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.
