disagreement there’s people who come together to serve a purpose in support of what they do believe in. And woe to anyone who crosses the path of those bearing righteous indignation: social media pariahs in our time find their celebrity or popularity made and unmade at the touch of a fingertip typing a poorly-chosen Twitter phrase that scrolls past the wrong owl-eyed do-gooder. In such instances missed meanings or fake facts can seem the culprit but often in and of itself the herding tendency of groupthink seems to lead an accusatory mob in search of an enemy. People in groups seem almost to beg for something to be incited about, something to drive their passions forth. It’s like that phrase that if you’re only raised with a hammer then all the world will appear to you as a nail.
Where we find ourselves in a group who seems girded for a fight, any fight, that’s where we fulsome pupils best recall the phrase: fools rush in. While historically the notion of mob violence brings to mind images of irate peasants and overtaxed small business people uniting in rage to storm the Bastille, the truth is that mobs and attendant violence are with us to this day. What’s newer is the notion of the lone wolf actor, the person who has seized upon a purpose based on the anonymous pot-stirring of one too many online gripe sessions.
All of which is to bring me to Salmad Rushdie. A prize writer and recent victim of one such violent attack, he was stabbed in the eye by an otherwise-dullsville young religious fanatic who spent too much time in online social forums and “in a basement playing video games”. The attacker “had only read a couple of pages of Rushdie’s writing, but he believed that the author had attacked Islam.” Rushdie, incredibly magnanimous even though he lost an eye, and nearly his life, expressed disappointment in how the internet has led many people to quickly indulge their urge to censor others. Seeing a mass of peers holding fanatical views from the safety of their own screens can lead a person to join in the melee without doing much research; yet, “… if you actually inform yourself, it’s harder to take up that kind of extreme polemical position.”
The “mob-like” affectations of social media diatribes are, to Rushdie, instances of merely “wielding the weapons” traditionally used by oppressors – precisely the tactics that further oppression no matter the good intentions. Perhaps our online realms provide us with too many means to join with others in righteous anger, as though too much information, too much knowledge, only increases our instinctual impulses. TMI indeed! But we’re technological in that we have to resist our bestial tendencies, else we will be gripped by one horrendous issue after another and, if we’re lifelong learners, lose touch with our higher ideals of bettering ourselves with the attainment of deeper and more nuanced knowledge.
