Crowds and power

 

I was listening to the news regarding Trump on social media (you really want to avoid disgust but the American system nurtured likes of him for decades -capitalist psychopaths, and then worked to exaggerate him as presidential candidate, also means state machinery was undermined -as no safeguards worked, in the arrogance that he cannot win hence it was seen as all eyeball fun by market media. Ofcourse most people understand importance of democracy, but can be disenchanted hence may not go for voting, as also role of misinformation and disinformation, outside agencies/rogue state wanting to influence elections. This arrogance is again displayed with Biden. Stakes are too high, but they are totally engrossed in their own invincibility as entitled local guardian whom the common people will have to vote for. One can also see this arrogance in Europe too -wonder if it is white supremacism exhibiting wanton liberal posturing as entitled binary of constructed bad, who are encouraging islamists hence revivalist regressives, protectionists/conservatives (indeed religions have no value for liberal or democratic ideals and more primitive it is more sinister its presence and spread by using platform of egalitarian ideals for worst)). I was reminded of Elias Canetti’s seminal book on crowd (Crowd and Power). It is an enchanting book, sometimes really bizarre in its search for understanding the root of crowd psychology as it traces traditions of remote tribes and origins of collective behavior. Quite a large book but divided into neat chapters. I have read so many books/articles on wide range that when you read something new you try to get the context and references hence attune your mind for an extension of views, confirmation or dissention. It is rare to have entirely new idea or thought or take on something as common as crowd that the feeling is indescribable. You really want to read it again and again to get into the depth of it and compare to what you know so far. Canetti has been my bedside reading for last many weeks. And yes, Nobel literature prize doesn’t disappoint, this was the reason why I chose to read this book as I was searching for what to read next (Canetti was awarded in 1981, and there were lots of criticism since he seemed to lack gravitas, indeed this book was seen as an amusement!). So, back to gutter mouth orange puffball, he was seen abusing the crowd who had come to listen to him (unhinged geriatric rant), earlier he had even said something like he could kill anyone but they will still vote for him, and yes millions did vote for him. This passage from the book is perceptive and gives deeper understanding of nature of crowd: 

A command addressed to a large number of people thus has a very special character. It is intended to make a crowd of them and, in as far as it succeeds in this, it does not arouse fear. The slogan of a demagogue, impelling people in a certain direction, has exactly the same function; it can be regarded as a command addressed to a large number. From the point of view of the crowd, which wants to come into existence quickly and to maintain as a unit, such slogans are useful and indeed indispensable. The art of a speaker consists in compressing all his aims into slogans. By hammering them home he engenders a crowd and helps to keep it in existence. He creates the crowd and keeps it alive by a comprehensive command from above. Once he has achieved this it scarcely matters what he demands. A speaker can insult and threaten an assemblage of people in the most terrible way and they will still love him if, by doing so, he succeeds in forming them into a crowd. 

It’s a book that I strongly suggest, not only as an interesting read, but a must for students, researchers, trying to fathom nature of crowd (that I desultory refer to as herd. In the last decade or so we have all the avenues to access all kinds of information but even then you prefer to be stupid -incapable to use critical faculties and information appropriately to be knowledgeable, then you are part of unthinking -the herd, since I am not looking for any followers/votes/audiences there are no niceties. A crowd degrades itself into permanence of herd). Canetti brings out something disturbing that makes us relook into Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. Command is ‘older than speech. If this were not so, dogs could not understand them. Animals can be trained because they can be taught to understand what is required of them without understanding speech”. While discussing command he brings out ‘sting’, something which remains behind in a person recipient of command, it sinks deep into the person who has carried out the command, and however deep it may lie hidden it will always remain a burden.  “A man’s appearance, the carriage of his head, the expression of his mouth, the way he looks at one -everything that makes him recognizable -will change sooner than the shape of the command which has lodged in him as a sting and which is preserved unaltered until he himself produces it again”. “It is very difficult to get rid of the sting. It must in fact dislodge itself and can only do so if and when it reacquires forces equal to that with which it originally penetrated. For this to happen there must be an exact repetition of the original command-situation, but in reverse. This is what the sting waits for through months, years and decades. It is as though each sting had a memory of its own, but of one thing only: the situation at which it was implanted. When the situation recurs…the sting seizes its opportunity and hastens to fall on its victim. The reversal has at last taken place”. “…the ‘free’ man is not the man who rids himself of commands after he has received them, but the man who knows how to evade them in the first place. But the man who takes the longest to rid himself of them, or who never achieves it, is undoubtedly the least free”. Canetti discusses these in much detail with examples from history from around the world (and that is what makes this book much compelling, examples from remotest of places and weaving into psychology of crowd). “A reversal comes into existence for the joint liberation of a large number of people from the stings of command they cannot hope to get rid of alone” … “When a revolt miscarries and people do not finally get rid of their stings, they nonetheless remember the time when they were a crowd. For that period at any rate they were free of stings and so will always look back to it with nostalgia”.

Hannah Arendt's observation of Eichmann as a pathetic figure, not devilish but pitiful, forms the basis of influential thought on making of common place evil. Canetti writes “It is well known that men who are acting under orders are capable of the most appalling deeds. When the source of their orders is blocked and they are forced to look back on what they have done, they do not recognize themselves. They say, “I never did that”, and it is by no means always clear in their minds that they are lying. When they are faced with witnesses and begin to waver, they still say, “I’m not like that. I couldn’t have done it”. They search themselves for traces of deed and cannot find them. It is astonishing how unaffected by it they seem. The life they lead afterwards really is another life, in no way colourized by their previous actions. They do not repent and do not even feel guilty. What they have done never really comes home to them”. If you have watched the documentary on trial of Eichmann you will see these reactions in the bearings of Eichmann, from denial to obedience to order -indeed command as Canetti argues (staying in Argentina as an ordinary family man after orchestrating genocide, indeed there is also a movie on Israeli secret service meticulous planning and kidnapping of Eichmann from Buenos Aires to Tel Aviv). Canetti continues “…what they do of their own volition leaves in them the traces one would expect. They would be ashamed to kill an unknown, defenseless creature which had not provoked them and it would disgust them to torture anyone. They are no better than most of those amongst whom they live, but they are also no worse. People who know them well…swear on oath that they are unjustly accused… When the long line of witnesses comes forward…recognize the accused and recall in minute detail his behavior, so that it becomes absurd to doubt his guilt, then one seems faced with an insoluble riddle ”.

This riddle is what Arendt gave a new understanding on nature of evil. Canetti however works with an extension of crowd and control, the insidious nature of command and how it dehumanizes, with a unique take through concept of sting. He elaborates “But for us it is no longer a riddle, for we know how command work. Every command that is carried out leaves a sting in the man who does it. But this, though in him, remains as alien to him as the command itself was in the moment when it was given. However long it lodges in him, it is never assimilated, but remains a foreign body…the sting is an interloper who never settles, an undesirable one wants to get rid of. It is what one has done and has, as we have seen, the exact shape of command given to one. It lives within its host as an alien, not subject to his authority, and thus does not cause him any feeling of guilt (all emphasis herein are mine). He does not accuse himself, but the sting; this is the true culprit, whom he carries with him everywhere. The more foreign to his nature the original command, the less guilt he feels about what it made him do; the more autonomous and separate the existence of the sting. It is his permanent witness that it was not he himself who perpetrated a given wrong. He sees himself as its victim and thus has no feeling life for real victim…it is true therefore, that people who have acted on orders can feel entirely guiltless. If they are capable of really facing their subsequent situation they probably feel something like astonishment at the fact that they were once so completely at the mercy of commands”. Canetti says “even this stirring of insight is worthless…it relates to past”, and what he asserts is what is really disturbing “What happened then can still happen again; it is no assurance that they will not again behave in the same way, even when the new situation they are faced with exactly resembles the old”. It is chilling indictment of how the society is organized and how it gives way to horrible acts wherein the perpetrator is least involved. “They remain just as defenseless as before in face of commands, only obscurely conscious of their danger….with them the command becomes destiny and they make it their pride to surrender to it blindly, as though it were particularly manly to blind oneself. Canetti concludes with a warning that “…whatever aspect we consider the command, we can now see that, as we know it today, in the compact and perfected form it has acquired in the course of its long history, it is the most dangerous single element in the social life of mankind. We must have the courage to stand against it and break its tyranny. The full weight of its pressure must be removed; it must not be allowed to go more than skin deep”. I guess, the last line is an acknowledgement that command cannot be completely be removed in the idea of nation and the way societies are organized. Technology has not only brought in transparency but also extension of command agency of dehumanization through AI -autonomous weapons. Most democratic state have responsibilities fixed through internal safeguards while robust international organizations flag transgressions. Apart from authoritarian states what is of serious worry, especially in democratic liberal societies, is the hold of command over common people by non state entities specifically religion. More primitive form a religion is grievous are the consequences and bleak are the possibilities. The danger of command and tyranny it leads to must be urgently understood. The chain of command that dehumanizes and controls must be undermined and critically examined at every occasion.